Jihad knocks on House of Saud's door

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By Rabbi Moshe Reiss

Earlier this year, descendants of former US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Saudi Arabia’s first king, Ibn Saud, celebrated the 60th anniversary of the first Saudi-US summit at the Suez Canal, where the foundations were laid for a “special relationship” between the two countries based on an oil-for-security alliance. Despite the importance of Saudi Arabia to the world, this was not widely noted in the major media.

Until recently, jihad was strongly supported by the Saudi government and its Wahhabi religious establishment. Wahhabism is a puritanical form of Islamic extremism that cannot tolerate any other interpretations of Islam, much less Judaism and Christianity. Their religious and material support of jihad is similar to that of the Taliban. Given that 15 of the actual terrorists of September 11 were from Saudi Arabia and that Osama bin Laden was raised in Saudi Arabia and was a Saudi businessmen and citizen, the Saudi government can be construed as having some responsibility for the World Trade Center attack. It was certainly more responsible than the government of Iraq.

Saudi funding sources, developed during the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980s, continued as the jihad expanded outside Afghanistan. The growth of jihad from Saudi Arabia was transmitted through Saudi-supported Islamic international organizations (the Islamic Conference Organization, the World Muslim League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth) to the rest of the Muslim world. Saudi funding has supported jihadis throughout the world; in Africa, Central Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia, in the United States and Europe; in fact in every area where jihad has occurred.

The Saudis have established and financed madrassas (religious schools) and mosques to indoctrinate young students and communities in virulent anti-Western dogma, and they have damaged tolerant and pluralistic traditions in Eastern and Central Asia and North Africa. Freedom House (a US-based think-tank) analyzed Saudi-sponsored books and pamphlets written in Arabic and found in mosques in the US. Freedom House stated that the teachings espouse an anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, misogynist, jihadi ideology, assume non-Muslims are enemies and propose Sharia law in America.

One former high-level Saudi government official described Imam Mohammed bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh as “a factory for terrorism”. Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari, dean of the faculty of Islamic law at Qatar University, has stated, “This culture [of terrorism] is rooted in the minds of those who suffered from a closed education that leaves no room for pluralism.”

We are not claiming that the Saudis were behind September 11, any more than the Central Intelligence Agency or Mossad; only that they have a responsibility, and more, than Iraq.

Imagine, Bernard Lewis suggests, “If the Ku Klux Klan or Aryan Nation obtained total control of Texas and had at its disposal all the oil revenues and used this money to establish a network of well-endowed schools and colleges all over Christendom peddling their particular brand of Christianity. This is what the Saudis have done with Wahhabism.”

Jihad is a holy war. It is based on a conspiracy theory of America and Israel (and other Western states) being “kufr” states; that is, states totally against the religion and way of life of Islam.

Its strategic objective is political change away from globalization and modernity. Jihadis believe globalization and modernity are part and parcel of the Judaic-Christian worldview. They have no positive objectives other than instituting medieval-oriented Sharia-based Islamic law. This could have only a negative impact on the socio-economic problems of Middle Eastern youth-based society - almost 50% of the populations are under voting age, with 20-30% unemployment.

 

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Its objectives are the destruction of Western and Jewish influence over the Western world and all infidels. A well known hadith (commentary based on the Prophet Mohammed) states, “when even the rocks and trees will call out Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!” This hadith is frequently used by bin Laden, who has also accused the Jews of “holding America and the West hostage”.

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah opened a conference on February 5-8 in Saudi Arabia on international counterterrorism. Two days before the conference official Saudi television interviewed several prominent Saudis. Suheida Hammed explained how Saudi terrorism was caused by the Jews. Mash’as al-Harathi wrote a poem dedicated to Saudi Minister of Defense Prince Sultan Feted, proclaiming that bin Laden was sent by the Jews.

For Christians they have stated, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” Recently, some have defined this “apocalyptic thinking” to mean that every Muslim must kill a Jew or Christian to substitute for him in Hell. This has (as noted by Richard Landes) been interpreted to mean that every Muslim has to kill a Jew or a Christian in order to be saved. A French-Arab youngster slaughtered and mutilated a Jew, his neighbor since childhood. He triumphantly announced to his parents, his hands still bloodied, “I’ve killed my Jew, I can go to paradise.” The jihadis now even include among “infidels” other Muslims, such as Shi’ites and Sunni civilians working for Westerners.

Jihadis intrinsically believe death to be preferable to life in a non-Islamic world. Their mission is to create a kingdom of heaven here on Earth. From their perspective, the eventuality of death prior to the total eschatology is an insignificant price to pay. Heaven is after all the “true” world. (See Asia Times Online, Suicide bombing: Theology of death October 22, 2004.)

Jihad is a modern form of totalitarianism challenging traditional Islam. Jihadis are fascists with imperial demands on the rest of the world. Sayyid Abdul Ala Mawdudi, a Pakistani and well known theoretician of jihad, has written, “Islam wants the whole Earth and does not content itself with only a part thereof. Islam wants and requires the Earth in order that the human race altogether can enjoy the concept and practical program of human happiness, by means of which God has honored Islam and put it above the other religions and laws.”

Very few jihadis base their theology on traditional Islam. They are, according to the French Islamic scholar Oliver Roy, “a by-product of Westernization and not a backlash against traditional Muslim cultures … they are born-again Muslims.” And like other “born agains”, despite their own choosing, they believe that choice itself is anti-God. Their training, with few exceptions, was not in the madrassas. The majority of the leaders are Western-oriented and educated. Sayyid Qutb, the self-proclaimed theocrat and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, did not study theology, graduated from an Egyptian secular university, and then studied engineering at a college in the United States; bin Laden’s deputy, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a medical doctor; Ramzi Yusuf (of the original 1993 World Trade Center bombing) was an electronics engineer trained in the United Kingdom, Omar Ahmad Saeed Sheikh, who was implicated in the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl, was born a British Muslim of Pakistani descent, educated in private schools and at the London School of Economics. Muhammad Atta, the leader of the September 11 bombing, was a promising architectural student who resided in Germany.

Bin Laden himself, despite issuing fatwas, is not a cleric or a trained theologian, but a Western-oriented businessman more familiar with arms dealing, money transfers and electronic technology than Islamic theology. He is the most successful entrepreneur of an enterprise dedicated to anti-liberal, anti-modern, anti-democratic objectives with a quasi-religious ideology. (One exception is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian trained in Afghanistan, who as far as is known has never been associated with the West. He was recently declared the “emir” of Iraq by bin Laden.)

 

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Jihad was created by the intersection of Islam and the West and these creators were trained in the West. They are modern, urbanized and influenced more by the leftist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s than by traditional Islam. They have developed a modern political ideology based on their version of how to reconcile “Islam” with the modern world. Third World members of Islam learnt through television and the Internet about both the freedom and the materialism of the West. Roy finds the fundamentalist inspiration to be far more mundane than spiritual: “For many of them, the return to religion has been brought about through their experience in politics, and not as a result of their religious belief.” Their arch competitors are capitalism and globalization; not Christianity or Judaism.

In 1979, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Shi’ite Muslims overthrew the Western-based government of the Shah of Iran. Shortly before the Cold War ended, Khomeini sent a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev in which he asserted the universality of Islam. He stressed the failure of communist ideology and implored the Soviet president not to turn West to market capitalism as a replacement, but to Islam.

After the ayatollahs took over Iran and established an Islamic state, Arab Sunni fundamentalists (with the help of the US) defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1989. In the power vacuum that followed, amid destructive fighting among the victorious mujahideen, the puritanical strain of Wahhabism combined with the ideology and jihad of Qutb’s Muslim Brotherhood to create the Taliban, who came to power in 1996. Qutb had been executed by the Egyptian government and the Brotherhood repressed. Its primary success was the founding of Hamas in Palestine and combining its ideology to create the Taliban in Afghanistan.

These two events - Iran and Afghanistan - gave rise to global jihad. Bin Laden as the self-proclaimed child of the Afghanistan war compares himself loosely to Mohammed and his conquest of the empires of eastern Christendom and Persia, as well as Saladin, who defeated the Crusader armies and conquered Jerusalem.

Is jihad a growth industry? Despite September 11, and with the exception of Iran 25 years ago, the globalization of jihad has not succeeded. Gilles Kepel, another French scholar, has suggested they are a dying breed.

In Iraq, though, jihad flourishes. According to several sources, more than half of the suicide bombers in the country come from Saudi Arabia (Rueven Paz, 61% of 154 names, Evan F Kohlmann, more than 50% of 235 names, and in a Washington Post analysis of websites listing dead suicide bombers, 44% came from Saudi Arabia).

Non-jihadi Muslim spokesmen are aware of the nature of jihadi revolutionaries as enemies of any prevailing order. Given the opportunity, al-Qaeda will destroy their self defined “near enemies”, whether in Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Saudi Arabia. Jihadis consider less extreme Muslims as clients of the infidels. Despite the religious symbiosis between Wahhabism and jihad, it is important to prevent bin Laden’s call to arms bringing these Muslims into his jihadi arms and into his ideological/political battle.

Saudi Arabia’s problem
Saudi Arabia, apart from having bin Laden and al-Qaeda as an enemy, is in crisis. Its elite is bitterly divided over how to escape. Crown Prince Abdullah leads a camp of reformers who seek rapprochement with the West, while Interior Minister Prince Nayef has sided with an anti-American religious establishment. Neither side believes in democracy and they reject human rights.

As the Saudis fight a jihadi insurgency led by al-Qaeda, both use the same religious grounds from which to draw legitimacy. Turki Hamad, a Saudi journalist, said they come from the same cultural discourse. This could result in a consolidation of the ideas of Nayef and Crown Prince Abdullah, ending in less reform. Yet Saudi Arabia is in desperate need of comprehensive political, economic, social, legal and educational reform.

So the leadership is slowly closing ranks and reasserting its authoritarian rule. Emboldened by its success in the domestic “war on terror”, which the Saudi government began only after its rule was directly threatened, the al-Saud family is flexing other muscles so that the masses, too, are left in no doubt that it is back in total control. Like other Arab regimes, it is using the “war on terror” to silence all dissent. (On Sunday, the al-Qaeda frontman in Saudi Arabia, Moroccan Younes Hayari, was killed in clashes with security forces.)

 

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In Saudi Arabia, almost 50% of the native population is aged 18 or under and 30% is unemployed. The government is run by men over 70 years of age. Even many of the 5,000 princes are unemployed. Yet 4 million foreign workers, out of a total population of 16 million, work in Saudi Arabia. They are overwhelmingly non-Wahhabi Sunnis, and therefore have neither religious nor any other rights. Almost 2 million Saudis are Shi’ites, also without rights. They follow Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Iraq. This must be a concern to the government.

The Saudis are finally realizing their problem. A member of the majlis al-shura (the Saudi consultative council that is a pretense for a parliament) once stated, “All they teach is to hate those who are different. We are a country that is economically in the 20th century and intellectually in the 14th century.”

A recent municipal election (excluding women voters) was held in Saudi Arabia. The candidates of the hardline “golden list” in the country’s most liberal city, Jeddah, won. Scholars have predicted that should democracy take hold in Saudi Arabia, the Islamists would win.

While the US has articulated a policy of democracy in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, even vaguely in Syria, it has not had a policy regarding political change in Saudi Arabia; it seeks the impossible - “stability” - from its oil-rich trading partner.

It has long been claimed that the primary reason then-president George H W Bush did not go further in 1991 in the Gulf War and take over Baghdad was his fear that it would set off a revolution in Saudi Arabia. The Bush connection to the House of Saud is too well known to need discussing.

Almost 20% of America’s oil comes from Saudi Arabia. And it is estimated that 60% of the world’s proven oil reserves lie under its soil, although this is disputed - see The Saudi oil bombshell, Asia Times Online, Jun 29.

The jihadis will do their best to disrupt this supply. Some people have claimed that the US-led invasion of Iraq (with less than a third of Saudi Arabia’s oil supply) was based on ensuring an additional supply. If that is so, invading Saudi Arabia could become necessary. The American government has to protect its own interests. Israel would certainly support an American invasion of Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia might not be as much a master of its own fate as it would believe.

*Rabbi Moshe Reiss is a graduate of Oxford University, has taught at Columbia University and was assistant rabbi at Yale University. He was the first rabbi to be invited to teach in the Department of Theology at the Catholic University of Leuven - Belgium (founded 1425) and has lectured in various countries. He has published three books on his [website](file:///z:/AT%20work/2%20for%20reading/www.moshereiss.org) on Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His book on Judaism is being published by sections in the Jewish Bible Quarterly. He now lives in Israel. *