The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists (12 page)

In the 1970s, the Wahhabi-Salafi assimilation was repre- sented by the thought of the new puritans, such as Salih Saraya (executed 1975), Shukri Mustafa (d. 1978), and Muhammad ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj (executed 1982). All three formed militant organizations and were executed for commit- ting terrorist acts in Egypt. Of the three, Faraj was particularly influential because of his famous treatise, titled
Jihad: The Ne- glected Duty
.
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In addition, Faraj was the chief ideologue be- hind Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. Faraj’s treatise called for the waging of an unrelenting military campaign against the heretical rulers of all Muslim countries. He went further, however: in Faraj’s view, it was not just the rulers that deserved to be excommunicated and fought against as infidels, but all Muslims must be treated as if they have re- verted to a state of near apostasy.

Faraj and his predecessors, Saraya and Shukri, had come to accept ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s and Qutb’s vision of Muslim society as misguided and foul and dreamed of an alternative society in which the true Islam would be fulfilled. All three activists were severely alienated from their present-day Muslim societies and rejected any level of moral attachment to fellow Muslims.
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Therefore, in their view, a country such as Egypt was thought to be as un-Islamic as Israel—in their view, Egypt and Israel

were equally un-Islamic countries.
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Although these three ac- tivists accepted Qutb’s worldview, and even accepted the idea of withdrawing from infidel society, they rejected the idea of deferred military action. Rather, they found ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s model, which excommunicated, attacked, and punished infidel societies, to be far more compelling. Therefore, militants like Faraj, in terms of their theological outlook, were much closer to ‘Abd al-Wahhab than Qutb. This is exactly why this new form of puritanism was rather ambivalent toward Qutb. While they were attracted to Qutb’s dichotomous view of Muslim societies and the world, they found Qutb’s reluctance to resort to military force most troubling, and so the new pu- ritans often attacked and condemned Qutb, while praising and idealizing ‘Abd al-Wahhab.
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In the same way that the traditional jurists used to describe the Wahhabis as the modern-day Khawarij of Islam, the same label was used to describe these new puritans. These new puri- tans, like the Wahhabis, had nothing but contempt for the ju- rists of Islam. So, for instance, the Shukri Mustafa group in 1977 abducted and executed Muhammad al-Dhahabi, a re- spected shaykh from Azhar who was a former Minister of Re- ligious Endowments. In many of its particulars, Shukri Mustapha’s thought was nearly identical to that of ‘Abd al- Wahhab.
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By the late 1970s, Wahhabism had co-opted the Salafi creed to the point that Salafism had become a code word for antilib- eral values. The puritanism that resulted from this co-optation was invariably intolerant, supremacist, oppressive toward women, opposed to rationalism, hostile toward most forms of creative artistic expression, and rigidly literalistic. But while all Islamic militant groups were puritan, Salafi, and Wahhabi, not all puritan groups were militant. Some puritan groups opted for the Mawdudi or Qutb approaches, following Wahhabism

in every respect except that they hoped to establish the true Is- lamic society through constant activism and proselytism rather than violence.

The majority of Muslim governments tolerated puritan movements as long as they did not turn violent. But in very few countries was there an effective ideological response to these puritan movements. One of the main reasons for this widespread failure was the reluctance of Muslim scholars and intellectuals to confront the Wahhabi origin of puritan move- ments. Especially by the 1980s and 1990s, other than Sufis and Shi’is, very few scholars dared criticize the Wahhabi influ- ence upon Salafism.
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Criticism directed at Saudi Arabia or Wahhabism was considered a risky and even dangerous activ- ity. For one, by virtue of their control of the two holy sites of Mecca and Medina, the Saudi government possessed a formidable power—that of granting or denying any Muslim around the world a visa. The power to regulate access to Mecca and Medina effectively meant that the Saudi govern- ment could decide whether any individual Muslim will be able to perform pilgrimage to the holy sites. This fact alone al- lowed the Saudi government the ability to have a very serious impact upon the life of any Muslim in the world. Any Muslim scholar who dared criticize Wahhabism, for instance, was de- nied a visa to visit the holy sites, and for many pious Muslims this would have constituted a very serious emotional blow.
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Moreover, starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Saudi Arabia had embarked on a systematic campaign of promoting Wahhabi thought among Muslims living in the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds.
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More importantly, Saudi Arabia had created a complex worldwide system of financial incentives that amply rewarded those who advocated “the right type” of thought or those who simply refrained from criticizing Wah- habism. This system of financial incentives was also employed

to control what publishers decided to print or who gets invited to join prestigious associations or conferences. The disparity in wealth between most Muslim countries and Saudi Arabia, and the hegemonic influence of oil money in the Muslim world made it highly impractical for most Muslim scholars to attempt to say anything critical about Wahhabism. Concretely, for instance, a Muslim scholar spending a six-month sabbati- cal in a Saudi Arabian university would make more money in the course of this sabbatical than he would make in ten years of teaching at the Azhar University in Egypt. Similarly, writers or
imam
s espousing pro-Wahhabi positions would qualify for very lucrative contracts, grants, and awards. And very often the Saudi Arabian government would purchase a sizeable number of copies of books by pro-Wahhabi writers in order to guarantee these authors a high level of profit and to create a strong incentive system for publishers to print particular kinds of books. In fact, the most alarming development in the 1980s and 1990s was that even Muslim scholars who were known for their liberalism and rationalism wrote books defending Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Wahhab and Wahhabism—portray- ing it as a movement most capable of confronting the chal- lenges of modernity. Whatever one can say about the motives of those writers, they were handsomely rewarded for their contributions, although their books were very selective and full of historical inaccuracies.
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In 1989, a prolific and influential Salafi jurist, Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1996), did the unthinkable: he wrote a blister- ing critique of the Wahhabi influence upon the Salafi creed. Al-Ghazali was growing increasingly tired of the antirational- ism and immoralism of those who described themselves as Salafis, and of the puritan movement in general. Though cog- nizant of the influence of Wahhabis on contemporary Islam, al-Ghazali did not dare criticize the Wahhabis explicitly or di-

rectly. Instead, he called them the modern-day
Ahl al-Hadith,
and he severely criticized what he called their literalism, anti- rationalism, and anti-interpretive approach to Islamic texts.
Ahl al-Hadith
is an amorphous expression that refers to lit- eralist movements in Islamic history that claimed to adhere to the traditions of the Prophet faithfully, and without the “cor- rupting” influence of human interpretation or reason. The
Ahl al-Hadith
concerned themselves with collecting, documenting, and transmitting traditions attributed to the Prophet and the Companions, and claimed to base their legal judgments on these traditions without the interference of human subjectivi- ties. In the fourth/tenth century, there was a close affinity be- tween the followers of Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 241/855), the founder of the Hanbali school of thought, and the
Ahl al- Hadith
—although the
Ahl al-Hadith
claimed not to follow any of the established schools of thought and to simply be the adherents of the truth. This affinity was sufficiently close that for a period of time the term
Ahl al-Hadith
referred to the lit- eralist and strict constructionist Hanbali scholars. Most im- portantly, in the jurisprudential tradition,
Ahl al-Hadith
represented closed-mindedness, conservatism, and ignorance.
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For al-Ghazali, in his day and age, the approach of Salafi Muslims to Islamic texts had become very reminiscent of the pedantic literalism of the
Ahl al-Hadith
in the premodern pe- riod, which opposed every rationalist orientation in Islam.
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By using the expression
Ahl al-Hadith
to describe the Wahhabis, al-Ghazali was also alluding to an old historical controversy between what some called the “pharmacists” and the “doc- tors” of Islam. According to some classical scholars, those who collected and transmitted traditions,
Ahl al-Hadith
were like pharmacists who made and preserved the chemicals, but did not know how to diagnose a disease or prescribe the ap- propriate medicine. The jurists, however, were more akin to

doctors, who used the material supplied by the pharmacists, but who also used superior knowledge and training to treat diseases.
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Likewise, al-Ghazali believed that the modern-day
Ahl al- Hadith,
whom he also called the traditionists, knew how to collect and memorize the traditions, but did not know how the source material could interact with legal methodology in order to produce jurisprudence. The traditionists (that is, the pharmacists) did not know how to apply the methods of law to the raw or primary materials, to balance between compet- ing and contradictory pieces of evidence, to weigh the objec- tives of the law against the means, to evaluate private against public interests, to analyze tensions between rules and princi- ples, to balance between deference to precedents and demands for change, to comprehend the reasons for differences of opin- ion, and to study the many other subtleties that go into the production of a legal judgment. Al-Ghazali argued that tradi- tionists are not trained in legal theory or the technicalities of legal methodology, and therefore are not qualified to issue legal judgments. In fact, according to al-Ghazali, when the tra- ditionists transgress upon jurisprudence and attempt to prac- tice law, they end up acting as
hadith
hurlers—that is, hurling traditions at their opponents to score cheap points. In effect, al-Ghazali accused the Wahhabis of being nothing more than hurlers of Prophetic traditions. Hurlers of Prophetic tradi- tions, because of their ignorance of jurisprudential theory and methodology, treat law in a whimsical and opportunistic fash- ion. They search through the thousands of statements and say- ings attributed to the Prophet in order to find anything that they could use to support their already preconceived and pre- determined positions. In effect, they utilize the inherited tradi- tions about the Prophet in an arbitrary and whimsical personalized fashion in order to affirm whatever positions

they feel like supporting.
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As a result, traditionists (or
hadith
hurlers) often end up confusing their cultural habits and pref- erences and Islamic law. They selectively pick evidence that supports their cultural biases and claim that these cultural practices are the Islamic mandated law. Al-Ghazali asserted that because such people do not abide by any disciplined methodology or principled way in thinking about the Divine Will, they end up corrupting Islamic law.

However, al-Ghazali went beyond accusing
Ahl al-Hadith
, the traditionists—ultimately, the Wahhabis—of corrupting Is- lamic law. He blamed the modern
Ahl al-Hadith,
or the Wah- habis, for perpetuating acts of fanaticism that defiled the image of Islam in the world. He contended that the modern- day
Ahl al-Hadith
suffered from an isolationist and arrogant attitude that made them uninterested in what the rest of hu- manity thought about Islam or Muslims. In al-Ghazali’s view, this arrogant and intolerant attitude deprecated and impover- ished Islamic thinking, and denied Islam its universalism and humanism. Rather tellingly, al-Ghazali claimed that the mod- ern
Ahl al-Hadith,
or Wahhabis, trapped Islam in an arid and harsh environment in which the earmarks of a humanist civi- lization were clearly absent. In effect, al-Ghazali argued, the contemporary Salafis under the influence of the Wahhabis had created a Bedouin Islam, and this Bedouin Islam had become widespread and influential.

Al-Ghazali strongly defended the juristic tradition in Islam, and decried the ambivalence and dismissiveness by which this tradition was being treated by Bedouin Islam. Aware of the confusion that had come to surround the meaning of the word
Salafism,
al-Ghazali avoided engaging in an argument about who were the real and genuine Salafis, but he did advocate a return to the methodologies of the scholars, such as Muham- mad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida, both of whom were pioneers of

the Salafi movement. In other words, al-Ghazali tried to bring Salafi thought back to its liberal and enlightened origins as a genuine reform movement. Implicitly, he was once again try- ing to differentiate and divorce Salafism from Wahhabism, claiming that the latter had corrupted the former.

Not since the 1930s had a major Muslim scholar attempted such a task. Al-Ghazali engaged in an introspective critical as- sessment of the state of Muslim thought, and concluded that the failures of Muslims were their own. Al-Ghazali insisted that the failure to democratize, respect human rights, modern- ize, and defend the reputation of Islam around the world was not the product of an anti-Islamic world conspiracy. It is con- trary to the ethics of Islam, al-Ghazali argued, for Muslims to fault anyone for these failures but themselves.

The sad reality was that the problems al-Ghazali was trying to address were more endemic and had become more complex than even he recognized. For too long influential Muslims had remained silent about the genocidal practices of the Wahhabis. Even more, the Saudi sphere of influence was far more exten- sive than al-Ghazali realized. For instance, Rashid Rida, whom Ghazali praised, was probably one of the most liberal and creative jurists of the early twentieth century, but he was also an apologist for the Wahhabis. Rida wrote a large num- ber of articles portraying ‘Abd al-Wahhab as a major reformer and as a pioneer of the Salafi movement. But Rida’s liberal ideas and writings were fundamentally inconsistent with Wah- habism, and this is why after Rida’s death, the Wahhabis regu- larly condemned and maligned Rida.
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As demonstrative proof of Wahhabi influence in the Muslim world, the Saudis banned the writings of Rida, successfully prevented the republication of his work even in Egypt, and generally speaking made his books very difficult to locate.
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