Post by Origanalist on Sept 24, 2014 9:00:21 GMT -8
Playing with Fanatic Fire: How the Saudis (and the U.S.) have perilously exploited radical Islam in their pursuit of power
Dan Sanchez, September 22, 2014
As the new war on ISIS widens, and the media war drums pick up the tempo, some nice breaks in the rhythm have been the few peeps made about the role of the U.S. and its allies (especially Saudi Arabia) in feeding the beast, by arming and training ISIS’s fellow travelers and prospective members in Syria.
Yet, this is no new phenomenon. Less-than-pious rulers (especially American presidents and decadent Saudi royals) have cynically harnessed radical Islam to fuel their worldly wars of conquest and dominance for centuries. And they have done so with the indispensable help of radical Islamic scholars, clerics, and preachers who formulate and communicate the doctrines that underpin that fanaticism.
This partnership is the most ancient variety of a more universal one: what Murray Rothbard called, “the State’s age-old alliance with the Court Intellectuals who weave the apologia for State rule.” Rothbard wrote:
“…since the early origins of the State, its rulers have always turned, as a necessary bolster to their rule, to an alliance with society’s class of intellectuals. (…) The alliance is based on a quid pro quo: on the one hand, the intellectuals spread among the masses the idea that the State and its rulers are wise, good, sometimes divine, and at the very least inevitable and better than any conceivable alternatives. In return for this panoply of ideology, the State incorporates the intellectuals as part of the ruling elite, granting them power, status, prestige, and material security.(…)
Before the modern era, particularly potent among the intellectual handmaidens of the State was the priestly caste, cementing the powerful and terrible alliance of warrior chief and medicine man, of Throne and Altar. The State “established” the Church and conferred upon it power, prestige, and wealth extracted from its subjects. In return, the Church anointed the State with divine sanction and inculcated this sanction into the populace.”
The ideological roots of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the current wave of Islamic fanaticism in general can be traced back to the 18th century, to one particular, “terrible alliance of warrior chief and medicine man, of Throne and Altar,” that serves as a textbook illustration of the explosive power of this kind of partnership.
Perfect Partners in Power
Before finding his “medicine man,” Muhammad ibn Saud, founder of the Saud dynasty that today reigns over Saudi Arabia, was nothing more than a petty marauding potentate ruling the town of Diriyah.
But his career took a turn when he offered asylum to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of Wahhabism, which is today the official religious doctrine of Saudi Arabia. al-Wahhab was an Islamic scholar and preacher who had been expelled from a neighboring town for stirring up trouble. Ibn Saud saw explosive martial potential in al-Wahhab’s teachings, and al-Wahhab saw in Ibn Saud a convenient vessel through which to spread his doctrine at the point of the sword. al-Wahhab allegedly told Ibn Saud:
“I want you to grant me an oath that you will perform jihad (Struggle to spread Islam) against the unbelievers. In return you will be imam, leader of the Muslim community and I will be leader in religious matters.”
They formalized the pact in 1744, and this power sharing arrangement between the Al Saud family, and the Al ash-Sheikh descendants of al-Wahhab has held to this day.
The two men discovered a particularly volatile blend of the defining chemical formula for state power: dogma-propagating violence mixed with violence-sanctifying dogma. The sword and the scepter had once again joined forces, and Araby would soon quake.
The more irreplaceable between the two contributions, however, was al-Wahhab’s. His doctrine was particularly suited to animate conquest. Its theocratic, intolerant, austere, puritanical zealotry stimulated both self-abasing sacrifice and self-righteous fury. And its sub-doctrine of takfir, which defines deviant Muslims as non-Muslims, and thereby overcomes the stigma attached to warring against co-religionists, was crucial in providing the Saudi conquest of Muslim peoples the animating fire of jihad.
More basically, if the faith of subjects can be manipulated to buttress state power, then it makes sense that fanatic faith, like that preached by al-Wahhab, can put state power into overdrive, fueling both absolutism and conquest.
Recently in The Huffington Post, British diplomat and former intelligence officer Alastaire Crooke told the story of this dynamic duo’s fanaticism-fueled march through the Middle East.
Ibn Saud’s clan, seizing on Abd al-Wahhab’s doctrine, now could do what they always did, which was raiding neighboring villages and robbing them of their possessions. Only now they were doing it not within the ambit of Arab tradition, but rather under the banner of jihad. Ibn Saud and Abd al-Wahhab also reintroduced the idea of martyrdom in the name of jihad, as it granted those martyred immediate entry into paradise.
In the beginning, they conquered a few local communities and imposed their rule over them. (The conquered inhabitants were given a limited choice: conversion to Wahhabism or death.) By 1790, the Alliance controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula and repeatedly raided Medina, Syria and Iraq.
Their strategy?—?like that of ISIS today?—?was to bring the peoples whom they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear. In 1801, the Allies attacked the Holy City of Karbala in Iraq. They massacred thousands of Shiites, including women and children. Many Shiite shrines were destroyed, including the shrine of Imam Hussein, the murdered grandson of Prophet Muhammad.
A British official, Lieutenant Francis Warden, observing the situation at the time, wrote: “They pillaged the whole of it [Karbala], and plundered the Tomb of Hussein… slaying in the course of the day, with circumstances of peculiar cruelty, above five thousand of the inhabitants …”
Osman Ibn Bishr Najdi, the historian of the first Saudi state, wrote that Ibn Saud committed a massacre in Karbala in 1801. He proudly documented that massacre saying, “we took Karbala and slaughtered and took its people (as slaves), then praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and we do not apologize for that and say: ‘And to the unbelievers: the same treatment.’”
Eventually the Ottoman Empire pushed back, gruesomely executing one of Ibn Saud’s heirs and then decisively crushing the First Saudi State in 1818, leaving only a rump Second State in Nejd, where the Wahabbi gene lay dormant, but not eradicated, for a century.
The Fanatic Fire Reignites
World War I, that greatest of calamities, was to make it active and pestilential again, as that war did with so many other virulent strains of statist fanaticism, including Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. Even before the war, when the Ottoman Empire was the declining “sick man of Europe,” the Saudis were able to make substantial gains, led by Saudi ruler Abdulaziz (known to the west as Ibn Saud, but not be confused with the founder of the dynasty). But the War, which fatally destabilized the Saudi state’s foremost enemy, the Ottoman Empire, and brought into the region what would become its foremost allies, Britain and America, is what led to it becoming firmly entrenched in power.
continued at...antiwar.com/blog/2014/09/22/playing-with-fanatic-fire/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AWCBlog+%28Antiwar.com+Blog%29
Dan Sanchez, September 22, 2014
As the new war on ISIS widens, and the media war drums pick up the tempo, some nice breaks in the rhythm have been the few peeps made about the role of the U.S. and its allies (especially Saudi Arabia) in feeding the beast, by arming and training ISIS’s fellow travelers and prospective members in Syria.
Yet, this is no new phenomenon. Less-than-pious rulers (especially American presidents and decadent Saudi royals) have cynically harnessed radical Islam to fuel their worldly wars of conquest and dominance for centuries. And they have done so with the indispensable help of radical Islamic scholars, clerics, and preachers who formulate and communicate the doctrines that underpin that fanaticism.
This partnership is the most ancient variety of a more universal one: what Murray Rothbard called, “the State’s age-old alliance with the Court Intellectuals who weave the apologia for State rule.” Rothbard wrote:
“…since the early origins of the State, its rulers have always turned, as a necessary bolster to their rule, to an alliance with society’s class of intellectuals. (…) The alliance is based on a quid pro quo: on the one hand, the intellectuals spread among the masses the idea that the State and its rulers are wise, good, sometimes divine, and at the very least inevitable and better than any conceivable alternatives. In return for this panoply of ideology, the State incorporates the intellectuals as part of the ruling elite, granting them power, status, prestige, and material security.(…)
Before the modern era, particularly potent among the intellectual handmaidens of the State was the priestly caste, cementing the powerful and terrible alliance of warrior chief and medicine man, of Throne and Altar. The State “established” the Church and conferred upon it power, prestige, and wealth extracted from its subjects. In return, the Church anointed the State with divine sanction and inculcated this sanction into the populace.”
The ideological roots of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the current wave of Islamic fanaticism in general can be traced back to the 18th century, to one particular, “terrible alliance of warrior chief and medicine man, of Throne and Altar,” that serves as a textbook illustration of the explosive power of this kind of partnership.
Perfect Partners in Power
Before finding his “medicine man,” Muhammad ibn Saud, founder of the Saud dynasty that today reigns over Saudi Arabia, was nothing more than a petty marauding potentate ruling the town of Diriyah.
But his career took a turn when he offered asylum to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of Wahhabism, which is today the official religious doctrine of Saudi Arabia. al-Wahhab was an Islamic scholar and preacher who had been expelled from a neighboring town for stirring up trouble. Ibn Saud saw explosive martial potential in al-Wahhab’s teachings, and al-Wahhab saw in Ibn Saud a convenient vessel through which to spread his doctrine at the point of the sword. al-Wahhab allegedly told Ibn Saud:
“I want you to grant me an oath that you will perform jihad (Struggle to spread Islam) against the unbelievers. In return you will be imam, leader of the Muslim community and I will be leader in religious matters.”
They formalized the pact in 1744, and this power sharing arrangement between the Al Saud family, and the Al ash-Sheikh descendants of al-Wahhab has held to this day.
The two men discovered a particularly volatile blend of the defining chemical formula for state power: dogma-propagating violence mixed with violence-sanctifying dogma. The sword and the scepter had once again joined forces, and Araby would soon quake.
The more irreplaceable between the two contributions, however, was al-Wahhab’s. His doctrine was particularly suited to animate conquest. Its theocratic, intolerant, austere, puritanical zealotry stimulated both self-abasing sacrifice and self-righteous fury. And its sub-doctrine of takfir, which defines deviant Muslims as non-Muslims, and thereby overcomes the stigma attached to warring against co-religionists, was crucial in providing the Saudi conquest of Muslim peoples the animating fire of jihad.
More basically, if the faith of subjects can be manipulated to buttress state power, then it makes sense that fanatic faith, like that preached by al-Wahhab, can put state power into overdrive, fueling both absolutism and conquest.
Recently in The Huffington Post, British diplomat and former intelligence officer Alastaire Crooke told the story of this dynamic duo’s fanaticism-fueled march through the Middle East.
Ibn Saud’s clan, seizing on Abd al-Wahhab’s doctrine, now could do what they always did, which was raiding neighboring villages and robbing them of their possessions. Only now they were doing it not within the ambit of Arab tradition, but rather under the banner of jihad. Ibn Saud and Abd al-Wahhab also reintroduced the idea of martyrdom in the name of jihad, as it granted those martyred immediate entry into paradise.
In the beginning, they conquered a few local communities and imposed their rule over them. (The conquered inhabitants were given a limited choice: conversion to Wahhabism or death.) By 1790, the Alliance controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula and repeatedly raided Medina, Syria and Iraq.
Their strategy?—?like that of ISIS today?—?was to bring the peoples whom they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear. In 1801, the Allies attacked the Holy City of Karbala in Iraq. They massacred thousands of Shiites, including women and children. Many Shiite shrines were destroyed, including the shrine of Imam Hussein, the murdered grandson of Prophet Muhammad.
A British official, Lieutenant Francis Warden, observing the situation at the time, wrote: “They pillaged the whole of it [Karbala], and plundered the Tomb of Hussein… slaying in the course of the day, with circumstances of peculiar cruelty, above five thousand of the inhabitants …”
Osman Ibn Bishr Najdi, the historian of the first Saudi state, wrote that Ibn Saud committed a massacre in Karbala in 1801. He proudly documented that massacre saying, “we took Karbala and slaughtered and took its people (as slaves), then praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and we do not apologize for that and say: ‘And to the unbelievers: the same treatment.’”
Eventually the Ottoman Empire pushed back, gruesomely executing one of Ibn Saud’s heirs and then decisively crushing the First Saudi State in 1818, leaving only a rump Second State in Nejd, where the Wahabbi gene lay dormant, but not eradicated, for a century.
The Fanatic Fire Reignites
World War I, that greatest of calamities, was to make it active and pestilential again, as that war did with so many other virulent strains of statist fanaticism, including Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. Even before the war, when the Ottoman Empire was the declining “sick man of Europe,” the Saudis were able to make substantial gains, led by Saudi ruler Abdulaziz (known to the west as Ibn Saud, but not be confused with the founder of the dynasty). But the War, which fatally destabilized the Saudi state’s foremost enemy, the Ottoman Empire, and brought into the region what would become its foremost allies, Britain and America, is what led to it becoming firmly entrenched in power.
continued at...antiwar.com/blog/2014/09/22/playing-with-fanatic-fire/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AWCBlog+%28Antiwar.com+Blog%29