|
|
|
|
Jihad knocks
on House of Saud's door
By Rabbi Moshe Reiss
Earlier this year, descendants of former
US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Saudi
Arabia's first king, Ibn Saud, celebrated the 60th
anniversary of the first Saudi-US summit at the
Suez Canal, where the foundations were laid for a
"special relationship" between the two countries
based on an oil-for-security alliance. Despite the
importance of Saudi Arabia to the world, this was
not widely noted in the major media.
Until
recently, jihad was strongly supported by the
Saudi government and its Wahhabi religious
establishment. Wahhabism is a puritanical form of
Islamic extremism that cannot tolerate any other
interpretations of Islam, much less Judaism and
Christianity. Their religious and material support
of jihad is similar to that of the Taliban. Given
that 15 of the actual terrorists of September 11
were from Saudi Arabia and that Osama bin Laden
was raised in Saudi Arabia and was a Saudi
businessmen and citizen, the Saudi government can
be construed as having some responsibility for the
World Trade Center attack. It was certainly more
responsible than the government of Iraq.
Saudi funding sources, developed during
the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980s,
continued as the jihad expanded outside
Afghanistan. The growth of jihad from Saudi Arabia
was transmitted through Saudi-supported Islamic
international organizations (the Islamic
Conference Organization, the World Muslim League
and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth) to the
rest of the Muslim world. Saudi funding has
supported jihadis throughout the world; in Africa,
Central Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Southeast
Asia, in the United States and Europe; in fact in
every area where jihad has occurred.
The
Saudis have established and financed
madrassas (religious schools) and mosques
to indoctrinate young students and communities in
virulent anti-Western dogma, and they have damaged
tolerant and pluralistic traditions in Eastern and
Central Asia and North Africa. Freedom House (a
US-based think-tank) analyzed Saudi-sponsored
books and pamphlets written in Arabic and found in
mosques in the US. Freedom House stated that the
teachings espouse an anti-Christian, anti-Semitic,
misogynist, jihadi ideology, assume non-Muslims
are enemies and propose Sharia law in America.
One former high-level Saudi government
official described Imam Mohammed bin Saud Islamic
University in Riyadh as "a factory for terrorism".
Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari, dean of the faculty of
Islamic law at Qatar University, has stated, "This
culture [of terrorism] is rooted in the minds of
those who suffered from a closed education that
leaves no room for pluralism."
We are not
claiming that the Saudis were behind September 11,
any more than the Central Intelligence Agency or
Mossad; only that they have a responsibility, and
more, than Iraq.
Imagine, Bernard Lewis
suggests, "If the Ku Klux Klan or Aryan Nation
obtained total control of Texas and had at its
disposal all the oil revenues and used this money
to establish a network of well-endowed schools and
colleges all over Christendom peddling their
particular brand of Christianity. This is what the
Saudis have done with Wahhabism."
Jihad is
a holy war. It is based on a conspiracy theory of
America and Israel (and other Western states)
being "kufr" states; that is, states totally
against the religion and way of life of Islam.
Its strategic objective is political
change away from globalization and modernity.
Jihadis believe globalization and modernity are
part and parcel of the Judaic-Christian worldview.
They have no positive objectives other than
instituting medieval-oriented Sharia-based Islamic
law. This could have only a negative impact on the
socio-economic problems of Middle Eastern
youth-based society - almost 50% of the
populations are under voting age, with 20-30%
unemployment.
Its objectives are the
destruction of Western and Jewish influence over
the Western world and all infidels. A well known
hadith (commentary based on the Prophet
Mohammed) states, "when even the rocks and trees
will call out Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding
behind me, come and kill him!" This hadith
is frequently used by bin Laden, who has also
accused the Jews of "holding America and the West
hostage".
Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah
opened a conference on February 5-8 in Saudi
Arabia on international counterterrorism. Two days
before the conference official Saudi television
interviewed several prominent Saudis. Suheida
Hammed explained how Saudi terrorism was caused by
the Jews. Mash'as al-Harathi wrote a poem
dedicated to Saudi Minister of Defense Prince
Sultan Feted, proclaiming that bin Laden was sent
by the Jews.
For Christians they have
stated, "First the Saturday people, then the
Sunday people." Recently, some have defined this
"apocalyptic thinking" to mean that every Muslim
must kill a Jew or Christian to substitute for him
in Hell. This has (as noted by Richard Landes)
been interpreted to mean that every Muslim has to
kill a Jew or a Christian in order to be saved. A
French-Arab youngster slaughtered and mutilated a
Jew, his neighbor since childhood. He triumphantly
announced to his parents, his hands still
bloodied, "I've killed my Jew, I can go to
paradise." The jihadis now even include among
"infidels" other Muslims, such as Shi'ites and
Sunni civilians working for Westerners.
Jihadis intrinsically believe death to be
preferable to life in a non-Islamic world. Their
mission is to create a kingdom of heaven here on
Earth. From their perspective, the eventuality of
death prior to the total eschatology is an
insignificant price to pay. Heaven is after all
the "true" world. (See Asia Times Online, Suicide bombing: Theology of
death October 22, 2004.)
Jihad
is a modern form of totalitarianism challenging
traditional Islam. Jihadis are fascists with
imperial demands on the rest of the world. Sayyid
Abdul Ala Mawdudi, a Pakistani and well known
theoretician of jihad, has written, "Islam wants
the whole Earth and does not content itself with
only a part thereof. Islam wants and requires the
Earth in order that the human race altogether can
enjoy the concept and practical program of human
happiness, by means of which God has honored Islam
and put it above the other religions and laws."
Very few jihadis base their theology on
traditional Islam. They are, according to the
French Islamic scholar Oliver Roy, "a by-product
of Westernization and not a backlash against
traditional Muslim cultures ... they are
born-again Muslims." And like other "born agains",
despite their own choosing, they believe that
choice itself is anti-God. Their training, with
few exceptions, was not in the madrassas.
The majority of the leaders are Western-oriented
and educated. Sayyid Qutb, the self-proclaimed
theocrat and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, did
not study theology, graduated from an Egyptian
secular university, and then studied engineering
at a college in the United States; bin Laden's
deputy, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a medical doctor;
Ramzi Yusuf (of the original 1993 World Trade
Center bombing) was an electronics engineer
trained in the United Kingdom, Omar Ahmad Saeed
Sheikh, who was implicated in the murder of US
journalist Daniel Pearl, was born a British Muslim
of Pakistani descent, educated in private schools
and at the London School of Economics. Muhammad
Atta, the leader of the September 11 bombing, was
a promising architectural student who resided in
Germany.
Bin Laden himself, despite
issuing fatwas, is not a cleric or a
trained theologian, but a Western-oriented
businessman more familiar with arms dealing, money
transfers and electronic technology than Islamic
theology. He is the most successful entrepreneur
of an enterprise dedicated to anti-liberal,
anti-modern, anti-democratic objectives with a
quasi-religious ideology. (One exception is Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian trained in
Afghanistan, who as far as is known has never been
associated with the West. He was recently declared
the "emir" of Iraq by bin Laden.)
Jihad
was created by the intersection of Islam and the
West and these creators were trained in the West.
They are modern, urbanized and influenced more by
the leftist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s than
by traditional Islam. They have developed a modern
political ideology based on their version of how
to reconcile "Islam" with the modern world. Third
World members of Islam learnt through television
and the Internet about both the freedom and the
materialism of the West. Roy finds the
fundamentalist inspiration to be far more mundane
than spiritual: "For many of them, the return to
religion has been brought about through their
experience in politics, and not as a result of
their religious belief." Their arch competitors
are capitalism and globalization; not Christianity
or Judaism.
In 1979, the Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini and his Shi'ite Muslims
overthrew the Western-based government of the Shah
of Iran. Shortly before the Cold War ended,
Khomeini sent a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev in
which he asserted the universality of Islam. He
stressed the failure of communist ideology and
implored the Soviet president not to turn West to
market capitalism as a replacement, but to Islam.
After the ayatollahs took over Iran and
established an Islamic state, Arab Sunni
fundamentalists (with the help of the US) defeated
the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1989. In the
power vacuum that followed, amid destructive
fighting among the victorious mujahideen, the
puritanical strain of Wahhabism combined with the
ideology and jihad of Qutb's Muslim Brotherhood to
create the Taliban, who came to power in 1996.
Qutb had been executed by the Egyptian government
and the Brotherhood repressed. Its primary success
was the founding of Hamas in Palestine and
combining its ideology to create the Taliban in
Afghanistan.
These two events - Iran and
Afghanistan - gave rise to global jihad. Bin Laden
as the self-proclaimed child of the Afghanistan
war compares himself loosely to Mohammed and his
conquest of the empires of eastern Christendom and
Persia, as well as Saladin, who defeated the
Crusader armies and conquered Jerusalem.
Is jihad a growth industry? Despite
September 11, and with the exception of Iran 25
years ago, the globalization of jihad has not
succeeded. Gilles Kepel, another French scholar,
has suggested they are a dying breed.
In
Iraq, though, jihad flourishes. According to
several sources, more than half of the suicide
bombers in the country come from Saudi Arabia
(Rueven Paz, 61% of 154 names, Evan F Kohlmann,
more than 50% of 235 names, and in a Washington
Post analysis of websites listing dead suicide
bombers, 44% came from Saudi Arabia).
Non-jihadi Muslim spokesmen are aware of
the nature of jihadi revolutionaries as enemies of
any prevailing order. Given the opportunity,
al-Qaeda will destroy their self defined "near
enemies", whether in Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Saudi
Arabia. Jihadis consider less extreme Muslims as
clients of the infidels. Despite the religious
symbiosis between Wahhabism and jihad, it is
important to prevent bin Laden's call to arms
bringing these Muslims into his jihadi arms and
into his ideological/political battle.
Saudi Arabia's problem
Saudi
Arabia, apart from having bin Laden and al-Qaeda
as an enemy, is in crisis. Its elite is bitterly
divided over how to escape. Crown Prince Abdullah
leads a camp of reformers who seek rapprochement
with the West, while Interior Minister Prince
Nayef has sided with an anti-American religious
establishment. Neither side believes in democracy
and they reject human rights.
As the
Saudis fight a jihadi insurgency led by al-Qaeda,
both use the same religious grounds from which to
draw legitimacy. Turki Hamad, a Saudi journalist,
said they come from the same cultural discourse.
This could result in a consolidation of the ideas
of Nayef and Crown Prince Abdullah, ending in less
reform. Yet Saudi Arabia is in desperate need of
comprehensive political, economic, social, legal
and educational reform.
So the leadership
is slowly closing ranks and reasserting its
authoritarian rule. Emboldened by its success in
the domestic "war on terror", which the Saudi
government began only after its rule was directly
threatened, the al-Saud family is flexing other
muscles so that the masses, too, are left in no
doubt that it is back in total control. Like other
Arab regimes, it is using the "war on terror" to
silence all dissent. (On Sunday, the al-Qaeda
frontman in Saudi Arabia, Moroccan Younes Hayari,
was killed in clashes with security forces.)
In Saudi Arabia, almost 50% of the native
population is aged 18 or under and 30% is
unemployed. The government is run by men over 70
years of age. Even many of the 5,000 princes are
unemployed. Yet 4 million foreign workers, out of
a total population of 16 million, work in Saudi
Arabia. They are overwhelmingly non-Wahhabi
Sunnis, and therefore have neither religious nor
any other rights. Almost 2 million Saudis are
Shi'ites, also without rights. They follow Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Iraq. This must be a
concern to the government.
The Saudis are
finally realizing their problem. A member of the
majlis al-shura (the Saudi consultative council
that is a pretense for a parliament) once stated,
"All they teach is to hate those who are
different. We are a country that is economically
in the 20th century and intellectually in the 14th
century."
A recent municipal election
(excluding women voters) was held in Saudi Arabia.
The candidates of the hardline "golden list" in
the country's most liberal city, Jeddah, won.
Scholars have predicted that should democracy take
hold in Saudi Arabia, the Islamists would win.
While the US has articulated a policy of
democracy in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, even
vaguely in Syria, it has not had a policy
regarding political change in Saudi Arabia; it
seeks the impossible - "stability" - from its
oil-rich trading partner.
It has long been
claimed that the primary reason then-president
George H W Bush did not go further in 1991 in the
Gulf War and take over Baghdad was his fear that
it would set off a revolution in Saudi Arabia. The
Bush connection to the House of Saud is too well
known to need discussing.
Almost 20% of
America's oil comes from Saudi Arabia. And it is
estimated that 60% of the world's proven oil
reserves lie under its soil, although this is
disputed - see The Saudi oil bombshell,
Asia Times Online, Jun 29.
The jihadis
will do their best to disrupt this supply. Some
people have claimed that the US-led invasion of
Iraq (with less than a third of Saudi Arabia's oil
supply) was based on ensuring an additional
supply. If that is so, invading Saudi Arabia could
become necessary. The American government has to
protect its own interests. Israel would certainly
support an American invasion of Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia might not be as much a master
of its own fate as it would believe.
Rabbi Moshe Reiss is a graduate
of Oxford University, has taught at Columbia
University and was assistant rabbi at Yale
University. He was the first rabbi to be invited
to teach in the Department of Theology at the
Catholic University of Leuven - Belgium (founded
1425) and has lectured in various countries. He
has published three books on his website on Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. His book on Judaism is
being published by sections in the Jewish Bible
Quarterly. He now lives in Israel.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
|
|
|
