God's Terrorists
Page 7
In return for their allegiance Muhammad ibn Saud offered his followers the prospect of conquest. Raiding one’s neighbours had been part and parcel of Bedouin life since before the days of the Prophet, but in 1746 Imam Al-Wahhab issued a formal proclamation of jihad against all those who refused to share his vision of Unity. Taking the early struggles of the Prophet against non-believers as its model, the Emir’s ghazu or war-parties began raiding deep into what were now proclaimed infidel territories, attacking the weakest first while their Imam secured non-aggression pacts with their more powerful neighbours. ‘By attacking the weaker singly and compelling them to join his standard against their neighbours,’ observed Lieutenant Francis Warden, author of the first British report on the Wahhabi phenomenon, Historical Sketch of the Wahabee tribe of Arabs 1795 to 1818, ‘the Wahabee [i.e., Muhammad ibn Saud] gradually increased his power to a height which enabled him to overawe the greater States.’
Whatever spiritual gloss he cared to put on it in his writings, under Al-Wahhab’s tutelage the Bedouin of Nejd became not so much holy warriors as fanatics without scruples. They preyed on their neighbours, each man in the raiding party setting out to plunder, destroy and kill bolstered by the conviction that he did so as a jihadi. One-fifth of the proceeds from these raids went to their emir, the rest being divided among the participating tribes. As for the imam and his Wahhabi ulema, they received the normal zakat or religious tax as required by the Quran of all true believers. Thus there was something in it for everyone – provided they were Wahhabi.
When in July 1929 the Wahhabi envoy Hafiz Wahba set out to explain the Wahhabi philosophy to his British audience at the Central Asian Society in London, he was at pains to draw parallels with the Protestant reformers in Europe, likening Ibn Taymiyya to his contemporary Martin Luther. The first European observers of the Wahhabis also drew parallels with their own Church. ‘The religion of the Wahabys may be called the Protestantism or even Puritanism of the Mohammedans’, noted J. H. Burckhardt:
The Wahaby acknowledges the Koran as a divine revelation; his principle is, ‘The Koran, and nothing but the Koran’ . . . He reproves the Muselmans of this age, for their impious vanity in dress, their luxury in eating and smoking. He asks them whether Mohammed dressed in pelisses, whether he ever smoked the argyle or the pipe? All his followers dress in the most simple garments, having neither about their own persons, nor their horses, any gold or silver; they abstain from smoking, which, they say, stupefies and intoxicates. They reject music, singing, dancing, and games of every kind, and live with each other (at least in the presence of their chief) on terms of most perfect equality.
Although Al-Wahhab’s main targets were the Sufis and the Shias, many of the most popular practices of Sunni Islam were also condemned as innovations or reversions to paganism. They included a host of expressions of religious devotion that had developed over the centuries, such as invoking the intercession of the Prophet, the saints or the angels; visiting or praying at the graves of holy men or erecting monuments over their graves; celebrating the Prophet’s birthday or the feasts of dead saints; and making votive offerings. At the same time, many everyday habits were also declared sinful, among them smoking tobacco or hashish, dancing, playing music, fortune-telling, dressing in silks, telling beads or wearing talismans. The shaving of beards, the wearing of robes that failed to show the ankle, the use of rosaries to count the ninety-nine names of God and much else besides was declared un-Islamic.
But the parallels with Puritanism went only so far. According to the Wahhabi code, the moment a Muslim deviated from Al-Wahhab’s interpretation of monotheism he became an unbeliever – and the moment he became an unbeliever his life and goods became forfeit. ‘Any doubt or hesitation’, states The Book of Unity, Kitab al-Tawhid, ‘deprives a man of immunity of his property and his life.’
When asked to name the chief qualities of their faith, Muslims almost invariably describe it as a religion of peace, using the adjectives ‘merciful’ and ‘compassionate’ to describe God, as set out in the famous invocation that makes up the first chapter of the Quran. The Arabic of the Quran is a richly symbolic language, full of nuances, ambiguities, and words that when pronounced with different inflections can convey wider meanings. It is also a source text full of seeming contradictions that demand scholarly guidance to be fully understood. By its exclusive interpretation of the Quran and the Hadith, Al-Wahhab’s theology threw overboard all the checks and balances that Islamic jurisprudence had developed over centuries of learning to shape a confusing and conflicting series of revelations delivered in hard times in a hard country in the seventh century into a model for civilised, theocratic living. And by its selective reading and its focus on those passages which gave licence to anathematise, persecute, and kill without mercy, Al-Wahhab’s Islam effectively sidelined the Quran’s central message of charity, tolerance, forgiveness and mercy.
At the heart of this selectivity was Al-Wahhab’s interpretation of jihad. Following Ibn Taymiyya’s lead, he dismissed as inauthentic the Prophet’s declaration of an end to the lesser jihad and the beginning of the greater. This proclamation finds no place either in the Book of Unity or in Al-Wahhab’s other key publication, Kitab al-Jihad, the Book of Struggle. Its author recognised the purpose of jihad to be the defence of Islam and the Islamic community – but for him, as for Ibn Taymiyya, that defence took only one form: violence against all who stood in Islam’s way. Polytheists and pagans were to be given one opportunity to convert, and became fair game thereafter. If they refused to submit or resisted they were to be killed, and if they were made prisoner and still refused to submit they should still be killed, although certain categories such as women, children, the elderly and slaves (and mullahs) might be spared. As for those who called themselves Muslims but were deviants and apostates who failed to acknowledge their falsehoods, they were to be shown no mercy. On the other hand, those who heeded and followed Imam Al-Wahhab’s teachings became sanctified warriors or, in his own words, ‘the army of God’. It became their duty to make jihad at least once a year as ordered by their Imam. This jihad could only take place by his specific order, and on his terms.
It has been argued recently on the basis of a study of Al-Wahhab’s writings preserved in Riyadh that the violence which characterised Wahhabism was the work of his successors and not promoted by the man himself. His writings do indeed show that Al-Wahhab always gave his neighbours an opportunity to convert before the Wahhabi ghazu were unleashed on them, and that when it suited him or when his neighbours were too powerful he made non-aggression pacts with them. Hitler applied much the same philosophy. What these writings also demonstrate is that the Wahhabi interpretation of jihad followed the selective trail first marked by Ibn Taymiyya. Nowhere in either the Book of Unity or the Book of Struggle is there to be found a single example of the many verses in the Quran that refer to non-violent means of defending Islam or propagating the faith, or which place specific restrictions on fighting (e.g., chapters and verses 2,109; 2,190; 2,194; 5,13; 6,106; 15, 94; 16,125; 22, 39-40; 29, 46; 42,15; 50,39; etc.). In the Book of Struggle Al-Wahhab turns for authority to just four verses from the Quran, precisely those verses most frequently cited by past militants such as Ibn Taymiyya and by present Islamist extremists whenever the call to jihad goes out. These include the much-quoted and much-abused ‘Verse of the Sword’ (chapter 9, verse 5), usually only quoted in part. The full verse reads: ‘Then, when the sacred months are over, kill the idolaters wherever you find them, take them [as captives], besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every point of observation. If they repent afterwards, perform the prayer and pay the alms, then release them. God is truly All-Forgiving, Merciful.’ In none of these four instances is reference made to the specific circumstances in which the Prophet originally dictated his statements. In the case of the Verse of the Sword, scholars of the Quran will point out that the whole chapter relates to the ending of a truce with non-believers that the Prophet Muhammad and his followers had
entered into, and that the verse should not be read in isolation. But then, literal and selective reading lies at the heart of fundamentalism, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Hindu.
In 1766 Muhammad ibn Saud was assassinated while at prayer and was succeeded as emir by his son Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud. The new emir built on and added to his father’s military successes – with his father-in-law at his elbow as both spiritual and tactical godfather. Even those biographies which extol his saintly virtues make it plain that Imam Al-Wahhab saw his duties as extending into the battlefield. He introduced firearms where the Bedouin had previously relied on the spear and the scimitar and he personally taught recruits how to handle this new weaponry. He also issued every holy warrior a firman or written order addressed to the gate-keeper of heaven, requiring him to be admitted forthwith as a martyr should he die in battle. The cult of martyrdom in Islam is traditionally associated with the Shias, arising from Imam Hussein’s seeking of martyrdom at Karbala. Now under the Wahhabis the prospect of dying in battle as a shahid or martyr became a powerful motivating factor, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Thus Emir Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud’s jihadis found themselves in a win-win situation: if they triumphed in battle they gained material benefits; if they were vanquished they went directly to Paradise.
Like the Pathans in their mountains, the Bedouin had always turned their hostile environment to their advantage. ‘Hunger, thirst and fatigue are the Wahabis’ natural allies,’ noted Louis de Corancez:
They have no discipline in combat, and are wary of engaging the enemy before he is weak enough to have lost the will to defend himself. Thus they pillage rather than wage war. They waver at the first sign of resistance, and are as speedy in fleeing from the enemy’s range as in pursuing him from beyond it. They cling to this course of action tenaciously, fleeing the enemy when he faces them and following in his steps when he in turn takes flight. Thus they spy on him for days on end, awaiting the opportunity to surprise and slaughter him without great danger, convinced that the finest victory lies in destroying everything without incurring any loses themselves.
The young emir and his older imam together improved upon this hit-and-run mode of warfare by inculcating a new sense of discipline among their soldiers, teaching them to make better use of the skills they already possessed: ‘Ibn Saud ordered that each dromedary should be mounted by two soldiers. He rationed not only the soldiers’ food, but also that of the camels, so that each was able to carry rations for a twenty-day journey . . . The two riders carry nothing except two goatskins, the one filled with water, the other with barley flour. When they become hungry they mix the flour in a little water. This is their only sustenance for weeks . . . Henceforth many armies were able to scour the desert and take their defenceless enemies by surprise.’ All these warriors were tribal levies, but three hundred of the best were selected to form a permanent force under the emir’s personal command. They were given fast horses, weapons and armour as well as other special privileges, and they became the vanguard of the Wahhabi ghazu or war party.
As his spiritual mentor grew older Emir Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud assumed greater authority, enforcing his father-in-law’s hard-line teaching with ever-increasing ruthlessness. According to Burckhardt, every non-Wahhabi tribe was first given the option to convert, and if its people refused they were condemned as meshrekin or heretics: ‘The Wahaby (as Ibn Saud, the chief, is emphatically styled) propagates his religion with the sword. Whenever he purposes to attack a district of heretics, he cautions them three times, and invites them to adopt his religion; after the third summons, he proclaims that the time for pardon has elapsed, and he then allows his troops to pillage and kill at their pleasure. All who are taken with arms are unmercifully put to death. This savage custom has inspired the Wahabys with a ferocious fanaticism that makes them dreadful to their adversaries.’ De Corancez confirms this ruthless approach to conversion:
At the moment when they were least expected, the Wahabis would arrive to confront the tribe they wished to subject, and a messenger from Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud would appear bearing a Koran in one hand and a sword in the other. His message was stark and simple: ‘Abd el Aziz to the Arabs of the tribe of ——, hail! Your duty is to believe in the book I send you. Do not be like the idolatrous Turks, who give God a human intermediary [a reference to the Wahhabi belief in a unitary God]. If you are true believers, you shall be saved; otherwise, I shall wage war upon you until death.’
Faced by such a stark choice, few tribes resisted. In 1773 the Emir’s strongest opponent in Nejd was defeated and the Wahhabis won the town of Riyadh, which now became the military base for further conquests extending far beyond the Nejd plateau.
In that same year Al-Wahhab, by then aged seventy, resigned the office of imam. Whether this was a voluntary or involuntary surrender is unclear. But the title was then assumed not by his eldest son or by some other leading figure from the Wahhabi ulema, as might have been expected, but by the Emir, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud. The word imam means ‘one who leads’ and is usually read in Sunni Islam as ‘one who leads the prayers’, but it is quite clear that Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud used the title to present himself as spiritual head of the Wahhabi ulema. Nor is it possible to ignore the word’s associations with the supreme religious authority and infallibility of the imams who guided the early Islamic community in the first decades after the death of Muhammad and are revered as the al- Salaf al-Salih or ‘the Righteous Forefathers’. When Emir and Imam Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud took the title for himself he may have done so in much the same spirit as that in which King Henry VIII assumed the title of Defender of the Faith after breaking away from the authority of Rome – but it was at this juncture that Wahhabism began to take on the characteristics of a cult built around the infallibility of its emir-cum-imam.
For the next two decades Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud alone directed the Wahhabi expansion in the dual role of temporal leader and spiritual head of the Wahhabi ulema, his genius as a military commander and popular ruler enabling him to enlarge his Wahhabi chiefdom to an extent his father and father-in-law could scarcely have dreamed of. His first mentor and father-in-law Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab died in 1792, leaving twenty widows and eighteen children, five of whom became renowned Wahhabi religious teachers in their turn. This dynasty became known as the Aal as-Sheikh, the Family of the Sheikhs, with its most senior male members assuming the title of Mufti or chief judge of the Wahhabi ulema, so helping to maintain the dynastic links between the Ibn Sauds and the Aal as-Sheikh which continues to this day.
By the start of the nineteenth century a common identity had begun to take shape among the disparate tribes of the Arabian peninsula, superseding all other local loyalties. It was an Arab identity but also a Wahhabi identity, both personified in Emir and Imam Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud. As Burckhardt put it:
All the Arabs, even his enemies, praise Saud for his wisdom in counsel and his skill in deciding litigations; he was very learned in the Muselman [Muslim] law; and the rigour of his justice, although it disgusted many of his chiefs, endeared him to the great mass of his Arabs . . . A country once conquered by the Wahaby enjoys under him the most perfect tranquillity. In Nejd and Hedjaz the roads are secure, and the people free from any kind of oppression. The Muselmans are forced to adopt his system; but the Jews and Christians are not molested in exercising the respective religions of their ancestors, on condition of paying tribute.
By all accounts Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud was handsome in demeanour and modest in disposition, his only extravagance a passion for fine horses and his only weakness, in Arab eyes, a morbid fear of assassination that caused him to direct his armies into battle from a secure position to the rear. Yet it remains an incontrovertible fact that under his aegis the Wahhabi ghazu brought terror to large parts of Arabia as far south as Oman and the Yemen, and to the lands to the north as far as Baghdad and Damascus.
In 1802 a Wahhabi raiding band led by the Emir’s eldest son Saud ibn Saud attacked Karbala in modern-day Iraq, the most
sacred shrine of the Shias, containing the tomb of their chief saint, Husayn, grandson of the Prophet and son of Imam Ali. ‘They pillaged the whole of it and plundered the Tomb of Hossein,’ wrote Lieutenant Francis Warden, ‘slaying in the course of the day, with circumstances of peculiar cruelty, above five thousand of the inhabitants. This event, which made a deep impression on the minds of the Turks, Arabs and Persians, was attributed to the guilty negligence of the Turkish Government, in failing to keep the Tomb of Hossein in a proper state of defence.’ Huge amounts of booty were seized, the emir-cum-imam taking the usual one-fifth for himself and sharing out the rest among his Wahhabi soldiery, a single share to every foot-soldier and a double share to every horseman.
In 1803 Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud requested and obtained the permission of the Sharif of Mecca, guardian of Islam’s holiest shrine, to perform the Hajj to Mecca, whereupon his Wahhabis laid waste to Islam’s holiest shrine. According to T. E. Ravenshaw, author of A Memorandum on the Sect of Wahabees, ‘They killed many Sheikhs and other believers who refused to adopt Wahabeeism; they robbed the splendid tombs of the Mahomedan saints who were interred there; and their fanatical zeal did not even spare the famous Mosque, which they robbed of the immense treasures and costly furniture to which each Mahomedan Prince of Europe, Asia and Africa had contributed his share.’