The Shaykh’s talk on the Saudi-Arab-American alliance against Iraq and the impermissibility of declaring the Iraqi people disbelievers as a whole

The Shaykh : We know with certainty that the Saudi ruler is not the same as the ruled. No matter how much we say that the Saudi ruler is better than the rulers of the Muslims, he still has some deviations that no one can deny. Is there any Muslim who practices the oneness of Allah (tawhid) on the face of the earth, especially in the land of tawhid, who would deny that the spread of images of the Saudi kings and their placement in the front of meeting halls contradicts tawhid? Do you imagine that there is anyone who disagrees with this? We imagine that there might be such people who permit hanging pictures in Syrian and Egyptian countries and the like. But as for Saudi scholars who grew up on tawhid and were raised on tawhid, they undoubtedly deny in the depths of their hearts the manifestations of shirk (associating partners with Allah) that the Saudi state is now spreading among all the peoples, let alone the Saudi people. This is a contradiction, this is a contradiction, but they deny it at least in their hearts, at the third level after which there is not a grain of faith, as is in the authentic hadith. So, just as there are individuals in the Saudi state and among the Saudi people who deny some of the rulers’ actions because they contradict the Islamic Shari'ah, so too there are people in other peoples who deny, sometimes in the heart, sometimes with the tongue, and sometimes by revolution, some of the rulers who rule by other than what Allah has revealed. So how is it permissible for us to associate them with their governments, to apply the term of disbelief (kufr) to them, and to cite the verses that command fighting the disbelievers? Rather, we exaggerate and say: they are more disbelieving than the disbelievers.
Knowing that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of our Salafi brothers in Iraq, and among them are some students who graduated from the Islamic University, and perhaps I was one of the supervising professors in their education. These people live in the land of Iraq. So how do we say: they must fight because they are disbelievers? And here—and there is no power nor might except in Allah—it comes.

The questioner : As you said, the ruler does not represent the people.

The Shaykh : He does not represent the people.