Author: Daniel Pipes
Publication: Wall Street Journal
Europe
Date: May 14, 2003
URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1098
The four bombings in Saudi Arabia
Monday, which killed dozens, including 10 Americans, are symptomatic of
a deep fissure in that country. The argument is over religion, politics
and foreigners-and it goes back a long way. The West must react by helping
the Saudi family win this dispute, while putting pressure on it to reform.
Saudi Arabia's origins lie in the
mid-eighteenth century, when a tribal leader named Muhammad Al Saud joined
forces with a religious leader named Muhammad bin Abd al- Wahhab. The first
gave his name to the kingdom that (with the exception of two interim periods)
still exists; the second gave his name to the version of Islam that still
serves as the kingdom's ideology.
On first appearance, the Wahhabi
version of Islam was seen as wildly extreme and was widely repudiated.
Its fanatical enmity toward other Muslims and its rejection of long-standing
Muslim customs made it anathema, for example, to the Ottoman rulers who
dominated the Middle East. The Saudi kingdom disappeared twice because
its military and religious aggressiveness made it so loathsome to its neighbors.
The current iteration of the Saudi
kingdom came into being in 1902 when a Saudi leader captured Riyadh. Ten
years later, there emerged a Wahhabi armed force known as the Ikhwan (Arabic
for "Brethren") which in its personal practices and its hostility toward
non- Wahhabis represented the most militant dimension of this already militant
movement. One war cry of theirs went: "The winds of Paradise are blowing.
Where are you who hanker after Paradise?"
The Ikhwan served the Saudi family
well, bringing it one military victory after another. A key turning point
came in 1924, when the father of today's Saudi king captured Mecca from
the great-great-grandfather of today's Jordanian king. This victory had
two major implications. It vanquished the last remaining rival of the Saudis
and established the family as the leading force on the Arabian peninsula.
And it brought under Saudi control not just another town but the holiest
city of Islam and a cosmopolitan urban area that hosted divergent interpretations
of Islam.
These changes turned the Saudi insurgency
into a state and brought a desert movement to the city. This meant the
Saudi monarch could no longer give the Ikhwan and the traditional Wahhabi
interpretation of Islam free reign, but had to control it. The result was
a civil war in the late 1920s which ended in the monarchy's victory over
the Ikhwan in 1930.
In other words, the less fanatical
version of Wahhabism triumphed over the more fanatical. The Saudi monarchs
presided over a kingdom extreme by comparison with other Muslim countries
but tame by Wahhabi standards.
Yes, the Saudi state deems the Koran
to be its constitution, forbids the practice of any religion but Islam
on its territory, employs an intolerant religious police, and imposes gender
apartheid. But it also enacts non-Koranic regulations, employs large numbers
of non-Muslims, constrains the religious police, and allows women to attend
school and work.
The Ikhwan may have lost the fight
in 1930, but its way of thinking lived on, representing the main opposition
to an ever-more grandiose and corrupt Saudi state. The potency of this
alternative became startlingly evident in 1979, when an Ikhwan-inspired
group violently seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. On a larger scale, the
Ikhwan spirit dominated jihad efforts against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan
during the 1980s. And the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan in the
period 1996-2001 embodied the Ikhwan in power.
Osama bin Laden, a Saudi who spent
formative years in Afghanistan, is the leading representative of the Ikhwan
movement today. He wants to depose the corrupt and hypocritical Saudi monarchy,
install a Taliban-like government, evict non-Muslim foreigners, and return
women to the harem. His vision has real appeal in Saudi Arabia; it's widely
reported that in a fair election, he would handily defeat the current ruler,
King Fahd.
Thus, the recent violence in Riyadh
ultimately reflects not just a hatred of Americans but a titanic clash
of visions and a struggle for power; in this, it recapitulates the civil
war of the 1920s. Is Saudi Arabia to remain a monarchy that at least partially
accommodates modernity and the outside world? Or is it to become the Islamic
Emirate of Arabia, a reincarnation of the Taliban's completely regressive
rule in Afghanistan?
For the outside world, the choice
is clear; however unattractive, the Saudi monarchy is preferable to the
yet worse Ikhwan alternative. This implies a two-step approach: help the
monarchy defeat its Ikhwan-inspired enemy and put serious pressure on the
kingdom to reform everything from its school system to its sponsorship
of Wahhabi organizations abroad.