Article of Wahhabism

[preemptingyou03]

http://www.globalpolitician.com/articleshow.asp?ID=1879&cid=2&sid=93

Of Women and Wahhabism
The Strange Backwardness of Saudi Arabia
By Nicholas M. Guariglia
May 16, 2006

Some four years ago, an all-girl’s school in the Saudi holy city of Mecca went ablaze in fire. The girls –– around 800 of them –– fled the building in a hastened frenzy. What a sight it must have been to see hundreds of young Saudi women escape a burning structure without the time or foresight to put on their headscarves and abayas… such a sight, indeed, that the kingdom’s religious police, the shadowy and much feared mutaween, attempted to keep the remaining girls inside the building. Fifteen of the girls died, not due to police negligence or despite police heroics, but due to a separate and secret police force actively hindering their escape. Their apparently heinous crime was having the nerve to show their faces in public, even under such extenuating circumstances.

There is something backward about rescuers seeking the death of those in need, and the phrase “rescue” referring not to the saving of potential victims but to avoiding the shame society as a whole would have to suffer if an egregious thing like a woman’s face was revealed. But this backwardness is wholly normal in the bizarro-world that is Saudi Arabia.

The creepy mutaween roam the streets like hungry vultures looking for un-Islamic activities. The definition of such activities is quite broad: reading unauthorized books, the open use of unauthorized electronics, women showing too much (or any) skin, gays holding hands, or even heterosexuals holding hands. Women walking alone are surrounded and taunted in a hooliganish West Side Story manner; kidnappings are usual, rapes frequent.

The stated doctrine of the mutaween rests in its eerie translation: the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Their existence ensures an eclectic mix of seventh-century tenets and a Jehovah’s Witnesses-like subculture on steroids, where everything from Valentine’s Day to excessive happiness is outlawed. When Saudi singer and Reality TV star Hisham Abdel Rahman graciously accepted kisses and handshakes from enthralled fans in a Riyadh mall, he was quickly arrested and detained for his “improper” actions which “undermined virtue” and caused an “indecent scene.” For all the hysteria over the Congress-approved Patriot Act, the next time Rumsfeld’s own secret morality-enforcers ransack MTV’s Real World house and capture various cast members, let me know.


For this reason and more, novelist and now-retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters classifies the terror war within the context of emancipating women and empowering half of the Arab world’s population. “The core issues for the terrorists are the interpretation of God’s will and the continued oppression of women,” Peters states, continuing, “Nothing so threatens Islamic extremists as the freedom Western women enjoy.” He has gone on to describe the Middle East as “sexually infantile,” like a “big junior high school dance, with the boys on one side of the gym and the girls on the other,” whereas al Qaida and likeminded affiliates are “homoerotic,” comprising “the last great boy’s club, meeting in caves and warning girls to stay out.”

And in reading his descriptions –– and comparing them to the literature and rantings of a bin Laden or a Dr. al Zawahiri –– you will come to find that, sadly, this war, in its broader interpretation, is in fact mainly about liberating young Muslim women and killing the young Muslim men who get in the way. From there, you must wonder why Peters is considered divisive at all, for his creed of Arab women’s rights is light-years ahead of any of the rhetoric said or actions done by any of the various feminist organizations in the West (who usually don an antiwar position).

This is not to say that there has not been a single feminist who has openly used the war against terrorism as a catalyst for greater political and social reform in the Arab world. Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam Today –– and recipient of death threats that’d make Salman Rushdie jealous –– is perhaps the most prominent Muslim woman who, from her Western laptop, exposes the high levels of sexism and racism that are so prevalent inside the Gulf dictatorships.

Ms. Manji abhors the commonness of anti-Semitism as well as gender inequality that exists within societies where her coreligionists reign. She favors the Islamic concept of ijtihad, which describes the process of making decisions of legality by independent interpretations of legal sources. This tradition, she claims, has largely been neglected by present day Muslims outside of the West, who abide by and enforce ancient dogma and warped creeds. These seventh-century Middle Eastern practices, disguised as righteous articles of faith, have at their core a theocratic authoritarianism that is not historically unusual, but certainly unprecedented in the year 2006, where secular law and human rights seem to prevail around the rest of the planet over floggings, loppings, and genital mutilation.


So alas, there is a totality to the Saudi royal family’s grip on society, which stems directly from their entrenchment in the totalitarian Wahhabi pathology. Wahhabism derives from literalist interpretations of the Qur’an within the Sunni denomination of Islam. The history of the Wahhabist movement consists of complex and odd relationships, extremist derivatives, and religious offshoots, from Salafism to Qutbism and beyond.

But what remains crystal clear is that sometime in 1744, theologian Muhammad ibn Abdal Wahhab –– studier of the fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiya –– married his daughter to the son of Muhammad bin Saud. From there on arose a centuries-long rendezvous between the teachings of Wahhab and an Arab tribal assemblage, aiming to establish ideological dominion over the peninsula. The vision for this establishment sparked both the first and second Saudi state, which struggled to assimilate various Arabian peoples under the principalities of Wahhabism. For a short period this movement was all but exiled, with the Ottoman-backed Al Rashid dynasty in Ha’il ascending to power… only to see the reconquering of Riyadh in 1902 and the reestablishment of the Wahhabis in 1932, under the rule of Ibn Saud.

From there, the contemporary House of Saud was born. But in terms of how the sheikhdom treats its females (and everyone else), our so-called friends are anything but cotemporary. The supposedly “reformist” King Abdullah recently demanded Saudi newspaper editors stop publishing pictures of women because they could lead young men astray: “One must think, ‘Do they want their daughter, their sister, or their wife to appear in this way?’ Of course, no one would accept this.”

Reading this in our leisure and liberalism, we correctly concentrate on the absurdity of such a mindset, but may still overlook an important fact: the newspapers Abdullah lectures are state-run; the editors that abide are state-puppets. “Do not write anything that can be harmful to the country,” he warned… and yet we pretend to be shocked when an entire continent goes berserk due to cartoon scribblings freely drawn and freely printed in a free press in Denmark.


But the problem does not end with the royal family’s fascistic undertones and religiously intolerant platform. Like a psychosis that has metastasized itself into a far greater pestilence, the inherent precepts of the Wahhabi ideology –– antithetical with Western civilization –– have spread throughout the madrassas and mosques of the world, from urban Cairo slums to “reeducation camps” in distant and rural Waziristan.

It is for this reason that, for all the complexities of Middle East geopolitics, the Saudi-U.S. alliance is without a doubt the most confusing. The past justification for such a partnership was, in the least, convincing: “Keep the oil flowing and the Soviets out.” We apparently couldn’t afford to be idealistic during a half-century nuclear standoff in a bipolar Cold War world, where Marxist control of Arabian oil revenue could have ensured the continued existence –– and possible triumph –– of the Moscow monolith.

But that age has passed. No longer must we worry about communist infiltration into Mecca (why we ever fretted over the achievement of atheism in the place of Islam’s birth beats me anyway). The old-school realpolitik idiocy that the State Department espoused –– which promised to bring us Middle East “stability” at “any price” (like lower Manhattan?) –– needs to be strangled and thrown into the proverbial geopolitical dumpster. It failed. By pushing for social reform –– and by creating it in a constitutional Iraq –– we are witnessing the beginnings of a gradual but great distancing between Washington and the Saudi regime. We’ve been stagnantly stuck in this stupid status quo, where our strategic ally is our ideological adversary; where we are economically interdependent with those we are culturally incompatible.

The royal family employs absurdly efficient propagandist techniques, assuring us slow-minded Westerners that if we seek liberalization abroad, we’re likely to get far worse outcomes. Prince Saud al Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, did so just the other day. Speaking of the terrorists-gone-politicians Hamas, he mocked our efforts to promote democracy in the Arab world: “You are dissatisfied with the results of the election which brought (the) Hamas government,” he reiterated, continuing, “Of course we always warned against elections, that sometimes they bring results that you don’t want.” But then came the doozy: “That’s why we haven’t applied the system yet in Saudi Arabia.”

From his perspective, that’s baloney. The reason the Saudi regime disallows a genuine electoral and parliamentary process is because they are fat, pampered, oversexed, unelected, pretty-boy monarchs who understandably like the fact that they’re in power. But the sad part of his sober calculation is that there is some truth to it. Arab states with “friendly leaders” like the tyrants of Saudi Arabia largely have hostile populations. This fact, however, does not mean the solution is more cozying up to our dictatorial buddies while they tell their people Zionists and Jews and Crusaders are they reason the mutaween secret police have to exist. It is true that Mr. bin Laden is a folk hero in the streets of the kingdom, and if an election were held tomorrow –– prior to a process of democratization –– he, or someone like him, could come to power.

Foreign policy “realists” float this idea around over our heads, demanding we crazy idealists wake up and realize our strategic interests are at stake if we start toying around with the naïve idea of allowing those people all the way over there to self-govern. But is it not these very same analysts and pundits that insist we get to the “core issue” and “root cause” of jihadist terrorism? Where the diverge occurs is on this single issue: some insist it is our policies, that if altered, would end the indoctrination in Pakistani madrassas, the racism in Egyptian state-run papers, the fascism in Damascus, and the incitement in Palestinian territories. Others believe the root cause stems from the unholy alliance between autocracies and theocrats –– and when the world, including the U.S., places its respective strategic worries over moral clarity –– which allows tolerance and acceptance of brutal kleptocracies, which spawns such indoctrination, which creates fundamentalist mindsets. No freedom equals mass resentment, which means a fertile ground for hijacking peaceful minds and transforming them into terroristic ones.


So we’re in a paradox, aren’t we? We have a Saudi government that arrests terrorists (which is good) and then, just down the road, subsidizes the local mosque with the twisted imam that preaches jihadism, thus creating terrorists (which is bad). This both-sides-of-the-fence policy on al Qaida, and jihadists as a whole, is the general survival-mode policy that most of the region’s autocrats use to maintain power: fight al Qaida tactically, to keep the U.S. happy; aid al Qaida strategically, to keep them happy.

It is now commonly accepted that this is precisely what the Saudis do. On the one hand, they need to kill al Qaidists like Abdel Aziz al Muqrin who view the regime’s intermingling economic relationship with the West as sacrilegious. Yet on the other hand, the Saudis are churning out such people by aiding their rise. Both the House of Saud and al Qaida, after all, are ideological companions. Laurent Murawic –– the much-villainized author and Saudi critic –– hits this note perfectly when he explains the Saudi-al Qaida Wahhabi version of Islam as an Islam “that kept itself totally isolated from the great centers of the Golden Age, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Kayruwan, Samarkand and Tashkent,” and a “creed which returns to an imagined, and wholly fantastical, seventh-century Islam.”

Why, then, do we see al Qaida attacks inside Saudi territory and Saudi police arresting al Qaida members –– and how are we supposed to perceive these events? Murawic’s explanation is blunt: “You can’t breed attack dogs and hope they will never come back to bite you.” And that is exactly what the royals have been doing for decades: exporting terrorism across the globe with the intent of keeping it out of the kingdom and keeping their grip on power a certainty.

It could be said that the only difference between the Saudi elite and the hierarchs of al Qaida is the former have oil, power, and a state to rule… and the latter do not. Therefore it could be said the princes in Riyadh prefer a Stalinist technique of regulated terrorism –– to “protect the fatherland,” i.e., maintain power –– whereas bin Laden and his henchmen seek a Trotskyite form of permanent revolution –– they have no fatherland to rule –– and therefore opt for deregulated terrorism, which holds “no tactical consideration,” in Murawic’s words.


What should –– and could –– the United States do with such a complicated and bizarre relationship? As usual, the answer for complexity is often found somewhere in simplicity. We ought to start speaking openly about the oddities of current Saudi culture and the inherently undemocratic nature of the Saudi monarchy. We ought to encourage Saudi liberalization, with the sober assessment that there is no such thing as a prominent Saudi reformer in the royal family. We need to seek and find Saudi democrats and empower them, giving them a voice they do not currently have. We should force the king to explain why the mutaween is a legitimate police force. And we must continue our current tactical counterterrorism relationship with the regime –– but with a stern reminder that we view arresting Wahhabis and the promotion of Wahhabism as contradictory, self-serving, and self-preserving.

Punishments are also an option. If the regime continues to export Wahhabi theology, it could be added to the State Department’s list of terror sponsors, or there could be a hypothetical Saudi Accountability Act passed in Congress, as has been done for others. Members of the royal family could be targeted via travel sanctions, restricting their ability to leave the country. And in the U.N. –– where Zionism was once wrongly defined as racism –– Wahhabism could be correctly defined as racism and, as we see, sexism and fascism. This strategic distancing, coupled with weaning ourselves off of foreign sources of oil, would be a healthy development in the Middle East and an important, and ultimately more humane, new chapter in the war against terrorists.

Fast forward a decade or two from now –– when Saudi demographics are dramatically different, al Qaida as a centralized network is gone as we know it, and most of our non-Wahhabi pan-Arabist secular problems like Ba’athism and non-Sunni Shi’a pathologies like Khomeinism have been addressed and discredited –– it is highly possible that the kingdom will be recognized as the epicenter of terrorism that it truly is before some great democratic revolution ever occurs. And we need to accept that, while empowering Saudi women to stand up, encouraging Saudi minority sects to possibly secede, and imploring CENTCOM commanders to dust off and spice up contingency plans for militarily seizing and retaking the Saudi oil fields, in the not-all-too-unlikely event a rogue prince ascends to power and cuts off the global petroleum supply to the planet’s industrialized economies.

What kind of wacky world of fascists, proliferation, petrodollars, globalization, cave-recorded audiotapes with promises of death and doom, and grandiose but loony –isms and –ocracies are we being introduced to? It seems as if most greet this new state of affairs with apathy, others with cynicism, and still others with anxiousness and pessimism. Very few accept such difficulties as difficult, but still doable… with a sense of sternness intertwined with unrelenting optimism for the future, and appreciation for past hurdles cleared by those who came before us. At the present, most observers wonder which way Iraq will go… when they should really be looking southward to the birthplace of Muhammad with greater concern and curiosity.

 

[waltky]

Granny says dey look like a buncha mutaweenies...

Saudi Religious Police Work to Improve Image
March 27, 2013 - In January 2012, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia dismissed the head of the powerful religious police and replaced him with a reported moderate — a move designed to appease growing complaints about abuses of power by a much-feared group known as the mutaween.

Since then, the new leader, Sheikh Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, has restricted the mutaween’s powers. Even so, many Saudis, especially women, say the changes are not enough. Hardly a week seems to go by that Saudi Arabia’s religious police don’t make the headlines — breaking up drug rings, arresting bootleggers, admonishing women for what they consider immodest dress. Sometimes the mutaween themselves become objects of ridicule — such as when they shut down a dinosaur exhibit in a shopping mall or banned cats and dogs as pets. And sometimes, mutaween actions have tragic consequences, such as the Mecca school fire of March 2002, when the religious police obstructed efforts to rescue female students because they might not be properly dressed. At least 14 girls burned to death, generating outrage across the globe.

Saudi members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or religious police, attend training in Riyadh

Historic roots

The religious police force is a relatively recent phenomenon in Saudi Arabia. The Islamic fundamentalist Wahhabis of the early 19th century were the first to use a religious police force to enforce religious laws they believed had been compromised under the Ottoman Empire. Scolding and coercing, the early mutaween ensured the public went to the mosques at prayer time, abstained from smoking, drinking, playing music or, in the case of women, dressing immodestly. Saudi Princess Basmah bint Saud Al-Saud, who now lives in London, goes back much further in the region’s history of religious enforcement. She says that Islamic religious enforcer was actually a woman and tells the story of Shifa bint Abdullah bin Abd Shams.

During the Prophet Mohamed’s lifetime, Shifa worked as a nurse, a healer and a teacher. Later, according to Basmah and other historical sources, the second caliph, Omar bin al-Khattab, appointed Shifa as the market controller in Medina, responsible for supervising all trade to guard against cheating, fraud and other violations. “She actually used to go to the market every morning with a big stick,” Basmah laughs, “telling men off when they were annoying the ladies or even annoying other customers.”

It was Basmah’s grandfather, the modern Kingdom’s founder Abdulaziz Al Saud, who created the Committee for the Protection of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice — which locals call the Hai’a. She says the Committee was intended to curb illegal trade activity, just as Shifa had done — not enforce morality. She blames the influx of the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt in the mid-1950s for bringing religious intolerance to Saudi Arabia. Under their influence, Basmah suggests, the mutaween, eventually began to write their own rules. But aren’t they supervised by the monarchy? Basmah answers, “As time goes on, sometimes you lose a grip on things, like a father and a mother with their children. Every time a child goes to the father, he will tell them, ‘Go to your mother!’ And at the end of that day, that child would never even go to the father anymore, because he would know where the decision-making really is.”

Token reforms?

See also:

Saudi religious police lift ban on women on bikes
Apr 1,`13 -- A Saudi newspaper says the kingdom's religious police are now allowing women to ride motorbikes and bicycles but only in restricted, recreational areas.

The Al-Yawm daily on Monday cited an unnamed official from the powerful religious police as saying women can ride bikes in parks and recreational areas but they have to be accompanied by a male relative and dressed in the full Islamic head-to-toe abaya.

Saudi Arabia follows an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam and bans women from driving. Women are also banned from riding motorcycles or bicycles in public places. The newspaper didn't say what triggered the lifting of the ban.

The official says women may not use the bikes for transportation but "only for entertainment" and that they should shun places where young men gather "to avoid harassment."

Source