Saudi Arabia has over the past six months arrested 701 people suspected of plotting attacks, officials have said. Releasing the information, the country's interior ministry said in a statement the fighters had plotted attacks against oil installations in the kingdom. Among those arrested, 520 are still in detention. The interior ministry statement read out on Saudi television said those detained were of various nationalities and were part of a wider plot managed from abroad. The statement said: "Security forces managed to arrest one cell in the Eastern Province led by African residents ... their concern was to get close to people working in the oil sector in order to find work in oil installations. "They planned in fact to attack an oil installation and security target with rigged cars [car bombs]." Other cells were said to have been broken up which planned attacks on economic targets in the world's largest oil exporter.
Foreign co-ordination
Some of the plots were said to have been hatched in co-ordination with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda second-in-command. The statement said that those organising people to come from abroad had taken "advantage of the facilities granted to the Muslim faithful to come to Mecca for the annual pilgrimage or to do the omra," or minor pilgrimage". One cell member was said to have been found with a taped message from al-Zawahiri. The kingdom has suffered several attacks blamed on al-Qaeda and mainly targeting westerners since 2003, but a crackdown has quelled attacks over the past two years.
Via Al Jazeera.
Showing posts with label Saudi Arabia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saudi Arabia. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Defeating Wahhabism
By Stephen Schwartz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, October 25, 2002
I have been invited here as the author of The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror (Doubleday). In this book, I discuss the origins of the Islamic sect of Wahhabism, its involvement with the royal authorities of Saudi Arabia, and the entanglement of both the sect and the kingdom with the global organization and financing of Islamic extremism and terrorism.
However, I will begin by outlining my personal experience and expertise in this area. I am Senior Policy Analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, and the director of an Islam and Democracy project now in formation there.
I do not come to this debate from an academic or government background. I have flattered myself in saying that I learned about Wahhabism the way George Orwell learned about Stalinism. Orwell did not go to Moscow; he went to Barcelona, where he witnessed the nefarious activities of the Soviet secret police. I did not go to Riyadh to study Wahhabism; I witnessed the attempt of Wahhabi-Saudi agents to take over Balkan Islam, in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Albania. I first heard the term Wahhabi in a Yugoslav context more than 10 years ago.
I had, in fact, originally gone to the Balkans, beginning in 1990 - that is, before the actual outbreak of fighting in the country - with the double interest of journalistic reporting and researching the remnants of Jewish life there. I then began my encounter with Balkan Islam - in an interfaith manner, by working with an Albanian Catholic institute, a uniquely useful forum for the study of Balkan religious life. Balkan Judaism has been greatly influenced by Balkan Islam - a topic on which I have another book soon to come out. But with the outbreak of the horrific aggression against Bosnia-Hercegovina, I learned that Bosnian Muslims, who were isolated and desperate, and who needed any friends they could get, were nonetheless extremely suspicious of the Saudis and Wahhabis. They view Wahhabi-Saudi Islam as a mortal threat to their own traditional, tolerant, and spiritual form of conservative Sunni Islam.
After much study, interviewing, and publishing on these topics, I went to the Balkans to live in 1999. With the end of the Kosovo intervention, I worked in that region, most notably, on the project of a permanent Kosovo interreligious council bringing together Albanian and Croatian Catholics, Serbian Orthodox, Sunni and Shi'a Muslims, and a very small Jewish remnant. In post-Dayton Bosnia, the Wahhabi-Saudis had been viewed coldly by the local Muslims, but in Kosovo the Albanian Muslims were much more hostile to them, and it was among Albanians, from 1999 to 2001 - only weeks before September 11, 2001 - that I witnessed, and had the honor of participating in, the resistance of the local Muslims to Saudi-Wahhabi efforts at control and indoctrination.
As I have come back to the United States, Balkan Muslim intellectuals with whom I am close have called on me to expose Wahhabi-Saudi religious colonialism to the Western public. This profound charge became even more serious after September 11th.
On the intellectual and professional journey that led to writing this book, I learned that hostility to Wahhabi extremism is prevalent throughout the Muslim world. In researching the my book, I drew on informants, most of them confidential, that included Saudi subjects, West Africans, Moroccans, Algerians, Egyptians, Somalis, Chechens, Ingushes, Uzbeks, Pakistanis, Indian Muslims, and Malaysians as well as Balkan and American Muslims.
I have had especially fruitful discussions with prominent Chechen and Ingush Muslims, who have described to me how Wahhabism, in the form of the Saudi adventurer who called himself Khattab, was injected into, and effectively split and undermined, the righteous struggle of the Chechen nation. I had, in fact, long been a sympathizer of the Chechens. I vividly remember how, as a high school student of the Russian language, 40 years ago, I read in a Soviet newspaper about the return of Chechens and Ingushes to their native lands. Later, I became very close to Robert Conquest, the Western scholar who deserves high honors for his exposure of Stalin's genocidal assault on small Caucasian Muslim nations, as well as on the Kalmyks, during the second world war.
I have also had extensive discussions with Uzbek intellectuals about the Wahhabi threat to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. In Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo, and Chechnya, we see repetition of the pattern of Wahhabi-Saudi infiltration. The Wahhabi-Saudi agents who introduce their doctrines, financing, recruitment, and incitement to terror into these countries have the same aim in all of them: to utilize ordinary Muslims for the advancement of their fundamentalist and extremist agenda.
Wahhabi-Saudi attempts to exploit the grievances, and often the atrocious victimization, of other Muslims, have led to their interference in Afghanistan, where they seized control of the anti-Russian struggle, and then fostered the dictatorship of the Taliban; in Israel, where the Saudi regime directly funds and guides Hamas; in Kashmir, where efforts of local moderates to resolve the status of the region have been thwarted by Wahhabi aggression; and in Algeria, where political tensions between the old socialist establishment and new Islamic movements were manipulated to launch a bloody civil war; all this in addition to the countries previously mentioned. In addition, Wahhabi-Saudi agents have sought to launch entirely new fronts for their ideological war, in Somalia, in Indonesia, and in the Philippines. And finally, Wahhabi-influenced extremist movements continue to contest for authority in such countries as Nigeria and, of course, the all-important example of a state driven to permanent crisis by Wahhabi influence: Pakistan.
Condemnation of Wahhabi extremism does not mean condemnation of those who are its exploited victims, such as the Chechens. I reject the promiscuous characterization of the Chechen armed struggle we find in Western media, where all Chechens are labeled either Islamist, when they are not, or are granted status as "Chechen nationalists or separatists," when some of them should be called "Wahhabis" or "Islamists," or are written off as terrorists. Nobody can doubt that the Chechens are justified in defending themselves, as they have for more than two centuries, against Russian imperialism.
Nobody can doubt that the struggle for survival of the Bosnian Muslims was entirely necessary and righteous.
Nobody can doubt that the Albanian nation, which is Muslim in its majority, was correct in defending itself against Slav Orthodox imperialism.
But in all three of these struggles, the defenders of Islam and the Chechen, Bosnian, and Albanian peoples based their commitment on their Sufi - and, among Albanians, their Shi'a - traditions. These cultural legacies are totally opposed to the pretensions of the Wahhabi-Saudi conspiracy to unification of world Islam under their control. Chechens, Bosnians, and Albanians are all condemned by Wahhabism to death for the alleged crime of "grave-worship," i.e. honoring and praying for intercession by Islamic saints.
To return to the Orwell parallel, in the Spanish civil war the Soviet Union was the most fearsome enemy of the indigenous radical traditions represented by the anarchist movement. In the Caucasian and Balkan conflicts the Wahhabi-Saudis have proven to be the worst enemies of local Islam.
This Islam is sometimes mischaracterized by Western commentators as "folk Islam." However, it covers a mighty big "folk." Participants in so-called "folk Islam" include, by far, the majority of the world's Muslims, found in West Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as well as in the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In Indonesia, the adherents of so-called "folk" Islam, organized in groups like Nadhlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyya, with 70 million members, have mobilized against Wahhabi infiltration. I believe the many millions of Indonesian traditional Muslims will wipe out the extremist menace in that country. These millions were not pleased by the Bali bombing horror.
The artificial distinction between "normative" and "folk" Islam should be reversed, for it is "folk" Islam that constitutes the global Islamic mainstream, while the "normative" Islam promoted by the Wahhabi-Saudi conspiracy represents, according to many Islamic scholars, a cruel and criminal deviation.
These issues are especially troublesome in the case of Uzbekistan, because Islamist extremists in that country have been taken up by the Western human rights industry as alleged victims of post-Communist oppression. Criticism of the Uzbek authorities - as well as of anti-Wahhabi Muslims in the Caucasus - has rested on the charge that the term "Wahhabism" is misused by ex-Communist governments to hide a campaign against ordinary Muslim believers. In the case of Uzbekistan under President Islam Karimov, the government is, indeed, a new, young, transitional democracy, whose institutions remain weak. I cannot claim to provide a full endorsement of the Uzbek regime, without going there. Obviously, as in any country, there have been abuses.
However, I note that much of the discussion of Uzbekistan and the claims of Islamic figures in that country to being victims of repression, rests on extremely vague terminology. For example, the latest U.S. State Department report on human rights abuses around the world was released on March 4. It includes numerous allegations against Uzbekistan, many involving the government's struggle to suppress Hizb-ut-Tahrir - a clandestine subversive movement originating in Arab countries. This is a battle in which the United States should probably be cheering Karimov on, rather than condemning him.
Getting it right in the fight against terrorism is all about making distinctions, not blurring them. In the Uzbek case, the State Department, parroting the Western human rights profession, accuses President Karimov of seeing evil Arab subversives where there are merely pious Muslims - the classic example of the supposed misuse of the term "Wahhabi." But the rights monitors suffer from the opposite blindness. They see only innocent, faithful Muslims where there are, in fact, terrorists. The issue is not religious devotion, but radicalism. The human rights lobby refuses to recognize the difference between traditional Uzbek Muslims and Arab-subsidized infiltrators whose "piety" is a cover for terrorist recruitment. This latter group is referred to in the State Department's Uzbek country report as "independent" and "particularly devout" Muslims. And the U.S. government takes the position that they are being abused by the government of Uzbekistan for "their religious beliefs."
I have spent quite a time hashing out these issues here in Washington, and after much discussion and introspection I arrived at the following position: the Uzbek authorities claim they have only repressed Wahhabis; those arrested claim they are not Wahhabis. So the question appeared to be open, and I will admit that my sympathies were more with the Uzbek authorities than with the alleged Wahhabis.
However, this controversy was clarified for me when I read an article by a certain Abdummanob Polat, an Uzbek human rights expert, titled "Can Uzbekistan Build Democracy and Civil Society?" This article appeared in a volume published right here at CACI, titled Civil Society in Central Asia, in 1999. In this text, Mr. Polat also adopts a vague, and in my view, a devious and deceptive vocabulary, when he discusses "independent" Islam in Uzbekistan.
Mr. Polat refers to the traditional Islam of the Uzbeks, an Islam based on Sufi spirituality, the four recognized schools of Sunni jurisprudence, and various customs Wahhabis despise, as "promoting loyalty to the existing rulers." This is the same claim implied by human rights monitors who allege that certain Muslims are persecuted by the Uzbek authorities because they are "independent" of the state. Mr. Polat uses this phrase in an obvious attempt to suggest that there is something extraordinary about Muslims being exhorted to loyalty to the existing political authority, and that this must reflect a holdover from the Communist regime, which demanded such subordination.
Loyalty to the existing rulers is not a Communist invention, or an Uzbek novelty, or any other kind of innovation in Islam. It is an essential principle of Islam embodied in the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. Unfortunately, few Westerners realize this. Of course, jihad against the Soviet state, which attempted to replace Islam with atheism, was another matter. But the Uzbek government of Islam Karimov, regardless of its failings, has not and does not seek to replace Islam with unbelief. Nobody seriously claims that Karimov is an enemy of Islam - only that he is an opponent of Wahhabi and other extremists, and seeks to foster a traditional, indigenous Sufi Islam that is loyal to the government. President Karimov's administration has built many medresas and mosques, and has rehabilitated the tombs of numerous saints. Uzbekistan, as the birthplace of Imam Bukhari and other great Islamic thinkers, has every right to demand a place as a leader among the Islamic countries. To repeat, and to emphasize, loyalty to such a government is an essential principle of the Sunnah, and those who agitate against such loyalty, and who proclaim their independence, i.e. their disobedience of the legal authorities, are guilty of fitnah or subversion, the ultimate Islamic sin.
Mr. Polat also disparages Uzbek traditional Islam by referring to it as "officially permitted by the government for decades," as if Central Asian traditional Islam were a puppet of the Communists. This is absurd. The former government "permitted" this form of Islam because it was the faith of the vast majority of the population, and action to completely suppress it, such as had occurred in the early years of the Bolshevik regime, had become impossible.
Mr. Polat also states that "this form of Islam… to some extent incorporated expensive ceremonies and rites, especially regarding funerals and weddings." Here we have the suggestion that traditional funeral and wedding customs had been introduced into Islam from the environment, and were "un-Islamic." This is pure Wahhabism. Funeral observances and elaborate weddings have been part of Islam all over the world since the time of Muhammad.
In summary, Mr. Polat states "Islam in Uzbekistan has acquired certain national and local features… local accretions" that, according to Mr. Polat, "changed [the orthodox] interpretation over the centuries." Once again, here is the paradigm that falsely describes local customs as intrusions into Islam. Worst of all, Mr. Polat designates the activity of the opponents of Uzbek traditional Islam as "indigenous attempts to understand and study real Islam." This presents the situation as if a group of Uzbeks who found it hard to pay for their weddings decided one fine day that their problem was that Islam was adulterated, and that they wouldn't have to pay so much for weddings if they followed a purified Islam. This is a very popular paradigm with Westerners: they believe Muslims take to fundamentalism in response to the alleged corruption of traditional shaykhs and Islamic healers. I am very sorry, but for a universe of reasons, I do not believe this. People do not simply come up with these ideas. People believe these things because of politics and propaganda. Even Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of the Saudi death cult, did not simply conclude one day that Islam was corrupted; his dispensation was based on a critique of Ottoman conditions. His attack on traditional Islam was political; that of the so-called dissident Muslims in Uzbekistan is political, and it is not based on legitimate grievances.
Any scheme that tries to set off "real Islam" or "pure Islam" or whatever they want to call it against traditional Islam - any scheme that describes traditional Muslims, whether they are Moroccan, Kosovar, Uzbek, or Indonesian - any ideology that labels existing, traditional Islam as "unbelief," "superstition," or "grave worship" - whether it emanates from the mosques of Riyadh or from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or from the acolytes of Mawdudi in Pakistan, or from Hezb-ut-Tahrir -- presents an extremist threat to the lives of ordinary Muslims.
The human rights activists and other defenders of these so-called "independent" Muslims do not grasp this. They do not comprehend that preaching against traditional Uzbek Islam as "superstition" or "grave worship" or "corruption" represents a serious breach of civility and a challenge to public order, and cannot be viewed, in American terms, as protected religious advocacy
In the U.S., when certain Christians advocate terrorism against abortion clinics, nobody views such discourse as protected religious speech. It is seen as extremist incitement and dealt with as such.
In Northern Ireland, when Protestant fanatics label Catholics non-Christian - exactly as the so-called "independent" Muslims in Uzbekistan label the adherents of traditional Islam - the result is that Protestants throw bricks at Catholic schoolchildren. Such preaching is not seen, especially in the United Kingdom, as protected religious speech. It is treated as terrorist incitement.
Even in Israel, advocacy of the physical liquidation of Arabs and Muslims by Jewish ultra-radicals is treated as terrorist incitement as punished by the state.
Uzbekistan faces the same problem. Those who claim to represent pure religion, and who denounce, demonize, and target other believers - ordinary people going about their lives - the mother keeping a home, the peasant working his land, the worker seeking betterment - cannot be seen as mere advocates of an alternative vision of Islam. They seek to subvert authority, to divide families and communities, and to incite terrorism.
Western societies have long recognized that in the field of religion, civility and order are more important than an abstract right of advocacy. When Rev. Jerry Falwell attacked the personality of the Prophet Muhammad, he was subject to serious criticism and forced to apologize to the Muslim believers, not simply because of political correctness, but because every intelligent and loyal American prizes interfaith civility, especially with those Muslims who join in defending America and democracy.
What, to summarize, is the goal of the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance? To destroy the traditional Islam present from Bosnia-Hercegovina to South Africa, and from Morocco to the Philippines, and to replace it with their extremist, ultra-rigid, and Puritanical version of Islam.
They do this through indoctrination, infiltration, and financial subsidies. Wahhabi-Saudi penetration of local Islamic communities may begin with the construction of Saudi-funded mosques, with Saudi-trained imams assigned to them. A reportage in Newsweek states that "at least 250 out of some 1,200 [recognized mosques] nationwide" - that is, in the U.S. - function under direct control of the North American Islamic Trust, a Wahhabi-Saudi body. Further reflecting Wahhabi-Saudi ideological influence over American Islam, Newsweek points out a really extraordinary fact: "An April 2001 survey by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that 69 percent of Muslims in America say it is 'absolutely fundamental' or 'very important' to have Salafi teachings at their mosques." "Salafi" is a cover term for Wahhabi - comparable to "socialist" for Soviet-controlled Communists.
"Wahhabization" may also begin with the distribution of literature - more properly designated as Wahhabi hate propaganda. I recently helped produce a report on the distribution of Wahhabi hate literature on the soil of the U.S., by institutions controlled by the Saudi government, online at www.defenddemocracy.org.
The Wahhabis have sought to extirpate Shi'a Islam, and to abolish the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence. They despise, to a point of homicidal rage, a number of traditional Islamic customs. More broadly, these include
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, October 25, 2002
Faculty, students, visitors, and honored guests from Central Asia, thank you for the opportunity to appear here today.
I have been invited here as the author of The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror (Doubleday). In this book, I discuss the origins of the Islamic sect of Wahhabism, its involvement with the royal authorities of Saudi Arabia, and the entanglement of both the sect and the kingdom with the global organization and financing of Islamic extremism and terrorism.
However, I will begin by outlining my personal experience and expertise in this area. I am Senior Policy Analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, and the director of an Islam and Democracy project now in formation there.
I do not come to this debate from an academic or government background. I have flattered myself in saying that I learned about Wahhabism the way George Orwell learned about Stalinism. Orwell did not go to Moscow; he went to Barcelona, where he witnessed the nefarious activities of the Soviet secret police. I did not go to Riyadh to study Wahhabism; I witnessed the attempt of Wahhabi-Saudi agents to take over Balkan Islam, in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Albania. I first heard the term Wahhabi in a Yugoslav context more than 10 years ago.
I had, in fact, originally gone to the Balkans, beginning in 1990 - that is, before the actual outbreak of fighting in the country - with the double interest of journalistic reporting and researching the remnants of Jewish life there. I then began my encounter with Balkan Islam - in an interfaith manner, by working with an Albanian Catholic institute, a uniquely useful forum for the study of Balkan religious life. Balkan Judaism has been greatly influenced by Balkan Islam - a topic on which I have another book soon to come out. But with the outbreak of the horrific aggression against Bosnia-Hercegovina, I learned that Bosnian Muslims, who were isolated and desperate, and who needed any friends they could get, were nonetheless extremely suspicious of the Saudis and Wahhabis. They view Wahhabi-Saudi Islam as a mortal threat to their own traditional, tolerant, and spiritual form of conservative Sunni Islam.
After much study, interviewing, and publishing on these topics, I went to the Balkans to live in 1999. With the end of the Kosovo intervention, I worked in that region, most notably, on the project of a permanent Kosovo interreligious council bringing together Albanian and Croatian Catholics, Serbian Orthodox, Sunni and Shi'a Muslims, and a very small Jewish remnant. In post-Dayton Bosnia, the Wahhabi-Saudis had been viewed coldly by the local Muslims, but in Kosovo the Albanian Muslims were much more hostile to them, and it was among Albanians, from 1999 to 2001 - only weeks before September 11, 2001 - that I witnessed, and had the honor of participating in, the resistance of the local Muslims to Saudi-Wahhabi efforts at control and indoctrination.
As I have come back to the United States, Balkan Muslim intellectuals with whom I am close have called on me to expose Wahhabi-Saudi religious colonialism to the Western public. This profound charge became even more serious after September 11th.
On the intellectual and professional journey that led to writing this book, I learned that hostility to Wahhabi extremism is prevalent throughout the Muslim world. In researching the my book, I drew on informants, most of them confidential, that included Saudi subjects, West Africans, Moroccans, Algerians, Egyptians, Somalis, Chechens, Ingushes, Uzbeks, Pakistanis, Indian Muslims, and Malaysians as well as Balkan and American Muslims.
I have had especially fruitful discussions with prominent Chechen and Ingush Muslims, who have described to me how Wahhabism, in the form of the Saudi adventurer who called himself Khattab, was injected into, and effectively split and undermined, the righteous struggle of the Chechen nation. I had, in fact, long been a sympathizer of the Chechens. I vividly remember how, as a high school student of the Russian language, 40 years ago, I read in a Soviet newspaper about the return of Chechens and Ingushes to their native lands. Later, I became very close to Robert Conquest, the Western scholar who deserves high honors for his exposure of Stalin's genocidal assault on small Caucasian Muslim nations, as well as on the Kalmyks, during the second world war.
I have also had extensive discussions with Uzbek intellectuals about the Wahhabi threat to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. In Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo, and Chechnya, we see repetition of the pattern of Wahhabi-Saudi infiltration. The Wahhabi-Saudi agents who introduce their doctrines, financing, recruitment, and incitement to terror into these countries have the same aim in all of them: to utilize ordinary Muslims for the advancement of their fundamentalist and extremist agenda.
Wahhabi-Saudi attempts to exploit the grievances, and often the atrocious victimization, of other Muslims, have led to their interference in Afghanistan, where they seized control of the anti-Russian struggle, and then fostered the dictatorship of the Taliban; in Israel, where the Saudi regime directly funds and guides Hamas; in Kashmir, where efforts of local moderates to resolve the status of the region have been thwarted by Wahhabi aggression; and in Algeria, where political tensions between the old socialist establishment and new Islamic movements were manipulated to launch a bloody civil war; all this in addition to the countries previously mentioned. In addition, Wahhabi-Saudi agents have sought to launch entirely new fronts for their ideological war, in Somalia, in Indonesia, and in the Philippines. And finally, Wahhabi-influenced extremist movements continue to contest for authority in such countries as Nigeria and, of course, the all-important example of a state driven to permanent crisis by Wahhabi influence: Pakistan.
Condemnation of Wahhabi extremism does not mean condemnation of those who are its exploited victims, such as the Chechens. I reject the promiscuous characterization of the Chechen armed struggle we find in Western media, where all Chechens are labeled either Islamist, when they are not, or are granted status as "Chechen nationalists or separatists," when some of them should be called "Wahhabis" or "Islamists," or are written off as terrorists. Nobody can doubt that the Chechens are justified in defending themselves, as they have for more than two centuries, against Russian imperialism.
Nobody can doubt that the struggle for survival of the Bosnian Muslims was entirely necessary and righteous.
Nobody can doubt that the Albanian nation, which is Muslim in its majority, was correct in defending itself against Slav Orthodox imperialism.
But in all three of these struggles, the defenders of Islam and the Chechen, Bosnian, and Albanian peoples based their commitment on their Sufi - and, among Albanians, their Shi'a - traditions. These cultural legacies are totally opposed to the pretensions of the Wahhabi-Saudi conspiracy to unification of world Islam under their control. Chechens, Bosnians, and Albanians are all condemned by Wahhabism to death for the alleged crime of "grave-worship," i.e. honoring and praying for intercession by Islamic saints.
To return to the Orwell parallel, in the Spanish civil war the Soviet Union was the most fearsome enemy of the indigenous radical traditions represented by the anarchist movement. In the Caucasian and Balkan conflicts the Wahhabi-Saudis have proven to be the worst enemies of local Islam.
This Islam is sometimes mischaracterized by Western commentators as "folk Islam." However, it covers a mighty big "folk." Participants in so-called "folk Islam" include, by far, the majority of the world's Muslims, found in West Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as well as in the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In Indonesia, the adherents of so-called "folk" Islam, organized in groups like Nadhlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyya, with 70 million members, have mobilized against Wahhabi infiltration. I believe the many millions of Indonesian traditional Muslims will wipe out the extremist menace in that country. These millions were not pleased by the Bali bombing horror.
The artificial distinction between "normative" and "folk" Islam should be reversed, for it is "folk" Islam that constitutes the global Islamic mainstream, while the "normative" Islam promoted by the Wahhabi-Saudi conspiracy represents, according to many Islamic scholars, a cruel and criminal deviation.
These issues are especially troublesome in the case of Uzbekistan, because Islamist extremists in that country have been taken up by the Western human rights industry as alleged victims of post-Communist oppression. Criticism of the Uzbek authorities - as well as of anti-Wahhabi Muslims in the Caucasus - has rested on the charge that the term "Wahhabism" is misused by ex-Communist governments to hide a campaign against ordinary Muslim believers. In the case of Uzbekistan under President Islam Karimov, the government is, indeed, a new, young, transitional democracy, whose institutions remain weak. I cannot claim to provide a full endorsement of the Uzbek regime, without going there. Obviously, as in any country, there have been abuses.
However, I note that much of the discussion of Uzbekistan and the claims of Islamic figures in that country to being victims of repression, rests on extremely vague terminology. For example, the latest U.S. State Department report on human rights abuses around the world was released on March 4. It includes numerous allegations against Uzbekistan, many involving the government's struggle to suppress Hizb-ut-Tahrir - a clandestine subversive movement originating in Arab countries. This is a battle in which the United States should probably be cheering Karimov on, rather than condemning him.
Getting it right in the fight against terrorism is all about making distinctions, not blurring them. In the Uzbek case, the State Department, parroting the Western human rights profession, accuses President Karimov of seeing evil Arab subversives where there are merely pious Muslims - the classic example of the supposed misuse of the term "Wahhabi." But the rights monitors suffer from the opposite blindness. They see only innocent, faithful Muslims where there are, in fact, terrorists. The issue is not religious devotion, but radicalism. The human rights lobby refuses to recognize the difference between traditional Uzbek Muslims and Arab-subsidized infiltrators whose "piety" is a cover for terrorist recruitment. This latter group is referred to in the State Department's Uzbek country report as "independent" and "particularly devout" Muslims. And the U.S. government takes the position that they are being abused by the government of Uzbekistan for "their religious beliefs."
I have spent quite a time hashing out these issues here in Washington, and after much discussion and introspection I arrived at the following position: the Uzbek authorities claim they have only repressed Wahhabis; those arrested claim they are not Wahhabis. So the question appeared to be open, and I will admit that my sympathies were more with the Uzbek authorities than with the alleged Wahhabis.
However, this controversy was clarified for me when I read an article by a certain Abdummanob Polat, an Uzbek human rights expert, titled "Can Uzbekistan Build Democracy and Civil Society?" This article appeared in a volume published right here at CACI, titled Civil Society in Central Asia, in 1999. In this text, Mr. Polat also adopts a vague, and in my view, a devious and deceptive vocabulary, when he discusses "independent" Islam in Uzbekistan.
Mr. Polat refers to the traditional Islam of the Uzbeks, an Islam based on Sufi spirituality, the four recognized schools of Sunni jurisprudence, and various customs Wahhabis despise, as "promoting loyalty to the existing rulers." This is the same claim implied by human rights monitors who allege that certain Muslims are persecuted by the Uzbek authorities because they are "independent" of the state. Mr. Polat uses this phrase in an obvious attempt to suggest that there is something extraordinary about Muslims being exhorted to loyalty to the existing political authority, and that this must reflect a holdover from the Communist regime, which demanded such subordination.
Loyalty to the existing rulers is not a Communist invention, or an Uzbek novelty, or any other kind of innovation in Islam. It is an essential principle of Islam embodied in the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. Unfortunately, few Westerners realize this. Of course, jihad against the Soviet state, which attempted to replace Islam with atheism, was another matter. But the Uzbek government of Islam Karimov, regardless of its failings, has not and does not seek to replace Islam with unbelief. Nobody seriously claims that Karimov is an enemy of Islam - only that he is an opponent of Wahhabi and other extremists, and seeks to foster a traditional, indigenous Sufi Islam that is loyal to the government. President Karimov's administration has built many medresas and mosques, and has rehabilitated the tombs of numerous saints. Uzbekistan, as the birthplace of Imam Bukhari and other great Islamic thinkers, has every right to demand a place as a leader among the Islamic countries. To repeat, and to emphasize, loyalty to such a government is an essential principle of the Sunnah, and those who agitate against such loyalty, and who proclaim their independence, i.e. their disobedience of the legal authorities, are guilty of fitnah or subversion, the ultimate Islamic sin.
Mr. Polat also disparages Uzbek traditional Islam by referring to it as "officially permitted by the government for decades," as if Central Asian traditional Islam were a puppet of the Communists. This is absurd. The former government "permitted" this form of Islam because it was the faith of the vast majority of the population, and action to completely suppress it, such as had occurred in the early years of the Bolshevik regime, had become impossible.
Mr. Polat also states that "this form of Islam… to some extent incorporated expensive ceremonies and rites, especially regarding funerals and weddings." Here we have the suggestion that traditional funeral and wedding customs had been introduced into Islam from the environment, and were "un-Islamic." This is pure Wahhabism. Funeral observances and elaborate weddings have been part of Islam all over the world since the time of Muhammad.
In summary, Mr. Polat states "Islam in Uzbekistan has acquired certain national and local features… local accretions" that, according to Mr. Polat, "changed [the orthodox] interpretation over the centuries." Once again, here is the paradigm that falsely describes local customs as intrusions into Islam. Worst of all, Mr. Polat designates the activity of the opponents of Uzbek traditional Islam as "indigenous attempts to understand and study real Islam." This presents the situation as if a group of Uzbeks who found it hard to pay for their weddings decided one fine day that their problem was that Islam was adulterated, and that they wouldn't have to pay so much for weddings if they followed a purified Islam. This is a very popular paradigm with Westerners: they believe Muslims take to fundamentalism in response to the alleged corruption of traditional shaykhs and Islamic healers. I am very sorry, but for a universe of reasons, I do not believe this. People do not simply come up with these ideas. People believe these things because of politics and propaganda. Even Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of the Saudi death cult, did not simply conclude one day that Islam was corrupted; his dispensation was based on a critique of Ottoman conditions. His attack on traditional Islam was political; that of the so-called dissident Muslims in Uzbekistan is political, and it is not based on legitimate grievances.
Any scheme that tries to set off "real Islam" or "pure Islam" or whatever they want to call it against traditional Islam - any scheme that describes traditional Muslims, whether they are Moroccan, Kosovar, Uzbek, or Indonesian - any ideology that labels existing, traditional Islam as "unbelief," "superstition," or "grave worship" - whether it emanates from the mosques of Riyadh or from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or from the acolytes of Mawdudi in Pakistan, or from Hezb-ut-Tahrir -- presents an extremist threat to the lives of ordinary Muslims.
The human rights activists and other defenders of these so-called "independent" Muslims do not grasp this. They do not comprehend that preaching against traditional Uzbek Islam as "superstition" or "grave worship" or "corruption" represents a serious breach of civility and a challenge to public order, and cannot be viewed, in American terms, as protected religious advocacy
In the U.S., when certain Christians advocate terrorism against abortion clinics, nobody views such discourse as protected religious speech. It is seen as extremist incitement and dealt with as such.
In Northern Ireland, when Protestant fanatics label Catholics non-Christian - exactly as the so-called "independent" Muslims in Uzbekistan label the adherents of traditional Islam - the result is that Protestants throw bricks at Catholic schoolchildren. Such preaching is not seen, especially in the United Kingdom, as protected religious speech. It is treated as terrorist incitement.
Even in Israel, advocacy of the physical liquidation of Arabs and Muslims by Jewish ultra-radicals is treated as terrorist incitement as punished by the state.
Uzbekistan faces the same problem. Those who claim to represent pure religion, and who denounce, demonize, and target other believers - ordinary people going about their lives - the mother keeping a home, the peasant working his land, the worker seeking betterment - cannot be seen as mere advocates of an alternative vision of Islam. They seek to subvert authority, to divide families and communities, and to incite terrorism.
Western societies have long recognized that in the field of religion, civility and order are more important than an abstract right of advocacy. When Rev. Jerry Falwell attacked the personality of the Prophet Muhammad, he was subject to serious criticism and forced to apologize to the Muslim believers, not simply because of political correctness, but because every intelligent and loyal American prizes interfaith civility, especially with those Muslims who join in defending America and democracy.
What, to summarize, is the goal of the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance? To destroy the traditional Islam present from Bosnia-Hercegovina to South Africa, and from Morocco to the Philippines, and to replace it with their extremist, ultra-rigid, and Puritanical version of Islam.
They do this through indoctrination, infiltration, and financial subsidies. Wahhabi-Saudi penetration of local Islamic communities may begin with the construction of Saudi-funded mosques, with Saudi-trained imams assigned to them. A reportage in Newsweek states that "at least 250 out of some 1,200 [recognized mosques] nationwide" - that is, in the U.S. - function under direct control of the North American Islamic Trust, a Wahhabi-Saudi body. Further reflecting Wahhabi-Saudi ideological influence over American Islam, Newsweek points out a really extraordinary fact: "An April 2001 survey by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that 69 percent of Muslims in America say it is 'absolutely fundamental' or 'very important' to have Salafi teachings at their mosques." "Salafi" is a cover term for Wahhabi - comparable to "socialist" for Soviet-controlled Communists.
"Wahhabization" may also begin with the distribution of literature - more properly designated as Wahhabi hate propaganda. I recently helped produce a report on the distribution of Wahhabi hate literature on the soil of the U.S., by institutions controlled by the Saudi government, online at www.defenddemocracy.org.
The Wahhabis have sought to extirpate Shi'a Islam, and to abolish the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence. They despise, to a point of homicidal rage, a number of traditional Islamic customs. More broadly, these include
- the entire body of Islamic spirituality known as Sufism or tasawwuf;
- intercessory prayer [Tawassul (using means), tashaffu` (using intercession), and istighatha (asking help)];
- celebration of the birthday of the Prophet (mawlid);
- recitation of two Quranic suras, Fatiha and Ya Sin, for the dead;
- honoring of saints, with erection, maintenance, and visiting of tombs for holy men;
- the establishment and preservation of grave markers and cemeteries, which are frequent targets of Wahhabi desecration.
I have recently received complaints from Kurdish Muslims in Northern Iraq, warning that Wahhabi infiltrators, aligned with al-Qaida, have begun demolishing traditional tombs in that area. Destruction of tombs and cemeteries is often, in fact, the first sign of Wahhabi activity. Early in 1998, just before the eruption of armed conflict in Kosovo, I was informed by Albanian Muslim clerics that Wahhabis had commenced a campaign of vandalizing gravemarkers in the Albanian districts of Macedonia. While attention to this problem was deflected by the Kosovo intervention, it remains a major issue for Albanian Muslims. In Kosovo, 250 mosques - half the total in the country - were seriously vandalized or destroyed by the Serbs. Representatives of relief agencies based in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states promised to rebuild these holy structures, but in numerous cases their so-called restoration begin with the uprooting of Ottoman cemeteries. These acts have outraged Albanian Muslims and led to the barring of the Saudis and other Gulf citizens from reconstruction projects in the embattled territory.
I personally observed the failure of Wahhabi-Saudi infiltrators to take control of Islam in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Albania. This profoundly cynical effort was motivated by the belief that the terrible martyrdom undergone by the Bosnian Muslims in particular, would induce these victims of an attempted genocide to turn away from their European roots and open, tolerant, Ottoman Islamic traditions, and to embrace Wahhabi extremism. I do not think any Islamic community in the world can be said to have suffered, in the last half century, a comparable agony to that of the Bosnians: tens of thousands of women and girls raped, a quarter of a million dead, 40 percent of mosques leveled, more than half a million people dispossessed of their homes. Yet the Bosnian believers, their eyes focused clearly and unwaveringly on their own Sunni legacy as well as their distinctive traditions, refused to submit to Saudi control.
Still, the repudiation of Saudi-Wahhabi pretensions by the Kosovar Muslims has been even more dramatic. Put simply, the entire Albanian nation is acutely conscious that it owes the survival of 2.5 million Kosovars to action by the democratic West, by the Christian leaders of the U.S., and to the noble activities of the Jewish religious and civic leaders in the West, who demanded action to stop the Serbian terror. In Kosovo, the Wahhabi-Saudi fake jihad has failed completely.
While the main immediate aim of Wahhabism is to capture and guide the global Islamic community, its doctrines are also deeply suffused with hatred of the other religions. This is something different from anti-Jewish propaganda disseminated by Arab media in their campaign against Israel. It is also something different from the claim of ultimate revelation and authority in traditional Islam. Anti-Jewish agitators among the Arabs remain chiefly motivated by political issues: their discourse expresses resentment over the Middle East crisis and a need for pretexts to divert their restive citizens from local complaints. While traditional Islam draws a firm line between itself and the earlier monotheism of the Jews and Christians, it does not command the Muslims to despise and murder Jews and Christians (notwithstanding Islamophobic polemics to the contrary.)
Wahhabism is as different from "ordinary" anti-Israeli ideology, or even from most of so-called "militant" Islam, as Nazism was from the mentality of the German military in the first world war, as different as Stalinist Communism was from the radical socialism of a generation before. It is a nihilistic, violent, Islamofascist movement that seeks not only to impose conformity on the world's Muslims, and to completely wipe out Shi'a Islam, but also to attack the world's Jews, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and other worshippers.
The extensions of the Wahhabi conspiracy - centered in such organizations as the Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, both headquartered in Saudi Arabia - are visible throughout the world, wherever Muslims are found, including on U.S. soil.
The failure of Western political and intellectual leaders to adequately understand the internal crisis in Islam, and the conflict between tradition and extremism, led to obliviousness in the face of the terror revealed on September 11th. At this point, certain measures have become imperative. One of them is for the U.S. to demand a full, transparent accounting of Saudi involvement in September 11th from the Saudi authorities. Another is to demand that the Saudi government, like the Soviet government and various right-wing dictatorships before it, entirely cut off its subsidies to the extremist Wahhabi ideological establishment. Third and most important, is to protect, support, and otherwise encourage Muslims opposed to Wahhabism to develop their own community institutions and to produce a new, articulate network of authoritative advocates who can bring the truth about traditional Islam to the Western public. The last is the mission of the Islam and Democracy program created by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Thank you for your time and attention.
(h/t avideditor)
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Time to forget the Crusades
The following is an editorial written by John Tolan for Al Jazeera:
Shortly thereafter, Louis Philippe, the King of France from 1830 to 1848, commissioned a Salle des Croisades at Versailles, replete with monumental romanticised paintings of scenes from the Crusades. It is perhaps no accident that at the same time the French were embarked upon the conquest of Algeria.
For numerous French and British of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the Crusades were a precursor to their brave new colonial adventures in the Orient.
In reaction, Turkish and Arab writers denounced the European colonial enterprise as a re-enactment of the fanaticism and violence of the Crusades.
The Crusades have long stirred emotions of admiration or revulsion, from Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata (1580) to Youssef Chahine's film Saladin the Victorious (1963) and beyond.
Arguing the clash
The legacy of crusading, simplified and distorted, is evoked to argue the inevitability of a present and future "clash of civilisations".
When Osama bin Laden speaks of countering the attacks of American and European "crusaders", he taps into a 19th-century European tradition of seeing the medieval crusades as precursors to the colonial (and subsequently post-colonial) relations between Europeans and Arabs.
But, the Crusades played little part in Arab conceptions of history from the 14th to the 19th centuries.
Until that time, the Crusades were a relatively minor phenomenon in the broad sweep of Muslim history. Of course, chroniclers such as Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Al Qalanisi or al-Maqrizi, close to rulers who fought against the Faranj (rulers like Saladin, al-Kamil, Baibars), made much of the threat posed by the Europeans and the heroic exploits of the sultans who defeated them.
Ibn al-Athir explained that the attack on the Muslim Mashreq (Middle East) was part of a movement of Faranj that included the Castilian capture of Toledo (in 1085) and the Norman conquest of Sicily (1072-91).
Yet for other Arab writers of the Middle Ages, the invasions of the Faranj were a minor inconvenience: they were simply another group of Christians who, like the Byzantines or Armenians, could seize small territories and pose threats to local Muslim rulers.
The Mongol threat
Far more troubling were the invasions of the Mongols, who captured and plundered large swaths of the Muslim heartland, sacking Baghdad in 1258 and Damascus several times.
The Mamluks' victory over the Mongols at Ayn Jalut in 1260 was far more vital than their victories over the string of small and powerless crusader enclaves such as that of Acre, which the Mamluks captured in 1291, ending the Crusader presence in the region.
Ibn Khaldun, in his great works of historiography, the Muqaddima and the Kitab al-'Ibar, has little to say of Crusades and Crusaders, much more about Mongols (including Timur, whom he met) and about the Berber dynasties of the Maghreb.
Few Arab authors of the following centuries take much interest in the Crusades, which are largely seen as a footnote to the sweep of Muslim history.
In Europe, meanwhile, the Crusades, and their failure to galvanise and unify European Christendom, were an obsession to many authors. In the aftermath of the loss of Acre in 1291, various Europeans called on kings, princes and popes to organise fresh crusades against the Mamluks and increasingly against the Ottomans.
Most of the anti-Turkish "crusades", like those of Nicopolis (1396) and Varna (1443) ended in crushing defeat for the European troops. But various European Christian authors continued to use the language of the Crusades to try to fire their co-religionists into attacking the Ottomans or other enemies, including Protestants and "heathen" American Indians.
The historians and philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment, in contrast, vilified the notion of war in the name of God: for them, holy war represented the epitome of medieval fanaticism. Voltaire depicts the Crusaders as blood-thirsty fanatics, while portraying their opponents, particularly Saladin and al-Kamil, as wise and just monarchs.
European nationalism
Yet this negative vision of crusading is swept aside in 19th-century Europe by three powerful forces in European culture: Romanticism, nationalism, and colonialism.
The Romantics rehabilitated the Crusades which they portrayed as, at times, bloody and senseless, yet redeemed by a remarkable and admirable idealism. This idea is embodied in the novels of Walter Scott, such as Ivanhoe (1819) and the Talisman (1825).
Francois de Chateaubriand, in his Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem (1811), takes umbrage at those who speak ill of the Crusades.
On the contrary, for him, despite their shortcomings the Crusaders were imbued with a faith and a selfless sense of mission that pushed them to abandon wives, children, lands and material riches to wrest Christ's tomb from the grasp of the Muslims.
In Jerusalem, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Chateaubriand was dubbed into the Order of the Holy Sepulcher by a Franciscan friar wielding what was supposed to be the sword of Godfrey of Bouillon, knight and first ruler of Crusader Jerusalem.
Chateaubriand and other Europeans dreamed of a return to the heroic age of the Crusades.
European colonialism
Their dream was not long in the waiting. Beginning in 1830, French troops undertook the conquest of Algeria. French Crusader historians Francois-Joseph Michaud and Jean-Joseph Poujoulat praised kings Charles X and Louis-Philippe as new incarnations of Saint Louis.
In a preface to a school textbook on the Crusades, the authors present the feats of medieval French Crusaders as models for the youth sent off to conquer Algeria: "The narration of the great events of olden times shall serve as lessons of patriotism for our youth."
When Napoleon III addressed the troops ready to set off for Lebanon in 1860, he exhorted them to be "the worthy children of those heroes who gloriously carried Christ's banner into those countries".
The British similarly painted their victories over the Ottomans in the first world war: Richard the Lionhearted, who failed to take Jerusalem from Saladin, appears in the pages of Punch in December 1917, in the aftermath of Allenby's capture of Jerusalem, saying "At last, my dream come true!"
One could multiply the examples of British and French authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries who affirmed that their colonial empires were reviving the best traditions of medieval crusading: its idealism, its mission to bear European civilisation into the heart of the Middle East.
Independence dashed
At the Versailles peace conference at the close of the first world war, when the French and British argued over the partition of the Arab lands wrested from the Ottoman empire and the Arab envoys increasingly realised their hopes for independence would be dashed, one of the French representatives tried to ground his claims on French prominence in the Crusades.
Amir Faisal, in frustration, shot back: "Would you kindly tell me just which one of us won the Crusades?"
It is through the French and British, principally, that Arabs of the 19th and 20th centuries rediscovered the Crusades. Modern Arabic terms for the Crusades, such as harb al-salib, were coined in the 19th century as translations of European terms; there had previously been no Arabic word for "crusade".
Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) warns that "Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us".
The first book in Arabic devoted specifically to the Crusades is Sayyid Ali al-Hariri's al-Hurub al-Ṣalibiya, published in Cairo in 1899. His work is grounded in both European scholarship and in knowledge of the medieval Arabic chroniclers.
Unify the Arabs!
Al-Hariri, like subsequent Arab scholars, accepted Michaud's assertion that the Crusades were a precursor for European colonialism. Arab nationalists responded by drawing their own historical lessons from this comparison: the new crusaders can be defeated just as their predecessors had been by the unification of the Arabs under leaders who, like Saladin and Baibars in the Middle Ages, will expel the intruders from Arab soil.
Since the middle of the 20th century, if Europeans or Americans compare the Crusades to colonialism, it is in order to denounce one, the other, or both. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, Westerners tend to see the Crusades as manifestations of violent fanaticism, not as expressions of admirable idealism.
It is now principally in the circles of radical Islam that the 19th-century European paradigm equating Crusades with European colonialism lives on.
Sayyid Qutb in the 1960s affirmed that "the Crusader spirit runs in the blood of all Westerners".
Similar statements have been proffered by more recent Islamists, including bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: Crusaders and Zionists are implacable enemies with whom one neither speaks nor compromises.
The mirror term among more extreme western writers is Jihadists: Islamists (or for some, more broadly Muslims) are seen to be inordinately hostile to non-Muslims, against whom holy war is a sacred duty.
What clash?
These Manichean world views fuel pessimistic scenarios such as Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilisations". Yet when one looks closely at the age of Crusades, one finds that the lesson to be drawn is far less simplistic than Huntington or bin Laden would have us believe.
It is a time of trade, when Egyptian merchants bought spices in India and sold them in Spain, when Venetians and Genoese traders sold English or Flemish wool cloth in Alexandria and brought back to Europe Egyptian glass, Damascene metalwork, Indian spices.
Pilgrims - Christians, Muslims and Jews - bound for Mecca and Jerusalem, travelled together on Genoese or Pisan ships, along with merchants, mercenaries and adventurers.
It is a time when storms tossed their ships and all raised their voices to God in a multilingual supplication. Conflict, as always, was endemic, but it often crossed confessional lines.
The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (and the other Crusader principalities) did not, as some have claimed, comprise an "apartheid" regime of boorish European louts lording over cultured but abject Muslims.
Its inhabitants were in fact a cosmopolitan mix of Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Normans, Provencaux, etc.
In religion they were Shia and Sunni Muslim, Druze, Catholic, Monophysite, and Jewish.
The Latin rulers gradually "orientalised", marrying the daughters of prominent indigenous Christians, learning Arabic, eating and dressing like natives, making truces and alliances with neighbouring Muslim rulers and promoting commerce.
Yet one should not imagine an idyllic land of tolerance: social distinctions were real, and often followed lines of religion and ethnicity.
Seeking historical understanding
In this, as in the violence with which they imposed and enforced their rule, the Latins differed little from other contemporary interlopers in Syria/Palestine: Turks, Byzantines, Kurds, Egyptian Fatimids and Mameluks.
The historical fallacy of identifying modern struggles with those of the Middle Ages continues to be an impediment to a real historical understanding of Arab-European (and more broadly Western-Muslim) relations.
The motivations for al-Qaeda's violence have more to do with internal Saudi politics and resentment of US policy in the Middle East than with a supposedly eternal clash between "crusaders" and "jihadists".
The roots of Iranian anti-Americanism can be found in decades of American alliance with the Shah, rather than in centuries of a supposed clash of civilisations.
The solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is to be found in the righting of the wrongs of the past 60 years, not in invoking the age of the Maccabees or Saladin.
It is time to put to rest simplistic notions of the clash of civilisations based on a falsified image of a long-vanished past. Our current problems are real enough to merit being understood on their own terms.
John Tolan is a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes (France). He is the author of Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), and St Francis and the Sultan: An Encounter Seen Through Eight Centuries of Texts and Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; French edition published in Paris: Seuil, 2007).
French historian Joseph Francois Michaud (1767-1839), in his Histoire des Croisades, affirmed that the Crusades had proven the superiority of Europeans over Muslims and showed the way to the conquest and civilisation of Asia.
Shortly thereafter, Louis Philippe, the King of France from 1830 to 1848, commissioned a Salle des Croisades at Versailles, replete with monumental romanticised paintings of scenes from the Crusades. It is perhaps no accident that at the same time the French were embarked upon the conquest of Algeria.
For numerous French and British of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the Crusades were a precursor to their brave new colonial adventures in the Orient.
In reaction, Turkish and Arab writers denounced the European colonial enterprise as a re-enactment of the fanaticism and violence of the Crusades.
The Crusades have long stirred emotions of admiration or revulsion, from Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata (1580) to Youssef Chahine's film Saladin the Victorious (1963) and beyond.
Arguing the clash
The legacy of crusading, simplified and distorted, is evoked to argue the inevitability of a present and future "clash of civilisations".
When Osama bin Laden speaks of countering the attacks of American and European "crusaders", he taps into a 19th-century European tradition of seeing the medieval crusades as precursors to the colonial (and subsequently post-colonial) relations between Europeans and Arabs.
But, the Crusades played little part in Arab conceptions of history from the 14th to the 19th centuries.
Until that time, the Crusades were a relatively minor phenomenon in the broad sweep of Muslim history. Of course, chroniclers such as Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Al Qalanisi or al-Maqrizi, close to rulers who fought against the Faranj (rulers like Saladin, al-Kamil, Baibars), made much of the threat posed by the Europeans and the heroic exploits of the sultans who defeated them.
Ibn al-Athir explained that the attack on the Muslim Mashreq (Middle East) was part of a movement of Faranj that included the Castilian capture of Toledo (in 1085) and the Norman conquest of Sicily (1072-91).
Yet for other Arab writers of the Middle Ages, the invasions of the Faranj were a minor inconvenience: they were simply another group of Christians who, like the Byzantines or Armenians, could seize small territories and pose threats to local Muslim rulers.
The Mongol threat
Far more troubling were the invasions of the Mongols, who captured and plundered large swaths of the Muslim heartland, sacking Baghdad in 1258 and Damascus several times.
The Mamluks' victory over the Mongols at Ayn Jalut in 1260 was far more vital than their victories over the string of small and powerless crusader enclaves such as that of Acre, which the Mamluks captured in 1291, ending the Crusader presence in the region.
Ibn Khaldun, in his great works of historiography, the Muqaddima and the Kitab al-'Ibar, has little to say of Crusades and Crusaders, much more about Mongols (including Timur, whom he met) and about the Berber dynasties of the Maghreb.
Few Arab authors of the following centuries take much interest in the Crusades, which are largely seen as a footnote to the sweep of Muslim history.
In Europe, meanwhile, the Crusades, and their failure to galvanise and unify European Christendom, were an obsession to many authors. In the aftermath of the loss of Acre in 1291, various Europeans called on kings, princes and popes to organise fresh crusades against the Mamluks and increasingly against the Ottomans.
Most of the anti-Turkish "crusades", like those of Nicopolis (1396) and Varna (1443) ended in crushing defeat for the European troops. But various European Christian authors continued to use the language of the Crusades to try to fire their co-religionists into attacking the Ottomans or other enemies, including Protestants and "heathen" American Indians.
The historians and philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment, in contrast, vilified the notion of war in the name of God: for them, holy war represented the epitome of medieval fanaticism. Voltaire depicts the Crusaders as blood-thirsty fanatics, while portraying their opponents, particularly Saladin and al-Kamil, as wise and just monarchs.
European nationalism
Yet this negative vision of crusading is swept aside in 19th-century Europe by three powerful forces in European culture: Romanticism, nationalism, and colonialism.
The Romantics rehabilitated the Crusades which they portrayed as, at times, bloody and senseless, yet redeemed by a remarkable and admirable idealism. This idea is embodied in the novels of Walter Scott, such as Ivanhoe (1819) and the Talisman (1825).
Francois de Chateaubriand, in his Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem (1811), takes umbrage at those who speak ill of the Crusades.
On the contrary, for him, despite their shortcomings the Crusaders were imbued with a faith and a selfless sense of mission that pushed them to abandon wives, children, lands and material riches to wrest Christ's tomb from the grasp of the Muslims.
In Jerusalem, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Chateaubriand was dubbed into the Order of the Holy Sepulcher by a Franciscan friar wielding what was supposed to be the sword of Godfrey of Bouillon, knight and first ruler of Crusader Jerusalem.
Chateaubriand and other Europeans dreamed of a return to the heroic age of the Crusades.
European colonialism
Their dream was not long in the waiting. Beginning in 1830, French troops undertook the conquest of Algeria. French Crusader historians Francois-Joseph Michaud and Jean-Joseph Poujoulat praised kings Charles X and Louis-Philippe as new incarnations of Saint Louis.
In a preface to a school textbook on the Crusades, the authors present the feats of medieval French Crusaders as models for the youth sent off to conquer Algeria: "The narration of the great events of olden times shall serve as lessons of patriotism for our youth."
When Napoleon III addressed the troops ready to set off for Lebanon in 1860, he exhorted them to be "the worthy children of those heroes who gloriously carried Christ's banner into those countries".
The British similarly painted their victories over the Ottomans in the first world war: Richard the Lionhearted, who failed to take Jerusalem from Saladin, appears in the pages of Punch in December 1917, in the aftermath of Allenby's capture of Jerusalem, saying "At last, my dream come true!"
One could multiply the examples of British and French authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries who affirmed that their colonial empires were reviving the best traditions of medieval crusading: its idealism, its mission to bear European civilisation into the heart of the Middle East.
Independence dashed
At the Versailles peace conference at the close of the first world war, when the French and British argued over the partition of the Arab lands wrested from the Ottoman empire and the Arab envoys increasingly realised their hopes for independence would be dashed, one of the French representatives tried to ground his claims on French prominence in the Crusades.
Amir Faisal, in frustration, shot back: "Would you kindly tell me just which one of us won the Crusades?"
It is through the French and British, principally, that Arabs of the 19th and 20th centuries rediscovered the Crusades. Modern Arabic terms for the Crusades, such as harb al-salib, were coined in the 19th century as translations of European terms; there had previously been no Arabic word for "crusade".
Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) warns that "Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us".
The first book in Arabic devoted specifically to the Crusades is Sayyid Ali al-Hariri's al-Hurub al-Ṣalibiya, published in Cairo in 1899. His work is grounded in both European scholarship and in knowledge of the medieval Arabic chroniclers.
Unify the Arabs!
Al-Hariri, like subsequent Arab scholars, accepted Michaud's assertion that the Crusades were a precursor for European colonialism. Arab nationalists responded by drawing their own historical lessons from this comparison: the new crusaders can be defeated just as their predecessors had been by the unification of the Arabs under leaders who, like Saladin and Baibars in the Middle Ages, will expel the intruders from Arab soil.
Since the middle of the 20th century, if Europeans or Americans compare the Crusades to colonialism, it is in order to denounce one, the other, or both. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, Westerners tend to see the Crusades as manifestations of violent fanaticism, not as expressions of admirable idealism.
It is now principally in the circles of radical Islam that the 19th-century European paradigm equating Crusades with European colonialism lives on.
Sayyid Qutb in the 1960s affirmed that "the Crusader spirit runs in the blood of all Westerners".
Similar statements have been proffered by more recent Islamists, including bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: Crusaders and Zionists are implacable enemies with whom one neither speaks nor compromises.
The mirror term among more extreme western writers is Jihadists: Islamists (or for some, more broadly Muslims) are seen to be inordinately hostile to non-Muslims, against whom holy war is a sacred duty.
What clash?
These Manichean world views fuel pessimistic scenarios such as Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilisations". Yet when one looks closely at the age of Crusades, one finds that the lesson to be drawn is far less simplistic than Huntington or bin Laden would have us believe.
It is a time of trade, when Egyptian merchants bought spices in India and sold them in Spain, when Venetians and Genoese traders sold English or Flemish wool cloth in Alexandria and brought back to Europe Egyptian glass, Damascene metalwork, Indian spices.
Pilgrims - Christians, Muslims and Jews - bound for Mecca and Jerusalem, travelled together on Genoese or Pisan ships, along with merchants, mercenaries and adventurers.
It is a time when storms tossed their ships and all raised their voices to God in a multilingual supplication. Conflict, as always, was endemic, but it often crossed confessional lines.
The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (and the other Crusader principalities) did not, as some have claimed, comprise an "apartheid" regime of boorish European louts lording over cultured but abject Muslims.
Its inhabitants were in fact a cosmopolitan mix of Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Normans, Provencaux, etc.
In religion they were Shia and Sunni Muslim, Druze, Catholic, Monophysite, and Jewish.
The Latin rulers gradually "orientalised", marrying the daughters of prominent indigenous Christians, learning Arabic, eating and dressing like natives, making truces and alliances with neighbouring Muslim rulers and promoting commerce.
Yet one should not imagine an idyllic land of tolerance: social distinctions were real, and often followed lines of religion and ethnicity.
Seeking historical understanding
In this, as in the violence with which they imposed and enforced their rule, the Latins differed little from other contemporary interlopers in Syria/Palestine: Turks, Byzantines, Kurds, Egyptian Fatimids and Mameluks.
The historical fallacy of identifying modern struggles with those of the Middle Ages continues to be an impediment to a real historical understanding of Arab-European (and more broadly Western-Muslim) relations.
The motivations for al-Qaeda's violence have more to do with internal Saudi politics and resentment of US policy in the Middle East than with a supposedly eternal clash between "crusaders" and "jihadists".
The roots of Iranian anti-Americanism can be found in decades of American alliance with the Shah, rather than in centuries of a supposed clash of civilisations.
The solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is to be found in the righting of the wrongs of the past 60 years, not in invoking the age of the Maccabees or Saladin.
It is time to put to rest simplistic notions of the clash of civilisations based on a falsified image of a long-vanished past. Our current problems are real enough to merit being understood on their own terms.
John Tolan is a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes (France). He is the author of Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), and St Francis and the Sultan: An Encounter Seen Through Eight Centuries of Texts and Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; French edition published in Paris: Seuil, 2007).
Monday, July 2, 2007
Saturday, June 23, 2007
The Roots of Apostasy
There are two major theories regarding the spiritual cancer currently afflicting Islam. They might be referred to as the Wahhabi and Salafist Theories. The Apostates trace their ideology back to Muḥammad ibn 'Abdu'l-Wahháb, but the evidence points towards Salafism. While the prevalence of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia certainly facilitated the Apostasy's spread into that kingdom, the Apostasy originated outside Saudi Arabia, among the Salafists. In any case, the two terms have since become nearly synonymous.
When Salafism got its start way back in the 19th Century, it was actually not a bad thing. The original source of the idea can be traced to one Siyyid Jamálu'd-Dín-i-Afghání. He was, surprisingly, a Shiite, and in many ways what we would refer to as a liberal. He lived in the twilight of the Caliphate, and lamented the passing of supremacy from the lands of Islam to the European powers. He believed that the reason for this was the splintering and ossification of Islam. He asked, "What would the early Muslims do now?", although his ideological descendants would warp this into "What did the early Muslims do then?", and somehow even get that wrong.
Afghani eventually died, as historical figures are wont to do, and his teachings were further developed by Muḥammad Abduh, who had studied under him at the grand and glorious Azhar University in Cairo, which would end up being the incubator for all this. Abduh's ideas were inherited by a student of his, Rashid Rida, and this seems to be where darkness begins to creep into the picture. The previous Salafists, who are also referred to as Islamic Modernists in order to distinguish them from their mutant spawn, had criticized both westernization and stodgy old conservatives within Islam. Rida put most of the blame on westernization.
One of Rida's most fervent admirers was Hassan al-Banna. He went even further than Rida had, and it is with him that we begin to see the "Islamism" we all know and love. In 1928, Banna founded what has come to be known as the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood's rise was meteoric, it rapidly became a major force in Egyptian politics. Enter Sayyid Qutb.
It was with Sayyid Qutb that Salafism's descent into Apostasy was completed. He was a high ranking member of the Brotherhood, and it was he who first raised the call for jihad. His Apostasy infected large parts of the Brotherhood, many of which split off to become full fledged terrorist organizations. Understandably alarmed, the Egyptian government took action against the Brotherhood, executing Qutb in 1966. Unfortunately, much of the faculty of al-Azhar University were by that time Apostates; they, in turn, churned out little Apostates, one of whom was Abdullah Yusuf Azzam.
Azzam went on to teach at a prestigious school in Saudi Arabia. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he issued the fatwa declaring jihad and formed the group Maktab al-Khadamat to train and equip jihadis. When he learned that a like-minded (and rich) former student of his, Osama bin Laden, had just moved into the area, he asked him for help. Osama said sure, and they became co-leaders of the group. Then, one day, Azzam was assassinated. The culprit was never firmly identified, but it had bin Laden's style. Osama then took sole command of the group.
Thus was al-Qaeda born.
Note: It's one in the morning as I write this, so I'm not going to proofread it yet. I will tomorrow.
When Salafism got its start way back in the 19th Century, it was actually not a bad thing. The original source of the idea can be traced to one Siyyid Jamálu'd-Dín-i-Afghání. He was, surprisingly, a Shiite, and in many ways what we would refer to as a liberal. He lived in the twilight of the Caliphate, and lamented the passing of supremacy from the lands of Islam to the European powers. He believed that the reason for this was the splintering and ossification of Islam. He asked, "What would the early Muslims do now?", although his ideological descendants would warp this into "What did the early Muslims do then?", and somehow even get that wrong.
Afghani eventually died, as historical figures are wont to do, and his teachings were further developed by Muḥammad Abduh, who had studied under him at the grand and glorious Azhar University in Cairo, which would end up being the incubator for all this. Abduh's ideas were inherited by a student of his, Rashid Rida, and this seems to be where darkness begins to creep into the picture. The previous Salafists, who are also referred to as Islamic Modernists in order to distinguish them from their mutant spawn, had criticized both westernization and stodgy old conservatives within Islam. Rida put most of the blame on westernization.
One of Rida's most fervent admirers was Hassan al-Banna. He went even further than Rida had, and it is with him that we begin to see the "Islamism" we all know and love. In 1928, Banna founded what has come to be known as the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood's rise was meteoric, it rapidly became a major force in Egyptian politics. Enter Sayyid Qutb.
It was with Sayyid Qutb that Salafism's descent into Apostasy was completed. He was a high ranking member of the Brotherhood, and it was he who first raised the call for jihad. His Apostasy infected large parts of the Brotherhood, many of which split off to become full fledged terrorist organizations. Understandably alarmed, the Egyptian government took action against the Brotherhood, executing Qutb in 1966. Unfortunately, much of the faculty of al-Azhar University were by that time Apostates; they, in turn, churned out little Apostates, one of whom was Abdullah Yusuf Azzam.
Azzam went on to teach at a prestigious school in Saudi Arabia. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he issued the fatwa declaring jihad and formed the group Maktab al-Khadamat to train and equip jihadis. When he learned that a like-minded (and rich) former student of his, Osama bin Laden, had just moved into the area, he asked him for help. Osama said sure, and they became co-leaders of the group. Then, one day, Azzam was assassinated. The culprit was never firmly identified, but it had bin Laden's style. Osama then took sole command of the group.
Thus was al-Qaeda born.
Note: It's one in the morning as I write this, so I'm not going to proofread it yet. I will tomorrow.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Saudis arrest 172 in 'terror raid'
The statement, broadcast on Al-Ekhbaria state television, said: "Some had begun training on the use of weapons, and some were sent to other countries to study aviation in preparation to use them to carry out terrorist operations inside the kingdom."
The ministry said that the suspects were plotting to carry out suicide attacks on public figures and oil installations in addition to targeting military bases.
Comment:
I find it peculiar that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is willing to attack oil facilities. I believe that they have actually made such an attack on at least one occasion. While on the one hand attacking the Saudis' source of wealth certainly makes strategic sense, on the other hand it could cause problems further down the road, as Osama bin Laden stated in his 1996 fatwa:
The presence of the USA Crusader military forces on land, sea and air of the states of the Islamic Gulf is the greatest danger threatening the largest oil reserve in the world. The existence of these forces in the area will provoke the people of the country and induces aggression on their religion, feelings and prides and push them to take up armed struggle against the invaders occupying the land; therefore spread of the fighting in the region will expose the oil wealth to the danger of being burned up. The economic interests of the States of the Gulf and the land of the two Holy Places will be damaged and even a greater damage will be caused to the economy of the world. I would like here to alert my brothers, the Mujahideen, the sons of the nation, to protect this (oil) wealth and not to include it in the battle as it is a great Islamic wealth and a large economical power essential for the soon to be established Islamic state, by Allah's Permission and Grace. We also warn the aggressors, the USA, against burning this Islamic wealth (a crime which they may commit in order to prevent it, at the end of the war, from falling in the hands of its legitimate owners and to cause economic damages to the competitors of the USA in Europe or the Far East, particularly Japan which is the major consumer of the oil of the region).
Curious.
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