2nd of 6 parts
Implications for the United States
and Thoughts for American Policy
Mordechai Nisan
Introduction
Three contenders compete for the leadership of the Middle Eastern and global Islamic jihad campaign.
Iran, following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, adopted a strategy to export the Khomeini doctrine and spirit to Shiite population centers in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Lebanon, and beyond. While pursuing its military and nuclear aspirations, Iran sets its regional political and religious sights toward the "Shiite Crescent" – linking it with Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, yet broadening its ambitions with support for Sunni allies, like the Palestinian Hamas. Iran, under the Ayatollah regime and President Ahmadinejad in Teheran, articulates global goals, specifically against the United States. But its specifically national Persian identity and Shiite religious coloration restrict its ostensible outreach and appeal, provoking Sunni Muslim and Arab hostility.
Al-Qai`dah, under the leadership of Osama bin-Laden, was politically conceived and incubated in the throes of the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, then born in the 1990s. It set into motion a far-flung Islamic campaign against "apostate" Muslim regimes, the United States, and Israel. Its emblematic attack of 9/11 in New York and Washington highlighted al-Qai`dah's determination and capabilities to strike at the American "Crusader" superpower on its national turf, while pursuing a global strategy covering the Middle East, Asia, the Caucasus, Europe, and Africa. Its methods of insurgency and terrorism, as in Iraq since 2003, are designed to bring about over time the renewal of the universal Sunni caliphate. As a result of the American military invasion in late 2001, al-Qai`dah's base of operations in Afghanistan was largely eliminated, it is threatened and targeted by intelligence, surveillance, and military agencies around the world, and has lost many of its operational leaders due to the decapitation strategy adopted by the United States. Al-Qai`dah functions now in a decentralized fashion, adjusting to new circumstances, but having failed to achieve many of its objectives.
That Saudi Arabia is both the historical sacred locus of Islam and the leading producer of oil is widely acknowledged: The religion's founding was in Arabia, it is the site of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the object of the yearly haj pilgrimage; and also, possessing 25% of the world's proven oil reserves, the major producer and exporter of petroleum. It is, however, less known that Saudi Arabia is the political heart for inspiring, teaching and promoting, financing and organizing, global jihad to Islamicize the entire Middle East and the world beyond. As an Arab country of the Sunni Muslim persuasion, Saudi Arabia exercises a normative sweep and universal pretensions denied Persian Shiite Iran. Overall, the three-pronged Saudi strategic combination of faith, money, and warfare constitutes a spiritual and material arsenal to overwhelm non-Muslim (and occasionally fellow-Muslim) adversaries near and far, as Islam successfully did historically in its formative period in the seventh-century and thereafter, sweeping out of Arabia and across continents – conquering, colonizing, and converting.
The world never recovered and has never been the same. In our evolving era and into the future, it is unlikely to survive the renewed assault today.
Saudi Arabia, although engaging in state-sponsored terrorism for decades, enjoys an image of moderation and friendship in the West. Its sinister and elusive strategy of jihad has not tarnished its political legitimacy; it feigns cooperation while advancing its own long-term Islamic agenda. The Saudis can win because their victims are unaware that these Arabs are threatening and fighting them. Their limited conventional military capabilities, though expected to expand considerably in the years ahead, belie a bellicosity conducted by other means. Iran and al-Qai`dah are sworn enemies of the United States, while Saudi Arabia has been historically identified as a partner with Washington in the war against the global jihad – of which none other than Saudi Arabia itself is the primary leader.
The Wahhabi Islamic doctrine and ethos from the eighteenth-century, born in the Nejd desert near Riyadh in isolation from foreign or Western civilizing influences, underpins the Saudi regime and society. Wahhabism is girded with cultic exclusivity and religious zealotry, a missionary impulse and militant fervor. There is a view of Wahhabism according to which it is actually an iconoclastic deviation from Islam and a denial of its basic Sunni principles. Since the founding of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s, the state is purportedly guided by shari`a law and a strict moral canon of public conduct. Beheadings and floggings are normal punishments for Islamic offenders; the Committee to Prevent Vice and Promote Virtue prowls the streets, to assure that women are veiled and chaperoned, and that male and female youth do not hold hands. At the annual National Heritage Festival in Riyadh, as at amusement parks and recreational centers, families of men and women cannot attend together; a policy of gender segregation set separate visiting days for the two sexes. Christians residing in or visiting Saudi Arabia do not enjoy freedom of worship or the right to build a church, nor even security for their physical welfare or judicial protection.
These specific features of Saudi society assume far more rigorous significance considering the religious and educational themes that nurture this Wahhabi-guided realm. The `ulema scholarly-legal authorities seek to assure that official Saudi behavior and policy accord with the strict ways of the sunna (tradition). In the mosques and universities of Mecca and Riyadh, Medina and Jeddah, Abha and Baraidi, throughout the realm, Saudi salafism (evoking the model of the pious leaders of early Islam) and jihadism (advocating holy war against infidels) constitute the thematic ingredients of the spiritual and political order of the day.1 Indeed, one of the official goals of the Saudi educational curricula is in "preparing students, physically and mentally, for jihad for the sake of Allah". Prominent sheikh scholars, like the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam who, at the end of the 1970s, taught at the Islamic University in Riyadh, and Abdul Aziz bin-Baz, the Saudi Grand Mufti until his death in 1999, explicitly preached the obligation of universal jihad for all Muslims, and hatred of Jews and Christians.2 It was also the Saudi cleric Nasir bin-Hamid al-Fahd who provided theological justification for mass murder of "infidels", assuming that non-conventional weapons were available for Islamic jihad.3 Being the most appropriate sanctuary and school for this creed, Saudi Arabia sports a national flag glittering with the essential Islamic statement of faith – "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Messenger" – alongside a drawn sword.
While ostensibly an insular society, Saudi Arabia has never been out of touch with the regional political environment. Republican Turkey's abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 catalyzed Saudi ambitions to politically capture center-stage as the throbbing pulse of the Muslim world. In 1926 it hosted the Congress of the Islamic World; in 1962 it founded the Muslim World Congress; in 1969 it formed the Organization of Islamic Congress (OIC), which today numbers some 57 countries; thereafter the Muslim World League (MWL) (Rabita) – all to promote and finance Islamic Wahhabism around the world. One-time secretary-general of the MWL, Abdullah Naseef, once declared that: "jihad in Islam was instituted to further the cause of justice, dignity and Qur`anic law".
This encoded message for the untrained observer is buoyed by a moral agenda and riveted to the practice of warfare.
Saudi Arabia and the Middle East
In Middle East politics, Saudi Arabia's Islamic agenda replaced Egypt's Arab nationalist doctrine under Gamal Abdul Nasser, who died in 1970. This ideological shift emerged especially in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur October War of 1973, when the oil-producing countries embargoed the United States and caused the price of oil for Western markets to sky-rocket. Ever since, the Saudis have become a strikingly dominant regional and international actor on the economic, political, and religious stages.
In 1974, King Feisal of Saudi Arabia convened an Islamic Summit in Lahore, leading to the adoption of secret decisions affirming that the Middle East will be Islamic, while the Christians of the Orient and the Jews of Israel will be eliminated.4 The first-line of regional attack was delineated, and three states in particular were primary candidates and targets for Islamic conquest. The complete Islamicization of the entire Middle East, after the Muslims' prophet Muhammad long ago Islamicized Arabia, awaits its historical consummation. Thereafter the wider world, already cringing and intimidated by Islam – recall the recent Dutch controversy concerning the cartoons of Muhammad and the Danish case of parliamentarian Ayyan Hirsi Ali – will be relatively easy prey for Allah's warriors, preachers, and martyrs.
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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