Posted on 12/09/2002 11:05:37 AM PST by swarthyguy
BURAIDA, Saudi Arabia — In the Saudi Arabia of Saleh al-Rashodi's Islamist dreams, there would be no music besides the muezzin's melancholy call to prayer, no photographs of people except those required for identification and no non-Muslims except those needed temporarily for specific jobs.
If that sounds like Afghanistan under the Taliban, Mr. Rashodi would not disagree. The Taliban, he said, came close to establishing an Islamic utopia in the modern world. "The Taliban were pure Muslims," he added, as he lounged on the ochre carpet of his office here in the Islamic equivalent of America's Bible Belt.
While Saudi Arabia has long been dominated by a conservative form of Islam, called Wahhabism in the West, Mr. Rashodi, 43, is part of an ultraconservative Islamic revival whose most extreme elements sympathize with, if not support, the holy war against the United States declared by Osama bin Laden. While many Americans have been disturbed by the conservative nature of Saudi Arabia's state-sponsored Islam, the kingdom is resisting an even more fundamentalist drift among its people.
The size of the ultraconservative movement is impossible to estimate, and it is difficult to say at what point it may overlap with terrorist organizations. But interviews with dozens of people in the kingdom suggest that a significant and growing number of people see the world in ways similar to the way Mr. Rashodi views it.
Many people warn that their militancy — and their numbers — could increase were the United States to attack Iraq, particularly if the royal family were to acquiesce to an American request to use Saudi bases.
Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and Saad al-Faqih, a Saudi dissident and Islamic activist living in London, said the country's Islamic militants with varying degrees of allegiance to Al Qaeda now numbered in the thousands.
"We're not talking about a limited number of people," Mr. Faqih says. "It's a trend."
Saudi Arabia's interior minister said last month that the authorities had questioned 700 people involved in "holy war activities" and still had 100 under custody. Anecdotal evidence, meanwhile, suggests that militancy is on the rise: events in the last three weeks have included a shootout between Islamic activists and security forces, as well as the burning of a McDonald's restaurant, both near Riyadh.
The rise of the ultraconservatives began in 1990, when King Fahd decided to permit the United States to station troops in the country and to use Saudi military bases as a staging ground for the Persian Gulf war. That split the country's ulema, or community of religious scholars, with many imams openly rejecting the king's decision.
The ultraconservatives deplore the American military presence as blasphemous, saying the prophet Muhammad had decreed that only Muslims should reside on the Arabian Peninsula. Indeed, Mr. bin Laden has always cited the presence of the Americans as one of the primary motivations for his jihad against the West. Tolerance of the Saudi-American friendship has weakened even further since Sept. 11, 2001, many conservative Muslims say, because of the perception that the United States has turned against Islam.
Mr. Rashodi, a thin, sharp-featured man with a four-inch beard, said that while the king made a mistake inviting the Americans to Saudi Arabia, many Saudis believed that the United States came to protect the Saudi people.
"But, this time, they know that America has a strategic goal," he said. Like many people in the Middle East, Mr. Rashodi said he believed that the United States was using the brewing conflict with Iraq to encircle the Muslim world militarily.
More liberal Saudis worry that the ultraconservative movement threatens Saudi Arabia's already limited basic freedoms and creates an environment in which militancy can thrive. They fear that the trend, if unchecked, could undermine efforts among some members of the royal family to modernize Saudi society, widening the gap between Saudi Arabia and the West. It could even imperil the authority of the Saudi royal family.
The country already exists in parallel worlds, one medieval, one modern. In the two-faced society of fast-food restaurants and periodic public beheadings, the new conservatism runs as a powerful countercurrent to the liberalization favored by much of the country's Western-educated elite.
The royal family is at best constrained by the ultraconservative movement. At worst, the House of Saud is held hostage by the religious right, which could galvanize now diffuse but widespread dissension if the government made an unpopular move.
That bind partly explains Saudi Arabia's apparent reluctance to move more forcefully against those Islamic charities that the United States suspects of financing terrorists, businessmen involved with some of the country's many charities say. It also explains the government's reluctance to allow the United States to use military facilities on Saudi soil in any future attack on Iraq.
"The conservative Islamists have a limit to what pressure they can take, and the government knows well where that limit is," said Mohsen al-Awajy, an Islamic activist who spent four years in jail in the 1990's for opposition to the government.
Mr. Awajy worries that American policy in the region, including support for Israel, threats against Iraq and a growing hostility toward Saudi Arabia, is strengthening the Islamist radical fringe.
"If America continues to follow these policies, I'm sure there will be no room for modernists and reformers who are raising the flag of coexistence," he said over a glass of water in a Riyadh hotel.
Modernization is a tricky process in a country dominated by fundamentalism, and in which the royal family derives much of its legitimacy from its religious credentials as the custodians of the great Islamic shrines in Mecca and Medina.
"You cannot neutralize religion in this society," said Khalil A. Kordi, a businessman and government adviser. "Even the most liberal Saudis won't accept that."
But the deep rift that opened in 1990 between opponents to the American presence and the mainstream religious establishment continues to widen, driven by ultraconservatives who want some power in governing the country.
Many Saudis complain that the government-backed monopoly enjoyed by the Wahhabi mainstream stifles more moderate Islamic voices that might temper the ultraconservative trend.
"If you are the only school of thought, you by nature become increasingly extreme," said Sammi Angawi, an architect and scholar based in Jidda who has spoken out for Islamic pluralism in the country. "One extreme evolves from another."
Though Wahhabism is practiced by just 10 percent of the world's one billion Muslims, it is the only school of thought preached in the religion's holiest city, Mecca, which Mr. Angawi likens to the heart and lungs of Islam.
"If something goes into the heart it will affect the whole body, even the brain," he said as a Red Sea breeze stirred the air in his home in Jidda. Pilgrims to the city should hear more than one opinion, he argues, so they can choose what to believe and "bring balance to Islam."
But Mr. Rashodi, one of the many ultraconservatives clustered here in Buraida, rejects the notion that there are more moderate interpretations of Islam.
"Islam is Islam," he insisted when asked about Muslims who believe differently than he. "There are not two Islams."
"The United States is against Islam," he said matter-of-factly, flipping the ends of a red-checked head scarf over his shoulders. "You are worried about holy war now, but you are looking at the reaction without seeing what you did first to cause it."
If people had taken Hitler at his word in Mein Kampf, someone would have squashed the bug long before he came to power, or at least by 1936 when he remilitarized the Rhineland.
Poverty, dirt, push carts and bag ladys. Yep, Moslem Utopia! God must love them... NOT!
Sacre Bleu! SA is getting nearly as bad as France.
Always the snide dig at Christian Americans.
Well, that pretty much says it all.
"The Taliban were pure Muslims," he added, as he lounged on the ochre carpet of his office here in the Islamic equivalent of America's Bible Belt.
And then the author couldn't resist the chance to inject his own prejudices into the article. I note his frequent use of the words "conservative" and "liberal" as well to describe the bad Muslims and good Muslims respectively.
Yeah, that aside, it was an eye opening article. This really starts to make me sick- this constant political grandstanding by everyone. It's hard to enjoy a movie anymore when half the cast to it were last seen on television in a different country bad mouthing America. This would have been a real beaut of an article had it not been for that. I'm agnostic too- not a religious man. But when I see such a blatant stab like that, I can't help but have it in the back of my mind the whole time I'm reading- "This guy's got an agenda".
I'm just sick of it. Lord of the Rings- the Two Towers is something I've been waiting a whole year for. Jackass that plays Aragorn has to get on television with a "No Blood for Oil" t-shirt while he's promoting the movie. I love Lord of the Rings and am determined to enjoy this movie, but why did this jackass have to try and ruin it for me? I will never be able to watch this movie now without his political commentary in the back of my mind. Even one of the actors in Black Hawk Down had the gall to spit on the very character he was playing to come out with a longwinded diatribe against American Empirialism in Somalia and how it was basically our fault that the world hates us and we are the true terrorists. I find this maddening. Can't ever get away from the leftists trying to pump their socialist sunshine up your ass.
Jafar Siddiqui BUMP.
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