Al-Qa’ida, Wahhabism and Jihad In the weeks since the heinous attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon we have heard a great many people say that these crimes were committed by people who embrace a “perverted version of Islam,” or by those who have “hijacked Islam.” The statement is often made that Islam is a religion of gentleness and peaceful behavior and that no true Muslim would commit such acts. In the present situation it is necessary to generalize in this way. Coalitions must be built and maintained across the world, but generalizations are always defective in some way. It is true that ordinary Muslims seek to live in peace with their neighbors and that they are enjoined in their scriptures and traditions against the very kinds of behavior that killed so many on 11 September. Suicide is forbidden in the Qur’an (Koran), as is war made upon women and children and the innocent in general. Nevertheless, the impression has been created that Islam is a pacifist religion rather like 21st century Christianity which has all but abandoned Aquinas’ doctrine of “The Just War.” In fact, Islam is not a pacifist religion. It has never been a pacifist religion. The prophet Muhammad led his armies in person against the enemies of the emergent Islamic revelation. His successors (caliphs) did the same in the early days of expansion The Caliph Omar himself accepted the surrender of Jerusalem when it was captured by force of arms from the Byzantines. Subsequent history shows clearly that Islamic states and peoples have never been strangers to the sword.

Nevertheless, it is true that the Islamic tradition contains within it a powerful tendency and admonition toward humane attitudes toward life and benevolence toward all mankind. This tendency is most clearly found in the teachings and influence of many of the Sufi (mystic) Orders to which a great many Muslims belong. An example of the kind of thinking typical of the Sufi element in Islam is this recent statement by Prince Hassan of Jordan, himself a member of the Naqshbandi Order.

 “ Respecting the sanctity of life is the cornerstone of all great faiths. Such acts of extreme violence, in which innocent men, women and children are both the targets and the pawns, are totally unjustifiable. No religious tradition can or will tolerate such behavior and all will loudly condemn it.”

If this is the thinking of a prominent Muslim, indeed a lineal descendant of the Prophet Muhammad himself, then who attacked us? We were attacked by those who hold the beliefs and way of life of the Sufis and ordinary Muslims in contempt as not really Islamic at all, by those who have always been prepared to kill if they could not persuade. We were attacked by the Wahhabis engaged as they always are in the pursuit of the central element of their belief, the Jihad, the Holy War.

Sunni Islam is a religion of laws, of legal schools and jurisprudence. God is master of the universe for Sunnis. He has made law for man to live by, for man to submit to. (Islam means submission in Arabic) There are four great schools of the religious law in Sunni Islam. All of these were founded in the Middle Ages and are named for the scholars who inspired a particular way of looking at scripture and tradition. One of these schools is named for a man named Ibn Hanbal who believed that the law should be seen in a very “boiled down,” literalist way that left little room for interpretation, adaptation or modernity. This was not a very popular way of thinking about the law since the passage of time and different circumstances required adaptability. The Hanbali school of law would probably have died out, discarded by believers as too extreme for “real life” except that in the 18th century, a scholar named Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab who lived in what is now Saudi Arabia embraced it and convinced a desert chieftain named Ibn Sa’ud to accept his version of Hanbalism as the official faith of what eventually became Saudi Arabia. This faith, popularly known as Wahhabism, rejected the right of all other Muslims to believe and practice Islam in their own ways. It particularly condemned all the different Sufi mystical brotherhoods for their attempts to experience God personally rather than through the rigid law of the Hanbali school. It continues to condemn all other Muslims. It cites the Qur’an’s description of war made against unbelievers in the first centuries of Islam to justify, indeed to require and demand, unceasing war to the death against other Muslims and especially against non-Muslims. This is the Jihad, a moral obligation of every true Muslim, but the Wahhabi way is an insistence on an understanding of Jihad that other Muslims have long left behind them. For the great majority of “The Faithful,” Jihad has long been divided into the “Greater Jihad” and the “Lesser Jihad.” The lesser Jihad is the Jihad of war, death and blood. The greater Jihad is the inner struggle of every pious Muslim to bring himself closer to God through self-denial, charity and a moral life. This was not, and is not, the Wahhabi way. For them, the unbeliever, and the non-Wahhabi Muslim must accept their view or suffer the consequences.

The followers of this cult, generally condemned as heretics, did their best to spread their rule by force across the Arabian Peninsula until the Ottoman Turkish governor of Egypt sent his army into the area and utterly crushed them. From that time in the late 18th century until the creation of modern Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the last century Wahhabism was a little known and marginal footnote in Islamic history. The Arabian Peninsula was unified by force of arms by Abd al-Aziz al-Sa’ud, the first king of Saudi Arabia. This process was largely completed by 1925. In the new Saudi state, Wahhabism was the official faith, the only faith sanctioned by the state. This remains the case. Eventually, the constant threat of rebellion caused the state to allow the Shia people of the Eastern Province to have their own mosques, but to this day no Christian, Jewish or other religious establishment is allowed in the Kingdom.

In the early years of the existence of the Saudi state, the Jihad doctrines of Wahhabism were ruthlessly enforced by the Ikhwan (Brotherhod) beduin armies which brought the Kingdom into being. A good example of this is the treatment given by the Ikhwan tribes to other beduin tribes living in Iraq and Jordan. Believing that they had a divine mission to accomplish, the Ikhwan tribes raided constantly into those countries, crossing borders that had no meaning for them to kill peaceful shepherds, their families and livestock. No quarter was ever given to women and children. This is an abomination in both Islamic tradition and Arab customary law. (‘urf). These large scale atrocities only came to an end when the governments of Iraq and Jordan adopted the tactic of pursuing the Ikhwan into Saudi Arabia to deal with them. The Saudi government then sought to disarm the Ikhwan tribes and faced a revolt by the zealots in the tribes who denounced the king as “no true Muslim.” This revolt was severely put down and its leaders executed.

In the aftermath of the Ikhwan revolt, the Saudi government sought to moderate its policies and practices so as to make it possible to interact productively with the outside world. The Saudi government has followed this path of relative moderation ever since. This became particularly important with the discovery of huge deposits of petroleum in the Kingdom before the Second World War. A kind of alliance with the United States in that war created a relationship which although it has never been formalized by treaty has stood the test of time. While the Saudi government has pursued its long term alignment with the United States, very different currents have run beneath the surface of society in that country.

The Al-Sa’ud royal family created the Kingdom by force of arms. They are descended from desert warlords of the central region of the peninsula (the Najd). They are not descended from the Prophet Muhammad as are the kings of Jordan and Morocco. In their subjects’ eyes they derive their legitimacy from their support and adherence to Wahhabi Islam. Because of this it has been very difficult for the royal government to restrict the teaching of Wahhabi doctrines in divinity schools, and universities or to prevent the preaching of these doctrines in the public mosques of the country. It has also been impossible for the government to prevent the export of vast sums of private Saudi money to support Wahhabi missionary works abroad. A similar flow of private money from several Gulf states has always “accompanied” Saudi funds.

What kind of pious missionary works have they accomplished? Schools have been founded across the Islamic world, in Europe and the United States. Mosques have been built and endowed in many places. Sheikh Hisham Kabbani recently wrote to the State Department that because mosques are not government regulated in the United states, as they are in the Islamic World, 80% of U.S, mosques are endowed by Wahhabi groups and have prayer leaders selected by the same groups. This means that the moral formation of American Muslim youth is in their hands. In the fifties, President Nasser of Egypt suppressed the “Society of the Muslim Brethren,” (the Ikhwan Muslimeen) and drove them underground. The Muslim Brethren were the oldest and in many ways one of the most murderous of extremist groups. Soon, thereafter, private money from the oil rich economies of the Gulf “rescued” the Muslim Brethren from extinction and was used to build them into a great force in the world. In the decades since then, the Egyptian Muslim Brethren have become a worldwide network of Wahhabi Ikhwan cells and societies with many linkages to all other Wahhabi terrorist groups. They are one of the largest components of the Al-Qa’ida network created by Osama bin Laden. The Wahhabi Ikhwan Muslimeen fought ferociously in Afghanistan against the Soviets. They fought there with pious volunteers from all over the Islamic World. Osama bin Laden fought there. His leadership was first noticed there. At the end of the Afghan War against the Soviets, America turned away from Afghanistan, turned away from the six non-Wahhabi Mujahideen armies who had done the bulk of the fighting. America turned away and did nothing while in the refugee camps in Pakistan the Wahhabi Taliban movement was born and took power in Kabul. How did they take power? They had money, lots of money and they had the continuing single-minded support of the world wide Wahhabi movement.

The Wahhabi movement believes that the Islamic World is corrupt and that it is the West which has corrupted it. They believe deeply that existing governments in their countries must be brought down to make way for a “pure” Islamic life. They believe that the United States is the ultimate enemy, “The Great Satan.” They will do whatever is needed to eliminate the United States as an obstacle to their dreams.

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/files/wahhabijihad.pdf