Muhammad unveiled a new faith to the people of Mecca in 610. Known as Islam, or submission to God, the monotheistic religion incorporated some Jewish and Christian traditions and expanded with a set of laws that governed most aspects of life, including political authority. Language does not provide a picture of reality, he argued, but rather presents a set of activities which he dubbed “language games.” In learning language, one needs to be able to respond to words in various contexts; speech and action work together. The internet has accelerated the spread of Wahhabism; many websites and social media feeds are now heavily marked by Wahhabi-inspired prejudices, including overwhelming quantities of anti-Shia hate speech. There are copies of the Farnese Hercules, including at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, as well as in the Antalya Museum in Turkey. Iran has supported and funded its own proxies in Syria, including the Lebanese Hezbollah, as well as the Assad government. Iran’s self-defeating position towards Israel, made more serious by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ relationship with the Lebanese Hezbollah and egregious anti-Semitic outbursts, is an exception. The head of the Islamic Republic of Iran and commander-in-chief of the armed forces maintains a close relationship with the Revolutionary Guard.

Iran is also accused of seeking hegemony or destabilising the region through its support for militias in Iraq, but this accusation is perverse. Beyond Wahhabism, another aspect of the Saudis’ distaste for Shias, and for other Sunni ruling elites in the Arab world, derives from traditional social and political patterns in the region. Since then, “Twelvers,” or Ithna Ashari Shias, have vested religious authority in their senior clerical leaders, called ayatollahs (Arabic for “sign of God”). They are ruling rentier states dependent on oil money to keep subject populations docile, with armed forces of doubtful effectiveness that have to be stiffened by mercenaries (from Pakistan and Colombia, for example) when serious ground fighting is in prospect. Except for the blossom colour, both variants are practically identical. Because of the air-tight nature of the interior when the doors are properly closed, you may have to work a little harder to latch them properly. However, since the election, many Mormon political leaders, such as Mitt Romney, have partially reconciled themselves with Trump. Since his election, Trump has changed his mind, but it is not clear why.

That is why Khalid, the then Saudi king, responded not by combating religious extremism but by appeasing and embracing it, turning the country away from Western models (at least on the surface) and back to the harsh principles of Wahhabism. Sheikh Nimr had advocated for greater political rights for Shiites in Saudi Arabia and surrounding countries. Can you match all these countries to their flags? The Maya civilization lasted for roughly 2,500 years, so it can be easy to see how the stories of gods and goddesses changed as time went on and people spread out to settle in new areas. Yet the tale it tells of good versus evil amid the survivors of a plague that wipes out most of Earth’s population is a classic and much beloved by readers. Iraqi Shias have an ambivalent attitude to Iran, sharing much of the mistrust that Sunni Iraqis and other Arabs have towards the Iranians. On 4 June, after the London Bridge terrorist attacks, Theresa May said that there had been “far too much tolerance” of Islamic extremism in the UK.

There is nothing on the Iranian or Shia side to compare with the damage done by the extreme Wahhabi world-view that led to the attacks of 11 September 2001, the atrocities of IS in Iraq and Syria and its outrages in Paris, Nice, London and Manchester. Struggles between Sunni and Shia forces have fed a Syrian civil war that threatens to transform the map of the Middle East, spurred violence that is fracturing Iraq and widened fissures in a number of tense Gulf countries. They were not open to Iranian leadership but may have been shamed by the Iranian example. Those who defend UK policy towards Saudi Arabia have sometimes done so on the curious grounds that we would achieve nothing by taking a more critical line: that the Saudis would take no notice, and we would merely lose influence (and lucrative arms sales contracts). If now, as seems to be his intention, Trump forces the rest of the US policymaking establishment to declare Iran in breach of the nuclear deal agreed in 2015, and against all the evidence, that will open yet wider the gap between policy and reality, remove one of the few forces for stability in the troubled Middle East, and bring the US closer to war with Iran.