Fault Lines in the Faith: Free Read | PROLOGUE
Covering the expansion of political Islam in the modern Arab and non-Arab world until the dawn of Crown Prince Bin Salman era in Saudi Arabia, Hasnain’s thorough research explores the radicalization of Muslim youth in North America and Europe, as well as the sectarian fault lines and rise of the Shia crescent in the Middle-East.
PROLOGUE
Muslims and Persians considered themselves culturally superior to Arabs. Furthermore, the religious revolution had also brought to the fore the age-old Sunni–Shia rivalry in the Middle East. Ironically, the Wahhabi–Salafi dominated Sunni Muslims of Saudi Arabia consider
Shia Muslims as apostates.The second apocalyptic event took place in November 1979—the
seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Juhayman al-Otaybi, a Saudi militant, inspired by Wahhabi Salafism. He was a member of an influential family from Najd and former personnel in the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces. He recruited a group of men and trained them first to seize the Grand Mosque and eventually overthrow the Saudi royal regime. He had chosen the first of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, for the act, when hundreds of believers converged to circumambulate the Holy Kaaba after the dawn prayers. According to the attackers, ‘The ruling al-Saud family had lost its legitimacy because it was corrupt, ostentatious and had destroyed Islamic basic values by aggressive policy of Westernizing the Saudi society. Al-Otaybi was largely inspired by the fourteenth century Islamist scholar Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328), and the eighteenth century Islamist theologian and scholar Muhammad ibn Abd
al-Wahhab (1703–1792). With his huge religious standing, Abd al-Wahhab pushed the boundaries of Ibn Taymiyyah’s ideology.
He extensively researched on Taymiyyah’s works and extracted his core beliefs in order to drill them once again into his contemporary Muslim society. During the time of Abd al-Wahhab, the Arabian Peninsula did not have any unified state organization. His first priority was to unite the Arab Muslims in their ‘initial purity’ by implementing Ibn Taymiyyah’s ideology. He started discussions with the chiefs of various settlements in the region. He convinced them that simply fighting on trivial issues would not bring them any dividend; the best thing to do was to return to the teachings of the Holy Quran and the Prophet’s Sunnah, and make them attractive to all the communities across settlements. He articulated the views written in his book Kitab Al-Tawhid (Book on Monotheism) in which he underscored all the prevalent deviations from the kind of Islam that he believed was the right one. He opposed obeisance at the graves of saints for blessings. He maintained that venerating the cult of saints was like worshipping idols and strongly denounced Sufism—a flexible, tolerant and open form of Islam. In 1744, Abd al-Wahhab made a historic agreement with Ibn Saud, an ambitious chieftain of Diriyah province in Najd, the central region of the Arabian Peninsula.
The agreement was a game changer for Abd al-Wahhab to legitimize his teachings and unleash an extremely puritanical narrative of Islam. Various Muslim settlements in the region were united in bringing back the early mythical days of Islam when it was assumed to be ‘uncorrupted’. This is called Salafi Islam. For the first time on a large scale, theMuslim communities of the Arabian Peninsula started marginalizing Sufism, a religious idea which believes in syncretism and tolerance of other religions. Ever since the formation of the kingdom in 1932, the Saudi royal family had been working in harmony with the Wahhabi clerics to systematically push the ideology among the communities. Nonetheless, the real game changer was the discovery of oil in the eastern province of the kingdom in 1938 and the subsequent glut of petrodollars that helped them operate independently with huge funds at their disposal. The Al Saud’s extended family members and succeeding rulers had an ostentatious lifestyle with luxurious palaces and yachts built or bought for them. Whereas, the religious establishment had total freedom to fund mosques, schools and Islamic centres globally and to promote the Wahhabi–Salafi strain of Islam, pushing the tolerant stream of Sufi Islam to the periphery. The strict Wahhabi teachings—aggressively advocated along with a generous financial package—found many takers throughout the Muslim world, with a vast majority of Sunni followers being lured to the fundamentalist ideology and the path of extremism.
The third apocalyptic event of the year 1979 occurred in the month of December when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the US administration led by Ronald Reagan decided to defeat the Soviet Union by arming the Islamists in Afghanistan. The group who fought the American war consisted of Afghanis, mujahideens (fighters converged in Pakistan from the Arab and Muslim world), Taliban (young students from Pakistani madrasas) and mercenaries. The American CIA made enormous funds available to the jihadi groups through the Pakistani ISI so as to bleed the Soviet Union using Islamists. This US project was called Operation Cyclone, the longest and most expensive covert operation the CIA ever undertook. The funding rose to US$630 million per year in 1987. The Pakistan government received more than US$20 billion to train and arm the Afghan resistance groups. The support proved vital to the mujahideen efforts against the Soviets. During this time, Arab volunteers, strongly subscribing to the Wahhabi–Salafi ideology, came to Pakistan in large numbers to build support groups. Even Saudi Arabia’s leadership poured millions of dollars into it.
Osama bin Laden, scion of the famous and fabulously rich bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia, landed in Pakistan with a large group of his Arab followers. Soon, jihadi volunteers from Yemen and Syria joined the holy war against the Soviet Union. The US-built Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other light weaponry were brought and distributed to the fighters through the Pakistani ISI. The corrupt Pakistani army generals swindled huge amounts of US funds and sold weaponry, including the Stinger missiles and AK-47s, in the open market of Karachi, Quetta and Peshawar. The Soviet invasion also caused the migration of around 4 million ordinary Afghans, displaced internally and across the border, into Pakistan. They moved into the border regions and settled in the sprawling refugee camps along the Durand Line, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The young boys were admitted to thousands of madrasas, financially supported by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi–Salafi establishments. They were largely given hate lessons against Sufi Islam and Shiism. One of the by-products of the US decision to support mujahideen in Afghanistan was the emergence of a new generation of student community (taliban), who were also taught in their early years about the Islamic sanction and benefits of the Supreme Sacrifice by different means, including suicide bombing. The students who graduated from these madrasas were well armed to spread the extremist version of Islam. When the Soviet Union decided to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989, the power vacuum was filled by the warring groups of former warlords.
This triggered a civil war that totally devastated the Afghan countryside. Smartly, the security establishment of the Pakistani government thought it to be the right moment to increase its influence in Afghanistan. They termed this as ‘strategic depth’, which would be highly crucial given the possibility of India trying to push them from the eastern border. After the initial military training, the Pakistan establishment pushed the Afghan Taliban from their madrasas, arming them with weapons and tanks. The friendly Saudi Arabia provided them with funds to purchase pickup trucks. A new army of Taliban, backed by the Pakistan army, entered Afghanistan and quelled the warring factions of warlords and established a Taliban-led Islamic government, based on the strict Sharia law. It was a model originally proposed by Ibn Taymiyyah, the fourteenth century Islamic scholar, and revived and institutionalized by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab in Saudi Arabia, after signing a pact with the Ibn Saud family in 1744. Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia recognized the Mullah Omar government as the legitimate administration of Afghanistan. The US intelligence agencies were also complicit in endorsing this failed nation with a fundamentalist character, without comprehending its long-term consequences.
Soon, the Kabul government implemented Sharia law. All women were put under strict face veil, women’s education was banned and they were removed from government jobs throughout Afghanistan. After installing the Taliban-led government, the US administration declared this Afghanistan project as ‘mission accomplished’ and behaved as if they had nothing to do with a country in which they had poured billions of dollars to arm a breed of ultra fundamentalist jihadi fighters. The US intelligence or administration traditionally never had a post-military-intervention strategy. Years later, they repeated the same mistake after the Iraq invasion, and left the country without any post-invasion governance plan in place. The result was profoundly devastating as a full-blown sectarian conflict was unleashed, which facilitated the eventual founding of ISIS, making the world witness a second wave of global jihadi terrorism by the followers of the Wahhabi–Salafi ideology.