by John McHugo
Yet by now there was interaction between the Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia and the revolutionary impulses that flowed from ideologues such as Sayyid Qutb. This development tested Wahhabism as a conservative ideology. Precisely how a strain of Saudi Wahhabism began to blend with revolutionary ideas has only been partially disentangled by scholars, although the broad outline seems clear.18 Muslim Brothers were offered asylum by Saudi Arabia after they were forced to flee from Egypt after Nasser’s crackdown on the Brotherhood in the 1950s. They were often given teaching positions, especially at the Islamic University of Medina after it opened in 1961 with the objective of exporting the Wahhabi variety of Islam. It was natural at that time – when educational levels in Saudi Arabia were still very low – for young Saudis to look up to these Egyptian teachers with great respect. Some of these teachers definitely had considerable influence on their pupils. One of them was Muhammad Qutb, who published Milestones, the work of his brother, Sayyid Qutb, while teaching in Saudi Arabia. It appears that Muhammad Qutb taught a young man called Osama bin Laden.
As has already been mentioned, in November 1979 Juhayman al-Otaybi led a militant group that stormed and occupied the Ka‘ba and the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Most of his followers were former students of the Islamic University of Medina. His ideology can be seen as Wahhabism blended with the ideology of Sayyid Qutb as developed by Muhammad Abd al-Salam al-Faraj – whose teachings inspired the assassination of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981. Mixed in with these was a strain of millenarianism that has been described as ‘altogether foreign to Wahhabism’.19
Juhayman al-Otaybi interpreted the Sharia in a way that demonstrated to his own satisfaction that the Wahhabi religious establishment had abandoned it. Thus, he was outraged at being asked to supply a passport photo in order to enrol at an Islamic university, since the most literal interpretation of Islam prohibits the reproduction of images. He also objected to images of the king on banknotes, to ‘shameful’ pictures of women on television, and to women entering the workplace in a way that involved contact with men. Such ideas were shared by many hard-line Wahhabis. But al-Otaybi went further. He did something that had no precedent since the days of Ibn Saud: he publicly attacked what he saw as the corruption and personal immorality of the royal family.20
In his view, the monarchy had only ever ruled according to its own whim. Thus, Ibn Saud had refused to support the Sultan-Caliph’s call for jihad against Britain and its allies in the First World War. Instead, he had opportunistically used the conflict to undermine the Hashemite Sharif of Mecca, who was a fellow Muslim. Subsequently, he had used the Wahhabi fighters known as the Ikhwan to spread the faith, but, having secured his position, allied himself with the Christians (the United States and Britain). Juhayman did not merely reject the Saudi monarchy; he also rejected the Wahhabi religious establishment that had collaborated with it and was therefore equally discredited in his eyes. Wahhabism teaches that only a legitimate ruler may proclaim jihad. But Juhayman felt able to take that duty upon himself.21
VII
Many of the positions taken by Juhayman took will seem familiar in those subsequently adopted by Osama bin Laden, the founder of the group known as al-Qa‘ida. This came into existence as a result of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The USSR had entered Afghanistan in December 1979 to prop up a communist government that had taken power in a recent coup and did not have widespread support. Ten to 15 per cent of the population of Afghanistan are Shi‘is, and the remainder Sunni Muslims. The Shi‘is come chiefly from the Hazara minority, which speaks its own dialect.
The communists and their Russian allies quickly alienated much of the population with the consequence that the country was soon in flames. The insurrection was tribally based or led by local warlords, who were often bitter rivals. Islam became the obvious rallying cry to unite Afghans against the communists. The USA and the Gulf monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia, therefore provided weapons and finance to the rebels to fight under an Islamic banner. They were also helped by the Pakistani intelligence services. It was at this time that the Taliban (literally, ‘the students of religion’) emerged. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, this movement gradually spread its control over most of Afghanistan. It took Kabul, the capital, in 1996, and most of the country over the following couple of years.
It is often asserted that the Taliban are Wahhabi in their inspiration and practice, but that is not quite correct. The Taliban belong to the Deobandi movement. This emerged in late nineteenth-century India as a reaction to British domination and the fear that living under non-Muslim rule would cause Indian Islam to atrophy. Unlike the Wahhabis, who follow the Hanbali doctrinal law school of Sunni jurisprudence, the Deobandis are members of the Hanafi school. Nevertheless, they share with the Wahhabis an obsession with the tiniest details of correct religious observance and a literalist interpretation of the strictest provisions of the Sharia. The Deobandis were therefore exactly the kind of movement that it was logical for the Saudis to encourage and target with extensive funding. As a result, the Deobandis expanded and absorbed Wahhabi ideas which are now widespread among Deobandis generally, and especially so among the Taliban. This led the Taliban – and many Deobandis outside Afghanistan – to consider Shi‘is to be apostates who merit death.
In areas that came under Taliban control there were massacres of Shi‘is, most notably in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif in 1998. In 2001, the Taliban went on to destroy the giant Buddhas carved into the rock at Bamyan, the stronghold of the Hazaras, the predominantly Shi‘i people who make up Afghanistan’s third-largest ethnic group. One factor behind the destruction may have been the fact that the statues played a role in Hazara folk religion.22 The Taliban declared jihad against the Hazaras. Iran was able to do relatively little to help them and other Afghani Shi‘is during the Soviet occupation. But after the Soviet withdrawal in February 1989 it supported the group known as the Northern Alliance, which the Hazaras joined. The Northern Alliance would take Kabul from the Taliban in late 2001 after American and other NATO nations also intervened to support it, following the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
One feature of the struggle against the Soviet occupation was the large number of Sunni Muslims from other countries who went to Afghanistan. They went to fight a jihad to liberate the country’s people from infidel control. They were predominantly Arab, and Saudis were especially numerous among them. As we have seen, by the early 1980s Islamism was fast replacing Arab nationalism as the most dynamic political force in Arab countries. The secular ideas of resistance and revolution were easy to incorporate into the struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In Islamic terms, fighting to repel the infidel Soviet invaders in Muslim Afghanistan was technically a defensive jihad, which its advocates could argue was binding on the Muslim community as a whole. The problem was: who was authorised under the Sharia to proclaim jihad? In the absence of a legitimate caliph, this task would have fallen on the rulers of predominantly Muslim states. But that would have entailed declaring war on the Soviet Union, and no Muslim majority state was about to do that. The solution was for the volunteers who had gone to fight the Soviets to take the Sharia into their own hands and wage their own jihad. This is very reminiscent of Juhayman al-Otaybi.
By 1982, the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services were cooperating, arranging for jihadi volunteers to assemble in and near the Pakistani city of Peshawar. The CIA also helped with arms and funding. Over the next ten years it is estimated that 35,000 young volunteers passed through Peshawar, of whom 12,000 to 25,000 were Saudis.23 A key facility in Peshawar was the so-called Services Centre run by Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a Palestinian who had sublimated his struggle to regain his own homeland into the jihadi cause. He now saw that cause as part of a much wider call to regain all the lands Islam had lost across the centuries, which he listed as: ‘Palestine, Bokhara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, Southern Yemen, Tashkent and Andalucia.’24
In the late 1970s, he had been on the faculty of the King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, where he had taught Osama bin Laden, and seems to have been an important influence on him. In 1984, Osama bin Laden became involved in Abdullah Azzam’s activities in the jihad and supplied funds and assistance for the establishment of training camps. Two years later, he journeyed to Peshawar himself and in 1987 saw action against Soviet forces inside Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal, he returned to Saudi Arabia where he became an anti-American activist calling for, for instance, a boycott of American goods.25
To some Sunni dissidents in Saudi Arabia, the decision to use non-Muslim forces was problematic on religious grounds. The defence of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina should fall to Muslims, not to soldiers who were Christians, Jews and atheists. The stationing of these forces on Saudi soil was argued to be a violation of the Sharia. Moreover, their real role was seen as being to occupy Arabia and control the Muslim world. For Osama bin Laden, this seems to have been the point at which he began the career which would see him become the mastermind for the attacks by hijacked airliners on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of 11 September 2001, and force him to become a fugitive after the consequent invasion of Afghanistan by an American-led coalition. It would end in his death at the hands of American special forces in his hideaway in Pakistan on 2 May 2011. The Kuwait crisis thus proved to be something of a watershed for the growth of violent, international jihadi Islamism among Sunni radicals.
On 2 August 1990 Iraq invaded the neighbouring state of Kuwait, which it occupied for a seven-month period. Defying a deadline imposed by the United Nations, Saddam Hussein refused to withdraw. Kuwait was eventually liberated in February 1991 by an American-led coalition. From then on, Saddam Hussein’s strategy was survival. He held back his elite republican guard, which was recruited among the Sunni tribes close to the area from which he came. Because of a no-fly zone imposed by the UN and enforced by America and its allies, a rebellion among the Kurds of northern Iraq was successful in creating an autonomous Kurdish region. In the south of Iraq, however, the Republican Guard crushed rebellions among the Shi‘is with relative ease. These were only locally based, and many areas remained quiet as they waited to see which way the wind would blow. Others did not wish to lose the benefits of Saddam Hussein’s politics of patronage.
Nervous that Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire the atom bomb, and well aware that his forces had used chemical weapons extensively in the war with Iran, the UN under American leadership imposed a draconian sanctions regime on Iraq. This would last until it was proved that the regime had abandoned its weapons programmes. These sanctions made any real rebuilding of the shattered country impossible. Their effect was made far worse by Saddam Hussein’s continued use of patronage to sustain the groups on which he relied, and which basically left the rest of the population to fend for itself. Many children died of malnutrition. In the meantime, he retained complete control of Iraq except in the Kurdish areas in the north. Although it seems he divested himself of weapons of mass destruction, he was careful not to declare this unambiguously, since he considered that the belief he might have them acted as a deterrent against an invasion. It was this ambiguity, however, that would lead to his overthrow by another, less broadly based, US-led coalition in 2003.
The period between the liberation of Kuwait and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 saw the onward march of Sunni Islamism. Side-by-side with the blood-drenched actions of militants in countries such as Egypt and Algeria, to say nothing of attacks on Western targets, there were also Islamists who renounced violence and strove for a cultural revolution to make Muslim countries and societies more ‘Islamic’. Much of this was successful, and was carried out by organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as by Salafis. Salafis, it will be recalled, were Sunnis who tried to return to the purity of the practice of the Prophet and his Companions, and avoiding the accretions which had become seen as part of Islam across the centuries. They attempted to live a scrupulously devout life and played a major role in the ‘re-Islamisation’ of many Muslim countries. Initially they did not engage in politics or armed struggle; but that would change over time.
VIII
In Pakistan relations between the Sunni majority (approximately 85 per cent of the population) and the Shi‘i minority (approximately 15 per cent)26 deteriorated sharply during the twenty years or so after 1979. Pakistan was founded in 1947 in response to the demand by many Muslim politicians and leaders of British India for a separate, predominantly Muslim state. It was conceived as a secular state inhabited by Muslims, not an Islamic state. Many refugees from the mob violence that raged across India at partition fled there. They were Sunnis and Shi‘is alike, although the impulse that had led to the partition had come chiefly from Sunnis. Some Muslims, especially many Shi‘is, had opposed partition and would have preferred to remain in an undivided India. Many were able to do so.
The idea of Pakistan was, at first, inclusive of Shi‘is and Sunnis, as the make-up of its institutions of state indicated. Muhammad Ali Jinnah – the founder of Pakistan who is revered among its people to this day – was from an Ismaili Shi‘i background. He adopted Twelver Shi‘ism, although he was lax in his religious observance. It took a while for the Sunni-Shi‘i divide to become significant in Pakistani politics,27 but that is what happened in the last two decades of the twentieth century. One factor that deepened the divide and made it toxic was the weakness of the Pakistani state. This led to governments trying to manipulate sectarianism for their own purposes. There had already been sectarianism in Pakistan aimed at the Ahmadiyya community (a Muslim movement that originated in the late nineteenth century). The position of the Ahmadis in Pakistan became impossible after 1974, when the Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (who was a Twelver Shi‘i) caved into pressure from hard-line Sunni groups and a law was passed forbidding them from describing themselves as Muslims. After 1979, Iran and Saudi Arabia behaved as though Pakistan’s Sunnis and Shi‘is were their proxies. The descent into Sunni-Shi‘i sectarianism seems to have been sparked by the Iranian Revolution and the ideological struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia that ensued.
In 1979 Pakistan was ruled by General Zia ul-Haq, who had come to power in a military coup two years earlier. He was engaged in an Islamisation campaign that sought to end his country’s secularism by putting Islam and the Sharia at the heart of the constitution and the institutions of the state. It was very much a Sunni form of Islam that he had in mind. His programme was intended to make Sunni rules of inheritance compulsory for all Muslims, and also to enable the government to collect the zakat, or charitable tax, which Shi‘is already paid to their clergy. This would have meant that devout Shi‘is would, in effect, have to pay the tax twice. Shi‘is campaigned to be exempted from the legislation, while Iran supported them by placing external pressure on Pakistan.
This combination was successful in making the government back down, but it had the effect that henceforth Shi‘is would be regarded as a separate religious minority. This meant that Shi‘i activism would be seen as a threat to Pakistan’s unity and the authority of the state. There had been a history of anti-Shi‘i polemic and agitation in British India, and colonial officials had often been concerned whether Ashura commemorations would pass off peacefully. Kipling had recorded disturbances during Ashura in Lahore in the 1880s.28 In theory, the Islamisation campaign in Pakistan during the 1980s was meant to be about transforming and uniting Pakistan by applying universal, Islamic values. Yet the understandable refusal of Shi‘is to accept aspects of the programme as applicable to all Muslims meant that it became specifically Sunni. It led to division, not unity. Sunni Islamists refused to accept Shi‘is as a distinct but legitimate sect, with the result that Shi‘is became perceived as ‘disloyal’ to Pakistan. In reponse, Shi‘is joined Pakistan’s pro-democracy movement and looked to it for support. But this enabled the military regime to use anti-Shi‘i feeling among Sunnis as a weapon in its fight against the resto
ration of democracy.29
Zia ul-Haq’s regime now openly promoted Sunnism as the distinctive identity of Pakistan. The president encouraged the construction of Sunni madrasas and opened the public sector to their graduates. Many madrasas were deliberately set up with assistance from the Pakistani military in areas with strong Shi‘i populations or close to the Iranian border. Saudi Arabia provided funding for them as part of its policy of seeking to harden the Sunni identity of countries surrounding Iran. Links between the military and Islamist groups such as the Taliban fighting the Russians in Afghanistan increased over time, and Wahhabi-style anti-Shi‘i feeling steadily consolidated itself. In 1988, the government permitted Sunni groups to attack Shi‘is in Gilgit, the one district in the tribal areas in the north-west of the country that had a Shi‘i majority. One hundred and fifty Shi‘is were killed. The government’s reaction was to construct a large Sunni mosque there.
The dangers of the strategy soon became apparent as the sectarian strife and disorder that had now become part of Pakistan’s life proved hard for the state to control. It was genuinely difficult for the state to oppose actions that were claimed to be carried out in the name of Islam. Some madrasas were involved in the campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and provided training and volunteers for the struggle. This made it even harder for the state to untie itself from the juggernaut it had set rolling. Vitriolic rhetoric against Shi‘is steadily increased, and was connected with rivalry among militants as they competed for Saudi funding. Even when the Pakistani government tried to curb religious militancy at home, it was still encouraging it in Afghanistan as a weapon against the Soviets.