I refer to the Malaysiakini report Fatwa Council under fire for banning yoga .

Respected Muslim scholars Tariq Ramadan (Hassan Al-Banna's grandson) and Ziauddin Sardar (Anwar Ibrahim's chum) of Egypt and India, respectively, have long declared their aversion to Wahhabism.

To the duo, Wahhabism, the rigid, literalist interpretation of faith, famously promoted by Saudi Arabia’s founders Muhammad Ibnu Abdul Wahhab and King Abdul Aziz Ibnu Saud, is a distortion of true, orthodox Islam found in the Quran and the Traditions (Sunnah).

True Islam has everything to do with love, peace, universal humanism, secularism, democracy, modernity, progress, women’s rights, protection of minorities and environmentalism. Wahhabism is the exact opposite.

This misinterpretation of God’s word has been in control of Mecca and Medina for 83 years and has its claws on every masjid of God and almost every priest of Islam.

Wahhabism was exported to every Muslim country via Saudi Arabia, the creation of the US-British imperialists. Jordan is the true custodian of Arabia and its holy cities Mecca and Medina.

During the rule of Dr Mahathir Mohamad, anti-Westernism was the foreign and domestic policy of the day. Islam was to be promoted as an alternative to Western liberal democracy.

But Mahathir's version of Islam was the same as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's. That is, Westernisation plus authoritarianism/ autocracy.

Mahathir's Islamisation was to turn Malaysian Muslims into 'robotic consumerists', with the freedom to be anybody but an independent thinker. Muslims who resented this way of life, ran away and ended up in the clutches of the only people who know how to survive repression - the Wahhabis.

Mahathir and his boys probably allowed Wahhabism to flourish as ‘the ugly opposition’, a social cost to justify the ISA and the slaughter of judicial independence.

He refused to befriend the West which owes its civilisation 100 per cent to Islam's philosophers such as Ibnu Sina, Al-Ghazali, Ziryab and Rumi. He tried to create his own Islamic system which looked 100 per cent like the un-Islamic Hosni Mubarak.

Religious teachers were sent to study in Wahhabi schools around the world. Wahhabi teachers were imported to teach Islam. Mahathir could have imported Western Muslims and Indonesian Muslims from the schools of Gus Dur and Amin Rais but chose not to, perhaps under pressure from that other Mubarak called Suharto.