Kudos to Dr Syed Alwi Ahmad for taking a stand against Wahhabism and other forms of absolutist interpretations of Islam. Wahhabism is a puritanical sect developed in a mono-cultural, mono-religious, desert society and is alien to multi-cultural Malaysia and Southeast Asia in general.

Wahhabism grew when Ibn Saud, the first ruler attempting to unify the Arabian peninsula, made a pact with the founder of Wahhabism in the 1920s in order to secure political support for his new regime.

Under the guise of a 'back-to-basics' movement, Wahhabism has shown itself to be intolerant of other points of views let alone other interpretations of Islam and thus often resorted to bullying and violence to achieve their ends.

The Saudi government has used their funding of Islamic charities and schools from Indonesia to Bosnia to spread this insidious and absolutist interpretation of Islam around the world.

Not to mention to the hundreds and thousands of students (Malaysians included) that go to the Middle East to further their Islamic studies who bring back this vacuous and dangerous interpretation of Islam back to their multi-religious homeland.

Have supporters of Wahhabism forgotten how women are treated like chattel in Saudi Arabia? Women there are not allowed to drive a car, let alone venture out of their homes without their husbands or male family members as escorts.

After the Dayton Accords in Bosnia and in post-conflict Kosovo, reconstruction aid poured in from Saudi Arabia. Much of it went into the Wahhabi proselytising, bullying, converting and bribing of destitute Muslims.

An austere desert sect, Wahhabism cannot abide with what it considers idolatry, frippery, or nostalgia for objects in religious places. When forced by locals to renovate rather than supplant, the Saudis obliterated all historical highlights, interior decorations, turquoise tilings and the like in local mosques, ripping out and whitewashing everything.

Like the Serbs and Croats, they forcibly purged what they considered alien - only they did so within the precincts of their own religion. In Kosovo's cemeteries, weeping villagers often witnessed Saudi bulldozers destroying the marble headstones of their Albanian forefathers from the 14th and 15th centuries.

During the Ottoman centuries, Mecca and Medina became highly cosmopolitan with many of the world's Muslims of varied sects choosing to settle and die there. Their descendants often came to visit their ancestors' tombs. That sacred ground was the common heritage of all Muslims.

But it became Saudi property when the Wahhabis took over in the 1920s and, ever since, they have systematically destroyed all such sites, including the tombs of the Prophet's own family and companions. This always involved digging deep under the foundations to remove all fragments of bones.

In Mecca, in the 1970s, they even tore down the dwelling of Mohammed's mother. A McDonald's has replaced it. To many eyes, even the Kaaba's Great Mosque of Mohammed has been utterly destroyed by total renovation.

Few Muslims dare to say such things publicly, of course, least of all the Saudis and al-Jazeera's correspondents. The monuments, though, or what remain of them, speak volumes.

I urge your readers to read Syed Alwi Ahmad's letter which hits the nail on it head when it comes to the irrelevance of Wahhabism in the Southeast Asian and Malaysian context.