The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists (10 page)

There was no way that those countries could exert effective pressure on the Saudi government and influence the kind of Islam that had become dominant in the holy land, and the Saudi government simply had no incentive to modify or mod- erate the creed to which it adhered. However, the 1970s be- came truly transformative for Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world. Before the 1970s, the Saudis acted as if Wahhabism was an internal affair well adapted to native needs of Saudi society and culture. The 1970s became a turning point in that the Saudi government decided to undertake a systematic cam- paign of aggressively exporting the Wahhabi creed to the rest of the Muslim world.
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Initially, this process of dissemination consisted of lending financial support to fundamentalist organizations, but by the 1980s it had become far more sophisticated and comprehen- sive. For instance, Saudi Arabia created a number of proxy or- ganizations, such as the Muslim World League, which widely distributed Wahhabi literature in all of the major languages of the world, gave out awards and grants, and provided funding for a massive network of publishers, schools, mosques, orga- nizations, and individuals. The net effect of this campaign was that many Islamic movements across the Muslim world be- came advocates of Wahhabi theology. Furthermore, a wide range of individuals and institutions learned to shape their thought, speech, and behavior in such a way as to incur and benefit from Saudi largesse.

In summary, four main factors contributed to the survival and expansion of Wahhabism in contemporary Islam:

1. By rebelling against the Ottomans, Wahhabism appealed to the emerging ideologies of Arab nationalism in the eighteenth century. By treating Muslim Ottoman rule as a foreign occupying power, Wahhabism set a powerful
   

   precedent for notions of Arab self-determination and au- tonomy.
   

2. As noted above, Wahhabism advocated the return to what ‘Abd al-Wahhab saw as the pristine and pure ori- gins of Islam. Accordingly, Wahhabism rejected the cu- mulative weight of historical baggage and insisted upon a return to the precedents of the “Rightly Guided” early generations (
   al-salaf al-salih
   ). The expression “rightly guided early generations” refers to the generation of Companions of the Prophet and the generation after it (the generation of the successors—
   al-tabi’in
   ). These two generations were seen in an idealistic light and they were often cited as an example to be imitated. The Wahhabi idea was intuitively liberating for Muslim reformers since it meant the rebirth of
   ijtihad,
   or the return to de novo examination and determination of legal issues unencum- bered by the accretions of precedents and inherited doc- trines. In other words, this idea of throwing away the past with its baggage and starting fresh was liberating. Theoretically, at least, Muslims could use
   ijtihad
   (inde- pendent and new analysis and thinking) to look with a fresh eye at the original sources of the Qur’an and the Sunna and come up with new interpretations and new solutions to the problems of the present without being burdened by the past. According to the Wahhabis, the only relevant and binding past was that which had been created by the Prophet, his Companions, and the Com- panions’ immediate successors.
   

3. By controlling Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia became naturally positioned to exercise a considerable influence on Muslim culture and thinking. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina are the symbolic heart of Islam, and
   

   are the sites where millions of Muslim perform pilgrim- age each year. By regulating what might be considered orthodox belief and practice while at pilgrimage, Saudi Arabia became uniquely positioned to greatly influence the belief systems of Islam itself. For instance, for purely symbolic purposes, the king of Saudi Arabia adopted the lowly title of the custodian and servant of the two holy sites to emphasize that he was the servant of all Muslims. In reality the title only underscored the moral position of authority the Saudi king claimed to himself in relation to the Muslim world.
   

4. Perhaps most importantly, the discovery and exploitation of oil in Saudi Arabia provided that country with high fi- nancial liquidity. Especially post-1975, with the sharp rise in oil prices, Saudi Arabia aggressively invested in the promotion of Wahhabi thought around the Muslim world. Even a cursory examination of the predominant ideas and practices prevalent especially in mosques re- veals the widespread influence of Wahhabi thought on the Muslim world today.
   

Part of the reason for Saudi Arabia’s aggressive proselytiz- ing of its creed is related to the third element mentioned above. It would have been politically awkward for Saudi Ara- bia to be the custodian of the two holy sites, but at the same time adopt a system of belief that was at odds with the rest of the Muslim world. To say the least, custodianship of the holy sites is a sensitive position in the Muslim world, and the Saudi exclusive claim to sovereignty over these cities re- mained problematic from the 1920s throughout the 1960s, especially because of the Wahhabis’ intolerant attitude toward ritualistic practices that they deemed unorthodox. In the 1950s

and 1960s, Saudi Arabia was coming under considerable pres- sure from republican and Arab nationalist regimes who tended to consider the Saudi system archaic and reactionary. Arab na- tionalist regimes, especially the regime of Gamal ‘Abd al- Nasser of Egypt, were secular, staunchly socialist, and revolutionary. The dynastic, capitalistic, and theocratic system of government in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries were considered historically retarded, and antirevolutionary. According to revolutionary Arab nationalists, Saudi Arabia was an artificial state invented by colonial forces in order to serve the interests of Western imperialism. Therefore, for in- stance, Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser not only challenged the custo- dianship of the Saudis over the holy sites, but he also attempted to overthrow the Saudi Arabian government. In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia finally possessed the financial means to address its legitimacy concerns. The Wahhabis either had to alter their own system of belief to make it more consistent with the convictions of other Muslims, or they had to aggres- sively spread their convictions to the rest of the Muslim world. The first would have required the Saudi regime to reinvent itself, but in many ways it was easier to attempt to reinvent the Muslim world, and that is the option they chose. Consequently, the Saudi Arabian government launched upon an aggressive campaign aimed at reinventing the Muslim world by disseminating Wahhabi ideology across the globe as the only legitimate form of Islam.
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Initially, this process of dissemination consisted of lending financial support to funda- mentalist organizations, but by the 1980s, this process be- came far more sophisticated and comprehensive. So, for instance, Saudi Arabia created a number of proxy organiza- tions, such as the Muslim World League (
Rabitat al-‘Alam al- Islami
), that widely distributed Wahhabi literature in all of the major languages of the world, gave out awards and grants,

and provided funding for a massive network of publishers, schools, mosques, organizations, and individuals. The net ef- fect of this campaign was that many Islamic movements across the Muslim world became advocates of Wahhabi the- ology. Furthermore, a wide range of institutions, whether schools, book publishers, magazines, newspapers, or even governments, as well as individuals, such as imams, teachers, or writers, learned to shape their behavior, speech, and thought in such a way as to incur and benefit from Saudi largesse. In many parts of the Muslim world, the wrong type of speech or conduct (such as failing to veil or advocate the veil) meant the denial of Saudi largesse or the denial of the possibility of attaining Saudi largesse, and in numerous con- texts this meant the difference between enjoying a decent standard of living or living in abject poverty.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that Wahhabism did not spread in the modern Muslim world under its own banner. Considering the marginal origins of the Wahhabi creed, this would have been quite difficult to accomplish. Wahhabism spread in the Muslim world under the banner of Salafism. In fact, the term
Wahhabism
is considered derogatory to the fol- lowers of Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab since Wahhabis prefer to see themselves as the representatives of Islamic orthodoxy. Ac- cording to its adherents, Wahhabism is not a school of thought within Islam, but is Islam itself, and it is the only pos- sible Islam. The fact that Wahhabism rejected the use of a school label gave it a rather diffuse quality and made many of its doctrines and methodologies eminently transferable. Salafism, unlike Wahhabism, was a far more credible paradigm in Islam, and in many ways, an ideal vehicle for

THE SALAFI ORIGINS

Salafism is a creed founded in the late nineteenth century by Muslim reformers such as Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1323/1905), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1314/1897), Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1354/1935), Muhammad al-Shawkani (d. 1250/1834), and Jalal al-San‘ani (d. 1225/1810). Some people even attribute the origin of the creed to Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) and his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350). The word
salaf
means predecessors, and in the Islamic context, it usually refers to the period of the Prophet, his Companions, and their succes- sors. As such, the term
salafi
(someone who follows the
salaf
) has a flexible and malleable meaning and a natural appeal be- cause it connotes authenticity and legitimacy. As a term, it is ex- ploitable by any movement that wants to claim that it is grounded in Islamic authenticity. Although the term was origi- nally adopted by liberal reformers, in the early twentieth cen- tury the Wahhabis referred to themselves as Salafis. However, the term did not become associated with the Wahhabi creed until the 1970s.

Salafism appealed to a very basic and fundamental concept in Islam—that Muslims ought to follow the precedents of the Prophet and his Rightly Guided Companions (
al-salaf al-salih
) as well as the pious early generations. Methodologically and in substance, Salafism was nearly identical to Wahhabism, ex- cept that Wahhabism was far less tolerant of diversity and dif- ferences of opinions. In many ways, Salafism was intuitively undeniable, partly because of its epistemological promise: it offered a worldview that was difficult to deny or challenge. The founders of Salafism maintained that on all issues, Mus- lims ought to return to the original textual sources of the Qur’an and the Sunna (precedent) of the Prophet. In doing so, Muslims ought to reinterpret the original sources in light

of modern needs and demands without being slavishly bound to the interpretive precedents of earlier Muslim generations. But as originally conceived, Salafism was not necessarily anti- intellectual, but like Wahhabism it did tend to be uninterested in history. By emphasizing a presumed “golden age” in Islam, the adherents of Salafism idealized the time of the Prophet and his Companions, and ignored or were uninterested in the balance of Islamic history.

Furthermore, by rejecting juristic precedents and under- valuing tradition as a source of authoritativeness, Salafism adopted a form of egalitarianism that deconstructed tradi- tional notions of established authority within Islam. Accord- ing to Salafism, effectively anyone was considered qualified to return to the original sources and speak for God. The very logic and premise of Salafism was that any commoner or layperson could read the Qur’an and the books containing the traditions of the Prophet and his Companions and then issue legal judgments. Taken to the extreme, this meant that each individual Muslim could fabricate his own version of Is- lamic law.

Effectively, by liberating Muslims from the burdens of the technocratic tradition of the jurists, Salafism contributed to the vacuum of authority in contemporary Islam. However, un- like Wahhabism, Salafism was not actively hostile to the juris- tic tradition or the practice of various competing schools of thought. It is as if Salafism considered the juristic tradition more as optional rather than necessarily dispensable. Further- more, unlike Wahhabism, Salafism was not hostile to mysti- cism or Sufism. Many of the proponents of Salafism were eager to throw off the shackles of tradition and to engage in the rethinking of Islamic solutions in light of modern de- mands. As far as the juristic tradition was concerned, most Salafi scholars were synchronizers; they tended to engage in a

practice known as
talfiq,
in which they mixed and matched various opinions from the past in order to emerge with novel approaches to problems.

An important dimension to Salafism was that, for the most part, it was founded by Muslim nationalists who were eager to read the values of modernism into the original sources of Islam. Hence, Salafism was not necessarily anti-Western. In fact, its founders strove to project contemporary institutions such as democracy, constitutionalism, or socialism onto the foundational texts, and to justify the paradigm of the modern nation-state within Islam. In this sense, Salafism, as originally conceived, betrayed a degree of opportunism. Its proponents tended to be more interested in the end results than in main- taining the integrity or coherence of the juristic method. Salafism was marked by an anxiety to reach results that would render Islam compatible with modernity, far more than a de- sire to critically understand either modernity or the Islamic tradition itself. For instance, the Salafis of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries heavily emphasized the predomi- nance of the concept of
maslaha
(public interest) in the formu- lation of Islamic law. Accordingly, it was consistently emphasized that whatever would fulfill the public interest ought to be deemed a part of Islamic law.
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This, however, exemplified a problem that came to plague Salafi thought throughout the twentieth century: its political opportunism. Salafism, which initially promised a liberal type of renaissance in the Islamic world, persistently compromised religious and ethical principles to power dynamics and politi- cal expedience. Confronted by the challenge of nationalism, Salafis—often invoking the logic of public interest and neces- sity—consistently transformed Islam into a politically reactive force engaged in a mundane struggle for identity and self- determination. As a result, Salafism became a highly diluted