by Ed Husain
Long before Osama bin Laden’s tirades, the influential Tunisian intellectual Shaikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi described the United States as ‘Crusader America’ and ‘the enemy of Islam’ because America liberated Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991. Knowing what we know of Ghannouchi today, it is hard to imagine him writing, as he did in 1991:
There must be no doubt that we will strike anywhere against whoever strikes Iraq ... We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world ... Muslim youth must be serious in their warning to the Americans that a blow to Iraq will be a licence to strike American and Western interests throughout the Islamic world.
Ghannouchi argued that the United States had waged a war against Islam, and called for a Muslim boycott of American goods, planes and ships. He genuinely believed that in annexing Kuwait Saddam Hussein had made a laudable move toward regional unity by ‘joining together two Arab states out of twenty-two’, and America had once again divided Arab lands.
Twenty years later, Ghannouchi’s stance had evolved out of all recognition, and he went visiting New York City and Washington, DC, calling on America to invest in the Middle East and work with Arabs and Turks in the region. I met him in 2012 at the headquarters of the Wall Street Journal in New York, where he was lobbying for better American coverage of Tunisia and seeking to attract foreign direct investment. The change in his position epitomises the continuing changes in the Middle East, as people yearn for revival and renewal.
Whereas Sayyed Qutb once took Islamism in the direction of intolerance and violence, Ghannouchi has steered this global movement today toward pluralism and coexistence. Exiled in London in the 1990s and 2000s, he witnessed a West that was different from the America Qutb claimed to know, and opposed. Ghannouchi returned to Tunisia in 2011 to lead his country toward democracy and prosperity, free from ideology. The fact that his organisation conceded defeat in national elections in 2015, and did not seek to impose its interpretation of Islam in public, marked a significant move away from earlier Islamism. In 2016, standing before global media cameras and political representation from Arab countries, Ghannouchi declared that politics must be kept far from the mosques of the Middle East. He declared his Ennahda movement as a Muslim democratic party, and jettisoned Islamism as an ideology of the past.8 The West mostly ignored this important change, but if understood properly and supported, then this ideological shift has the potential to give birth to free and normative politics in the Middle East. In reality, this means that Ennahda is now a sister political party to the British Conservative Party, or Germany’s Christian Democrats.
I had the privilege of welcoming Ghannouchi to several high-level round-table meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and New York. ‘The mosques are open in Tunisia, and so are the beaches’ was his honest answer to questions on freedom of choice in his country. His public and personal honouring of Jewish communities in Tunisia is another mark of his civility. When asked questions on law and economics, he deferred to women in his delegation, showing them a respect and recognition not normally expected of leaders in the Middle East.
On secularism, Ghannouchi did not hesitate to reject outright French-style laïcité as anti-religious. He said that militant secular democracy had no place in the Muslim world, and where it was enforced there was a strong backlash against it: Iran, Turkey, even Algeria. Ghannouchi then highlighted two forms of secularism or pluralism that he said were not antagonistic toward faith, and indeed accommodated devotion. In Great Britain, the Queen was the head of state and Church. In America, Christianity and faith generally were not imposed or established, but the state was not antagonistic toward piety. Both British and American models were more in line than the French with the sentiments and expectations of the Muslim world.
Ghannouchi’s influence on politics and thinking extends beyond Tunisia. In Egypt, he was among a group of advisers around the first Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi. But Ghannouchi’s direct appeal to Morsi not to rule alone, but to form coalitions with secularists and nationalists, fell on deaf ears. Today, the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood languishes in the same prison quarters that produced Sayyed Qutb and jihadism.
While Ghannouchi did not succeed in Egypt, his advocacy of an ethics-driven economy and centre-right politics has been more successful in Turkey, where his books and articles have shaped the thinking of the Islam-inspired AK Party. President Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan and those around him readily acknowledge their intellectual debt to him. And Ghannouchi, in turn, has tried to take the best from the Turks in learning how to create jobs, attract foreign investment, build infrastructure, and provide a world-class education system and healthcare for Tunisian citizens. These are the issues that matter to governments and responsible politicians, not obsessions with confronting the West. In seeking solutions to these issues of governance, both Turks and Tunisians have shifted away from Islamist ideology and have tried to move toward free-market economics and democratic conservatism. In this, they have much in common with European or American Christian conservatives. Their Islam is expressed through their personal piety, not by imposing their view of scripture on the public or declaring Haram acts illegal. But where is the Western support for this nascent but vitally important political project? Who will treat yesterday’s Islamists as today’s conservative Muslim democrats?
The respected professor of Islamic studies Shaikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, arguably Sunni Islam’s most important contemporary religious authority, to whom Ghannouchi and other political leaders defer, explains that since sharia’s five overarching goals, the Maqasid, are the preservation of life, property, intellect, family and religion, therefore any system of government that achieves the Maqasid is a sharia-compliant government. In this mainstream scholarly Muslim interpretation, the secular authority of the state and its courts is completely compatible with Islam.
Although such a broad and contextualised approach to Islam, sharia, politics and power might appeal to a new generation of former Islamists and emerging Muslim political conservatives, however, it is also alienating to others, particularly those who take a fully literalist approach to scripture: the Salafis.
9
Who is a Salafi? Or a Wahhabi?
Puritanism existed in the West before it emerged in the Arab world. But whereas the Puritans ceased to exist as a movement in the West, they continue to thrive across the Muslim world. Salafism or Wahhabism is the name given to Islam’s puritans: Protestants against mainstream Islam. In England, when Edward VI came to the throne in 1547 at the age of nine, the Puritans seized the opportunity to introduce evangelical reform, close down shrines because they promoted idolatry, whitewash over church wall paintings, and sell off or destroy musical instruments. They were particularly insistent that individual believers could have direct access to Christian scriptures, bypassing clerics. And all this was happening 200 years before the eerily similar puritanism of the Salafis surfaced in Arabia.
Put simply, a Salafi is a Muslim who claims to be following the example of the Salaf (‘predecessors’), the first three generations of Muslims. They claim to draw their guidance from the first century of Islam (seventh century CE): the Prophet, his companions, and their immediate companions. After these three generations – the Salaf al-Saliheen (‘the pious predecessors’) – they consider that Islam grew corrupted through Christian, Roman, Persian, Greek and other influences. To be pure, therefore, Muslims must adhere only to the practices of the Salaf – hence the popular reference to them as Salafis, or more precisely as Wahhabis, after the modern revival of this puritanism by the Bedouin preacher Mohamed ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792).
Here’s the rub: each and every Muslim believes in the message of the Prophet and strives to emulate him and his companions. But not every Muslim is a Wahhabi. Salafism is a noble idea; Wahhabism is living it out in practice under the guidance of texts as interpreted
by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his students. By focusing on Wahhabism, we examine the true nature of the modern claimants of Salafism.
Osama bin Laden was a Salafi–Wahhabi. After 9/11, there was much focus on the historic roots of Wahhabism and its deep ties with the Saudi government. Similarly, the Afghan jihad of the 1980s helped bring Salafi–Wahhabis to international attention, as droves of them from around the world went off to fight the godless Soviet enemy. On the battlefields of Afghanistan, they learned how to operate weapons and make bombs. With the destruction of the Soviet Union, this global fighting force turned on a new enemy: the West and its allies.
One of the reasons Wahhabism is a potent force today is that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia has spent an estimated $200 billion of its oil wealth in recent decades strenuously propagating its hard-line theology around the globe. The alliance between the Wahhabis and the rulers of Saudi Arabia dates back to an eighteenth-century pact between Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself and a local tribal chieftain, Mohamed ibn Saud, forefather of today’s ruling Al Saud dynasty. Ibn Saud recognised Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s puritanical creed, while the radical preacher acknowledged Ibn Saud’s ambitious political leadership. In 1749, Ibn Saud pledged allegiance to the monotheistic preacher, and in return Ibn Abd al-Wahhab recognised the Saudi claim to power. That alliance still forms the basis of the political contract whereby the Saudi state upholds its clerical classes, ensuring they are well financed, immune from scrutiny, and able to impose their singular interpretation of monotheism on Islam’s holiest sites.
Salafi–Wahhabism is the prevailing Islamic force in Saudi Arabia today. Its hard-line interpretation of Islam means that Christians are forbidden to build churches, Saudi women must cover up with a black face veil, a niqab, and near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina separate highways have been constructed for Muslims and non-Muslims. Beheadings are carried out by the state in public squares outside mosques on Fridays in the name of applying a literalist, Wahhabi, understanding of sharia as state law.
Prominent Saudi clerics, such as the popular television personality and author of school textbooks Saleh al-Fawzan, have declared in recent years that ‘slavery is part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain for as long as there is Islam’. He accuses Muslims who reject slavery of being ‘apostates’, for which the penalty in Saudi Arabia is execution. Those who reject slavery, therefore, deserve to be killed.
How can mainstream Muslims engage in dialogue and try to dissuade Salafis who want to kill those who disagree with them? They can’t. Al-Fawzan is not a fringe figure inside Saudi Arabia. For this incitement to killing, he was neither arrested nor put on trial. The fact that ISIS and other extremist organisations practise sexual slavery can be directly linked to this normalisation of slavery inside the Saudi kingdom. Al-Fawzan is a professor at a government university in Riyadh, and has been at various times a member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious bodies. He is a prominent example, but there are several other influential clerics. They all draw their legitimacy from citing the works of the founder of Wahhabism, Mohamed Ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
His teachings and hard-line interpretation of tawhid (the ‘oneness’ of God) form the official Islam of Saudi Arabia, in opposition to that followed by most other Muslims around the world. His book, Kitab al-Tawhid, The Book of Oneness, dominates the global Muslim book market in cheap but well-bound editions from petrodollar-financed Gulf publishing houses. The best-funded universities in the Muslim world, in the Saudi cities of Mecca, Medina, Riyadh and Jeddah, all turn out tens of thousands of young clerics trained to travel across the Muslim world and spread the ideas in this book.
Let’s take a closer look at his theology. His fundamental claim was that the vast majority of the world’s Muslims had deviated from the creed of the Salaf. As Puritans opposed Catholicism, Wahhabis opposed the mainstream Islam of the Ottomans and the Mughals. The errancy of the majority of Muslims in the form of Shirk (idolatry, or polytheism) had to be physically purged out of Islam – hence the creation of the Ikhwan, a volunteer force dedicated to forcefully imposing Wahhabi ideas and behaviour. Creed, or ‘aqida, is of key importance to Wahhabis. Because the Muslim creed had ‘deviated’ (in their view), Muslims’ actions had become un-Islamic. In his singular obsession with ‘aqida, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab focused on purity of tawhid as literally understood from scripture, devoid of context or the interpretations of sharia masters over the preceding millennium.
The vast majority of Sunni Muslims believe in what is called the Ash‘ari creed, named after the early Imam al-Ash‘ari, who was a master theologian born in Basra in 873, and who lived and died in Baghdad. His aim was to create a theological formulation that isolated Muslim belief from external influences. Where verses of the Quran talk about God’s hand, knees or face, the Ash’ari school interpret this as speaking of the majesty of God metaphorically, since it is beyond human comprehension. When God says in the Quran that He descends to the lowest heaven to seek out those asking for His compassion, the majority of the world’s Muslims have, for a thousand years, interpreted these verses as allegorical expressions of God’s care for His creation. The Quran teaches us that the majority of its verses are Muhkamat (having a definite meaning), ‘and these are the foundation of the book’, but there are also Mutashabihat, ‘verses that are ambiguous’. The Quran then condemns those who use the ambiguous verses to make trouble with their own spurious interpretations. To avoid the curse of that denunciation, Sunni Muslims of the mainstream have steered clear of literalism for over a millennium.
Not so the Salafis or Wahhabis. They insist on the creed that God literally has a hand, feet, knees and a face. He sits on a throne. When He descends to the lower skies, He is literally present. They view Ash‘ari theologians as being swayed by the Greeks with their talk of speculative theology, rationalist theology and metaphors. Such foreign influence over Islam had to be cleansed by purity of tawhid, belief in God’s oneness.
Imam al-Ash‘ari, however, was well versed in the Arab poetry of the time of the Prophet, and therefore well equipped to make sense of metaphors in scripture. When the Quran mentioned ‘God’s hand’ it was a reference to His power. ‘God’s face’ should be understood as a metaphor for His essence, and ‘God’s sight’ was an indication of His constant vigilance over His creation. His descent in the last part of the night represented His mercy and love for pious Muslims. This remained the interpretation of the majority of Muslims for more than a millennium. To modern Salafi–Wahhabis, however, all this is heresy. Herein lies the fundamental difference in methodology of understanding scripture and reaching conclusions as to creed. To Salafi–Wahhabis, most Muslims are heretics because they do not literally believe that God has a face, has eyes to see, and physically descends to earth. To test Muslims, Salafi–Wahhabis often ask: ‘Where is Allah?’ To which Muslims invariably answer: ‘Everywhere’, or ‘In my heart’, or ‘With me’. Again, these are mainstream responses based on age-old interpretations of the Quran. For instance, the Quran says that Allah is ‘closer to us than our jugular vein’. But for the Salafi, God is on His throne.
These differences, even more than attitudes to terrorism, explain how most Muslims are not Salafi–Wahhabis and are, indeed, the first targets of Salafi–Wahhabism, because Salafi–Wahhabis see a need to cleanse Islam of the stain of these ordinary Muslims. The West has not understood this theological and methodological clash, this schism between Salafi–Wahhabis and the majority of Muslims. Yet highlighting it much more clearly differentiates most Muslims from the fanatical Salafi fringe.
Despite their dictatorial ways and simplistic doctrine, Salafi–Wahhabis represent fewer than 5 per cent of the world’s Muslims, and are found mostly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and among imams recently exported from Saudi universities to drum up recruits in all parts of the Muslim world.1 The vast majority of the globe’s Muslims are either Ash‘ari or similar in ‘aqida. With this flexibility of faith, Muslims who visit the shrine of a saint do not worship the sain
t or Sufi, but seek intercession with God through those whom God loves. But to the Salafi–Wahhabis, with their rigid literalism, such a practice is idolatry or Shirk and must be stopped at all costs.
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s book Kitab al-Tawhid was essentially a literalist collection of verses of the Quran and hadiths with no commentary, either from him or other scholars. He argued that God alone should be worshipped, that shrines and saints were to be disregarded, and Sufis and Shi‘a were heretics. Those who supported saints, shrines, Sufis or Shi‘a were no longer Muslims, but idolaters. They were no longer committed to Tawhid, but were committing Shirk, or polytheism. In short, they were apostates and polytheists.
This theological position had serious consequences. As Mushrikeen, or polytheists, a despised category of humans, Muslims were no longer Muslims in the eyes of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his followers. The greatest polytheists became the Ottoman sultans and their local governors, patrons of mainstream Islam, shrines, churches, Sufism, music, art, calligraphy, and all that was perceived by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab as un-Islamic. In rejecting them, he was doing the same thing as his fourteenth-century mentor Ibn Taymiyya, who had risen up against the Mongols, alleging that they did not implement the sharia. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab made the same claim against the Ottomans. He saw himself as a new prophet sent to renew monotheism, and to distinguish himself from mainstream Muslims he and his followers started to refer to themselves as Muwahhidun, or monotheists.
He started calling upon neighbouring tribes to adopt his monotheism against the ‘polytheists’, the mainstream Muslims. When he destroyed a shrine and caused a local outcry, he was banished and sought refuge among the tribes of Arabia.
