Wahhabism and the Saudi state

Wahhabism is an ultra conservative branch of Sunni Islam which is practiced in Saudi Arabia. It is sometimes mistaken for Salafi ,but for the discerning there is a subtle distinction. Wahhabism is more considered as the most conservative sect within Salafism which regards Islamic legal scholarship as an unwarranted innovation. Wahhabism was propagated by Mohammad ibn Abd al Wahhab as a revivalist movement and it was gains any form of idolatry and possibly at direct conflict with peaceful cults of Islam like Sufism. Muhammad Ibn Abd Al Wahhab was born in 1703 near Riyadh. Theologian trained in the Hanbali school of law, he began to preach in 1740 a particularly uncompromising Islam based on a literal interpretation of the Koran. Unlike the other four Sunni schools of law, the Wahhabis do not recognize that the Quran and Sunnah (tradition of the Prophet) as sources of law. The Kitab al-Tawhid or "Treaty of divine uniqueness" of Ibn 'Abd al Wahhab can thus be regarded as the reference of the Wahhabi theology. Colliding with the customs of his contemporaries (worship of saints) as well as Shiite Muslims, Ibn 'Abd Al Wahhab was forced into exile and found refuge in a local emir Muhammad Al Saud, who then adopted the Wahhabi doctrine. In 1744, the family 'Abd al Wahhab and the Al Saud family conclude a political-religious pact sealed by a marriage, which is the ideological and political foundation of the present Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.The Wahhabi movement was very powerful, so much so that his followers managed to seize the cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, Damascus in Syria as well as Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz. However, they were beaten in 1818 by the EgyptianOttoman army of Muhammad Ali, on behalf of the Sublime Porte. Thus, back in the holy cities of Istanbul authority.Meanwhile, the Saud dynasty and the Wahhabi movement took control of the territories of the interior of Arabia. Briefly removed from power and put in exile by a rival family, Rashidi, they returned in force in 1901 under the leadership of Abd al-Aziz ibn 'Abd ar-Rahman, said Ibn Saud, and reclaim the Nejd and Cities Holy Mecca and Medina (torn from the Hashemites in 1926). They then created in 1932 the Kingdom of

Submitted by Anoop Chand A,12DM-028, GEO A

Wahhabism and the Saudi state

Arabia.

The Wahhabism imposed archaic principles and emptied of any spirituality in much of Arabia - Mecca to Oman - from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Wahhabism is essentially misogynistic,homophobic and hate spewing in nature. They rose to prominence in Saudi Arabia because of their tie up with Ibn Saud royal family and hence with the course of time became the most popular or rather practised form of Islam in Saudi Arabia and much of the terrible human rights record and skewed practices In Saudi Arabia can be attributed to Wahhabism. The way the Saudi state is in ,right now,most of it can be attributed to Wahhabism . The strict segregation of the opposite genders, almost non existent woman rights( they still dont have the right to vote or drive in Saudi), prosecution of homosexuals, strict enforcement of abaya, the all covering garment for women.This was done in conjunction with Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice which is a state religious police established by the Saudi government at the behest of Wahhabis also known as the mutaweens. One of the most infamous cases of Mutaweens was when they refused to let the fire fighters intervene when there was a fire in girls school and locked up the doors because they thought that the girl would arouse the firefighters who werent related in blood to them. Subsequently all of the girls died due to asphyxiation.

Submitted by Anoop Chand A,12DM-028, GEO A

Wahhabism and the Saudi state

Fig 2:Mutaweens going about their job The segregation is enforced almost everywhere. Different entrances in restaurants, malls just to name a few. Infact until 2007,mutaweeds had the power to physically thrash people with a stick if they felt they were crossing the line. Wahhabis popularly perceive anything Western as evil and try to restrict access to anything western which includes music, dance as well as cinema. But ironically, a lot of Saudi Arabians want to ape this lifestyle and do go to America for their higher studies and for an experience of American way of life but they wouldnt want the same back in their home country. Infact most of the Saudis are against women getting the right to drive. Wahhabism eventhough it is one of the most conservative sects of Islam, it is not the one responsible for jihadism. Even though the hate spewing, xenophobic nature may have been one of the reasons behind it, wahhabis believe that only the ruler has the right to wage a war(jihad0. Hence they do not support the jihadi terrorists. Osama bin Laden has been decried by a lot of Wahhabis. It is considered more to be a jihadi sect of salafism. The discovery of huge oil reserves in the basement of Saudi allowed the new dynasty of Saud to establish his theocratic and absolutist power. It also allowed the Saud to finance the propaganda of Wahhabism, the official doctrine of the regime. The avowed aim of Saud was indeed to impose Wahhabism to all Muslim nations and even the rest of the world. Warlike and conquering, Wahhabism is an ultraconservative and resolutely backward-looking doctrine that aims to keep the masses in ignorance of scientific and philosophical realities. It is estimated that the Wahhabis are 8 in number to 10 million, which is very little compared to all Muslims (less than 1% of the total). But they have considerable financial resources, probably equal or superior to those available to other Islamic movements. In addition, all Islamic movements were more or less watered down by the Wahabi doctrine through the broad and generous distribution of their books .Wahhabism truly raised its ugly head during the 1970s when the whole Gulf Oil Boom happened. The price of oil arose three times during those times and the Wahhabism benefitted from it. Hence Wahhabism is also sometimes referred to as petro Islam. An incredible amount of money to the tune of 87 million dollars have been spent in propagating Wahhabism. Right from constructing mosques to masjids to the training of imams. It has rewarded all the journalists, satellite 3

Submitted by Anoop Chand A,12DM-028, GEO A

Wahhabism and the Saudi state

channels who have followed them and have been instrumental in setting up the satellite centre of one of the most oldest and revered Islamic university in the world, Al Azhar in Egypt. From young to old, they have programs for the indoctrination of the subjects. Most of the material that they preach are generally against infidels which include non believers of Islam as well as some Sunni sects and Shiites. These teachings also claim that democracy has been the reason for all the 20th century wars and all other panacea. The Saudi embassy even had an Islamic affairs department and at its peak ran a 8 million dollar campaign to propagate the religion. For many years, Saudis distributed an English version of the Koran which had commentary by Abdullah Yousuf Ali.But in late 1990s ,they replaced that with commentary by two Wahhabi scholars from Medina. Wahhabism spread it to a lot of countries and they especially chose to target the educated American and British Muslims. The Islamic Affairs department greatly helped in this endeavour .The institute in Fairfax was a way for the Saudis to tap the talents of the brightest Muslims in the United States.Fairfax is a small county in the state of Virginia. They used to offer free Arabic classes in the pretext of getting back to their roots. And those who did well academically were offered full scholarships to study at Saudi universities. Most of the institute's faculty were Saudi-born or Saudi-trained religious scholars who had a conservative Salafi or Wahhabi perspective. Sheikh Abdel Aziz Fawzan, who taught Islamic law, drew a theological lesson from the 2004 South Asia tsunami that was similar to the one evangelical Christian Jerry Falwell initially drew from the Sept. 11 attacks. The tsunami, Fawzan declared, was God's punishment for allowing resorts where "especially at Christmas, fornication and sexual perversion of all kinds are rampant."which is kinda ironical because most sort of the perversions are rampant in Saudi Arabia because of the extreme segregation practised where natural urges are curbed.Google trends is proof of that and even in the case of the infamous operation In Abbottabad, they could unearth a lot of stuff including the absolutely deplorable child pornography The U.S. government took serious cognisance of the Saudi activity here after the catastrophic Sept. 11 attacks. The particular Fairfax institute in question was targeted. Sixteen faculty members were asked to leave the country in December 2003 when the State Department revoked the diplomatic visas of more than 20 Saudis involved in this programme. The revocations were part of the US program to curb the anti national activities or possibly terrorism promoting activities of Saudi . According to the Saudi embassy all religious affairs divisions have been closed subsequently but no terrorist charges were implicated. Saudi government has since then claimed to make a conscious attempt to look into the material they provided so that it is not perceived as provocative or bigoted by not only non Muslims but also liberal Muslims.

Submitted by Anoop Chand A,12DM-028, GEO A

Wahhabism and the Saudi state

Wahhabis targets have not been limited to the Western world. Since the sixties, the Saudi royal family and its Wahhabi allies are working to an active policy of international proselytization, spreading the Wahhabi conception beyond the borders of the kingdom. With significant financial resources at its disposal, Saudi Arabia promotes idealization, according to the Wahhabi design, states such as Pakistan and Sudan. Thus, Saudi Arabia funded directly or indirectly the creation and development of radical Islamist movements pushing along some other Islamist movements in a dogmatic radicalization and / or policy. Dagestan in Algeria through Afghanistan, many Islamist groups have benefited from Saudi largesse, which does not mean that all groups that have received funding from the Saudi kingdom claim to the Wahhabi trend or those who have actually adopted the tenets of Wahhabism are important or influential movements in the religious and political spheres of Muslim states. They have also targeted the poor muslims in countries in South and South East Asia like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and even parts of India. Even in a state like Kerala consisting of a highly educated populace, Wahhabis have managed to make inroads effectively making the muslim population more conservative and inducting values which are so foreign to them but they are made to believe the contrary. 5

Submitted by Anoop Chand A,12DM-028, GEO A

Wahhabism and the Saudi state

From the 2000s ever since the 9/11 attacks Wahhabism has received a lot of criticism in and out of the country.But the most surprising a priori in this spirit of criticism is perhaps the position of the Saudi government: he was careful first to intervene, leaving, as we have seen in the case of al-Maliki, the religious institution to settle accounts with his detractors, before bringing in June 2003 - via the Prince Abdullah - a stone in the edifice of the questioning of Wahhabism with the organization of the first conference National Dialogue in Riyadh. It was in this context that, for the first time in the history of Saudi Arabia, representatives of all religious groups in the territory of the Kingdom - Sunni Wahhabi and non-Wahhabi, including Sufi trend Twelver and Ismaili Shia - were invited to sit side by side to discuss the future of the country.The discussions marked the first meeting lead to the drafting of a charter approved by Crown Prince Abdullah that contained, in addition to a call for political reform, an appeal to social and religious reform,it dealt a serious blow to Wahhabism.On the one hand, there was the officially recognized religious and intellectual diversity of Saudi Arabia, which was a profound challenge to the Wahhabi exclusivism, on the other hand, the principle of sadd al-dhara i (the blocking means) was pinned, and text ads that would be in future only be used "with measurement and moderation." Finally, no member of the official Wahhabi religious establishment was present, which could be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to marginalize the power. A second session of the national dialogue was held in December 2003, with discussion of a very high deductible, marked especially by the statement mentioned Abd al-Aziz al-Qasim. Several other sessions followed until 2005, with a much less ambitious content. The opening "post-Wahhabi" movement launched in June 2003, however, continued in other forms. For if the national dialogue was the most open of the institutional aspect, it was far to be the only event: the Saudi press, tightly controlled by the government, and opened its columns to the theses of the new intellectuals, offering them the opportunity to be heard by large sections of the educated population. The issue of women was also frequently mentioned, and tolerated - even encouraged - certain acts of individual rebellion, as when, at the Jeddah Economic Forum in January 2004, the businesswoman Lubna al-Ulayan "loses" her headscarf, full opening speech to a crowded room. The Grand Mufti protest, but the political institution remained silent.The issue of religious minorities traditionally treated the mode of exclusion, also underwent major developments: some restrictions on religious practice Shiites had been removed, for example, as in the recent Ashura celebrations where those it may, since 2004, scrolled freely in the cities of the eastern province where they are the majority . Finally, the episode of the death of Sheikh Muhammad Mecca Alawi al-Maliki gave a very vivid illustration of the opening "post-Wahhabi" being: while he had all his life, been virulent attacks by the Wahhabi religious establishment culminating with his takfir already mentioned in 1982, his death in November 2004, was one of the major titles in the Saudi press, which described him as almost a national event. Better, Crown Prince Abdullah was himself seen expressing his condolences to the family of the deceased during a widely publicized visit. 6

Submitted by Anoop Chand A,12DM-028, GEO A

Wahhabism and the Saudi state

But to conclude that the "post-Wahhabism" the new intellectuals were among the first to be called. The reasons for this opening were many.Post September 11 attacks U.S. pressure, the need, in times of domestic and regional crisis, to establish a national identity and Wahhabism has been unable to create unity, and, perhaps most importantly, strategy of Crown Prince Abdullah that seeks to attract the support of the most liberal fringes of the Saudi political field in his showdown against his brothers Sudayri - Nayef, the interior minister, the head - allied to the Conservatives.Consequently, the new religious intellectuals, since September 11, and even more since 2003, benefited to make their criticisms of a climate favorable, marked by a certain receptive policy.

The rise of the reformist "Islamo-liberal" Saudi Arabia is accompanied by the emergence of a group of new religious intellectuals, producing a deeply religious criticism against the dominant discourse-Wahhabi orthodoxy - against-speech which, in turn, served as a theoretical support to the spectacular ideological repositioning What constituted within the Saudi Islamist movement, the emergence of "Islamo-liberal" current. The strength of this religious-speech against lies, as we have seen, in its extremely plastic nature, since it can play on different registers of legitimacy of Wahhabism - Islamic Salafi and "Wahhabi" - to counter on each of them. Although these new intellectuals remain few in number, their position in the Islamist field allowed them to exercise a significant influence. They have somehow acted as a pressure group, seeking to attract the necessary support of the great figures of the "Islamic awakening", as the popular Salman al-Awda, who, after signed the manifesto of peaceful coexistence with the West in April 2002, has repeatedly closed positions with Abd al-Aziz alQasim. They, moreover, have been able to take advantage of the climate of the postSeptember 11 to push the power - embodied here by Prince Abdullah - in the sense of opening "post-Wahhabi", trying to propose an alternative Islamic discourse, the only way to allow it to exceed its legitimacy now compact without sacrificing valuable Wahhabi Islamic legitimacy. But the alliance between Abdullah and "Islamo-liberal" had its limits: if the religious criticism and calls for a "post-Wahhabi" opening corresponded to the expectations of a crown prince at once engaged in an arms iron with his brothers Sudayris allied with conservative forces. He was also eager to show abroad, in the aftermath of September 11, a rider, and anxious face to restore national unity undermined by decades of Wahhabi exclusivism. Abdullah was ready to adopt any policy reforms that the most politicized of "Islamo-liberals," Abdullah al-Hamid in mind, consider a necessary corollary of religious reform. This contradiction came to light in March 2004 with the arrest of al-Hamid and a dozen other political activists who, for the most part, called for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. Since al-Hamid release in August 2005, the tension became 7

Submitted by Anoop Chand A,12DM-028, GEO A

Wahhabism and the Saudi state

palpable. Reform of Wahhabism, can it be done - as would the power - in a climate of political stagnation?

Submitted by Anoop Chand A,12DM-028, GEO A