The Islamist

by Ed Husain

  After two years in Syria I was ready to come back home to London. Although I grew to love Syria, particularly Damascus, I knew it would never be home for me. Syria taught me much. However, as with every country, it had its faults: a macho culture, widespread sexism, latent racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and a highly corrupt bureaucracy. Britain might not be perfect, but it was better than this. Though sad at the prospect of leaving many of our new Arab friends, Faye and I discussed returning to London.

  During my early months in Damascus, while teaching at the university, young Syrian women would often tell me about the changes that were taking place in their society. Syrians generally, and women in particular, are genteel and gracious. At the end of one course I was confounded by the large, elaborate bouquet of flowers the students presented to me. I was also given CDs of Fairouz, a Lebanese musical legend, and Arabic books to help with my own learning. Such generous gifts were all the more poignant because I knew that poverty levels in Syria were high. Better-paid medical doctors and civil servants earned under 8,000 lire a month (less than £100), and students at the university paid their fees with money borrowed from their parents.

  In view of such economic difficulties, large numbers of Syrians, in common with other Arabs, had flocked to the Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, returning during the summer months. These included many of my students. During my stay in Syria I discovered that there were significant cultural, social, and physical differences between the Arabs from the Levant and those of the Gulf states. Even in matters of religion there was an unbridgeable gap. The notion that Arabs are a homogeneous, monolithic people is a potent myth of our times.

  The Arabs of the Levant are radically different in culture, customs, taste, and outlook to their counterparts in the Gulf. Damascene Syrians would often tell me that Saudi influences were corrupting Islam in Syria. Students in my classrooms reported incidents of their own family members who had undergone a personality change while working in Saudi Arabia, becoming stricter in their behaviour and claiming purity of religion. They refused to listen to music, meet female relatives, or pray at most mosques in Damascus, claiming that the imams there were ‘deviant’ and constantly proselytizing about the ‘one God’, or tawheed. Hearing this reminded me of my days at Tower Hamlets College and the Wahhabis.

  Despite the widespread dislike of Saudis in Syria, there was one factor that endeared the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the hearts and minds of not only Syrians, but a billion Muslims spanning the globe: the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. Muslims often accept the abuse and mistreatment they receive at the hands of Saudis out of deference for Islam’s holiest places.

  In Muslim homes throughout Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Britain will always be found a picture of the Ka’bah in Mecca or the sepulchre of the Prophet in Medina. Observant Muslims pray facing Mecca several times a day; it is the city in which, according to Muslim tradition, Abraham, Hagar, and their son Ishmael lived for a period. The Prophet Mohammed was born in Mecca and persevered through relentless persecution at the hands of Meccan pagans for a decade before migrating to Medina, where he passed away. Early Muslim history revolves around Mecca and Medina, the Koran focuses on events in these two cities, and the life of the Prophet is set in these ancient Arabian metropolises.

  Throughout history, women and men have found solace, contentment, and transcendence in the shade of the Ka’bah in Mecca, or beside the Prophet’s tomb in Medina. Faye and I wanted to do the same. So, rather than going straight home, we applied for and were offered jobs at the British Council in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s ‘most liberal city’.

  Two years in Syria, away from Islamism in Britain and in the company of amiable believers of many religions in Damascus, had, I knew, decontaminated my mind. Now, more than ever, I felt free. I saw British Muslims arrive in Damascus and struggle with an Islam that was comparatively liberal, discomfited at the sight of unveiled women, clean-shaven men and celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday, and bemoaning the absence of Islamist organizations. Many asked, ‘Where is Islam?’ I wanted that question to be asked back in Britain, for what they expected to see in Syria was a projection of their own literalist brand of British Islam.

  Two weeks before we left Syria, Faye and I decided to shed our spectacles. We underwent laser surgery on our eyes and saw the world anew. Syria had both corrected my vision and removed the Islamist blinkers for ever.

  14.

  Saudi Arabia: Where is Islam?

  Islam is written in books and the Muslims are in their graves.

  Hasan al-Basri, Muslim scholar-saint, d. 728

  As we stood at Jeddah airport, I hoped that the security officers would not search our bags. I had taken the precaution of sending all my books on politics, history, Rumi’s poetry, Sufism, and comparative religion back to Britain, but deep in my suitcase, I had buried a book of daily litanies recited by the Prophet and beautiful Arabic poetry in praise of him written by the famed sage of Arabia, Imam al-Haddad (d. 1720). As the guard began to root through my belongings I clasped my hands and prayed he would not discover it. Thankfully, he didn’t.

  Wahhabis are a deeply literalist sect. Metaphors, allegories, love, and transcendence have no meaning for them. They are exceptionally harsh towards Muslims expressing love and dedication to the Prophet. To Wahhabis, that borders on worship and is therefore idolatrous.

  My own experience of life inside Islamist organizations was that they were all at one with the Wahhabis in creed. It is a fact that Wahhabis do not pray in Sufi mosques, considering the majority of the world’s Muslims to be polytheists, or mushriks, because of our aversion to literalism in understanding God’s attributes. In Britain and in Syria Wahhabis avoided praying at ordinary mainstream mosques and would attend only mosques managed by themselves or the Muslim Brotherhood.

  In addition to Wahhabi and Islamist literalist ideas of God, both sects believe that the Prophet ought not to be venerated, that Sufis are too close to the Prophet, that celebrating his birthday is an imitation of kuffar Christian practices, and that visiting the tombs of saints is tantamount to idolatry. Sufism and other Muslim traditions are deviations from the ‘true faith’. To Wahhabis, selective Muslim sources are to be accepted as literal Truth, and emphasis must be on the oneness of God, tawheed. On theological grounds, Wahhabis may disagree with older, more established traditions of Muslim thought, but the difficulty arose when they started to slaughter Sufis, Shias, and other Muslims. By killing those they disagreed with and later having oil wealth, Wahhabis ensured their dominance of modern Muslim thought, in tandem with Islamism, and the commitment to an Islamic political state. The problem we call ‘al-Qaeda’ is a bastard child of modernist Islamism and reactionary Wahhabism.

  How did Wahhabism start? The Wahhabi mindset emerged from the central Arabian wastelands of Najd, among the followers of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab bin Sulaiman al-Tamimi, commonly known as Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a puritanical eighteenth-century Muslim leader. Adopting the discarded writings of the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiya, Abd al-Wahhab rejected the established practices of the local Najdi population (in what is now the central region of Saudi Arabia), including respect for Muslim saints and preservation of historical tombs. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab could not fathom such things: to him, worship, understood in the narrowest way possible, meant obedience to a great God in the skies. There was no need for intermediaries, devotion, training, scholarly guidance, or adherence to time-honoured practice. All this could, and would, be done away with.

  In 1744-5 Ibn Abd al-Wahhab negotiated a deal with the then nomadic tribe of Saud, forebears of the current Saudi royal family: in exchange for support in their quest for local political domination, the Saudis would back Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s mission to impose his literalist interpretation of Islam at a local level in Najd. Detractors referred to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s cult as Wahhabism (Wahhabiyyah in Arabic) and tried to oppose the spread of the sect’s ideas. However, under the political patronage of the Saud tribe, Wahhabism
went from strength to strength.

  Between 1745 and 1818 the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance rode roughshod over local traditional forms of Islam: they subdued other clans, destroyed Muslim shrines, slaughtered thousands of Muslims in neighbouring Hijaz, and expanded as far as Karbala in Iraq in 1801, where they killed thousands more and destroyed Islamic holy sites, claiming such activities would purify Islam from ‘idolatrous’ influences. They not only killed Muslims of Sufi and Shia persuasions, but deliberately sought to annihilate those who had a bloodline that went back to the Prophet Mohammed, locally known as the sayyids or the ashraf.

  In response to the rise of the Wahhabis, in 1818 the Ottomans sent armies from Egypt to quell the extremists. Yet by 1912, with the Ottoman Empire in its death throes, the group had re-emerged. Ibn Saud, now leader of the Saud tribe, gained prominence and strength with British support, as did his bed-fellows the Wahhabis. Locally they were known as the Ikhwan, precursors of the current Mutawwa’een (mutawwa’een is the colloquial plural form of mutawwa’a - literally, ‘those who enforce obedience’; more commonly, ‘the religion police’. Officially known in Saudi Arabia as the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Evil, the Mutawwa’een is a government-funded organization which watches over the nation’s morality.

  In 1934, with the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Saud tribe continued to honour their 1744-5 agreement with the family of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, now increasingly known as Aal-Shaikh, meaning the ‘family of the shaikh’. Had it not been for the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, and the unique association of the country in Muslim minds with the site of Mecca and Medina, then Wahhabism would have been nothing more than a renegade, deviant sect within Islam. But the missionary zeal of Wahhabism was enhanced manifold by geography and the financial advantages of black gold.

  To this day every Saudi embassy has a missionary arm, staffed by Wahhabis, to monitor Muslim activity in the host country and help support Wahhabism financially. When I had sought to learn Arabic at the Muslim World League, the attempt to recruit me to a Saudi university had been backed by the Saudi embassy.

  Today the majority of the world’s Muslims still adhere to moderate Islam: deeply personal, highly spiritual, and Sufi influenced. However, this cannot be taken for granted. Saudi Arabia remains committed to training clerics in the Wahhabi mould, and tens of thousands of them have been sent to all corners of the globe to propagate this simple, desert form of Islam. Britain and the West are particular targets for Wahhabi literalism.

  Despite Islamist protests that the Saudi monarchy is not sufficiently Islamic, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is as close to the type of country Islamists wish to create as exists. In Saudi Arabia my Islamist days came flashing back to me as reminders of what I had tried to bring about. While I was there, I kept a detailed diary. At first the luxury of living in a modern city with a developed infrastructure cocooned me from the frightful reality of life in Saudi Arabia. During our first two months, Faye and I relished our new and luxurious lifestyle: a shiny jeep, two swimming pools, domestic help, and a much higher, tax-free salary than we had received in Syria. After our comparatively frugal existence in Damascus, this was paradise.

  We both knew that Westerners were confined within compounds in Saudi Arabia, and more so following recent Wahhabi attacks on Western interests. The world’s media, under Saudi guidance, referred to this as ‘al-Qaeda terrorism’ inside Saudi Arabia. But then al-Qaeda itself is a hybrid beast, a marriage of convenience between Islamism and Wahhabism whose offspring is terrorism. The terrorist attacks on the American embassy in Jeddah in early 2005, as well as several attacks in Riyadh and other cities, were conducted by Wahhabis and their followers who abhorred the Saudi monarchy: chief among them was Osama bin Laden.

  In Jeddah we lived in a compound owned by the Bin Laden company, next door to the company’s head office. Within weeks, I discerned that compound life was a microcosm of the expatriate lifestyle in Saudi Arabia. It represented the social structure that Saudis imposed on their foreign workforce and had the following pecking order: Americans were at the top, followed by Brits, then other Europeans, then Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians, Yemenis, and other Arabs, followed by the Sudanese. Asians (Filipinos, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis) were at the bottom of the pile, above only poor black Africans from Chad, mainly staying beyond their pilgrimage visas.

  Throughout my stay in Saudi Arabia I never divulged my Asian ethnicity. My goatee beard and good Arabic ensured that I could pass for an Arab. Besides, I had family members in Saudi Arabia on my mother’s side and, technically speaking, an ‘Arab’ is anyone who speaks Arabic. When the perennial question of why a brown person was teaching English at the British Council came up, I simply explained I was in Saudi Arabia to discover the land of my ancestors. I was now considered to be ‘originally Saudi’. My decision to withhold my full background from the Saudis enabled me to learn things that I would not have known otherwise. After Syria, I refused to be pigeon-holed by Arab racism, to be seen as an inferior hindi, or Indian. In the racist Arab psyche, hindi is as pejorative as kuffar. In countless gatherings I silently sat and listened to racist caricatures of a billion people by Saudi bigots.

  In the pecking order, then, I was on a par with the Saudis. In fact, in many cases I was considered ‘superior’ because I was also British. The British-Saudi combination both impressed and gained the trust of my many Saudi acquaintances, appararent from small but significant acts such as the Saudi security guards waving our car through security checkpoints, to young Saudis confessing their deepest fears and anxieties to me, talking freely about Osama bin Laden as ‘one of us’.

  With my mother’s Saudi family members I was at ease, exhibiting the mannerisms, etiquette, and behaviour that confirmed I belonged. I rode in our new jeep dressed in flowing white tunic and sporting a trimmed goatee. Faye wore her abaya, the long black garment worn by all Muslim women in public in Saudi Arabia.

  But looking like a young Saudi was not enough: I had to act Saudi, be Saudi. And here I failed.

  My first clash with Saudi culture came when, being driven around in a bullet-proof jeep, I saw African women in black abayas tending to the rubbish bins outside restaurants, residences, and other busy places.

  ‘Why are there so many black cleaners on the streets?’ I asked the driver. ‘And why do they carry all that cardboard around with them?’

  The driver laughed. ‘They’re not cleaners. They are scavengers; women who collect cardboard from all across Jeddah and then sell it. They also collect bottles, drink cans, bags . . .’

  ‘Don’t we recycle these things here?’

  ‘No. Too much trouble. The women do a good job, generally.’

  ‘You mean you don’t find it objectionable that poor immigrant women from Africa work in such undignified and unhygienic conditions on the streets?’

  ‘Believe me, there are worse jobs women can do.’

  Though it grieves me to admit it, the driver was right. In Saudi Arabia women indeed did do worse jobs. Many of the African women lived in an area of Jeddah known as Karantina, a slum full of poverty, prostitution, and disease. Living in a plush compound for Westerners and rubbing shoulders with Saudi bankers, journalists, educators, businessmen, clerics, and the like had blinded me to the real Saudi Arabia. Disregarding British Council advice, I headed out to Karantina, the most unsecure and dangerous quarter of Jeddah.

  I wanted to see for myself how black immigrants lived in Saudi Arabia. The hallmark of a civilization is, I believe, how it treats its minorities. My day in Karantina, a perversion of the term ‘quarantine’, was one of the worst of my life. Thousands of people who had been living in Saudi Arabia for decades, but without passports, had been deemed ‘illegal’ by the government and, quite literally, abandoned under a flyover.

  A non-Saudi black student I had met at the British Council accompanied me. ‘Last week a woman gave birth here,’ he said, pointing to a ramshackle cardboard shanty. Disturbed, I no
w realized that the materials I had seen those women carrying were not always for sale, but for shelter. While rich Saudis zoomed over the flyover in their fast cars, others rotted in the sun below them.

  Now my assumed Saudi identity brought shame to me: how could I walk around Karantina? My companion asked if I was still keen to do so; there had been recent murders and even the Saudi police were afraid to enter the place. I was aghast. I had never expected to see such naked poverty in Saudi Arabia.

  As we returned to our car an elderly Saudi man turned up with clothes and food for the refugees. It was such occasional gestures of humanity that helped maintain my faith in human goodness.

  In the distance, I noticed a woman praying. She stood immediately outside her cardboard shack and bowed, now rising, now prostrating. Her shelter was too small for her to pray in private.

  At that moment it dawned on me that Britain, my home, had given refuge to thousands of black Africans from Somalia and Sudan: I had seen them in their droves in Whitechapel. They prayed, had their own mosques, were free, and were given government housing. How could it be that Saudi Arabia had condemned African Muslims to misery and squalor? It was a harrowing experience. As far as I was concerned, Muslims enjoyed a better lifestyle in non-Muslim Britain than they did in Muslim Saudi Arabia. At that moment, I longed to be home again.

  All my talk of ummah seemed so juvenile now. It was only in the comfort of Britain that Islamists could come out with such radical, utopian slogans as one government, one ever-expanding country, for one Muslim nation. The racist reality of the Arab psyche would never accept black and white people as equal.