The Islamist

by Ed Husain

  Readers were warned about the evil effects of plurality and political parties, democracy, and a parliamentary system. Worse, several pages were devoted to blaming Jews for the world’s ills.

  The evidence cited for this racist and criminal worldview was the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fraudulent document used by the German chancellor Adolf Hitler and other European and American leaders8 to validate their virulent anti-Semitism, which eventually led to the Holocaust.

  The book, now unavailable in most countries but widely available throughout the Arab world, continues to be the source of evidence for a Jewish plan to dominate the Arab and wider world. I bought my own copy from a secular left-wing bookshop in Damascus. Egypt, recipient of vast amounts of US and EU aid, even produced a 41-part TV series based on the Protocols, and broadcast it to the Arab world as recently as 2002.

  Islamist apologists point out that they are not against Jews, but Zionists. Reading these vile, hateful texts leaves me in no doubt that this was only a play on words, a shallow trick to pre empt accusations of anti-Semitism. To them, Jew and Zionist are synonyms, selectively used to win over a given audience.

  An author of the Islamic Culture series is Mohamed Qutb, teacher to Osama bin Laden and brother of the founder of Islamism, Syed Qutb. Osama bin Laden, though a civil engineering undergraduate at Jeddah’s King Abd al-Aziz University, studied the compulsory Islamic Studies units under none other than Mohamed Qutb. Bin Laden attended Qutb’s lectures out of interest and support, not because he had been assigned to Qutb’s study group. Is it any wonder that bin Laden aspires to a world in which infidels either accept Islam or live under Islamist domination? Bin Laden’s idiosyncratic jihad includes the violent overthrow of Arab governments, an idea first expressed by Syed Qutb from his prison cell in Cairo. Were bin Laden’s beliefs and actions, in large part, influenced by his Saudi education? His early exposure to Qutb?

  The Islamic Culture series catalogues Muslim history and the recent decline in Arab imperial glory by doing what most Islamists do: blaming others. Islamists of various shades (including Wahhabis and jihadis) are masters at blaming the Zionists, the Jews, the British, French, and Italian imperialists, the Turks and the Freemasons, but never themselves. Osama bin Laden’s videos speak of the US as the cause of Muslim decline. This university literature was an exact replica of that mindset: it blamed others. It put forward a panacea in the form of the radical, firebrand Islam of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Little wonder, then, that bin Laden allied himself with fellow Wahhabis in Egypt, particularly Ayman al-Zawahiri.

  It has no mention of the criticism and indeed the isolation of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab by leading Muslim scholars of his time. His own brother, Shaikh Sulaiman Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, no less a scholar, was even the first to write an extended refutation of Wahhabism.

  What happened to the Muslims? I lamented. Once producers of great thinkers, grammarians, theologians, scientists, innovators, poets, jurists, and architects, today’s Muslim schools and universities are producing government-fearing sycophants or extremist zealots. Where are the free-thinking intellectuals?

  What I was taught in clandestinely Islamist mosques and cell meetings in Britain was being taught openly at universities in Saudi Arabia. Islamist extremism was nowhere near subsiding.

  During my early trips to Mecca I often prayed alone, away from the crowds, in deep remembrance of a loving and merciful God. I relished walking around the vast courtyard of the mosque there, slowly circulating the Ka’bah at the centre and reminiscing about the moments when the Prophet Mohammed, and before him Abraham, walked the same earth. What were their thoughts? How did they feel in what was then barren soil, with this simple structure before them? Why was their communing with the divine so powerful? All the while I would walk past humble servants of God in prayer and recitation, and Sufis in meditation. Millions across the globe craved to be in the sanctuary in Mecca - I was grateful to be able to visit it so often.

  As I grew more familiar with the layout of the sanctuary, I began to discern that there was an underlying control imposed on the thousands of worshippers in Mecca. We were allowed to worship, but not to gather together for study of religion. As I walked around, whispering salutations to the Prophet, I noticed large groups of Saudi men, mostly in red headscarves, gathering round large chairs in different areas of the huge courtyard. There were at least six such gatherings, headed by Wahhabi clerics. Judging from one teacher, most of the lecture, or commentary, was on a certain book about prayer rituals. As usual they wore their red and white royal-family-imitating chequered headscarves, sometimes a plain white one, with long white robes down to their shins. Jesus once scolded the Pharisees, comparing them to bright white tombs that looked beautiful from the outside but contained only corruption and corrosion. The Wahhabi clerics today, in their pristine white robes, are no different.

  For hundreds of years this courtyard was a centre of learning and erudition. Muslim scholars from all schools of thought taught here for decades at a time. Ibn Jubayr, a twelfth-century Spanish Muslim, wrote in his memoirs that several schools of thought, including the Shia school of Zaydis, were teaching in the courtyard in 1183. Today, that is no longer the case. Singular, monolithic, austere, and rigid religiosity from Najd is the order of the day.

  Once, in a gathering among his companions, the Prophet Mohammed prayed, ‘O Lord, bless us in our Shaam9 and our Yemen.’ Several people in the gathering requested, ‘Bless us in our Najd, O Messenger of God.’ The Prophet repeated his prayers for Syria and Yemen. They made the request for Najd again, and the Prophet prayed for Syria and Yemen. Upon their third request, he prophesied, ‘There, in Najd, will be earthquakes and troubles. The horn of evil will appear from Najd.’ They fell silent.

  At another time, the Prophet gestured towards the east from Medina, in the direction of the Najd region, and warned three times, ‘Trouble will be from there.’

  Commentators on the pronouncements of the Prophet, the muhaddithun, have frequently pointed to these and other comments of the Messenger of God to illustrate the evil of the Wahhabi movement.

  While trying to follow in the footsteps of the Prophet, I realized that there was precious little left of his heritage in Saudi Arabia. In Mecca, all historical remnants of the Prophet’s life were destroyed with dynamite for fear of polytheism and in accordance with the Wahhabi mantra of ‘worshipping one God’. To visit the Prophet’s house in Mecca, or to view with awe the houses of his close companions, was now considered shirk or polytheism.

  In place of history and heritage, hotel complexes have been built across Mecca. Entire mountains have been blasted away to make room for the booming hotel business. In essence, this is destruction not only of Muslim history but of Islam itself. I had grown up in a city where history was valued. In Mecca, the Prophet was no more.

  Racism, anti-Christianity, destruction of Muslim heritage, hatred of Jews, anti-Americanism, subjugation of women, banning of music were all inculcated in most of the Saudi youths I came across. How could these attitudes be so widespread and so deeply ingrained? Why was Wahhabism so successful?

  Throughout history, whenever governments have claimed to rule in the name of religion, by divine authority, the result has been tyranny and injustice. The Umayyads, in the name of Islam, slaughtered thousands who opposed them in the seventh century, including the Prophet Mohammed’s own grandchildren. Religions are not for governments or states, they are for individuals. The state can assist individuals’ religious responsibilities, but governments cannot, should not, profess faith. Repeatedly in the Koran, God calls upon individual humans to better their condition, to be kind to the wayfarer, to give alms, honour their parents, believe in an afterlife, pray with spiritual presence, prepare for accountability of our worldly actions - these are not state functions.

  If the Muslim Brotherhood were to seize power in Egypt - a situation not wholly inconceivable - then Hizb ut-Tahrir would condemn the ‘Islamic state’ for not being sufficiently Islamic
, as they do today with Iran and Saudi Arabia. The perfect Islamic state is a cherished myth, sold to naive Muslims by conniving Islamists. In reality, no government would be ‘Islamic’ to a degree sufficient to satisfy every Islamist group. In the name of religion, these groups seek political power for their own organizational and ideological purposes.

  By the summer of 2005 Faye and I had only eight weeks left in Saudi Arabia before we would return home to London. Thursday 7 July was the beginning of the Saudi weekend. Faye and I were due to lunch with Sultan, a Saudi banker who was financial adviser to four government ministers. I wanted to gauge what he and his wife, Faye’s student, thought about life inside the land of their birth. Fresh from my study of Saudi school textbooks, I had many questions to ask him. Under pressure from the US government, direct references to jihad had been removed from the books, but from what I had read they still contained abundant material that could incite hatred and encourage zealots and bigots.

  On television that morning we watched the developing story of a power cut on the London underground. As the cameras focused on King’s Cross, Edgware Road, Aldgate, and Russell Square, I looked on with a mixture of interest and homesickness. Soon, the power-cut story turned into shell-shocked reportage of a series of terrorist bombings. My initial suspicion was that the perpetrators were Saudis. My experience of them, their virulence towards my non-Muslim friends, their hate-filled textbooks, made me think that bin Laden’s Saudi soldiers had now targeted my home town. It never crossed my mind that the rhetoric of jihad introduced to Britain by Hizb ut-Tahrir could have anything to do with such horror.

  My sister avoided the suicide attack on Aldgate station by four minutes.

  On the previous day London had won the 2012 Olympic bid. At the British Council we had celebrated along with the nation that was now in mourning.

  The G8 summit in Scotland had also been derailed by events further south. The summit, thanks largely to the combined efforts of Tony Blair and Sir Bob Geldof, had been set to tackle poverty in Africa. Now it was forced to address Islamist terrorism; Arab grievances had hijacked the agenda again. The fact that hundreds of children die in Africa every day would be of no relevance to a committed Islamist. In the extremist mind, the plight of the tiny Palestinian nation is more important than the deaths of millions of black Africans. Who in the Arab world cares that some 6,000 people die each day in Africa from AIDS? Let them die, they’re not Muslims, would be the unspoken line of argument. As an Islamist, it was only the suffering of Muslims that had moved me, provoked a reaction. Now, human suffering mattered to me, regardless of religion.

  Faye and I were glued to the television for hours. Watching fellow Londoners come out of tube stations, injured and mortified but facing the world’s media with a defiant sense of dignity, made me feel proud to be British.

  We met Sultan and his wife at an Indian restaurant near the British Council. Sultan was in his early thirties and his wife in her late twenties. They had travelled widely and seemed much more liberal than most Saudis I had met. Behind a makeshift partition, the restaurant surroundings were considered private and his wife, to my amazement, removed her veil to facilitate a four-way discussion between us. We discussed our travels, our time in Saudi Arabia, and the impressions we had formed.

  Sultan spoke fondly of his time in London, particularly his placement at Coutts & Co. as a trainee banker. We then moved on to the subject uppermost in my mind, the terrorist attacks on London. My host did not really seem to care. He expressed no real sympathy or shock, despite speaking so warmly of his time in London. ‘I suppose they will say bin Laden was behind the attacks. They blamed us for 9/11,’ he said.

  Keen to take him up on his comment, I asked him, ‘Based on your education in Saudi Arabian schools, do you think there is a connection between the form of Islam children are taught here and the action of fifteen Saudi men on September 11th?’

  Without thinking, his immediate response was, ‘No. No, because Saudis were not behind 9/11. The plane hijackers were not Saudi men. One thousand two hundred and forty-six Jews were absent from work on that day, and there is the proof that they, the Jews, were behind the killings. Not Saudis.’

  It was the first time I heard so precise a number of Jewish absentees. I sat there pondering on the pan-Arab denial of the truth, a refusal to accept that the Wahhabi jihadi terrorism festering in their midst had inflicted calamities on the entire world.

  At this point his wife interjected and reminded him that the number was not 1,246 but higher. She also reminded him of a film that predicted 9/11.

  ‘Yes,’ he continued. ‘The Americans produced a film depicting the destruction of the twin towers by Jews before 9/11. They knew it was going to happen, so they released a film. And now they blame us!’

  ‘And what is the name of that film?’ I asked, intrigued.

  Sultan pulled out his mobile phone, rang several of his friends to get me the name but they could not remember. He promised to e-mail me with its title. ‘Did you read the newspapers two days ago?’ he went on.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘The Americans anticipated a meteorite coming towards the earth so they blasted it from the heavens. Ed, they can see meteorites coming, they claim their satellite spy dishes can pick up details of cigarette packets in the desert, but they couldn’t spot three huge aeroplanes? They didn’t know that they would be hijacked? I can’t believe that. Besides, Saudis are not competent enough to co-ordinate such an attack on New York.’

  I had heard similar arguments in London and several Middle Eastern capitals that hijacking passenger planes and flying them into civic buildings, slaughtering thousands of innocent lives in the process, was somehow intelligent and Saudis and Arabs were not capable of such brilliance. I didn’t even bother trying to point out the illogicality of their arguments. They were convinced they were right and nothing was going to change that. Not to mention that making such accusations to a well-connected banker in a Jeddah restaurant could quickly have landed me in a dark prison cell.

  Sultan soon noticed that I had become somewhat reticent. ‘We all like Osama; we just don’t like the bother he has created for us,’ Sultan said. He pointed to his wife and said her best friend was Osama’s niece.

  ‘Really?’ I asked.

  ‘We know the bin Laden family. It is a large family and they are very humble people. They have billions of riyals but they drive ordinary cars; they don’t show off like the newly rich Saudi families and people respect them for that. Look at Osama - he is one of the wealthiest men in the world and he has given up everything. Most bin Ladens are like that.’

  Sultan’s wife emphasized that her friend was self-deprecating, too. They had attended the same secondary school and the bin Ladens had always despised ostentation.

  I asked how they felt about the school curriculum in Saudi Arabia being changed.

  ‘We don’t like it,’ said Sultan. ‘They are doing this because the Americans are forcing our government to take out references to jihad from our textbooks. Most Saudis are very angry about this.’

  Sultan’s wife, directing her words towards Faye, then said, ‘Osama wants Arabs to be great again, as we were in the past. And he wants us to do this through jihad. I will teach my children jihad and the true Islam that we are taught in our schools. The Americans will not change our faith. It is only in Saudi Arabia that we have a true form of Islam and we will not change this. All other countries have a faulty understanding of Islam.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, recalling the books of Mawdudi that had also spoken about a ‘True Islam’.

  ‘Take Egypt, for example,’ replied Sultan. ‘Women wear headscarves in Egypt but they do everything that is forbidden. That is because the Islam taught in their schools is wrong . . .’ As Sultan explained himself I wondered to myself why it is that, among Arab men, Islam is always judged by the conduct of women. Saudi Islam was true Islam because their women were in black and Egyptian or Turkish Islam was deviant b
ecause their women wore coloured scarves. Was that the best argument for their brand of Islam the Saudis could come up with?

  In my class the following Sunday, the beginning of the Saudi working week, were nearly sixty Saudis. Only one mentioned the London bombings.

  ‘Was your family harmed?’ he asked.

  ‘My sister missed an explosion by four minutes but otherwise they’re all fine, thank you.’

  The student, before a full class, sighed and said, ‘There are no benefits in terrorism. Why do people kill innocents?’

  Two others quickly gave him his answer in Arabic: ‘There are benefits. They will feel how we feel.’

  I was livid. ‘Excuse me?’ I said. ‘Who will know how it feels?

  ‘We don’t mean you, Teacher,’ said one. ‘We are talking about people in England. You are here. They need to know how Iraqis and Palestinians feel.’

  ‘The British people have been bombed by the IRA for years,’ I retorted. ‘Londoners were bombed by Hitler during the Blitz. The largest demonstrations against the war in Iraq were in London. People in Britain don’t need to be taught what it feels like to be bombed.’

  Several students nodded in agreement. The argumentative ones became quiet. Were they convinced by what I had said? It was difficult to tell.

  Two weeks after the terrorist attacks in London Zafir, a young Saudi student, raised his hand and asked, ‘Teacher, how can I go to London?’

  ‘Much depends on your reason for going to Britain. Do you want to study, or just be a tourist?’

  ‘Teacher, I want to go London next month. I want bomb, big bomb in London, again. I want make jihad!’

  ‘What?’ I exclaimed. Another student raised both hands and shouted, ‘Me too! Me too!’

  Other students applauded those who had just articulated what many of them were thinking. I was incandescent. In protest, I walked out of the classroom to a chorus of jeering and catcalls.