WHEN Ibn Sa’ud’s illiterate tribesmen, the half-naked Bedouin ikhwan, butchered 4,000 inhabitants of Taif in the 18th century and ransacked its libraries, they used the leather covers of the vandalised holy books to make sandals. Whipped up by the angry theology of the Najdi cleric, Ibn ‘Abd ul-Wahhab, Ibn Sa’ud’s[…]
