Chapter V: RADICAL ISLAM RESURGENT

The Main Enemy:  Islamism
Chapter V: Radical Islam Resurgent

When did Radical Islam or Islamism first come into being as a significant phenomenon internationally?

It is well-known that several strands of Moslem radicalism have existed independently in a number of geographic areas since the early decades of the twentieth century. These include:

*the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood (Ikhwan al Moslemin) founded in 1928 as a reaction to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s abolishment of the Caliphate in 1924.

*the Deobandi Islamic school in India and its proselytizing arm, the Islamic missionary movement of Tablighi Jamaat.

*the preservation and growth of the Wahhabi extremist creed under the protection of the Saudi Kingdom in Arabia in the 1930s and beyond. 

This chapter will focus primarily on Wahhabism as the primary driver of present-day Islamism, made possible by Saudi oil money.

The term Wahhabism  is from the Arabic wahhabiya, a fundamentalist school in Islam practiced by the followers of the eighteenth-century Islamic cleric Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-92) from the Najd region of central Arabia.

An alternate term for Wahhabism is Salafism.  Salaf is Arabic for "forefather," thus Salafis demand a return to the Islam alleged to be practiced by the founding forefathers of Islam in the 7^th century.  Al-Wahhab is regarded as the principal advocate of Salafism.

Wahhabism is the official state religion in Saudi Arabia and the dominant creed in some other parts of the Arabian Peninsula.

Beginning in the 1970s, it has been exported and promoted outside of Arabia with the help of large-scale funding by Saudi Arabia and has become the dominant idiom of Sunni Islam in diaspora communities in non-Moslem countries.

Wahhabism has much in common with the worldview of the Moslem Brotherhood and the Deobandis from South Asia, and is an integral part of the core ideology of the Wahhabi/Salafi school of radical Islam that motivates Islamist extremism and terrorism.

Most adherents of Wahhabism do not refer to themselves as Wahhabis but as Salafis since they consider naming anything after an individual idolatrous. To that extent, the use of the term Wahhabism or Wahhabi  is often an indication of a critical attitude toward the creed.

Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab began preaching an extreme, literalist version of Islam in Najd, Saudi Arabia, in the 1730s that recognized only the first generations of Moslems under the "rightly guided" (rashidun) caliphs to have been true Moslems and declared Islam as practiced after that to have been polluted by illegitimate innovations (bidah) and polytheism (shirk).

He took it upon himself to purify the faith by preaching strict monotheism (tawhid) and banning numerous popular worship practices of the time as idolatrous. He was particularly hostile to Sufis and Shiites, whom he considered apostates.

Over time his teaching evolved to the point where any Moslem who did not agree with his views could be declared an apostate (takfir) and subjected to violence.

In 1744, Abd al-Wahhab entered into an alliance with Mohammed ibn Saud, the progenitor of the House of Saud, under the terms of which Ibn Saud was to retain political leadership, while the cleric’s ideas were formalized as the official religion of Saud’s fiefdom, and Wahhab and his descendents were put in charge of the religious establishment in perpetuity. This alliance has lasted to the present day.

Shortly after this alliance was formed, the new allies declared jihad on the neighboring Moslem tribes and violently subdued and plundered them.

This tradition of unprovoked violence in the name of religion continued for many decades. In 1802 the Wahhabis sacked the Shiite holy city of Karbala in present-day Iraq, murdered thousands, and destroyed the tomb of the revered Shiite saint and grandson of Prophet Mohammed, Imam Hussein. 

Wahhabism remained a marginal extremist phenomenon opposed by the vast majority of Moslem believers, until Saudi Arabia found itself the recipient of huge windfall profits from its oil exports beginning in the early 1970s.

One way in which the Saudi kingdom sought to expand its influence abroad and, at the same time, deflect the attention of radical Wahhabis from its own corrupt establishment was to fund lavishly the export of Wahhabism beyond its borders.

This has been especially the case with respect to non-Moslem countries where, according to Saudi figures, Riyadh has spent over $80 billion between 1973 and 2002 on Wahhabi-oriented Islamic activities. The result has been a huge international network of Wahhabi mosques, Islamic centers, madrassas (Islamic schools), and charities that constitute the actual infrastructure of Islamic extremism worldwide.

By the 1940s, following WWII and the beginning of the decolonization process, the Moslem Brotherhood (MB) expanded dramatically throughout the Arab world, while, at the same time, a virulent strand of Islamism made its appearance in the Indian subcontinent under the ideological leadership of Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903-1978), a hugely influential Pakistani Islamist thinker and politician.

While these various movements and personalities occasionally influenced each other through their written work, there was little direct interaction among them and no sense of a common cause.

This began to change in the late 1950s and 1960s. A long-simmering conflict between the Egyptian government under Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Moslem Brotherhood eventually escalated into several major government crackdowns on the MB, with dozens of its members, including its leading theologian Sayyid Qutb, tortured, tried, and executed, thousands imprisoned, and many more expelled from the country.

Most of the latter found refuge and financial support in Saudi Arabia, whose Wahhabi version of Islam resembled closely the radical Salafism of the Ikhwan. Not inconsequential was also the fact that, at the time, the Saudi state was at loggerheads with Nasser‘s crypto-socialist, pro-Soviet regime on a variety of issues.

This marked the beginning of a strategic alliance between the well-honed organizational and conspiratorial skills of the Moslem Brotherhood and Saudi petro-dollars that were just starting to flow in. Many Ikhwan members found employment in Saudi religious institutions, and Riyadh also made it possible for hundreds if not thousands of MB cadres to enroll in European universities.

One of the important early results of this alliance was the founding, with the help of prominent Ikhwan intellectuals like Said Ramadan and Kamal el-Helbawy, of key Saudi-sponsored and funded Islamist front organizations, such as the Moslem World League (MWL) in the 1960s and the World Assembly of Moslem Youth (WAMY) a bit later.

This was followed by the establishment of other important Saudi fronts, like Al Haramain and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) that not only engaged in sponsoring Islamist activities but also directly financed terrorism.[1]

It is interesting to note that the founding of the MWL was also the occasion for the first practical cooperation among the Wahhabis, the MB, and the Pakistani Islamists as represented by Abul Ala Mawdudi, who along with Said Ramadan, became a founding director of the Moslem League.

The MWL, which is headquartered in Jeddah and controlled by the Saudi state, was envisaged as the first major Islamist front organization and a key player of an international Islamic Movement in the making. It continues to play an indispensable role in worldwide Islamization efforts by the Wahhabis and their MB and Pakistani allies.

The internationalization of the Islamist movement under Saudi state sponsorship signified by the establishment of MWL remains the dominant paradigm of radical Islam to this day. 

Another key milestone was the establishment by MB activists and Saudi money of Moslem Student Associations as the first Islamist outposts in Western educational systems in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States in 1962 and 1963.[2]

The Moslem Student Association of the United States and Canada, founded at the University of Illinois by some seventy MB adherents with money from the Moslem World League, for instance, was the first radical Islamist organization in America and the progenitor of virtually all Wahhabi/Ikhwan-affiliated organizations in the country to this day.

Islamism Comes of Age
The decade of the 1970s marked another watershed in the fortunes of radical Islam in the aftermath of the 1973 oil embargo of the United States by Saudi Arabia and a nearly hundred­fold increase in the kingdom’s oil revenues over the next ten years.  Saudi oil revenues jumped from $1 billion in 1970 to $116 billion in 1980.  

Suddenly flush with unprecedented amounts of petro-dollars, the Saudis dramatically boosted their financial support for radical Islam worldwide, and especially in the West. According to Saudi government figures, Riyadh provided $48 billion dollars to support Islamic activities abroad between the years 1975 and 1987, or some $4 billion per annum, a truly staggering amount of money at that time.[3]

All in all, Saudi figures show that in the period 1973 and 2002, the kingdom spent more than $80 billion to promote Islamic activities in the non-Moslem world alone.[4] This truly colossal sum has built a huge network of Wahhabi-controlled institutions, including over 1500 mosques, 150 Islamic Centers, 202 Moslem colleges, and 2000 Islamic schools in non-Moslem countries alone.[5]

As a result, there is hardly a city of any size in the West that does not have a Saudi-controlled institution preaching extremism, inciting hatred against Western civilization, and directly or indirectly advocating its destruction. 

At about the same time – 1977 – in Pakistan, a military coup brought to power General Zia ul-Haq, a zealous Islamist. Zia proceeded to Islamize Pakistani society from the top down, giving a major boost to the extremist Deobandi, Jamiat-e-Islami, and the openly Wahhabi Ahle Hadith movements at the expense of the syncretic Barelvi Moslems and the Shias who together made up more than ninety percent of the population.

With large amounts of Saudi financial support beginning in the early 1980s and coinciding with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, thousands of radical Deobandi and Ahle Hadith madrassas and dozens of jihadist organizations were established under government auspices, contributing decisively to the wholesale Islamization of Pakistan and its transformation into a jihadist breeding ground in the last two decades of the twentieth century.[6]

No less relevant is the fact that these same movements have been able to take over the British Moslem establishment from the more moderate Barelvi and Bengali elements, thus bringing Pakistan’s Islamist movement into the European diaspora communities and contributing decisively to their own radicalization.[7]

As was the case in the subcontinent, Wahhabi money was instrumental in providing support to many of the key Islamist institutions in Britain, from the Muslim Council of Britain dedicated to the promotion of Mawdudi’s thought, to the Tablighi Jamaat European headquarters at the Dewsbury "mega-mosque."

We’ll be discussing these subversive Islamist organization in further detail next week in Chapter VI:  Islamism in Europe.

[3]  See "Saudi Aid to the Developing World," November 2002, in www.saudinf.com/main/1102.htm. Though the Saudis often claim that this money is for "development aid," even a perfunctory examination of its recipients indicates that the bulk of it is earmarked for Islamist activities, a fact occasionally admitted officially, as, for instance, when a Saudi government newspaper bragged that "It was only when oil revenues began to generate real wealth, that the kingdom could fulfill its ambitions of spreading the word of Islam to every corner of the world." Ain Al-Yaqeen, March 27, 2002. 

[4]  For details see "Wahhabism: State-Sponsored Extremism Worldwide," testimony by Alex Alexiev, U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, June 26, 2003. Available at http://kyl.senate.gov/legis_center/subdocs/sc062603_alexiev.pdf. 

[5]  Cited in the Saudi English-language government newspaper Ain al-Yaqeen, March 2, 2002.

[6]  For details on Saudi financing of Pakistani extremists see Alex Alexiev, "The Pakistani Time Bomb," Commentary, April 2003.

[7]  A recent Chester University study of British mosques commissioned by the BBC reveals that sixty-six percent of the imams are Urdu-speaking and Deobandi-trained, while only six percent speak English. http://terrorismresearchwatch.wordpress.com/2007/11/03/chester-university-study-on-imams-in-britian/.