http://www.masud.co.uk/
Why Extremism Always
Fails:
Spanish Muslim
Perspectives
Abd el-Wahid Miranda
Two
weeks after the World Trade Center disaster,
a Black Muslim of my acquaintance visited a news store situated a
few blocks from the site of the catastrophe. The store, which had
reopened that day, was run by five Senegalese immigrants. Their
Muslim background was clearly known to the lady who walked in, who
came straight up to them and said: ‘We’re so sorry about what
happened. Don’t worry. We know it wasn’t Muslims who did it. It
was the Wahhabis!’
The Western
world is now beginning to understand why Wahhabism is so unpopular
among Muslims. Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, not usually given to subtle understandings of
Muslim aqida issues, has said that ‘the Saudis are having
to essentially buy off their extreme groups in order to maintain
themselves … They are essentially funding a significant portion of
what we are now dealing with -- Islam gone awry.’
According
to the Muslim journalist Stephen Schwartz, writing in the English
journal The Spectator, ‘Bin Laden is a Wahhabi extremist.
So are his Egyptian allies, who exulted as they stabbed foreign
tourists to death at Luxor not many years ago, bathing in blood up
to their elbows and emitting blasphemous cries of ecstasy. So are
the Algerian Islamist terrorists whose contribution to the
purification of the world consisted of murdering people for such
sins as running a movie projector or reading secular newspapers. …
The vast majority of Muslims in the world … loathe Wahhabism
because it is a violent break with tradition. … To expose the
extent of Saudi and Wahhabi extremist influence on American
Muslims would deeply compromise many Islamic clerics in the US.'
Academic
analysis has also concluded that Saudi Islam is at the core of the
current crisis. Many studies cite the 1998 Harvard thesis of the
Saudi dissident Nawaf Obeid, who writes: 'According to a
high-ranking official in the [Saudi] Ministry of Justice, Sheikh
Mohamed bin Jubeir [current chairman of the Saudi Consultative
Council], who has been called the 'exporter' of the Wahhabi creed
in the Muslim world, was a strong advocate of aiding the Taleban'.
Nonetheless, American daisy-cutter bombs are not landing on the
Saudi universities in Madinah and Riyadh, in whose laboratories
the new and hate-filled strains of Wahhabism are being designed.
Neither is Saudi Arabia anywhere on the notoriously clumsy
American list of states supporting terrorism. The Saudis, as
usual, are exempted from any serious criticism, even when experts
agree that while they may not themselves be the root of the
problem, they are certainly watering it.
Muslim
observers in Spain are speculating on the reasons for this strange
contradiction. Not many believe that American policy is still so
ignorant of the internal dynamics of the Middle East that it
simply has no idea about Wahhabi involvement in international
terrorism. The answer, they suggest, lies in the interests of
American industry. Saudi Arabia is the most important US ally in
the struggle to keep down the price of crude oil. No less
significantly, it purchases American weaponry and thereby keeps
afloat the enormous arms industry whose future seemed threatened
by the closure of the Cold War.
Denis
Halliday, the former UN assistant secretary-general who resigned
in protest at the sanctions against Iraq, has this to observe: ‘If
you look at the sales of US military hardware, Saddam is the best
salesman in town. I think over 100 billion has been sold to the
Saudis, Kuwaitis, the Gulf states, Turkey, Israel and so on. It’s
thanks to Saddam. Just last week they sold $6.2bn of military
aircraft to the United Arab Emirates. What on earth does a little
country need hardware like that for?’ Clearly, this is a
gravy-train the Americans will be reluctant to derail.
Other
Muslims suspect that the reasons for American indifference to
Wahhabism lie in a strategy to destroy Islam by supporting a
movement that is destroying it from within. Mansur Reyes, a
trustee of the El-Falah mosque in Barcelona, suggests that
orthodox Islam, with its spiritual pathways and rich cultural and
intellectual heritage, is perceived as the real threat to the
United States. The West, according to this opinion, therefore
allows the Wahhabi universities to continue to send their
missionaries around the Islamic world, to eliminate every
dimension of the religion that might attract Westerners, and hold
the interest of educated people in the Islamic countries.
Reyes, who
spent time at a university in Makkah only to become a longstanding
critic of extremism, goes on to make a more purely religious
observation. Like other Sunni Muslims, he believes that the
current misfortunes of the Islamic world prove that because of the
spread of false doctrines, the Muslims no longer deserve the
divine favor which once gave them mastery of the planet.
'The
Ottoman Caliph Mehmed was given divine permission to capture the
holy city of Constantinople when he sent his dervishes to the
front of his army, and they held a Sufi ceremony in full view of
the city walls,’ he recalls. ‘So many awlija (saints) were
praying for the Muslim army in those days that Islam was
victorious even in places where it had never succeeded before.’
The
courageous Reyes, who claims that his life has been repeatedly
threatened by Wahhabi extremists in Barcelona, insists that 'we
must consider why the prayers of these Wahhabists are not
answered. In Algeria they pray every day for the destruction of
the government, but their prayers are refused. In Afghanistan,
they pray for the defeat of America, but their prayers are
refused. In Egypt they pray for the death of Mubarek and the
Christians, but their prayers are refused. If they claim that they
are the kind of Muslims that Allah loves, they should look at
their hands, and ask themselves why their prayers fail.'
Many
believe that this orthodox criticism of Wahhabism holds the key to
its downfall. 'Wahhabism is popular because of a sense of
political and social frustration', says Salih del Campo, a
journalist from Galicia who has also met Wahhabis at first hand.
'And if it is rooted in political emotions, then it will die
quickly when its political causes turn out to be failures.' He
points out that in Spain, North African Wahhabis who declared
their support for the World Trade Center attacks have ‘gone quiet’
following the sudden collapse of the Taleban, the key Wahhabi
allies in Afghanistan.
The
flashpoint of the Caucasus has also forced many former Wahhabi
sympathisers to wonder about the failure of their prayers. In
Azerbaijan, attempts by small Wahhabi groups led by Mubariz Aliev
to attack the government have produced only a general
anti-religious drive by the regime. Aliev, arrested in Baku for
the December 1998 attack on the European Bank of Reconstruction
and Development, led a group which is also thought to have been
involved in a series of threats against 'headquarters of
idolatry', which culminated in 1999 with the murder of the famous
astrologer Etibar Yerkin and his two sons. The Azerbaijan
government has, for now, suppressed Wahhabi terror, but the price
paid by ordinary non-Wahhabi Muslims has been a heavy one, as
mosques and periodicals come under increasingly heavy scrutiny,
threatening both to weaken the Islamic revival among the
republic’s Sunni minority, and to drive unemployed and angry youth
into revenge attacks which bring about further government
repression.
In the
North Caucasus republics, Wahhabism is being increasingly blamed
for the failure of attempts to reintroduce Sharia law and to
present a united Muslim front against Russian military occupation.
The website of the official Chechen government in exile,
www.amina.com, identifies the spread of Wahhabi ideas as one
major cause of the fall of independent Chechnya two years ago.
The rise of
Wahhabism in this region, devastated by seven decades of official
atheism, is usually traced back to 1991, with the establishment of
the Al-Hikma madrassa in the Daghestani town of Kizilyurt. Its
director, Bagauddin Kebedov, accepted funds and guidance from two
Wahhabi organisations, Al-Haramayn, and Al-Igase. While neither of
these groups advocated armed revolt, the beliefs they encouraged
led some of the madrassa’s 700 pupils to declare most ordinary
Caucasian Muslims to be apostates (murtad). When Kebedev
left for Chechnya in 1998, and his relatively moderate Wahhabist
successor Ahmad-Qadi Akhtaev died the next year, a sudden
radicalisation took place. Under the leadership of the Saudi
Wahhabi fighter Abd al-Rahman Khattab, and his Chechen associate
Shamil Basayev, the local Wahhabis attacked Daghestani police
stations and traditional Sunni mosques. The revolt was quickly
defeated, resulting in an increasing reliance by Daghestan on
Russian forces, and the Wahhabi leaders fled into Chechnya.
The Chechen
president Aslan Maskhadov at this time led a fully independent
Chechen nation. Saudi Arabia, fearful of angering Moscow, had
refused to recognize it (even though the tiny but evidently more
courageous state of Estonia had recognized it without hesitation).
Perhaps because of Saudi policy, Maskhadov adopted a strongly
anti-Wahhabi line. In 1998, announcing the success of the Chechen
National Guard in repulsing an attack by Wahhabis in the city of
Gudermes, he announced that 'the Chechen leadership has enough
force to stop the spread in Chechnya of the anti-Islamic
pernicious Wahhabi doctrine.’ He went on to say, 'Military
formations of the Wahhabi stamp will be disarmed and disbanded.
Ringleaders and ideologues of these movements will be held
criminally responsible. Before being allowed to leave, they must
stand before a Sharia court and be punished for their bid to fuel
a civil war in Chechnya.’
The
incursion of Basayev’s fighters in August 1999 provoked the war
that ordinary Chechens had dreaded. According to the official
Chechen website, 'People knew all that summer that teenage boys
were being recruited from the Wahhabi areas. Anyone could see that
there would be a new war with Russia if the commanders started
trouble in Daghestan. So the clan elders went to Shamel Basayev
and asked him to drop his plan. But he took no notice.’ The
presence of Khattab was particularly provocative. In an interview
with Greg Myre of Associated Press he made explicit threats: 'Let
Russia await our explosions blasting through their cities. I swear
we will do it.’
The Wahhabi
incursion brought about, as feared, a massive Russian invasion.
Unlike the first Chechen war, documented by Anatol Lieven in his
book Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power, this new
conflict contained a significant Wahhabi ingredient. Failure was
thus inevitable; and Chechnya is now firmly in Moscow’s grip.
'Local anger against the Wahhabis', says one Chechen commentator,
'is now white-hot.'
After the
catastrophe in the Caucasus, Khattab sought refuge in Afghanistan,
where he may have died in the recent fighting for the northern
city of Kunduz. Also dead in Kunduz was Juma Namangani, head of
the pro-Wahhabi Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Namangani rose to
fame in the summers of 1999 and 2000, when his warriors invaded
remote areas of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, setting up a small
Wahhabi utopian camp in the Tavildere region near the Tajik
capital Dushanbe. After their raid in Kyrgyzstan, the mayor of the
town of Osh, which had been ransacked by the Wahhabi forces,
observed, 'I cannot say that there are no problems. Wahhabis are
active among the youth, who know little about Islam.’ In
Tajikistan, however, the government peacefully decimated the ranks
of Namangani’s supporters when the Supreme Court legalised Islamic
opposition parties. Over half of Namangani’s former activists
accepted an amnesty and chose careers in the army or police. The
last significant rebel formation, numbering 800 men under the
command of Mirza Zia'ev, was completely integrated into the Tajik
government, and Zia'ev himself was appointed Minister of Civil
Defence. A hardcore of mainly Arab and Chechen fighters remained
in the hills, calling those who switched sides ‘apostates’ and
‘brothers of devils’.
The failure
of extremism in the Caucasus and Central Asia has now been
repeated in Afghanistan. Reyes believes that the Chechen failure
mirrors exactly the extremist failure in Afghanistan. An
indigenous Sunni Islamic government was unable to resist allowing
its territory to be used by Wahhabi activists, many of them
hailing from the Middle East. 'The most obvious explanation of the
sudden failure which followed,' he adds, 'is the provocation to
more powerful states represented by the radicalization and growing
xenophobia of the populations. But the true Muslim explanation is
that wherever these people go, they bring Allah’s rejection. They
show disrespect to the saints, they reject the Hanafi scholars,
they frighten women and Christians, and they introduce fitna
into every mosque. In that situation Allah will not help a Muslim
state. Just look at Algeria. Allah says that “you will be
uppermost if you are true believers”. They need to think about
this verse.’
Reyes
believes strongly that the Taleban would still be in power had
Mullah Omar not allowed himself to be drawn into an alliance with
Bin Laden’s mainly Saudi supporters. He quotes Mullah Muhammad
Khaksar, the former Taleban Deputy Interior Minister, who
denounced Mullah Omar’s policies after the fall of Kabul, as
saying: ‘Mullah Omar’s personality changed 95% since the beginning
of the movement. I don’t think the Arabs should be forgiven. It
was because of them that US aircraft came to Afghanistan and
bombed our country, killing thousands of people.'
Many
Spanish Muslims commentating on the crisis on the main
Spanish-language Muslim websites,
www.webislam.com, and
www.verdeislam.com, seem to support Khaksar’s analysis. The
alliance with Bin Laden was a catastrophe for the Afghan Muslim
people, and a godsend to the Americans, who are now entrenching
themselves in Uzbekistan and are already working on a new oil
pipeline across the entire region. Some even blame the acute
Afghan drought (which began in earnest in 1998, the year of Bin
Laden’s fatwa advocating the indiscriminate murder of
American citizens) on Mullah Omar’s decision, citing the Quranic
verse ‘Had the people of the villages believed truly, We would
have poured down on them blessings from the skies.’ Tragically,
the ‘people of the villages’, and their rulers, received cluster
bombs instead.