Our Future: A Role of the Daesh?

Kamel Daoud

Wikipedia

The Moroccan writer Kamel Daoud, columnist for Quotidien d'Oran and author of The Meursault Investigation, has written a column, "Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It" (New York Times, November 20, 2015, translated from the French by John Cullen), and Daoud doesn't hold back:

Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity's common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.

And what is Wahhabism? Oh, just an Islamist movement that controls the richest oil fields in the world, plus a few other things, hardly worth mentioning:

Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.

The West's denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world's chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.

Because of Saudi Arabia's wealth, Islamism has spread throughout the Muslim world, concerning which, Daoud points out:

Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.

That's why this is going to be a dangerous ideological fight to the finish . . .

Zaid Nabulsi Blames Wahhabi Teachings and Reliance on Early Muslim Texts for Islamist Barbarity

Google Images

In its series "Reform in the Muslim World," Memri (Special Dispatch No. 5963, February 11, 2015) reports on a column by Zaid Nabulsi in the English-language Jordan Times, titled "We Have a Problem" (February 10, 2015), which blames Wahhabi teachings and reliance on early Muslim texts for current-day Islamist barbarity, and I excerpt from his column below:

Enough is enough. It is time to speak out. 'Islam is innocent' is an incomplete sentence. Introspection is needed . . . . [I]f we shy away from reality, the alternative will be more images like those we witnessed . . . when brave [Jordanian pilot] Lt. Muath Al-Kasasbeh was burnt to death . . . . Some Wahhabist teachings, which have permeated . . . the Muslim world, are simply irreconcilable with decent human values, especially the ones that declare that every non-Wahhabist is a disposable body whose blood may be shed . . . . It has become tiresome to keep hearing the unproductive cliché that Islam is innocent after each atrocity committed by devout fanatics who did nothing except execute the exact letter of their textbooks, which order them to slaughter the infidels . . . . [To say] that mainstream Islam has nothing to do with those atrocities does not hold water anymore because Wahhabism and Islam have become indistinguishable. To understand the crisis of Muslims today, one has to remember that Wahhabism exists in several textbooks containing the alleged sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, or books of 'Hadith,' revered by so many. What we . . . confront is the undeniable fact that . . . from many stories found in these books . . . [comes] the unprecedented cruelty of groups such as the . . . Islamic State . . . . The catastrophe today is . . . the visible manifestation of Islam in the modern world, as demonstrated by the prevalent beliefs and practices of . . . Muslims . . . . If we truly want to defend Islam, we need to perform . . . invasive surgery. Take the Muslim Brotherhood as an example of the prevalence of the Wahhabist teachings among Muslims today. The Brotherhood is the virtual womb that incubated all the current jihadist groups, including Al-Qaeda itself . . . . The . . . decapitations in Syria over the last four years . . . [were] promoted by very rich Sunni clerics . . . . aided by . . . countless satellite stations openly calling for the murder of Alawites and Shi'ites, and financed by billions from extremely wealthy but hateful Muslims . . . . [E]nough with the denials . . . . [T]ime to raise the alarm. We have a problem! . . . . There is . . . a propensity towards eliminating 'the other' . . . within Wahhabist ideology. It is not only foolish to deny this fact, it is also dangerous, for we would be covering the cancerous tumour with a bandage. What we cannot deny is that . . . Wahhabist textbooks are the . . . operating manuals that Islamist butchers use to justify their savagery. For example, very few people know that while [the Jordanian pilot] Muath was being set on fire in that macabre video, the voiceover was a recitation of an Ibn Taymiyah fatwa deeming the incineration of unbelievers a legitimate act of jihad. Ibn Taymiyah is not some obscure scholar on the fringe of Sunni Islam. In the Sunni world, he is universally venerated . . . [as] 'Sheikh of Islam,' elevating him to an almost infallible clerical status . . . . [W]e need to do more than just repeat this meaningless mantra about us having nothing to do with [ISIS]. We have to muster the courage to identify the specific texts that actually defame Islam, denounce them and permanently cleanse Islamic tradition of them.

This sounds much like Ibrahim Issa's criticism of the same problem, which I posted on yesterday. Perhaps Warren Larson is right "that many Muslims are going through some serious soul-searching at the moment."

Let us hope so . . .

Qur'an: Subject to Reason?

Google Images

Only yesterday, I posted on static texts in changing times, and afterwards found this article, "Liberal Iraqi Shi'ite Scholar Sayyed Ahmed Al-Qabbanji Calls For Reason In Islam," by Yotam Feldner for Memri (Inquiry and Analysis Series Report No. 937, February 21, 2013), which says the following on the views of the liberal scholar mentioned in the title:

Al-Qabbanji's take on the Islamic religion is entirely unorthodox. In his lectures, he methodically deconstructs the Islamic perceptions of Allah, the Prophet Muhammad, the Koran, the shari'a, and all the taboos of conventional Islam. His underlying assumption is that nothing in religion can be true -- not even the Koran -- if it does not pass the litmus test of reason.

In a lecture on "Rationality in Jurisprudence," Al-Qabbanji explained the difference between his own perception of the shari'a and that of conventional Islamists. He broke down the conventional perception of the shari'a into the following five principles: The shari'a: 1) is eternal; 2) is total; 3) is beneficial; 4) is uninferable; and 5) trumps reason.

According to Al-Qabbanji, the Islamists, especially the Wahhabis, hold to these five points and maintain that:

Whenever contradiction arises, the shari'a takes precedence over reason. Al-Qabbanji explained that the Wahhabis openly adhere to this fifth principle, which is conceptualized in Ibn Taymiyyah's book The Rejection of the Conflict between Reason and the Revelation.

Al-Qabbanji argues for the precedence of reason, which demonstrates that some parts of the Qur'an are outdated:

The mere suggestion that anything in the Koran is a thing of the past defies the conventional Islamic belief that views the Koran as the literal word of God, as revealed to the illiterate Prophet Muhammad. But Al-Qabbanji rejects the concept of the Koran as the word of Allah, saying instead that it is full of untruths, contradiction, superstition, and immoral behavior. When the Koran was formed, he says, "there was not a single iota of falsehood in it. It was all true." Today, however, it must be accepted that the Koran rulings were appropriate [only] for their time. The treatment of women, justification of slavery, and jizya poll tax for Christians and Jews are frequently cited by Al-Qabbanji as examples of how the Koran's rulings were in keeping with what was deemed just and reasonable at the time, but which today are considered unjust, irrational, and immoral.

As one might expect, Al-Qabbanji has been arrested for his intriguing attempt to bring Islam into the modern world. Click on the link and read the entire article by Yotam Feldner, who has written this report as a preliminary draft of a chapter for an upcoming book on liberal Arab scholars.

Islam hasn't always been puritanical . . .

Old Map of Mecca

1787 Turkish Map

(Image from Wikipedia)

In addition to learning of Sayyid Qutb's position as a bridge between the Muslim Brotherhood and Wahhabi Islam, I learned something else intriguing from reading Samuel Helfont's monograph, this time concerning the Wahhabist assualt on Ottoman Mecca, a place that hardly differed from any secular 'sin-city' at the turn of the 19th century:

Even more revealing of Wahhabism were conflicts in the first decade of the 19th century with the Ottomans in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.[20] The Wahhabists made drastic changes, many of which were intended to expose the faults of Ottoman Islam. Wahhabists criticized orthodox Ottoman theology and Sufi practices and faulted the Ottomans for failing to implement even the more lenient interpretations of Islamic law. As one historian explains, "The status of the holy city [Mecca] made its inhabitants feel superior to all other Muslims and led them to excuse a certain lewdness of behavior. Whole blocks of Mecca had belonged to prostitutes, who even paid a tax on their occupation. Homosexuality was widespread. Alcohol was sold almost at the gate of the Kaaba and drunkenness was not uncommon."[21] (Samuel Helfont, The Sunni Divide: Understanding Politics and Terrorism in the Arab Middle East, page 6)

[20] Esther Peskes and W. Ende, s.v. "Wahhabiyya," in Encyclopedia of Islam, eds. P. Bearman, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs, and Th. Bianquis (Leiden: Brill Online, 2006), Volume XI.
[21] James Wynbrandt, A Brief History of Saudi Arabia (New York: Checkmark Books, 2004), p. 136.

This account of Mecca is hard to imagine today, but I see where the Wahhabi Muslims' puritanical impulse originates, for they criticized the Ottomans for being so little Muslim that "even the more lenient interpretations of Islamic law" were neglected in favor of purely 'infidel' practices -- such as trafficking in alcohol and sex -- and Wahhabists have thus had to maintain purity ever since or lose their legitimacy entirely.

The Wahhabists in power have therefore had far less interest in implementing "even the more lenient interpretations of Islamic law" than did the Ottomans, albeit with an opposite result -- rigor over neglect.

Samuel Helfont on Qutb and abd al-Wahab: Convergence

Al Qaeda Board Meeting

Wahabi Islam (Bin Laden) Meets Muslim Brotherhood (Zawahiri)

(Image from The Raw Feed)

In a couple of recent posts, I noted that Samuel Helfont, who is working on his doctorate at Princeton University in its Near Eastern Studies Department, had written an article for the Foreign Policy Research Institute's E-Notes. The article, "Politics, Terrorism, and the Sunni Divide," had left me with a puzzle over Helfont's division of Sunni Islamism into a Wahabist faction and a Muslim Brotherhood faction, as I noted in both posts:

One problem with Helfont's analysis, however, is that it does not very well account for the rise of Al Qaeda, which combines aspects of both types of Islamism -- as Helfont notes -- for given the stark distinction drawn between the two, one wouldn't expect to find such a combination.

Mr. Helfont noticed my original blogpost and notified me of a longer version of his article -- in monograph form at 74 pages -- that resolves the puzzle. I posted a pre-reading note on this in a recent post, "Samuel Helfont: More on the Sunni Divide," and have since had time to read much of the monograph (and skim the remainder): The Sunni Divide: Understanding Politics and Terrorism in the Arab Middle East. Here from Helfont's monograph is the resolution to my bafflement, for the passage reveals the link forged between Wahabi Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood by the person of Qutb and his reflections on Islam:

In declaring the Muslim world non-Islamic, Qutb crossed a line that few in Islamic history had dared to traverse. With few exceptions, Islamic scholars had accepted the legitimacy of a ruler as long as he declared there were no God but God and that Muhammad was the last of the Prophets. Qutb's position on this matter resembles that of abd al-Wahhab but differs from al-Banna's position in two very important ways. First, and most obviously, abd al-Wahhab and Qutb are two of only a handful of Islamic scholars to excommunicate other Muslims. In this, they were similar to, and were influenced by the important medieval theologian ibn Taymiyyah. Al-Banna, in contrast, never even approached Qutb's position on this matter.As Gilles Kepel, a prominent historian of Islamic movements, notes, al-Banna "never dreamed of accusing the Egyptian society of his day of being non-Islamic." Second and equally important was that Qutb began to make his arguments on the basis of his interpretation of Islamic sources. In prison, his isolation allowed him to put modern considerations aside. He argued for the restoration of Islam on Islamic terms. Gone were the nationalist and socialist justifications for an Islamic society. Qutb argued that the Quran and hadith had all the information a Muslim needed to organize society. Similar to abd al-Wahhab's theory that Islam had become a stranger, Qutb argued that Muslims had allowed non-Islamic ideas and practices to contaminate Islam and that living a truly Islamic life required Muslims not only to believe but to act in accordance with Islamic law. (Helfont, The Sunni Divide, page 21)

The upshot of this was that Qutb's followers have gravitated towards a politicized Wahabist Islam that tries to retain its premodern outlook, whereas those who followed al-Banna stayed within the Muslim Brotherhood's mainstream, an Islamist movement that compromises with Western Modernity.

For greater clarification on this point, see Mr. Helfont's monograph.

Speaking of Saudi Arabia . . .

"Rock the Casbah"

The Clash

(Image from Wikipedia)

Music from The Accolade isn't the only sound emanating from Saudi Arabia these days. We also hear remarks about fighting terrorism.

For example, in its Special Dispatch Series, Number 2130 (November 26, 2008), MEMRI informs us that on October 2, 2008, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Na'if bin Abd Al-'Aziz -- who happens to be a 'Prince' -- spoke in his Jeddah home to senior officials of the Saudi Ministry of Interior about terrorism: "I appeal to the clerics, the intellectuals, and to all my compatriots -- each according to his position and ability -- to help [fight terrorism]."

A couple of weeks later, on October 15, 2008, Prince Na'if spoke at a symposium on "ideological security," stating that "in combating ideological extremism, the Saudi mosques had failed to fulfill the task expected of them -- that is, preaching tolerance. He contended that the global increase in crime demanded close cooperation between security [apparatuses] and educational institutions."

About a week later, Prince Na'if described "the damage that terrorists had caused Saudi Arabia, explaining that not only had their activities harmed the country's reputation worldwide, but that terrorism had come to be regarded as an integral part of Islam and to be attributed to all Muslims." He added "in this regard that various crimes, including bombings, kidnappings, and terrorizing people in the Saudi Kingdom, were crimes of haraba. Such crimes, defined in the Koran as acts of 'spreading corruption and chaos around the world,' are characterized by the shari'a as especially grievous, and as punishable by death."

I suppose this Na'if's remarks should be welcomed, but he's truly a 'naif' if he thinks that a substantially more tolerant form of Islam can be fostered through Saudi Arabia's normative Wahabism, for Wahabi Islam is one of the world's most intolerant forms of Islamism. At best, Wahabism can be made only marginally more tolerant.

I know, I know, I ought to provide evidence for my harsh judgement, but that would take too much time this busy morning (though readers can search my blog for more on Wahabism, and Salafism generally), so I'll leave my judgement dangling without a support net below.

Meanwhile, I'm placing my bets on cultural phenomena linked to the younger generation to which that girl band The Accolade belongs. Incidentally, one of this blog's regular readers, "Conservative in Virginia," reminds us that The Clash predicted way back in 1982 that music would "Rock the Casbah":

Now the king told the boogie men
You have to let that raga drop
The oil down the desert way
Has been shakin' to the top
The sheik he drove his cadillac
He went a cruisin' down the ville
The muezzin was a standing
On the radiator grille

Chorus

The shareef don't like it
Rockin' the casbah
Rock the casbah
The shareef don't like it
Rockin' the casbah
Rock the casbah

By order of the prophet
We ban that boogie sound
Degenerate the faithful
With that crazy casbah sound
But the bedouin they brought out
The electric camel drum
The local guitar picker
Got his guitar pickin' thumb
As soon as the shareef
Had cleared the square
They began to wail

Chorus

Now over at the temple
Oh! they really pack em in
The in crowd say it's cool
To dig this chanting thing
But as the wind changed direction
The temple band took five
The crowd caught a wiff
Of that crazy casbah jive

Chorus

The king called up his jet fighters
He said you better earn your pay
Drop your bombs between the minarets
Down the casbah way

As soon as the shareef was
Chauffeured outta there
The jet pilots tuned to
The cockpit radio blare

As soon as the shareef was
Outta their hair
The jet pilots wailed

Chorus

He thinks it's not kosher
Fundamentally he can't take it.
You know he really hates it.

Yes, yes -- more of this, please. If you missed it, try You Tube.

Ibn Taymiyyah: Significance for Current-Day Islamism?

Ghazan Kahn (1271-1304) Converts to Islam (1295)

. . . but fails to satisfy Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328)

(Image from Wikipedia)

For my course on Islamism, I've recently read Shmuel Bar's article "Jihad Ideology in Light of Contemporary Fatwas" (Hudson Institute, Monographs Series No. 1, Paper Number 1, August 15, 2006), published by the Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World, which also offers many other articles on contemporary Islamism.

I've found Bar's article very useful in clarifying the role that fatwas, i.e., Islamic legal rulings, play in justifying the violent actions carried out by Islamist militants. Bar explains a central point that can easily escape our notice if we imagine that we can appeal to ethical arguments to dissuade jihadist violence, for "questions that are commonly deemed 'moral' and 'ethical' are subordinated to legal casuistry" (page 1a).

Bar notes that Islamists interpret jihad primarily in military terms and enjoin it as a duty:

According to this viewpoint, not only is jihad a duty, but at least under the present circumstances it may only take the form of a Military jihad, and cannot be interpreted as a spiritual struggle. Furthermore, military jihad -- and of course martyrdom -- has added both spiritual and temporal value. It "implies all kinds of worship, both in its inner and outer forms. More than any other act it implies love and devotion for Allah, [Who is exalted,] trust in Him, the surrender of one's life and property to Him, patience, asceticism, remembrance of Allah and all kinds of other acts [of worship]. And the individual or community that participates in it finds itself between two blissful outcomes: either victory and triumph or martyrdom and Paradise."

According to Bar's footnote 20 (page 17), this quote comes from Ibn Taymiyyah, al-Siyaasa al-shar'iyya fee Islah al-raa'ee wa al-raa'iyya (Governance According to Allah's Law in reforming both the ruler and his flock).

On a website maintained by Ted Thornton, I have found the same passage, albeit in more complete form (cf. the phrase "Who is exalted" in brackets above), citing pages 47-49 of Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996). Perhaps Bar is borrowing the quote from Peters and if so ought to give credit, but perhaps some citations were abbreviated when Bar crafted this article to summarize his book, Warrant for Terror: The Fatwas of Radical Islam (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

Be that as it may, Thornton quotes Ibn Taymiyyah further:

"Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God's entirely and God's word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought." (page 49 of Peters)

These quotes from Ibn Taymiyyah begin to clarify for me the importance that this Muslim scholar has for contemporary Islamist thinking. Another quote supplied by Thornton clarifies Ibn Taymiyyah's significance for the Wahhabi Islam practiced by Saudi Arabia:

"The religion of Islam turns on these two principles: worshipping God alone and worshipping Him by what He prescribed. He is not served by innovation . . . . It is not permissible when guilt has been established by proof or by witness to suspend the legal punishment, whether by remitting it or by substituting a fine or any other thing: the hand of the thief must be cut off, for the application of the punishments is one of the acts of religion like the jihad in the Way of God."

Thornton borrows this quote from John Alden Williams, The Word of Islam (Austin, Texas, 1994), 164f). This fits with Bar's point that in Islamism (or broader Islam itself?), "questions that are commonly deemed 'moral' and 'ethical' are subordinated to legal casuistry" (page 1a). To think beyond what Allah has prescribed, which would require ethical rethinking, constitutes innovation, such that one is no longer worshipping Allah properly. Ibn Taymiyyah's influence on Ibn Wahhab may be at work here, for the Wahhabist form of Islam found in Saudi Arabia is of this strict sort.

One begins to suspect that the individual in Islamist circles is not encouraged to think at all but merely to listen and obey.

I suppose that there's always a reason for everything, and Thornton gives his speculation for the rigidity pervading Ibn Taymiyyah's views:

Possibly behind much of the conservatism, literalism, and fundamentalism in his thought are the following facts. The Islamic Middle East had just passed through one of its severest ordeals: it had for two centuries been menaced from the West by the Crusaders (eight waves of them). Moreover, the Mongol threat from the East had been neutralized only three years before Ibn Taymiyya's birth in Harran (in Mesopotamia).

The threat re-emerged in the 1290s, despite the Kahn's coversion to Islam. Hence my decision to post the above image of Ibn Taymiyyah's archenemy, Ghazan Kahn.