The "ancient" Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has only been a kingdom for around seventy years, coincidentally about as long as it's been since oil was discovered under its desert sands.  Before that, it was a poor land of many small Bedouin tribes.
          In the mid-18th century, a man from the Arabian plain of Najd named Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab developed a strict new approach to Islam, stressing a highly conservative and militant version of the faith.  He found a political partner in Muhammad ibn Saud, the ruler of the tribe of Diriyah.  Together, through ruthless conquest backed by a questionable interpretation of the faith, which soon became known as Wahhabism, they conquered large parts of the Arabian peninsula and created, through marriage, the dynastic family that rules Saudi Arabia to this day.
          This is extremely important, because Wahhabism is the form of Islam most practiced in Saudi Arabia today, and is officially sanctioned and approved of by the Saudi royal family.  It is Wahhabism that turned the word jihad from a meaning of "struggle," somewhat akin to Christian evangelism, into the phrase "holy war," which is what most Westerners think it means.  It is Wahhabism that preaches militant intolerance of other faiths, such as Christianity and Judaism. Most Muslim sects throughout history protected Christians and Jews as "people of the book."  It is also Wahhabism that finds other Muslims who don't believe as they do to be kafir, or infidels, and subject to the same brutal penalties or worse as non-Muslims.  It should be noted that jihad is not one of the Five Pillars of Islamic faith, but under Wahhabism it has been elevated to a central obligation of Islam.
          In 1933, a giant oil concession of 360,000 square miles was granted to Standard Oil of California by the new king, Ibn Saud, even though it angered many of his followers to be dealing with the infidels.  When oil was struck in 1938, serious money started flowing as well, overpowering the arguments of the ulamas, or religious leaders, and the "special relationship" between the United States and Saudi Arabia began to take shape.  However, herein lay the seeds of the divide between the royal desire to make billions of dollars, the need to have a powerful nation provide security, and the religious ulama's insistence on Wahhabi principles.  Thus, for example, the US was allowed to maintain an airbase in Dhahran, but was not permitted to undertake Christian religious services on the base, or anywhere in Saudi Arabia, for that matter.
          In 1962, in an effort to curb the spread of secular Arab nationalism of the kind made popular by Egypt's President Nasser, the Saudi government hosted an Islamic Conference in Mecca out of which the Muslim World League was formed.  The ultimate goal of the league was the spread of Wahhabism to the rest of the Muslim world.  The Saudi government, awash in petrodollars, provided 99% of the financing for the Muslim World League.  In 1963, the entire education system in Saudi Arabia was turned over to the Wahhabi ulamas, including the Islamic University of Medina and the King Abdul Aziz University.  This meant that the entire generation born from the late 1950's on grew up with the doctrine of Wahhabism.  Add to this the fact that many leading members of the militant Islamic group Muslim Brotherhood began teaching at these universities and gathering recruits for their coming jihad.  The Muslim Brotherhood, which created havoc in Nasser's Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and sought refuge in Saudi Arabia after being run out of their native countries, got its original inspiration from the teachings of Muhammad ibn Wahhab.
          In the 1980's, the Saudi government gave billions of dollars to the Pakistani Intelligence Service, or ISI, to teach, train and equip young militant mujahedin fighters in their battle against the Soviet-backed Afghan government.  Along with this came further billions in private Saudi money to further the Wahhabist cause.  The Pakistanis spent much of this money opening madrassahs, or fundamentalist Islamic schools, where the most conservative Muslim theology was taught.  It was out of these schools that the Taliban was born.  It was also here that the rich Saudi, Osama bin-Laden, with the help of his own country's Intelligence Service, created an organization to funnel money to the mujahedin and train and equip Arabs from across the Middle East to become jihadists, or warriors.  
          The United States, in its zeal to stop the spread of communism to Afghanistan by any means, funded many of these same militant Islamic fighters to the tune of billions of more dollars.  With all of these billions upon billions of dollars of support coming in, it's no wonder that the Islamic rebels eventually prevailed.  It was to be a Pyrrhic victory for the U.S., however.  The end result was the Taliban in power in Afghanistan, thousands of trained Arab radicals itching to export their jihad, and an organization swimming in money called al-Qaeda, run by Osama bin-Laden and given shelter by the Taliban.
          With this bit of Saudi history, it becomes all too easy to understand how fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia, funded and masterminded by the Saudi bin-Laden.  The Saudi royals play a brilliant game of both-ends-against-the-middle, allowing militant Islamic teaching in their schools and universities, funding radical Islamic terrorist organizations that have been a major part of the worst terrorist actions of the last 30 years, all the while somehow managing to convince the US to provide a shield of defense against these same radicals.  Pretty nifty stuff.  Meanwhile, we oil-aholic Americans belly up to the bar for another barrel of the hard stuff, shelling out billions upon billions of dollars that pass through the hands of our Big Oil companies, then go straight into the Saudi coffers to be distributed to the very Islamic terrorist organizations that we are trying to defeat.  If this all wasn't so sadly true, you couldn't make it up.

          There are two main sects of Muslims, Sunnis and Shias.  At the beginning, in the 8th century, there was a dispute over who would succeed the Prophet Muhammad.  Most Muslims accepted Muhammad's right-hand man, Abu Bakr, as his successor, or the first Caliph.  A smaller group thought it should be his son-in-law, Ali.  Ali did eventually become the fourth Caliph, but was quickly overthrown by descendants of Bakr, or the Umayyad Dynasty.  At this point, the Sunnis followed the Umayyad line, and the Shias followed Ali's descendants, who were called Imams.  Most of the basic tenets of Islam are the same in both sects.  A majority of Muslims are Sunnis, but Iran is a majority Shi'ite nation, as is Iraq. The thought struck me that there sure have been a lot of bad feelings over the centuries between these two sects who, in most respects, believe the same things. So many people have died over the details.
          Then I started thinking about Catholics and Protestants.  I grew up in the Catholic faith.  Both my mother and father were born and raised Catholic.  All five of us kids were baptized Catholic, took our first Holy Communion at age seven, and were all Confirmed at thirteen.  My older brothers and my older sister went to Catholic schools, but my younger sister and I, for the most part, didn't.  I don't really know why.  There were a lot of Catholic families in my neighborhood, families with lots of children.  I'm not sure where I learned this (probably Catechism), but I distinctly remember believing that Catholics were the only ones who were really serious about getting to Heaven because we had to go to church and we took Holy Communion every Sunday.  Those other people, the Protestants (whatever that was), were a kind of Catholic lite.  The way I understood it was that they didn't have to go to church, and they didn't take Communion every Sunday, and they didn't go to Confession, and they didn't believe in Mary!  Saying "Hail Marys" were second in importance only to the "Our Father" in important prayers.  I remember sitting in the back of my parent's car on Sunday morning as we would pass a non-Catholic's house, and I would think, "I wonder what those people do on Sunday mornings?" 
          Fast-forward about twenty years.  After a time away from any organized religion, I was brought back into the Faith through an evangelical non-denominational Protestant church.  I realized that most of the things that I thought about Protestants when I was a child were either wrong, or misunderstood.  But one day, something disturbing happened to me.  Someone, knowing that I was brought up in the Catholic Church, asked me, "When did you become a Christian?"  I came to realize soon enough that many Protestants don't really think being a Catholic qualifies as truly being a Christian.  When I worked at a Christian record company, which really means a Protestant Christian record company, there was a problem when I wanted to sign a very talented young Catholic singer.  It was agreed that she would need to be "indoctrinated" in the Protestant lingo, and that she would play down her Catholicism as much as possible.  I heard many times that Catholics were a kind of Christian lite.
          Having spent a considerable amount of time in both faith groups, I'm confident about a couple of things. There are both Catholics and Protestants who talk a lot about being religious, but there isn't a lot of heart in it. There are also a lot of Catholics and Protestants who make it their life's goal to know Jesus Christ, and to try and walk in His footsteps. There sure have been a lot of bad feelings over the centuries between these two sects who, for the most part, believe the same things. So much blood has been spilled over the details.