Demonising the Wahhabi kingdom
The Two Faces Of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror, Stephen Schwartz, New York: Doubleday, 2002. pp336; Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, Dore Gold, Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003. pp309
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City lights, Jeddah -- not quite the barren desert commonly perceived in the West; A Saudi Arabian flowerman from the mountainous region of Asir
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Since September 11, 2001, Saudi Arabia, an Islamic theocracy nearly as closed to Westerners as North Korea, has squirmed under the media spotlight like a maggot suddenly revealed under a cold, once immovable stone. In a world searching for an explanation for the emergence of Al- Qa'eda, but willing to listen more to theories about the clash of civilisations than to criticism of American foreign policy, a consensus in the United States especially has emerged that specifically Saudi-backed Islamic fundamentalism is behind many of the world's conflicts -- from Algeria to Indonesia, Bosnia-Herzegovina to Chechnya -- in which Islamic jihad has played a crucial role. Fifteen of the 19 suicide-hijackers on 11 September were Saudi nationals, as was the man who recruited them: Osama Bin Laden. After the attacks, ordinary Saudis found themselves being shunned in the United States as potential terrorists, following decades of being indulged as perceived oil-rich princes. They returned home en masse. The Saudi government was ridiculed internationally by the refusal, for six months after 11 September, of Interior Minister Prince Naif Bin Abdul-Aziz to admit publicly that Saudi nationals had been involved.
The kingdom has rarely been out of the international headlines: Saudi Arabia as the birthplace of Bin Laden; as the home of "Wahhabi" Islam, now the world's pet hate as the alleged promoter of a violently anti- non-Muslim ideology; as the funder of international terrorist groups through its Islamic charity organisations; as the "unreliable US ally" in the war on terror, and reluctant backer of the US-led invasion of Iraq; and then, most recently, itself as the victim of Al-Qa'eda terrorism in the heart of its capital city, where on 12 May suicide bombers blew up three Western residential buildings, killing 26 bystanders and nine suicide bombers.
Enthusiastically adopted especially by right-wing, pro-Israeli figures inside and outside the Bush administration, the argument that Saudi Arabia is at the root of almost all Islamic terrorism is detailed exhaustively in two books written by authors from within their ranks. Dore Gold, author of the bestselling Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, is an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and formerly the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. His book is endorsed by the US hawks Richard Perle and Daniel Pipes.
Stephen Schwartz, whose The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror appeared at the height of the anti-Saudi campaign, is a relatively little- known writer. Gold's diplomatic activity on behalf of the Jewish state goes back decades, and alone justifies his claim to be an expert on the Middle East. His book is an updated, and presumably jazzed up, version of a PhD thesis he wrote decades ago. The question of whether Schwartz, on the other hand, is qualified to discuss this subject at all is debatable. Schwartz has served on a Washington think tank funded by the pro- Israeli Bradley Foundation, and published numerous articles in right-wing publications such as Commentary, the National Review and the tabloid New York Post.
Commentary has published an "expose" on Edward Said which falsely claimed that Said had misrepresented his early years in his memoir Out of Place to play up his Palestinian roots. Now Schwartz, with equal disdain for the truth, calls Said in The Two Faces of Islam an apologist for Palestinian suicide attacks. In fact, Said has always taken every conceivable opportunity to denounce suicide attacks as both immoral and counter-productive vis-à-vis the Palestinian cause. This smear serves as a warning about how much trust should be placed in Schwartz when it comes to his analysis of weightier matters. An example of how surreal things often get in The Two Faces of Islam is Schwartz's claim that it was chiefly as a result of pressure from Saudi Arabia that the US government and public mistakenly grew to view the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini as a "daemonic figure". Schwartz clearly has a bit of a soft spot for the secretive US-loving Ayatollah, and devotes a whole chapter to him.
Inevitably, Gold's narrative is by far the more successfully argued of the two. His undeclared agenda is to prove that America's support for Israel is almost an irrelevance among the many causes of Islamic militancy, let alone terrorism. Even if Israel did not exist, he implies, the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia would still be bent on world domination through jihad, because to die as a martyr is, as it were, the only thing they live for. He is particularly good on how, for Osama Bin Laden, the Palestinians were always an afterthought until after 11 September. "In short," he writes, "the Arab world has a problem with Israel because of its deeper anger toward the West." Of course, it would be difficult to find an Arab -- or for that matter an intelligent Westerner -- who would take such summaries seriously.
Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam and its prophet, Mohamed, as well as the cradle of an Arabic language considered holy by Muslims. As home to Islam's two holiest shrines in Mecca and Medina, the western Hejaz region has been the focal point for the annual Hajj for almost 14 centuries; and it is to Mecca that Muslims pray five times a day. The central region, Al-Najd, is the stronghold of the Wahhabi sect of Islam, founded by a local, Mohamed Bin Abdel-Wahhab, in the 18th century. It is an even more austere off-shoot of the back-to-basics Hanbali school, considered by many the most puritanical of Islam's four recognised schools of thought. The Al-Saud ruling family has historic ties to the Wahhabis, and has ruled in partnership with a Wahhabi religious establishment since King Abdul-Aziz (or Ibn Saud, as he is better known in the West) unified the country in 1932. Ibn Saud used the religious army known as the Ikhwan (brotherhood) -- drawn from the Wahhabis' ranks and bent on conquest through jihad, with all the extraordinary violence that comes with it -- to conquer the vast swath of mostly desert land now called Saudi Arabia, and first to pacify by force and afterward unify through indoctrination its often rebellious and remarkably diverse peoples. Conquest complete, Ibn Saud and the Wahhabis made a pact. Let the Al-Saud dynasty run the government and take care of national security and foreign policy, the king told them, and you can impose a strictly interpreted Islamic social order and run the education and judicial systems according to Wahhabi principles. It was a marriage, as far as Gold and Schwartz are concerned, made in hell; and it is only now, following the devastating synchronised suicide bombings in Riyadh on 12 May and Osama Bin Laden's explicit call for the first time for an uprising against the royal family, that the honeymoon period can confidently be declared to have come to an end.
The Wahhabi ideals of Islamic jihad are still promoted in Saudi mosques, both Gold and Schwartz argue, with Gold providing extensive documentary evidence in a lengthy appendix to ram the point home. A general hatred of the "kefir" (or "infidels", included among whom, to the Wahhabi mentality, are even non-Wahhabi Muslims) has remained an integral part of the national school curriculum, they add. It was out of this environment that so many of the hijackers could so easily have been recruited for the 11 September attacks, Gold and Schwartz conclude, and the House of Saudi was directly responsible for having let such fanaticism fester in its bosom.
Neither Schwartz nor Gold have visited Saudi Arabia, a detail Gold considers unworthy of mention but which Schwartz tackles head-on: "George Orwell did not learn about Stalinism by going to Moscow; rather, he went to Barcelona, where he witnessed the Communist secret police at work undermining the Spanish left. Similarly, I did not need to go to Riyadh to understand the malign activities of the Arabs, because I learned about them in Sarajevo, where Saudi-backed extremists actively sought to subvert the legitimate cause of the Bosnian Muslims." But rather than giving a journalistic account of the Soviet Union, Orwell chose the medium of fiction to get at a higher truth about the nature of that totalitarian regime. This problem of crude ideological summary untainted by personal experience is compounded in both books by the fact that their authors seem to share what can only be described as contempt for the Saudi people, as well as the more unorthodox manifestations of their religion. Neither has written a single sentence which unambiguously says something positive about Saudi Arabia. How else, but through such cold distance from the subject, could Schwartz, for instance, endorse a description of the inhabitants of the Asir region bordering Yemen (from where most of the Saudi hijackers on 11 September came) as "barbarians"? Things in Saudi Arabia are only black and white, like the "abayas" and "thobes" worn by the Saudi people, to those who have never been here.
Similarly, nowhere does Gold acknowledge that Saudi Arabia's population, 70 per cent of whom are under the age of 21, have for the most part at best a schizophrenic reaction to the calls for jihad by their religious leaders he himself so religiously documents. Yes, some may attend of their own free will a hate-filled Friday sermon; but they may also be sure to back home in time to catch the next satellite film. The real story of Saudi Arabia now is how so many young people now do not pray at all, or even fast during Ramadan; and how this is perhaps the best indication that the kind of Islamist resistance the Al-Saud are facing is a very politicised form of Islam and has little to do with the kind of "religious fanaticism" both authors claim to be at the heart of "Wahhabi-exported terrorism".
Gold and Schwartz's refusal to look at the complex reality on the ground is mirrored in their reluctance even to acknowledge the role American foreign policy has had in shaping a world into which Islamist terror has emerged as such a profound player. Gold raises only to dismiss the argument that Israeli atrocities and American imperialist ambitions in the Middle East may have become so serious a cause of resentment as to provoke a violent reaction. Predictably, Schwartz is even more eager to sidestep the issue, because his whole thesis is built around the idea that it is something intrinsic in Wahhabism that is at the root of Saudi-backed terror. For him, international politics, where America could be interpreted as anything but an altruistic player, complicates things horribly, and he consequently gets into difficulties when it comes to discussing the nitty-gritty -- as for example when he grudgingly concedes only that "in some sense... the United States shares the blame for the devastation of Afghan society." The reality is that the mujahadin who later formed the Taliban regime were armed and funded by the CIA through its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI, in financial terms to a much greater extent than they were by the Saudi religious establishment.
The books by Gold and Schwartz are basically policy papers riding on a wave of anti-Saudi sentiment in the United States after 11 September. But the real story of Saudi Arabia now -- with the reformists in the ascendancy, US troops leaving the holy land and all but the most radical Saudis united in their condemnation of extremism following the Riyadh suicide bomb attacks -- is the subtle but real moves by the Saudi royal family to at last marginalise the Wahhabi establishment, and the great unanswered question of who the kingdom's youthful population will side with. No country on earth is going to change more dramatically in the next 10 years, and with greater economic and political consequences for the world, than Saudi Arabia. Whether change happens as a result of outside intervention, as in Iraq, which presumably is what Gold and Schwartz would be in favour of, or from calls for change at home, remains to be seen.
Reviewed by John R Bradley*
* The writer is managing editor of the Jeddah-based Arab News
