The Wahhabi Code

How the Saudis Spread Extremism Globally

Terence Ward

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781628729719
• eBook ISBN: 9781628729726
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An Eye-Opening, Concise Look at the Source of the Current Wave of Terrorism, How it Spread, and Why the West Did Nothing Lifting the mask of international terrorism, Terence Ward reveals a sinister truth. Far from being "the West's ally in the War on Terror, " Saudi Arabia is in reality the largest exporter of Wahhabism—the severe, ultra-conservative sect of Islam that is both Saudi Arabia's official religion and the core ideology for international terror groups such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Boko Haram. Over decades, the Saudi regime has engaged in a well-crafted mission to fund charities, mosques, and schools that promote their Wahhabi doctrine across the Middle East and beyond. Efforts to expand Saudi influence have now been focused on European cities as well. The front lines of the War of Terror aren't a world away; they are much closer than we can imagine. Terence Ward, who has spent much of his life in the Middle East, gives his unique insight into the culture of extremism, its rapid expansion, and how it can be stopped.

1

ON PARISIAN BOULEVARDS

Behold! The caravan of civilization has been ambushed. Everywhere fools are in charge.

—JALALADDIN RUMI

WINTER 2015

Pale morning light. Early Saturday. November 14. I stare out my window, stunned as a storm sweeps in from the east. News comes in from Paris. Dead citoyens lie scattered across the city. On Boulevard Voltaire, in Le Carillon bar and La Belle Equipe restaurant, outside À la Bonne Bière café, inside the Bataclan theater. Here, in Florence, the Arno churns with rainfall from the night before. Tears for the fallen.

“What now?” I ask myself. Yet, I know the answer. It is ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. And the hunt for those responsible will lead police and journalists to Brussels, Europe’s epicenter of Wahhabism, where it has been incubating for decades.

I search the internet. I Google the word Wahhabi. Only four articles appear, all from 2014. One is posted on an Indian website, the other by British journalist Patrick Cockburn in The Independent, another by David Kirkpatrick in the New York Times, and the last in The Economist. Nothing else.

By noon, the body count grows—130 dead and 368 injured.

ISIS has claimed responsibility for the murders. But who are these people? And who has inspired and funded ISIS?

For the average citizen, this answer seems lost in the mists of time, in the distant fog of Middle Eastern wars that began with the American invasion of Iraq and later spread across Syria. This region of the world, now cursed with anarchy, leaves most questions unanswered.

Searching for clues, I open Kirkpatrick’s New York Times article, “ISIS’ Harsh Brand of Islam Is Rooted in Austere Saudi Creed,” in which he writes:

For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State … are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement…. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group’s territory have shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van. Bernard Haykel of Princeton has described al-Baghdadi’s creed as “a kind of untamed Wahhabism.”

Other clues lay inside the Economist article, “The Other Beheaders:”

There is not much difference between a death sentence in the jihadists’ “Islamic State” and in Saudi Arabia, a country seen as a crucial Western ally in the fight against ISIS. Nor, indeed, is there much difference between the two entities in other applications of a particularly merciless brand of sharia, or Islamic law, including public whippings and the right for victims of crime to claim eye-for-an-eye revenge. Dissidents in Raqqa, the Syrian town that is ISIS’s proto-capital, say all 12 of the judges who now run its court system, adjudicating everything from property disputes to capital crimes, are Saudis. The group has also created a Saudi-style religious police, charged with rooting out vice and shooing the faithful to prayers. And as in ISIS-ruled zones, where churches and non-Sunni mosques have been blown up or converted to other uses.

I begin writing an article full of fury and anguish, but not with the venom of Oriana Fallaci or her uncontrollable hate. I write with deep affection for these ancient lands where I lived for over thirty years. I write with urgency to speak on behalf of these people, family and friends that I have known and loved my entire life. And I write for a troubled world under threat.

After finishing the piece, I sent it to my friend Stanley Weiss, chairman emeritus of Business Executives for National Security and expert on international politics. Stanley’s reaction was unusual—he was upset.

“Why haven’t I heard anything about this?” he asked over the telephone. A sophisticated, cosmopolitan gentleman with long security experience and a global awareness of looming dangers, Stanley does not enjoy being taken by surprise. He ended with, “This may be the most important article that I’ve read this year.”

A month later in December on the BBC, five experts are posed the question “Is Saudi Arabia to Blame for the Islamic State?” Saudi-born Madawi al-Rashid, visiting professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, answered with yet more clues:

The Wahhabis were given full control of the religious, social and cultural life of the kingdom. As long as the Wahhabi preachers preached that Saudis should obey their rulers, the al-Saud family was happy. In the 1960s and 1970s the Arab world was full of revolutionary ideas. The Saudi government thought the Wahhabis were a good antidote, because they provide an alternative narrative about how to obey rulers and not interfere in politics. In the 1980s, King Fahd established a printing press to publish Korans, sent for free to different parts of the world. They established Al-Madinah University to teach religion to students from around the world.

When Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union, Wahhabism was instrumentalized by the Saudi regime. It inspired young Muslim men to go to Afghanistan to fight a jihad against the Russian infidels. Wahhabism benefitted from the arrival of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were exiled from places like Egypt, Syria and Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s. Saudi Arabia welcomed them. A lot of them became religious teachers so the fusion between this Wahhabi tradition, and the organizational skills of other Islamists, led to the emergence of a new trend in Saudi Arabia; the Islamist trend, what is referred to as the Islamic awakening.

Soon after, my article was published in the Huffington Post on January 14, 2016. Stanley’s comment introduced the piece.

FIVE SAUDI IMPERIAL PROJECTS THE WEST HAS SLEPT THROUGH

By Stanley A. Weiss and Terence Ward

Horrified by the news that Saudi Arabia would set a record for beheadings in 2015 while continuing to fund radical Islamic groups across the world, I wrote a column last October arguing that it was time for the United States to reconsider its seventy-year relationship with the kingdom in Riyadh. After the piece was posted, one of the friends I heard from was Terence Ward, author of the internationally praised memoir, Searching for Hassan. Ward knows about Saudi Arabia: while born in Colorado, he spent his childhood in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Not only does he have a rich understanding of the deep conflicts within Islam and between nations in the Middle East, but as a man who speaks six languages—including Arabic and Farsi—his understanding of the subtleties of those conflicts go well beyond that of most Westerners. As tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia have rapidly escalated this month over Riyadh’s execution of a high-profile Shiite cleric, Ward reached out with a thoughtful perspective on Saudi Arabia and the West. I print it in full. …

Since 2001, Western leaders have discretely avoided the naked truth—today’s Islamic terrorism is deeply rooted in the Saudi Wahhabi faith. First with al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks and now with ISIS bombings in Brussels and slaughter in Paris, the West’s rush for revenge ignores those roots yet again.

Both al-Qaeda and ISIS needed failed states to create their base: in Afghanistan, and in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, respectively. But to flourish, they needed funding and ideology, which were imported from Saudi Arabia.

To be blunt, where is decapitation a public sport? Only in Riyadh and Raqqa. Growing up in Saudi Arabia, I witnessed crowds gather on Friday in “chop-chop square” to watch the medieval spectacle. The recent forty-seven beheadings remind us again of this uniquely Saudi custom. Now, it has now been exported to Syria where YouTube clips spread the spectacle to the world. But they share more than executions. Few know that as Syrian and Iraqi towns fell to ISIS, Saudi textbooks replaced what was in classrooms before. So, if any Western leaders seriously want to end the radicalization of young Muslims, they must look no further than the father of the radical faith followed by both terror groups—found in the Saudi religious industrial complex. Wahhabism. In Saudi Arabia, there are no churches, synagogues, or Hindu temples. Wahhabism is not a religion of tolerance. The chilling fact is that in three decades, the Saudis have launched five imperial projects in support of Wahhabism—all sources of today’s jihadists.

The first project in Pakistan began when General Zia ul-Haq, after seizing power in 1977, imposed sharia law and then gave carte blanche to create countless Saudi-funded Wahhabi madrasas—Islamic schools—across the country to indoctrinate young children and fill the gap of a collapsed education system. Targeting refugee camps full of vulnerable Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion, the Wahhabi movement found its base.

The second project in Afghanistan was born in these refugee camps when a new generation came of age, calling themselves “the students” or “Taliban.” In 1994, Mullah Omar and fifty madrasa students launched out from Quetta as a fighting force crossing the border, seizing Kandahar, and then taking Kabul in 1996. By 1997, Saudi employees were traveling for free as tourists on government-paid holidays to visit the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan with their families so they could witness the “true Islam.” Mullah Omar was invited on Hajj by the Saudi monarch in 1998. He then ordered the Bamiyan Buddhas blown apart in March 2001, in keeping with the iconoclast Saudi vision. The free tourist trips from Riyadh ended abruptly on September 11 that same year.

The third project was al-Qaeda’s global jihad financed by Wahhabi funders that began with financing foreign fighters in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and climaxed with the Twin Towers attack. It’s enough to remember that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers, as well as al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden, hailed from Saudi Arabia.

The fourth imperial project is named ISIS, also known as ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), or DAESH (an acronym formed from the Arabic transliteration of ISIS). Its mother was America’s Iraq invasion. Its father was Saudi Arabia’s eager Wahhabi funders and a defiant ideology that capitalized on the Sunni humiliation in Iraq and Syria. Now, the Sunni–Shia conflagration is tearing apart both countries and the region is ablaze with four civil wars. Of course, Saudis argue this was all started to combat Iran’s imperial ambitions, but the truth is that Sunnis, not the Shia, have mastered their macabre monopoly on suicide bombings. This is the terror that was exported to Paris.

The fifth imperial project lies in Western Europe—in all madrasas funded by Saudi money and staffed with Wahhabi-trained imams from Paris to Brussels, Antwerp and Rotterdam, from Marseilles to Birmingham. Thousands of mosques and schools have trained a new generation of Muslims in the rigid and intolerant faith imported from Riyadh, without any local government supervision. And now these seeds planted by Saudi Arabia are bearing fruit under a newly re-named Salafist banner. This Salafi term has been cleverly promoted to disguise any connection to Wahhabism or the Saudi origins, and it has worked. International journalists now solely use the word Salafi as if describing a widespread conservative current in Islam today.

Over forty years ago, Belgium’s King Baudouin cut a deal with Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal. In exchange for cheap oil, Baudouin gave the Saudis a ninety-nine-year lease on the former Oriental Pavilion for the Grande Mosque. At the same time, the Belgians allowed Saudi trained imams to preach to the growing numbers of Maghrebi immigrants coming into the country. This gave the House of Saud carte blanche for three generations to spread their doctrine of Wahhabism in rigid religious schools, setting up tension between the more moderate Tunisian and Moroccan traditions and the Saudi-financed teachings. Today, there are seventy-seven mosques in Brussels, which is not only the capital of the Europe Union and NATO, it is also the capital of European Wahhabism and Islamic terrorism.

From the 2001 assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud—the famed Afghan anti-Taliban leader—to the 2004 Madrid train bombings, from the Paris shootings at the Charlie Hebdo offices, to last year’s killings at the Jewish museum in Brussels and this summer’s foiled shooting spree on a high-speed train, from the Paris massacres and the recent bombings in Brussels, all investigators’ lines of inquiry have led to Europe’s “ground zero” of terrorism—the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek. This should not be surprising. Only last year, Belgium was riveted by the trial of forty-six people who were found guilty of belonging to Sharia4Belgium, a group that recruited volunteers to fight in Syria with ISIS. And Belgium has the other dubious honor of sending ISIS more foreign fighters per capita than any other country in Europe.

The element that all five imperial projects share is the Wahhabi doctrine—extremist, fundamentalist, and exclusionist. This creed is surprisingly new to Islam. Only two hundred years old, it carries the name of its firebrand founder, Muhammad Abdul Wahhab. The Christian equivalent would be a union of two groups: the Jehovah Witness and the American racist Christian group, the Ku Klux Klan. The Wahhabi doctrine views all other Muslims as deviant, decadent, and dangerous heretics, deserving no mercy. Moderate Sunnis, Sufis, Shia, Ismailis, Druze, Yazidis, Alawites, even the whirling dervishes are all enemies—impure, fallen Muslims. Apostates all. Of course, non-Muslims fall under the same umbrella of loathing. No common humanity exists. There is no possible dialogue. Their sharia is the only covenant. All non-Wahhabi believers are expendable. It is high time to point out publically the differences existing between the many variants of traditional Islam and the virulent hostility with which the newly created Wahhabi sect views everyone else, be they Muslims or not.

Make no mistake; the Saudi Wahhabis are on a global mission of conversion. Their dream is to change forever a faith that once was tolerant, back when Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived side by side in the cosmopolitan Levant’s multi-cultural mélange of dialects and faiths along the Eastern Mediterranean—from Alexandria to Beirut, from Damascus to Istanbul.

In the non-Arabic world of Southeast Asia—in Indonesia with over 190 million Muslim faithful—the mood is still reminiscent of those more tolerant times. Islam arrived there with Persian and Gujarati merchants who sailed into tropical ports with their mystical and very tolerant Islam. Their faith was grounded in open-minded Sufi beliefs and traditions. This is why Islam spread so quickly across the archipelago. Had these early merchants offered instead, a rigidly austere Wahhabi “desert-bound message,” there would have been few takers.

Now, it is only in Indonesia that a forceful repudiation of the Islamic State has surfaced. It has come from the powerful Nahdlatul Ulama party, called NU, that counts as members over fifty million Muslims. Their recent film of ISIS beheadings features the voice-over of their revered leader and former Indonesian president, Abdurrahman Wahid, singing a Javanese mystical poem: “Many who memorize the Quran and Hadith love to condemn others as infidels while ignoring their own infidelity to God, their hearts and minds still mired in filth.”

This campaign for a liberal, pluralistic Islam comes from a country with a rich Hindu and Buddhist past, where Sunnis and Shias live together in harmony. This tradition of Islam stresses nonviolence, inclusiveness, and acceptance of other religions. It was borne from the Sufi tradition. All commentators and pundits who have been asking for a “reformation in Islam,” needn’t look further. The Islam that they are searching for exists in Indonesia. And it is the antidote to jihadism.

It is this faith that historically spread across the islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bengal. And it is this faith that was also rooted in the beating heart of the Islamic world: Mecca. Few Westerners know that for one thousand years the holy city of Mecca was the center of the Sufi universe, where music, dance, and ecstatic prayer celebrated the divine and faithful gathered at shrines and graves of saints.

When the Wahhabi-backed House of Saud conquered the Hejaz, Mecca, and Medina in 1924, the state of Saudi Arabia was declared, and Wahhabism was proclaimed the official religion. In less than one hundred years, the Saud family and their Wahhabi benefactors erased the city’s rich, mystic past, including historical sites like the Prophet’s house in Mecca, along with that of his daughter Fatimeh. Homes of the Prophet’s wives are now parking lots. All those pilgrims who embark on their Hajj arrive in Mecca only to find a city that has been cleansed of its diverse layers of Islamic history.

Alas, virtually every aspect and corner Islam today has now been penetrated by Wahhabi influence, thanks to 200 billion dollars spent over the last thirty years in a strategic campaign to promote Wahhabism around the world. Thousands of Saudi-funded madrasas have indoctrinated countless young minds with the Wahhabi doctrine in Belgium, France, Holland, Germany, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the UK, as well as across the Arab world. At the moment, the economies of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 On Parisian Boulevards
• 2 Clarity in Chaos
• 3 Arabia of the Wahhabis
• 4 A Pact in the Desert
• 5 Seiges of Mecca
• 6 Unspoken Connections
• 7 Origins of Islam
• 8 The Shia Passion
• 9 Hidden Faces of Islam: Sufism and the Poets
• 10 The Sunni World: Past and Present
• 11 Message for the Young
• 12 A Letter from the Aegean Sea
• 13 The Road to Samarkand
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Photos