Follow the
money and all radical Islamist roads lead back to Saudi
Arabia
David McWilliams Twitter 18/11/2015
It's
customary to open the first speech of a conference with the
catch-all welcome of "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen". It's
more of a habit than anything else. It is therefore unusual to then
look down more carefully from the podium at the huge hall and
realise that there are no ladies present at all.
This absence was one of my first impressions
of Saudi Arabia and, although it should have been expected,
addressing an all-male audience - many in dresses - in this day and
age, feels extremely backward. If a country is trying to be a
leading global power and economic giant, excluding half its
population seems a bit daft.
That's Saudi Arabia and I was in its main
city, Riyadh.
In contrast, last year at a similar event in
Morocco, it couldn't have been more different. In Morocco, the hall
is full of women, they are vocal and questioning, and in Casablanca
there is a sense of equality - or at least something moving towards
equality. In Saudi, the opposite is the case. Let's just say that
you'd be waiting a while in Riyadh for a #wakingthefeminists
Twitter handle!
The difference between both countries and
between Saudi Arabia and many other Sunni Muslim countries is that
Saudi Arabia has embraced Wahhabism. When I was in Riyadh, I spoke
to a few Arab friends to try to get a handle on Wahhabism because,
if you want to understand the region, it's critical to understand
this strain of Islam that is preferred by - and exported by - Saudi
Arabia.
You can't understand Isil and what drives them
to blow up ancient Roman, Persian and Buddhist monuments without
understanding Wahhabis. Nor can you understand what perverted logic
drives them to kill innocents without learning about this type of
strict Islam.
Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab was born not far
from Riyadh in 1703. He trained as a holy man and was, like many
religious people, constantly torn between a purist adherence to the
original scriptures and a more tolerant accommodation of the word
of God leavened with the reality of day-to-day living. This schism
is not unusual. The fight between puritanism and pragmatism is
after all, at the heart of the great split in the western Christian
Church too - what we call the Reformation.
Al Wahhab called for the purification of Islam
and a return to pristine Islam. When the young Imam called for the
beheading of women in his local town for adultery, the people knew
this guy meant business. However, it is likely that this form of
extremism wouldn't have caught on in what was, by the standards of
the time, a reasonably tolerant place had it not been for local
insurrection against the unpopular Ottoman Empire which ran the
Arabian Peninsula and taxed the locals mercilessly.
Possibly in an effort to get God on his side
in his fight against Istanbul, the local leader of a small oasis,
Mohammad ibn Saud, threw his lot in with the renegade preacher, Al
Wahhab, in 1745. The link between the House of Saud and Wahhabi was
forged there and then; and they have been allies ever
since.
At the time, Islam, like lots of religions,
was a concoction of bits of other religions, beliefs and practices.
These had been borrowed and customised along the way. Remember this
part of the world was the crucible of civilisation, the epicentre
of the world's great trading routes and a place where the three
main monotheist religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam had been
founded - Judaism and Christianity literally a few yards from each
other, Islam a few hundred miles down the road.
Given this mix, it's hardly surprising that
there were huge overlaps in these faiths and, as Islam was the
newest creed, it borrowed the most. Al Wahhab objected to this
evolutionary, almost 'hand-me-down' approach to Islam. As a purist,
he wanted to go back to basics, to make pristine the religion.
Possibly the most important tenet of Wahhabis is that they believe
in what they call "the oneness of God". As a result, association
with lesser gods, other gods, mysticism, shrines, temples, saints
or holy men amounts to idolatry and must be stamped out.
This put Wahhabis on a collision course with
the other strains of Islam such as Shi'as or, even worse in the
eyes of the Wahhabis, Sufism. Shi'as and Sufis were the enemy
within and, of course, Judaism and Christianity were the enemies at
the door. Wahhabis called for jihad against all these
infidels.
The Saudi/Wahhabi alliance was cemented by war
and conquest as Arabian armies, immersed in a pure sectarian Islam,
rampaged around the southern flanks of the crumbling Ottoman
Empire. The Wahhabis were feared, deploying extremely brutal
tactics against their Shi'ite enemies, for example in their sacking
in the early 19th century of Karbala, Mecca and Medina, which were
particularly vicious. But just in case we Christians get on our
high horse, such sectarian savagery was a re-run of the earlier,
17th century, Thirty Years War in Europe.
For a century, the march, and reach, of the
Wahhabis was limited to the Arabian Peninsula. Then the game
changed, Saudi Arabia struck oil and the politics of the region
altered forever, so too did geo-politics and Western economic
expedience. Once the Saudis discovered oil, the West snuggled up to
Riyadh, no questions asked.
Now the most extreme form of Islam was wedded
to the richest country on earth and the Saudis have set about
exporting not just oil, but a radical, intolerant form of Islam
which drives Isil and various other jihadi groups. Saudi Arabia has
spent some of its vast oil wealth on financing madrassas from
Malaysia to Manchester - some of which are projecting Wahhabi ideas
far from the Gulf.
Isil, with its murder of innocents, its
desecration of ancient monuments and its subjugation of women, is
the latest incarnation of extreme Wahhabism, and Saudi Arabia - the
West's biggest ally in the region - is Isil's biggest external
financier.
It costs money to wage war and Isil gets money
from oil, local racketeering, hostage-taking and external private
donations. The private donations come from donors, many of whom are
Saudi.
When you follow the money, all radical roads
lead back to Saudi Arabia, not states that are supposedly the
West's enemies such as Libya, Iraq or even Assad's
Syria.
From the majority of the 9/11 hijackers, to
Bin Laden, his al-Qa'ida chief lieutenants and now Isil, each of
these extremist organisations are the 21st century offspring of
Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, the cleric who came out of the desert
in the 1730s and the institution he allied with in 1745: the House
of Saud.
Irish Independent