Posted on 09/23/2001 11:38:03 PM PDT by Wallaby
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
The question America dares not ask: What role do the Saudis play? Stephen Schwartz MAIL ON SUNDAY Pg. 16 September 23, 2001
THE first thing to do when trying to understand Islamic suicide bombers is to forget cliches about the Muslim taste for martyrdom.
It exists, of course, but the desire for paradise is not a safe guide to what motivated the suicide attacks on New York and Washington.
What has so galvanised violent tendencies in the world's second-largest religion and,in America,the fastest growing faith?...if you ask educated, pious, traditional but forward-looking Muslims, ... many of them will answer you with one word: Wahhabism.
Throughout history, political extremists of all faiths have willingly given up their lives in the belief that they would change the course of history, or at least win an advantage for their cause.
Tamils are not Muslims, but they blow themselves up in their war in Sri Lanka; kamikaze pilots in the Second World War were not Muslims, but they flew their fighters into American aircraft carriers. The Islamofascist ideology of Osama Bin Laden and those closest to him, such as the Egyptian and Algerian Islamic Groups, is no more intrinsically linked to Islam than Pearl Harbour was to Buddhism or Ulster terrorists whatever they may profess are to Christianity.
The attacks of September 11 are simply not compatible with orthodox Muslim theology, which cautions soldiers 'in the way of Allah' to fight their enemies face-to-face, without harming non-combatants, women or children.
Most Muslims, not only in Britain and America, but in the world, are lawabiding citizens of their countries a point stressed by President Bush and other American leaders, much to their credit.
So what turned the perpetrators of those appalling attacks into the monsters they became? What has so galvanised violent tendencies in the world's second-largest religion and,in America,the fastest growing faith? Can it really flow from a quarrel over land in the Middle East?
Westerners look for answers in the distant past, beginning with the Crusades.
But if you ask educated, pious, traditional but forward-looking Muslims what has driven their 'umma', or global community, in this direction, many of them will answer you with one word: Wahhabism.
This strain of Islam emerged not at the time of the Crusades, but little more than two centuries ago. It was born of a preacher Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1703-92) from the Nejd the area where Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh, now stands .
The official religion of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, it is the equivalent of the most extreme Puritanical Christianity. It abolishes all decoration in mosques even the name of the Prophet Mohammed must not be written in them and even gravestones are anathema as idols.
It bans music and demands death for sexual transgressions or drinking.
Unique in Islam, it brands those who do not pray as unbelievers. It is violent, it is intolerant, and it is fanatical beyond measure. Not all Muslims are suicide bombers, but all Muslim suicide bombers are Wahhabis.
The cult was always associated with mass murder. When the Wahhabis took the city of Qarbala in 1801 they killed 2,000 citizens in the streets.
In the 19th Century, Wahhabism took the form of Arab nationalism against the Turks.
And a forerunner of America helping Bin Laden by subsidising the Afghan Mujahideen in the early 20th Century Britain lent support to Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi Arabs in their revolt against the 'decadent' Ottoman Empire.
The Turks tolerated the vast differences in local traditions across their Islamic empire.
No such tolerance exists in Wahhabism, which is why the concept of US troops on Saudi soil so inflames Bin Laden.
Bin Laden is a Wahhabi.
So, too, are suicide bombers in Israel and the Egyptians who bathed in the blood of tourists they stabbed to death at Luxor four years ago.
So were the Algerian terrorists whose contribution to world purification included murdering people for reading secular newspapers. So are the Taliban-style guerrillas in Kashmir who murder Hindus.
The Iranians are not Wahhabis, which partially explains their slow moves towards moderation after a period of puritan revivalism.
The Taliban do practise a variant of Wahhabism.
But none of this extremism has been inspired by American fumblings in the world and it has little to do with the tragedies that have beset Israelis and Palestinians.
In fact, most Muslims in the world are peaceful people who would prefer Western democracy in their own countries and loathe Wahhabism.
For them, Bin Laden and Wahhabis are not defending Islam; they represent an ultraradical break in the direction of a sectarian utopia.
Thus, Wahhabis are best described as Islamofascists, although they have much in common with the Bolsheviks.
The Bengali Sufi writer Zeeshan Ali has described the situation touchingly: 'Muslims from Bangladesh now in the US, uphold the traditional beliefs of Islam but keep quiet when their beliefs are attacked by Wahhabis who all of a sudden become "better" Muslims.
'These Wahhabis go even further and accuse their own fathers of heresy and sin.
'The children of immigrants get exposed only to this onesided version of Islam and are led to think it is the only Islam.' This is why some of those young people in the ten-million-strong Muslim community in America, as well as those in Europe, are ready to commit themselves to selfdestruction and mass murder.
Wahhabism preached in an estimated 80 per cent of American mosques is subsidised by Saudi Arabia, even though Bin Laden has sworn to destroy the Saudi royal family.
The Saudis have played a double game for years.
They pretended to be allies in a common struggle against Saddam Hussein while they spread Wahhabi ideology everywhere Muslims are to be found, just as, during the Second World War, Stalin promoted an 'antifascist' coalition with the United States while carrying out espionage and subversion on American territory. The motive was the same: the belief that the West was or is decadent and doomed.
One major question is never asked in American discussions of Arab terrorism: What is the role of Saudi Arabia?
It cannot be asked because American companies depend too much on Saudi oil while the politicians have become too cosy with the Saudi rulers.
But it is the most significant question: If we get rid of Bin Laden, who do we then have to deal with? The answer was put by Islamic expert Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego. 'If the US wants to do something about radical Islam, it has to deal with Saudi Arabia,' he says.
'The "rogue states" (Iraq, Libya, etc) are less important in the radicalisation of Islam than Saudi Arabia the single most important cause and supporter of the general fanaticisation of Islam.' From what we now know, all the suicide pilots seem to have been Saudis, citizens of the Gulf states, Egyptians or Algerians planted in America long before the outbreak of the latest Palestinian intifada.
In fact, they seem to have begun their conspiracy while the Middle East peace process was in full, if short, bloom.
Anti-terror experts and politicians in the West must now consider the Saudi connection.
Stephen Schwartz is author of Intellectuals And Assassins, published by Anthem Press.
In watching these worms squirm, the horror that sould hit all citizens that love their country, is the governments acceptance and insistance that people that do not love this country, some who would even harm this country, be welcomed into this country to set up a miniature homeland, and the insanity of them in forcing this presence, and demand of acceptance and tolerance, upon natural born citizens, whose own good natural instincts tell them that this is inherently dangerous and unacceptable.
In watching these worms squirm, the horror that sould hit all citizens that love their country, is the governments acceptance and insistance that people that do not love this country, some who would even harm this country, be welcomed into this country to set up a miniature homeland, and the insanity of them in forcing this presence, and demand of acceptance and tolerance, upon natural born citizens, whose own good natural instincts tell them that this is inherently dangerous and unacceptable.
I have collected a number of articles that address this very question:
On the Complicity of Mainstream Islamic Society
In my book, a country that executes Christians for practicing their faith amongst themselves, is pretty close to totally whacko. Saudi Arabia is a feudal nation without even a magna carta. But lots of oil.
See:
DUBAI, Sept 24
His purist interpretation was taken up in 1745 by Mohammad ibn Saud, the founder of the Saud dynasty which controls modern Saudi Arabia. Wahhab declared all those who disagreed heretics and used force to impose the doctrine. Today his descendants known as the ash-Shaykh family still control the religious institutions of Saudi Arabia in a cooperative and consensual relationship with the royal family. Olivier Roy, a specialist in political Islam at France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, explains that the influence of Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism on the Taliban began in the 1980s. |
"The networks of Taliban schools were developed in Pakistan and mostly financed by Saudi Arabia, which also provided teachers and offered scholarships to youngsters. So we had a 'wahhabisation' of the Taliban movement, which was originally not Wahhabi," Roy said. The Taliban, in fact, belonged to a traditional movement in the Indian sub-continent called the Deobandist school, "who never waged war on images or statues," Roy said in reference to the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan's Bamiyan province in March. The Taliban's interpretation of Wahhabism is far stricter than that practised in Saudi Arabia today. The militia demands that women be completely covered in public, bans music, television and cinema, and exacts punishments such as execution, stoning, amputation and flogging for moral offences. Paradoxically, when the Soviet Union, the common enemy of the United States and the Taliban, left Afghanistan in the late 1980s, it was the resources and ideology exported from Saudi Arabia and the training and money from the United States that led to the establishment of the hardline regime violently hostile to US interests. Afghanistan has since 1994 been home to Saudi-born bin Laden, prime suspect in the September 11 terror attacks in the United States that left thousands dead. Bin Laden's presence has only increased the isolation of Afghanistan and today Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are the only countries to recognise the Taliban. The United Arab Emirates snapped diplomatic relations on Saturday after the regime in Kabul refused to hand over bin Laden. Riyadh downgraded ties with Kabul to charge d'affaires level in 1998 in a similar protest. In September 1999, the parliament of the Russian republic of Dagestan outlawed any Wahhabi organisation, accusing followers of organising two armed uprisings in an effort to establish an Islamic republic independent of Moscow. And in April, the pro-Russian Chechen mufti, Akhmad Shamaiev, accused Saudi Arabia of being behind the development of Wahhabism in Chechnya and the Caucasus region through "young men" who had completed further education in the oil-rich kingdom. The only other Wahhabi state is Qatar, but the doctrine is not enforced as strictly. |
A number of the bombers of Israel and elsewhere aren't even primarily motivated by Islamic fundamentalism, though the most extreme groups are, and the guys who hit us were. Islamic fundamentalism is not reducable to Wahhabism, though. It is a more varied and a more recent thing, mostly a phenomenon of this century. Islamic revival was the early and hopeful term, and Islamic radicalism the more recent one - fundamentalism would cover all of them.
The attractions of the notion that Islam is sound only in the institutions of the first 300 years are partly theological but mostly political. In the first sense, it goes back to a time before division by controversy, much as some Protestant groups define doctrine by the Nicene creed, to antedate east-west splits, etc. But there was another political attraction of the idea at the time and place of its adoption. The Turks hadn't shown up yet, and Arabs were still in charge.
The Turks weren't resisted in the 19th and early 20th century because they were supposedly tolerant. The secularized attitude of modern Turkey dates only to 1920, and Attaturk's language based nationalist revolution after the defeat of WW I. Turkish rule was resisted by the Arabs out of language nationalism - because they spoke Turkish rather than Arabic - and because they were distant and rather harsh despots ruling the whole Middle East from Istanbul. From the time of the French revolution, nationalism (defined by language grouping) has been an important political force in the Arab world.
So a puritan nationalist break-away movement in the deserts of Arabia, and the distant fertile coast of Yemen shielded by those deserts, arose naturally. They denied Islamic legitimacy to their Turkish rulers by "disqualifying" every political event in Islamic history after the Turks arrived in serious force. They could claim that Islam had originated among Arabs, not steppe nomad Turks from central Asia, who were still barbarians then.
But they did not get very far in the 19th century, because the Turks were much stronger, and were at the time continually supported by the policy of the British, who propped up the Ottoman Empire as a means of containing Russia. Although the British eased this policy to secure Egypt for themselves, under a puppet Arab government.
The main event of the early 20th century for the whole region was the explusion of the Turks by the Allied powers, supported by a nationalist rising by all the Arabs. Afterwards, the power vaccum left by the withdrawl of the Turks was filled by Arab kings of the House of Faisal, originally placed on their thrones to rule over divisions on the map carved out by European diplomats, by the British foreign office.
One of these was on the throne of Arabia. It was this Faisal king that the House of Saud overthrew between the two world wars, to create the present kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This success coincided with significant oil discoveries in the area, which the Saudis made available from development by western companies, from both the UK and the US.
This hardly qualifies as some inspiration to later Islamic fundamentalists. Islamic fundamentalists seek the overthrow of the Saudi government as corrupt lackies of the west - for selling us oil instead of embargoing it, for living luxuriously, for cooperating with us militarily, for letting our troops into the country, etc.
The present kings of the House of Saud are committed to a culturally conservative domestic policy. There are obvious reasons for this. They are traditional kings. Modern ideologies imported from the west tend to have a dim view of the legitimacy of kings who reign without constitutions or parliaments. Traditional culture sees them as a matter of course. When the Shah of Iran engaged in a "revolution from above" in favor of what he understood to be modernism and center-left pseudo-socialism, he soon found himself without a constituency. And then without a country. People noticed.
None of which makes the cultural conservatism of the Saudis into bomb throwing. Nor makes an 18th century sect into all of modern Islamic fundamentalism. The Iranians were not more moderate than the Saudis in 1979, as everyone knows; there is nothing magically moderate about Shiite rather than Sunni Islam. (Perhaps the reverse, in fact). The Party of God (Hezbollah) are certainly bombers, and they are certainly not Sunni Wahhabis. There are many other Islamicist parties and groups in other countries, that are Sunni. But they aren't Wahhabis either - Islamic Brotherhood, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, yada yada.
What I think happened here is the article writer asked a theologian to explain something to him about fundamentalist Islam, and the person who wrote the article did not understand the nuances of what he was told. Both the bombers and the Wahhabis can properly be called "fundamentalist", in the sense of the way they read the Koran and decide to accept stories about the prophet as bonafide, etc. Both are culturally conservative. There the equivalence ends. There are plenty of nasties who aren't Wahhabis, and plenty of Wahhabis who aren't nasty. Including the government of Saudi Arabia.
Every single Middle Eastern national without a valid visa should already be incarcerated, either awaiting trial or on a (very) slow boat home. I cannot even conceive why this has not happened.
The green card holders and J-1/H-1 holders raise more complicated issues-but the illegals are simple, right?
Do you get it?
The corrupt desire of politicans to stuff ballot boxes has placed us in grave danger. I get that.
Bin Laden's argument with the Saudi Royal family is that they do not adhere to the strict behaviour codes of the Wahabbi variety of Islam. They drink, they are sexually indulgent, they are corrupt. And they allow 10,000 American troops to stay on the Holy Ground of Saudi Arabia, corrupting the place, in his eyes.
I'm not sure that the author's contention that bin Laden wants to rule Saudi Arabia is correct. But he definitely wants to see the fall of the current Saudi regime and its replacement by people who will more purely follow the Wahabbi variety of Islam.
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