Posted on 07/02/2004 3:19:05 AM PDT by Tantumergo
All eyes have been on Iraq and the handover. But it is time America and its allies turned their attention to Saudi Arabia and the militant Islam that thrives there – a creed which continues to fund and inspire al-Qaida
Last autumn I visited a Sufi shrine just outside Peshawar in the North West Frontier of Pakistan. Rahman Baba was a seventeenth-century mystic whose Sufi verses have made him the national poet of the Pathans, and whose tomb has for centuries been a place where musicians and poets have gathered. A friend who used to live nearby during the 1980s advised me to go on a Thursday night as that was when great crowds of Pathans would come and sing qawwalis – mystical love songs – to their saint by the light of the moon, a sight he described as unforgettable.
All this was very much in keeping with Sufi practice, and typical of the popular mystical form of Islam that has dominated South Asia since Islam reached the region in the late twelfth century. Indeed in India, as in sub-Saharan Africa, Sufism was the main force in the dissemination and spread of Islam. Sufis believe strongly in the power of music and poetry to move devotees towards greater love of God. As al-Ghazzali wrote in the eleventh century: “The heart of man has been so made by God that, like a flint, it contains a hidden fire which is evoked by music and harmony, and renders the listener beside himself with ecstasy.”
Since my friend left Peshawar, however, much had changed in the region. A hardline Islamic party had now come to power in the Frontier province and removed all posters from the streets (only the picture of Colonel Sanders outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken had been left, apparently out of respect for the Colonel’s properly Islamic beard). Moreover, two Saudi-funded Wahhabi religious schools – or madrasas – had now opened near the shrine of Rahman Baba and had attempted to halt what they saw as the un-Islamic practices there.
As advised, I went along on a Thursday evening. I drove out of Peshawar, past the two madrasas, and found my way to a large enclosure sheltered by a wind-break of date palms. Tamarind, neem trees and a great spreading banyan grew beside a bubbling spring. Above rose the glistening white dome of the saint’s tomb. It was a beautiful place; but there were no musicians there that evening, only a small crowd of beggars, a man selling chickpeas, and a couple of faqirs carrying green flags. Watching suspiciously from a short distance stood two young men with full beards, white robes and checked red and white Saudi ghutras (headscarves). I asked the shrine’s pirzada (Sufi master) what had happened to the musicians for which his shrine was once famous. He motioned for me to come to his room, out of earshot of the two men in the ghutras.
“My family have been singing here for generations,” he told me. “But now these Arab madrasa students come here and create trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?” I asked.
“They tell us that what we do is wrong. They ask people who are singing to stop. Sometimes arguments break out – even fist fights and brawls.”
“How long has this being going on?” I asked.
“Before the Afghan war there was nothing like this,” replied the pirzada. “It only began when Reagan and the Saudis starting sending jihadis [holy warriors] to Peshawar. Before that the Pushtuns here loved Sufism. Then the Saudis came, with their huge propaganda to stop us visiting the saints, and to stop us preaching ishq [love]. Now this trouble happens more and more frequently. Last week they actually broke the saz of a famous musician from Kohat. ”
“What do you do?” I asked.
“What can we do?” he replied. “We pray that Baba will work a miracle, that right will overpower wrong. But our way is pacifist. We love. We never fight. When these Arabs come here I don’t know what to do.”
I have often thought of the shrine of Rahman Baba over the last fortnight as further violence has shaken Saudi Arabia. Following on from the kidnapping and murder last month of 22 expatriates in Khobar, gun battles in the streets of Jeddah and the murder in broad daylight of a BBC cameraman, this weekend has bought further violence to the kingdom. One American has been kidnapped and another, an engineer named Paul Johnson, was murdered. The Foreign Office has begun the process of pulling out non-essential staff.
Despite the killing by Saudi security forces of one of the most senior al-Qaida operatives in the kingdom, things are clearly coming to a head in Saudi Arabia. It is not exactly falling apart, but we are close to seeing the mass exodus of the expatriate community that runs its oil business, with a potentially disastrous effect on oil prices. This militancy is fanned by an increasingly unstable and volatile Iraq next door, where Islamist forces are proving very effective against coalition forces, leading to a widespread feeling that US allies in the region have had their day, and that the fall of both the Saudi regime and the new Government in Iraq is now a possibility.
On the BBC’s Today programme 10 days ago, the Saudi ambassador, Prince Turki al Faisal, expressed his grief at the death of the BBC cameraman, and swore that the authorities were doing everything to arrest the culprits responsible for his death. But at no point did the interviewer mention that Turki has admitted having had five meetings with Osama bin Laden. Indeed al-Qaida was in some respects a creation of Saudi intelligence during the Afghan jihad against the Soviets, and Osama bin Laden first saw action in Afghanistan fighting under Abd al-Rab al-Rasul Sayyaf, the Saudis’ main protégé in the region.
If more and more of the Muslim world is now open to a newly intolerant and sometimes violent strain of Islam, no force has been more responsible for this than the ultra-Orthodox tribal absolutism of Saudi Arabia. Ever since Prince Turki’s forebear, Ibn Saud, conquered the Hejaz in the 1930s, the Saudis have promoted Wahhabism, the most severe incarnation of Islam.
Since the oil boom of the early 1970s this policy of exporting not just petroleum but also hardline Wahhabism grew to become a fundamental tenet of Saudi foreign policy: for 30 years a sizeable slice of the country’s oil revenues has been devoted to promoting Wahhabism and funding Islamic organisations that share the Wahhabis’ literalist and fundamentalist approach. They thus promote radical strands of Islam at the expense of more mystical, traditional, moderate, tolerant and pluralistic forms of the religion. In this way the Saudis have provoked a clash of civilisations, not so much between East and West but within Islam itself.
The Wahhabis have always been opponents of Sufi and non-Arab strains of Islam: on coming to power in the early nineteenth century, the Wahhabis destroyed all the Sufi and Shia shrines in Arabia and Iraq, including the tombs of descendants of the Prophet, and wreaked devastation on the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala, recently the scene of further confrontations between the US and their Shia opponents. At the time, most Muslims regarded the Wahhabis as an extreme and alien sect, a perversion bordering on infidelity – kufr. Even to this day, the Wahhabis make up only two per cent of the world’s Muslims. However, the Wahhabis have used their oil revenues – the Saudis still control one quarter of the world’s reserves – to attempt to suppress Sufism, and to attempt to remake Islam in their own puritanical image. The Saudis now dominate as much as 95 per cent of Arabic-language media, from newspapers and publishing to television stations; while 80 per cent of the mosques in the US are controlled by Wahhabi imams.
While limiting radical Islam at home, the Saudis have promoted it abroad. They have achieved this principally by funding hardline Wahhabi and Salafi schools in the Muslim world, most concertedly in Afghanistan, Kurdistan and Pakistan. In Pakistan a recent Interior Ministry report revealed that there are now 27 times as many madrasas as there were in 1947: from 245 at the time of independence the number has shot up to 6870 in 2001. There are now an estimated 700,000 Pakistanis enrolled in madrasas: an entire Islamist education system existing parallel to the moribund state sector and now educating a substantial proportion of Pakistani children.
The great majority of these new madrasas are built with funds from Riyadh, and the most militant and jihadi-minded madrasas have received especially lavish sums from the Saudis: the Haqqaniya at Akora Khattack in the North West Frontier, for example, has close ties with the University of Medina. It was in these madrasas that the Taliban were trained. Indeed Sami ul-Haq, the director of the Haqqaniya Madrasa, proudly boasts of having helped found the Taliban and of numbering among his graduates most of its commanders and leaders. Whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters, Sami ul-Haq would simply close down the madrasa and send his students off to fight.
The Saudis not only provided money for the jihadi schools that helped create the Taliban, they also funded its takeover of Afghanistan. Once the Taliban began advancing on Kabul in 1996, the Saudis increased the military aid they received: Prince Turki personally flew several times into Kandahar, providing funds, weapons, vehicles and fuel to aid the Taliban conquest of the country. In return, the Taliban modelled several of their institutions on Saudi prototypes, notably the much-feared Religious Police. Saudi Arabia became one of only three countries to recognise the Taliban’s medieval regime.
A similar pattern was followed in Central Asia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Saudis sent millions of Qur’ans to the newly independent republics, funded Central Asians to go on hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) and gave scholarships for mullahs to study in Saudi Arabia, where they imbibed radical Wahhabism. The rulers of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have since called Wahhabism the biggest threat to the stability of their countries.
The Saudis have recently stepped up funding radical Islam in Africa: in Tanzania alone the Saudis have been spending $1 million a year building new mosques, madrasas and Islamic centres, while Wahhabi activists have begun bombing bars and beating women who go out with uncovered faces. In Bosnia, $33 million was spent on building new Wahhabi cultural centres and institutes, while around $500,000 was spent in Kosovo sponsoring 388 religious “propagators” who wished to convert the Sufi-minded Kosovars to Wahhabism. Closer to home, there have been “telethons” on Saudi television, and personal appeals from the Crown Prince Abdullah to raise money for Hamas and the families of suicide bombers, so encouraging the most intransigent Islamist elements in Palestine at the expense of the moderates and liberals.
Since the downfall of the Taliban, Pakistan’s Saudi-funded jihadi madrasas continue to encourage recruits to join new jihads against targets as diverse as the US, Russia, China and India. Some of the more extreme madrasas have also tried to bring about a radicalisation of Pakistan itself: in 1998, for example, madrasa students in Baluchistan began organising bonfires of televisions and attacking video shops.
A direct result of this Saudi influence is that a growing number of Muslims internationally have been taught a story of Islamic tradition from which Sufism is rigorously excluded, which justifies violence and which breeds a strong antipathy towards non-Muslims. You can see the effect internationally: look at the coverage of any Islamist demonstration in Indonesia and the rabble-rousers are all wearing ghutras; watch an interview with a Nigerian cleric in favour of death by stoning, and he will invariably be wearing Saudi clothes, quite alien to Africa. Internationally, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish Wahhabism from militant Islam.
It is not just that Saudi oil wealth has promoted the theological environment that has allowed the ideas of groups such as al-Qaida to flourish. The link is more direct, for it was Saudi money that financed both the most extreme jihadis fighting in Afghanistan and the camps in which they were trained. It was funds from Saudi intelligence, for example, which paid for the construction of Osama bin Laden’s redoubt at Tora Bora. A recent UN report calculated that, in the decade leading up to 9/11, Saudi Arabia transferred over $500 million to al-Qaida via Islamic charities. It is no coincidence that Saudi Arabia provided 15 of the 19 hijackers on 11 September. Likewise in Indonesia, the Bali bombings were the work of the Lashkar-i Jihad movement that emerged from a group of Saudi-funded madrasas.
Yet the West, dependent on Saudi oil and rich from profitable arms sales to the Gulf, continues to ignore the culpability of the Saudis – to the extent that the Bush administration secretly facilitated the mass evacuation of leading Saudis – including several of the bin Laden clan and members of the royal family – from the US on 13 September 2001, while almost all American planes remained grounded. None of the Saudis was questioned by the FBI or CIA, despite the fact that the bin Ladens at least must have been able to give the security forces vital background information on the man responsible for the bloodiest act of terrorism in American history. Later the Bush administration went even further and blacked out 28 pages of a congressional report that documented Saudi Government ties with the 9/11 hijackers.
The US continues to allow the Saudis to suppress human rights, deny freedom of worship and lock up political activists every bit as brutally as the Taliban, with barely a whisper of criticism. Indeed Amnesty International recently produced a report highlighting the Saudis’ “arrest and detention abuses, secret trials, torture, flogging and amputation, and the abuse of women”. Rather than protesting, Bush and Blair do all they can to shore up this hated and corrupt autocracy. As any alternative government is likely to be even more virulently ultra-orthodox and anti-Western, and because the Saudis continue to buy such enormous quantities of weaponry from Britain and America, the Ibn Saud dynasty is allowed to remain in place and British and American policy continues to support – and to do lucrative business with – a regime that has done more than anything else to foster the spirit of anti-Western, ultra-militant Islam. Without the Saudis, and the fortunes they have pumped into militant Islam across the globe, 9/11 – and more recently the attacks this year in Madrid – could not possibly have happened.
For far more than the secular Ba’athist regimes targeted by the Washington neo-cons, it is the Saudis who have turned the face of Islam against the West. In that sense, the war in Iraq was the wrong war, fought against the wrong enemy. It removed an unpleasant but stable and secular Ba’athist regime which was deeply opposed to militant Islam, while providing both a rallying cry and base of operations for al-Qaida supporters. Indeed, if the war against the Taliban in the winter of 2001-2 successfully rid international militant Islam of an Afghan safe haven, it looks as if the war in Iraq has now provided a replacement: Iraq in its anarchy is currently the safest place on the planet to be a member of al-Qaida – a quite astonishing own goal on the part of Bush and Blair.
Meanwhile, the country which has played by far the greatest role in advancing global Islamic militancy was never listed in Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, and is a major US ally.
This is the ultimate irony: that Saudi money comes from the West in the form of oil revenues and investment – so that in the end it is we who are funding the export of Wahhabi intolerance. If the Saudi regime is now crumbling due to the uncontrollable militant forces they themselves have unleashed, we have only ourselves to blame.
William Dalrymple’s most recent book, White Mughals (Harper Perennial) won the Wolfson Prize for History.
Of possible interest to your ping lists.
Lengthy article, but very incisive, making the case that Saudi Arabia is the ultimate source and sponsor of most Islamic Terrorism - and that the West is letting them get away with it because of the oil.
Yes, we should be fighting all countries everywhere simultaneously. < /sarcasm>
"In Bosnia, $33 million was spent on building new Wahhabi cultural centres and institutes, while around $500,000 was spent in Kosovo sponsoring 388 religious “propagators” who wished to convert the Sufi-minded Kosovars to Wahhabism."
This article gives some idea of the forces your brothers and sisters are having to contend with in Eastern Europe and the Levant.
Maybe Milosevic was more prescient of the true situation than the Western governments.
What Dick Morris recently said has an axiomatic ring to it: To paraphrase "When The West learns to live without oil, many of these problems will simply vanish."
"Rahman Baba was a seventeenth-century mystic...."
Just want to point out that we are not related.
Gee, this is news now? Really, the Saudis, why, I never.
But the President said......
Title is wrong.
Not Cannot, Won't. Reasons too dirty to expound on in public.
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