Spreading Wahhabism Beyond Arabia
By Medea Benjamin
Certainly Saudi Arabia is not the only culprit for the worldwide surge in violent Muslim extremism since 2000.
There are the catastrophic U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya;
the illegal Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories; the
sectarian nature of the Iraqi government; the torture at Guantanamo Bay
and Abu Ghraib; and the brutal repression of the Assad dictatorship in
Syria. But Wahhabi ideology has certainly been one of the key factors in
the spread of terrorism.
Wahhabism is an extreme, fundamentalist sect of Sunni Islam that was
created based on the teachings of eighteenth-century Imam Wahhab. His
students and followers advocated a return to the austere practices
supposedly followed by the Salaf, or earliest Muslims, during the
seventh century.
According to Imam Wahhab, popular local forms
of Islam that incorporated reverence to past Imams, their shrines, or
ancient pagan sacred sites were sacrilegious, since only the one true
God is worthy of reverence. The Shia practice of revering and making
pilgrimages to the shrines of Shiite Imams was one of Wahhab’s prime
targets, but he also condemned Sunni Muslims in Arabia for revering
trees, rocks, and other traditional sacred sites. Based on his
teachings, Wahhabism developed in its harshest form to say that Muslims
should hate non-Muslims; that Shia and other non- Wahhabi Muslims are
infidels; and that the Saudi monarchy is the ordained protector of the
Muslim faith.
The interpretation of Islam promoted by the Saudis
was in sharp contrast to the ancient traditions of tolerance in Muslim
countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Mali. President Obama himself
remarked on this in a conversation with Australian Prime Minister
Malcolm Turnbull. Obama described how he has watched Indonesia, where he
lived as a child, gradually move from a “relaxed, syncretistic Islam to
a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation” due to Saudi
influence.
The name “Wahhabism” itself was originally used only
by Imam Wahhab’s opponents, much as opponents of today’s Islamic State
movement call it by the acronym “Daesh.” Calling Wahhab’s followers
“Wahhabis” was a sly dig at the contradiction at the heart of this new
sect. The Wahhabis condemned reverence to other well-known Imams, but
seemed to make an exception for Wahhab himself, so the label “Wahhabi”
was pointedly ironic.
Wahhabism would have remained a marginal
sect were it not for its union with the political power of the Saudi
family combined with oil money. Wahhabism was first used by the Al Saud
family as a way to unite the peninsula’s unruly tribes and later as a
bulwark against the rise of secularism, Arab nationalism, and Soviet
influence in the Middle East. Wahhabism became the strategy for the
monarchy to justify its hold on power and project that power abroad.
As the kingdom evolved, the Saudi family and religious clerics used the
public schools to inculcate their citizens with the radical Wahhabist
ideology. According to a 2006 report by the U.S. group Freedom House,
Islamic studies textbooks issued by the Saudi Ministry of Education
taught students that Christians, Jews, Shiites, and Sufi Muslims are
enemies of the true believer. An eighth grade text read: “The apes are
Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the
infidels of the communion of Jesus.” Some books justified violence
against apostates, sorcerers, and homosexuals, and labeled Jews and
Christians “enemies of the believers.” A high school textbook presented
the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as an authentic document, rather
than a notorious forgery designed to promote hostility toward Jews.
Responding to U.S. pressure, the Saudis agreed to revise and update
textbooks to remove bigoted views. They pledged to complete the task in
two years, but eight years later, in 2014, the U.S. Commission on
International Religious Freedom reported that “revisions are incomplete
and language promoting hatred and incitement to violence remains in high
school texts.” It is also impossible to recall the tens of thousands of
older versions of textbooks and other intolerant materials in
circulation.
Wahhabi-oriented television channels that reach
deep into households from urban Tunisia to rural Mali continue to spew
hate, as do some Islamist newspapers and websites. The tragic result is
that in some parts of the world, a whole generation of Muslims has grown
up with a distorted, negative view of other religions and an
intolerant, sectarian understanding of their own faith.
Throughout world history, such unions of political power and religious
sects have created powerful and dangerous forces. The claims of
fundamentalists to represent “pure” forms of well- established religions
have made these political movements particularly resistant to
compromise or reconciliation with the rest of human society.
These patterns have emerged in the United States with the Religious
Right, in Latin America with Evangelical Christians, in Sri Lanka with
the Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalists, in India with the Hindu Nationalist
BJP, in Israel with the fundamentalist Jewish sects colonizing illegal
settlements, and in Iraq with the U.S.-backed Da’wa regime.
These movements share several common features:
• They claim to be carrying out the will of God or a divine plan.
• They condemn members of other branches of their own religion as heathens or apostates.
• They justify war, murder, and other crimes as a legitimate means to religiously sanctioned political ends.
• They harness religious authority to justify their own political and economic interests.
The rise of Saudi Arabia and the spread of Sunni fundamentalism may be
the clearest example of this pattern in the world today, and it poses a
grave threat to global security and peace.
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How Wahhabism Spread Beyond the Arabian Penninsula
The year 1979 was critical in Saudi history. The Iranian revolution,
the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Saudi militants, and the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan all became intertwined in determining the
path Saudi rulers would take.
The Iranian revolution sent shock
waves through the Saudi leadership, not only because the Iranian
clerics staked a competitive claim to representing Islam, but also
because it inspired Wahhabi militants inside the kingdom to question
Saudi rulers. This led to the November 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque
in Mecca by religious extremists. Their call for the overthrow of the
royal family, who they claimed had been corrupted by Western interests,
echoed the revolutionaries who deposed the Shah in neighboring Iran.
Militants held the mosque for two weeks with hundreds of pilgrims
trapped inside. The Saudi rulers eventually brought in French special
forces to recapture the mosque. In the bloody battle that ensued,
hundreds were killed—rebels, Saudi forces, and pilgrims—and the
government later beheaded sixty-three captured militants in public
squares across the country.
Facing a crisis in the wake of the
Iranian revolution and Grand Mosque seizure, the Saudi rulers calculated
that one way to help reclaim their role as the rightful guardians of
Islam in the region—and appease their own religious zealots—would be by
using their oil wealth to spread Wahhabi ideology all over the world.
They also used the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to redirect the
religious zeal of Saudi militants toward external conflicts, encouraging
them to go fight against the Soviet infidels.
The soaring oil
prices in the 1970s gave the kingdom all the petrodollars it needed to
export its rigid form of Islam. The Muslim World League, established by
the Saudis in 1962 to spread Islamic teachings, became a powerhouse for
the production and dissemination of Wahhabi scholarship around the
globe. The Saudi Ministry of Religion printed and distributed Wahhabi
translations of the Quran and Wahhabi doctrinal texts throughout the
Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Saudis gained control of most Islamic
publishing houses around the world.
They built madrassas, which
means schools in Arabic, to teach Wahhabi ideology throughout the Muslim
world. In many poor regions, this was the only education available. One
of the countries that received the largest number of Saudi schools was
Pakistan. General Zia-ul-Haq had seized power in 1977, imposed Sharia
law, and then gave the Saudis free rein to create Islamic schools across
the country to fill the gap of a collapsed education system.
According to the late King Fahd’s website, the Saudi government spent $4
billion a year building mosques and schools, paying the salaries of
preachers and teachers, providing scholarships for students, and
publishing textbooks to spread Wahhabism. Together with Wahhabi
charities and royal trusts, they built more than fifteen hundred
mosques, two hundred Muslim centers, two hundred Islamic colleges, and
two thousand madrassas worldwide. The Saudi government staffed those
institutions with nearly four thousand preachers and missionaries,
paying for the salaries of students who received scholarships to study
in the kingdom and returned home to teach in schools or preach in
mosques.
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The Creation and Growth of the Taliban
When Afghanistan, another largely Sunni country, came under Soviet
domination in 1979, the Saudi monarchy saw an opportunity to position
itself as the global defender of Muslims against foreign invaders. This
was also convenient for the United States, whose main concern was
defeating the Soviet Union.
In collaboration with the CIA, the
Saudis funded the armed resistance in Afghanistan, a group that became
known as the mujahideen, which translates to “holy warriors.” The United
States committed hundreds of millions of dollars each year to the
mission, and the Saudis matched it, dollar for dollar, with their money
flowing through a CIA-run Swiss bank account.
The Saudis also
helped recruit fighters for the resistance by creating a new kind of
madrassa in the Pakistan–Afghanistan region that focused more on making
war on infidels (the Soviets) than on Islamic scholarship. The recruits
came predominantly from the lower classes in the Afghan–Pakistan region,
including Afghans who had fled the Soviet invasion and were living in
refugee camps.
Thousands of these schools sprang up along
Pakistan’s border and then inside Afghanistan itself— training not
scholars, but fighters equipped with Wahhabi ideology and American
weapons. They used Islam as a vehicle for creating a very disciplined
guerrilla army with a clear anti-communist ideology.
In these
camps, a new generation came of age, calling themselves the Taliban,
which comes from the Arabic word talib, which means student. They became
one of the groups of mujahideen that fought the Soviet occupation from
1979 to 1989.
When the Soviets withdrew, Afghanistan plunged
into chaos with competing warlords fighting each other for control. The
Taliban, who had been loosely organized on a regional basis, unified
under the leadership of Mullah Omar, the son of a landless farmer. From
Pakistan, they launched an offensive and succeeded in seizing the city
of Kandahar from a notorious warlord. Two years later, they took Kabul
and declared the establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
Only three countries—Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi
Arabia—established diplomatic relations with the new Taliban government.
The Saudi government even granted government-paid holidays to its
employees and their families to visit Afghanistan so they could witness
the “true Islam.” In 1998, the Saudi monarch invited Mullah Omar to make
the Hajj to Mecca.
A well-known Saudi figure who supported the
Taliban and set up operations in Afghanistan during that time was Osama
bin Laden. After helping the mujahideen overthrow the Soviets, bin Laden
had started thinking about a global jihad. At a 1988 meeting in
Peshawar, Pakistan, he and some of his top fighters decided to form a
new network and called it Al Qaeda—literally, “the Base.” They forged
links with militants across the Middle East and North Africa. After a
stint in Sudan, bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996 and was warmly
welcomed by the Taliban and its top leader Mullah Omar.
It was
from the Al Qaeda headquarters in Afghanistan that bin Laden announced a
jihad to expel foreign troops and interests from Islamic lands, and
made a public declaration of war against the United States.
Medea Benjamin,
Kingdom of the Unjust
