"sastry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Wed January 11 2006 22:48, Kiran Jonnalagadda wrote:
could it not be that the region's rulers like to keep Islam
that way to maintain their stranglehold on oil resources?
I belive that "keeping Islam that way" is a great way of holding on to
power
in an oligarchy. The infuence in the West that those oligarchies/monarchs
acquired due to oil wealth made sure that the West did nothing to to touch
or
change those monarchs in the manner that the West tried to do in Vietnam
for
example.
After nearly a century, the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance that has kept the house
of Saud in power seems to be foundering a bit. The latest Economist has an
interesting article on this and other recent developments in Saudi Arabia.
It will be interesting to see how things play out in the next decade.
(Reproducing the article in full below, because access is restricted to
subscribers)
SURVEY: SAUDI ARABIA
Keeping the faith
Jan 5th 2006
From The Economist print edition
A very special kind of Islam
UNTIL two years ago, Saudi religious textbooks suggested that a good way to
show love for God was to treat infidels with contempt. Students learned that
communism, secularism and capitalism were forms of apostasy. Inventors and
those who call themselves scientists, they read, were nothing of the kind
because their so-called science was limited to worldly matters. The only
true men of science were those who knew God and feared Him.
Passages such as these have since been purged, as part of a general campaign
against "exaggeration" in religious teaching, but not without fierce
resistance. In 2004, for instance, a group of 150 religious scholars, among
them officials in the education ministry, blasted such revisionism in a
petition. "It is not possible to erase this enmity simply by removing
something from the curriculum!" exclaimed their message to the king. "The
enmity between infidels and Muslims is a fact of existence as well as a
legal obligation."
Many teachers have simply refused to use the kinder, gentler new texts. Even
some parents complain that they no longer trust the curriculum to convey
correct values. In one notorious incident last year, colleagues and students
of a high-school chemistry teacher pressed charges against him for speaking
against jihadist violence, for "favouring Christians and Jews", and for
poking fun at clerics' beards. The local judge handed him a 40-month jail
sentence, plus 750 lashes.
Texts containing incitement to religious hatred are still stocked in
mosques, bookstores and libraries. A giant state-run press outside Medina,
for instance, produces some 10m beautifully printed Korans a year, in 40
languages, which are distributed free throughout the world. Yet these are no
ordinary Korans. They are annotated by Wahhabist scholars, who pronounce,
among other things, that jihad is one of the "pillars" of Islam. (Most
Muslims recognise five pillars: the profession of faith, prayer,
alms-giving, fasting and pilgrimage.) "By abandoning jihad, Islam is
destroyed," says one footnote. "Jihad is an obligatory duty, and he who
tries to escape this duty, or does not in his innermost heart wish to
fulfill this duty, dies with the qualities of a hypocrite."
Obviously, most Saudis make their way through life without taking up arms
against the world. But plenty do feel inspired by such fighting words. In
the past, and often with a nod from Washington, the most enthusiastic were
exported to such theatres of war as Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia. Some
estimates put the number of Saudi volunteers in those conflicts as high as
30,000. Generous funding also flowed to jihadist causes, often without the
knowledge of the donors. ("I thought it was like the Salvation Army," says a
Riyadh businessman of a charity he had long sponsored before it was linked
to terrorism.) The skies of America, as well as Iraq, have been more recent
arenas for youths wishing to sacrifice their lives for what they see as the
good of the faith.
Whatever their reservations about jihadist tactics, most Saudis were
impressed by their zeal and at least somewhat sympathetic to their goals.
Television pictures of Muslims suffering injustice in Palestine and
elsewhere bolstered the already xenophobic world view of the Wahhabist
establishment that controls the kingdom's mosques and schools. After
September 11th 2001, America's proclamation of war on terror, accompanied by
words and phrases such as "crusade" and "with us or against us", fed
suspicions of a plan to divide and weaken Muslims.
Not in our backyard
But such defensive complacency came to an abrupt end in May 2003 when a
local cell linked to al-Qaeda sent suicide truck bombs into three
residential compounds in Riyadh. The following 18 months saw a series of
deadly bombings and shoot-outs as militants attacked expatriate workers as
well as Saudi police. The security forces' response at first seemed bungling
and confused, but slowly they gained the upper hand. There have been no
significant attacks since December 2004.
The killing of scores of suspects and the arrest of hundreds more is one
reason for the decline in violence, but psychological attrition may have
been more effective still. Ordinary Saudis have been outraged by the
militants' callousness, and disturbed to see their safe, quiet cities
rattled by gunfire. Even outright bigots have found it hard to excuse the
radicals' taking of Muslim lives. The authorities have capitalised on such
feelings by showing emotive footage of weeping mothers and fathers
denouncing their jihadist sons. A senior prince in the security forces
reckons that 80% of their success is due to such persuasion and only 20% to
better policing.
More significantly still, the bloodshed has prompted inquiry into its root
causes. Some of these are historical. Before the creation of the Saudi
state, the majority of people in the future kingdom's territory did not
follow the Wahhabists' Hanbali school of Islam. The great mosques of Mecca
and Medina were famed for the diversity of the scholars who taught there.
This liberal stance incensed the Al Sauds' puritan Bedouin warriors. Yet
once he had captured the holy cities, in 1925, Abdul Aziz Al Saud began to
bridle at his allies' fanaticism. They alienated his subjects by such
actions as destroying the tomb-shrines of the Prophet's descendants, which
they said were objects of idol-worship. The Wahhabi ranks split and senior
clerics sided with the Al Sauds, arguing that obedience to a "rightful
commander" was preferable to anarchy. Some joined jihadist rebels who
denounced the Al Sauds for going soft. The rebels were eventually crushed,
but the conflict underlined the Saudi rulers' dependence on loyal Wahhabist
clerics.
Ever since, Saudi rulers have been careful to maintain this loyalty, taking
out what the French Islamologist Gilles Kepel calls "ideological insurance".
Clerical approval was always sought, and sometimes obtained only with great
difficulty, before reforms such as the introduction of banking and paper
money in the 1950s and the abolition of slavery and the start of schooling
for girls in the 1960s. When television arrived in 1965 it caused riots,
quelled only when senior clerics grasped the fact that they could use this
heathen innovation to promote the faith. In 1979, after a band of messianic
Wahhabist radicals invaded the great mosque at Mecca, loyal clerics gave
their blessing to the use of firearms to flush them out. Perhaps most
controversially, in 1990 they gave grudging approval to the deployment of
American troops on Saudi soil to repel Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
The clerics' loyalty stretched to overlooking other things that might have
been criticised on religious grounds, such as royal corruption, as well as
many practical secular innovations. Saudi banks, for instance, have been
offering interest-bearing accounts right from the start, despite Islam's
reservations about interest. The highly regarded central bank simply argued
that the banks' clients should be allowed to choose the kinds of financial
instruments they wished to use. Commercial disputes have not been settled in
sharia courts since the 1960s because their rulings were found to be
ruinously unpredictable. Instead, such disputes are referred to a commission
appointed by the Ministry of Trade.
The Al Sauds rewarded the clerics' loyalty well. Wahhabists were given full
control of criminal and personal justice and extensive influence over
education. Wahhabist schools and sharia courts supplanted older institutions
across the kingdom. The powers of the mutawaa or religious police were
widened, and rules on such things as female dress more rigidly enforced.
Huge sums went to religious causes, from the founding of Islamic
universities to the building of mosques and the expansion of pilgrimage
facilities. In the 1980s funding was increased further by King Fahd, who
wanted to bury his previous reputation for moral laxity but also saw a
threat to the kingdom's primacy among Muslims from revolutionary Iran.
But the clerics' loyalty came at a cost. Students in the new institutions
began to question the scriptural basis for their support of the Al Sauds and
their policies. Some turned to the ultra-puritan ideas of earlier Wahhabist
rebels, but the lavish state patronage also attracted foreigners, who
brought with them new ideological currents and a modern take on Islamic
governance. Thousands of Muslim Brothers, persecuted in Egypt and Syria,
found refuge in the kingdom. They included Muhammad Qutb, whose better-known
brother, Sayyid Qutb, was hanged in Egypt for teaching that jihad must be
waged against Muslim rulers who stray from Islam. Muhammad Qutb taught for
years at Mecca's Umm al Qura University. His ardent followers included Osama
bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and the populist Saudi preacher
Safar Hawali.
The 1970s and 80s saw the quiet emergence of a youthful counter-movement to
official Wahhabism. Known as the sahwa, or awakening, it came into sudden
full view during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis. Preachers such as Mr Hawali gained
instant prestige from their opposition to the alliance with infidel America
and their demands for political reform within a new model of an Islamic
state. Their outspoken views inspired a wave of activism, including attacks
on shops selling videos and satellite dishes. In a crackdown in the
mid-1990s, many young activists were imprisoned or fled abroad. The
heavy-handed response pushed some activists, such as Mr bin Laden and his
followers, towards terrorism, and the Al Sauds themselves became a prime
target.
A symbiosis challenged
"The Wahhabi-Saudi alliance worked like magic," says a liberal lawyer in
Riyadh. "But now it's turned against the magician." However, that may be too
simple a view. The large official religious establishment, paid for by the
state, is ostensibly made up of loyal Wahhabists. Some of them, including
nearly all the kingdom's 700 judges, are extremely conservative. The
country's main universities also remain steeped in Wahhabist thought. But
the Wahhabists' religious rulings have lost credibility with the wider
public. Their official condemnation of terrorism, for example, is based
mainly on the argument that it represents disobedience to the "rightful
commander" under whose sole authority jihad can be pursued.
Many Saudis, particularly junior bureaucrats and schoolteachers, look
instead to the activist Islamism of the sahwa and the Muslim Brotherhood.
It, too, is conservative and xenophobic, but its attitude to the role of the
monarchy is more questioning and its approach to social issues slightly more
progressive. To its supporters, al-Qaeda-style violence is an aberration in
itself, although "resistance" in Iraq or Palestine is perfectly legitimate.
It was this movement, which some call Islahi or reformist, that performed
best in last year's partial municipal elections.
Some charged Islahi candidates with using scare tactics, such as accusing
liberal rivals of secularism, which Saudis consider a vicious slander. But
Bassim Alim, a Jeddah lawyer with a Harvard degree, thinks the Islahi
movement was simply better organised. "Many people felt like me," he says.
"The elections were an opportunity to send a message that we are a Muslim
country. You could say we are fundamentalists, but not fanatics. I want my
country to be Islamically inclined, but with an open mind. Right now, the
use of Islam by the Saudi government is much like the way communism is used
by the Chinese, just to control people." Mr Alim has taught his daughters to
drive, and would be "ecstatic to have American-style democracy or any kind
of democracy". But he describes America as a racially bigoted country bent
on world domination.
A small but increasingly vocal group of Saudis takes a much more liberal
view of religion and state. This progressive elite is poorly organised, as
its trouncing in the election showed, and Islamists, even modernist ones
such as Mr Alim, say it is out of touch with the pulse of Saudi society. Yet
it has a strong voice, both in the local Saudi press and on the satellite
channels that are the kingdom's main source of information and
entertainment. "I don't want revolution, and I think most Saudis believe
democracy is pie in the sky," says a cigar-chomping stockbroker. "But I want
the interior and justice ministries purged, and the whole question of who
appoints judges revised."
The Al Saud family itself represents a broad spectrum of opinion. King
Abdullah, for example, is a traditional, pious conservative, but quietly
backs a more liberal social agenda. "He feels betrayed by the religious
establishment," says a history professor in Riyadh. "He thinks they created
the environment that made terrorism possible." But although many younger
princes would like to see a full break with the Wahhabist alliance, senior
princes remain fearful of radical action. One very wealthy member of the
royal family, himself a liberal, says he still prefers to buy "immunity"
from conservative criticism by handing out generous charitable donations.
To date, the Al Sauds seem to have tried to preserve a balance. They have
silenced liberal demands when they have grown too strident; yet in the past
few years they have also got the most fanatical preachers sacked, school
curricula revised and religious tolerance vigorously promoted. "Until two
years ago the mutawaa could say anything they like, they could not be
challenged," explains Prince Waleed bin Talal, who is both actively pious
and an outspoken defender of women's rights. "Now they are being handcuffed,
but gently, because when you fight them with logic they prove to be weak."
He adds with a mischievous grin: "I like it when they bark. It means they're
in a corner."
