This week, the Saudi royal family is in London on its first state visit for 20 years. A state visit by the Saudi royal family is no small thing – this is a big family. Indeed, King Abdullah flew no less than five private jets to the UK, carrying over 100 advisors, ambassadors, economists, chefs, barbers, and some of his 30 wives. He has rented out most of the Dorchester Hotel for his retinue.

Yesterday, the Saudi royal family was entertained by the British royal family at Buckingham Palace, where they dined on a halal meal of roast venison with stuffed tomatoes. The Queen spoke blandly of the “mutual benefit” which comes from the UK’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, while King Abdullah sensibly found a common and apolitical conversation topic in horse-racing, presenting the Queen with an antique book on Arabian horses.

But behind the niceties, this is an awkward visit. The problems kicked off even before the House of Saud had descended on the UK. King Abdullah, in an interview with the BBC, said Saudi Arabia had warned MI5 about the terrorist attacks of July 2005 but that “unfortunately no action was taken. And it may have been able to maybe avert the tragedy”.

This is an extraordinary thing to say shortly before a state visit. It’s basically suggesting our government was negligent, and this negligence cost British lives. It’s the sort of thing that can destroy governments – look at all the noise the Democrat Party in the US made about whether president Bush could have done more to prevent 9/11.

It is implying the same thing as president Putin implied when he visited the UK for the G8 meeting in 2005 – the UK is not doing enough to crack down on the extremist vipers lurking within its tolerant and open borders, and other countries are paying the price.

King Abdullah’s remarks caused a big stir, leading MI5 to make a rare public statement, saying: "No prior warning of the attacks was received from any source. The Saudis provided information about possible planning for an attack in the UK which was materially different from the attacks that took place in London on 7 July."

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, also cancelled a planned joint press conference with the Saudi foreign minister, making the cunning excuse that he had to go to the US to adopt a son…

We have been just as ungracious hosts as they have been ungracious guests. A British think-tank, the Policy Exchange [http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/], published a report on the eve of King Abdullah’s visit, saying that if extremists did lurk in the UK, it was above all the fault of the Saudi regime.

The report published the results of research into the availability of extremist literature at UK mosques and Muslim organizations.

By ‘extremist’, they mean literature that promotes violent jihad, the killing of apostates, and the global struggle against Jews.

It found such research available at around 25% of UK mosques, including some of the best-funded and most ‘mainstream’ mosques in London, such as the Regents Park mosque, near where I live.

The report pointed a finger squarely at Saudi Arabia for funding and disseminating much of this extremist literature. The influence of Saudi Arabia, it said, “was both powerful and malign. Much of the material is connected in some way with the Saudi kingdom, whether by virtue of being written by members of the Wahhabite religious establishment; being published and distributed by official, or semi-official Saudi institutions; or being found in Saudi-funded, or linked, mosques and schools in this country”.

This is not the first report to blame Saudi Arabia for the spread of Islamic extremism in the West. A book was published in the UK this year called The Islamist, which was an autobiographical account of how a young British Muslim became involved in Islamic radicalism, before realizing the error of his ways. The book was a real eye-opener in making many British people realize quite how deeply radical Islam had infiltrated British Muslim life, and quite how fundamentally it was opposed to liberal democracy.

The author, Ed Husain, had been exposed to the influence of Wahhabism in the UK first-hand, through islamist organizations like Jamat-e-Islami or the Youth Muslim Organization (YMO), both of which were directly funded by Saudi Arabia’s missionary arm, the Muslim World League.

Wahhabism is a form of highly literal, fundamentalist and puritanical Islam which has been embraced and promoted by the Saud family for a century. Indeed, the rise of the Saud family is inextricably linked to the rise of Wahhabism as a pan-Islamic doctrine of Jihad.

Wahhabi organizations like Jamat-e-Islami actively spread the ideas of Islamists like Abul Ala Mawdudi, the twentieth century thinker, who called for a “universal revolution” to overthrow all states opposed to Islam, and set up a “theo-democratic” Muslim state ruled by Shariah law, in which all Muslims would be mystically united as one beneath the benevolent rule of Allah and his priests.

Husain had first-hand experience of such a Shariah state when he taught for the British Council in Riyadh. He was startled by the Wahhabi extremism found in the texts on Islamic Culture, which were at the heart of the Saudi educational curriculum.

He writes: “I read these texts very closely: entire pages were devoted to explaining to undergraduates that all forms of Islam except Wahhabism were deviation…Readers were warned about the evil effects of plurality and political parties, democracy, and a parliamentary system. Worse, several pages were devoted to blaming Jews for the world’s ills.” These same texts, he says, were also circulated by Saudi-funded Wahhabi organizations in the UK.

If Saudi Arabia has helped spread Wahhabism, then the UK also helped the rise of Saudi Arabia. The Muslim scholar Reza Aslan writes, in his history of Islam, of how the British government first helped the Saud family to come to power after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, with the help of the charismatic Lawrence of Arabia.

He writes: “The British, who were eager to control the Persian Gulf, encouraged the Saudis to recapture the Arabian Peninsula from Ottoman control. The British provided regular shipments of weapons and money. Under the command of Ibn Saud’s heir, Abd al-Aziz, the plan worked. After publicly executing forty thousand men and reimposing Wahhabism over the entire peninsula, Abd al-Aziz renamed the Arabian Peninsula ‘the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’.”

Almost immediately, the newly-enthroned Saud royal family discovered oil on the Peninsula. “They now felt it was up to them to respond to this blessing from God by spreading their puritanical doctrine to the rest of the world, and purging the Muslim faith once and for all of its religious and ethnic diversity.”

The UK’s cynical and mutually exploitative relationship with the Saud royal family continues to this day. For example, the biggest client of BAE, the UK arms exporter, is Saudi Arabia. BAE recently signed a $40 billion new arms deal with the Sauds. The Anti-Fraud office began an investigation into bribery around this deal, but the Foreign Office, remarkably, intervened to stop the investigation. Saudi oil money is simply too important to the UK economy – not just to the arms trade, but also to real estate, the stock market, banking, and luxury goods.

That is why Gordon Brown, while publicly denouncing the Burmese military dictatorship, was happy to put on his white tie and tails to welcome the Saudi dictatorship to Buckingham Palace.

It’s a relationship of mutual exploitation, and mutual disrespect. The Saudis think we are unscrupulous and corrupt, but they need our guns and fighter jets. We think they are decadent, spoilt, hypocritical and fundamentalist, but we need their oil, and their petrodollars. So we embrace warmly, while stabbing each other in the back. Such is the sweet conviviality of international trade.

Jules Evans, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, London

October 31, 2007