Active Stocks
Thu Mar 28 2024 15:59:33
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 155.90 2.00%
  1. ICICI Bank share price
  2. 1,095.75 1.08%
  1. HDFC Bank share price
  2. 1,448.20 0.52%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 428.55 0.13%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 277.05 2.21%
Business News/ Politics / News/  Saudi Arabia’s decade of denial
BackBack

Saudi Arabia’s decade of denial

Saudi Arabia’s decade of denial

Fayez Nureldine/AFP Premium

Fayez Nureldine/AFP

Saudi Arabia may not have been directly implicated in the conspiracy that killed more than 3,000 people on 11 September 2001, but it has been consumed in a conspiracy of silence ever since. The kingdom remains in sullen denial of the fact that the terrorists’ ideology—their inspiration to behave as they did—was created and nurtured within its borders.

Fayez Nureldine/AFP

From the moment the twin towers fell in New York, the US sought to define for the world how to view the terrorist attack. President George W. Bush declared that “you are either with us, or against us", and quickly began to classify entire nations in these Manichaean terms.

Muslim leaders everywhere worried that they would be stigmatized, perhaps nowhere more so than in Saudi Arabia, whose regime feared that its decades of friendship with the US might end. But those fears were misplaced, because the Bush administration was determined to minimize the Saudi role in the 9/11 atrocity. True, 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and the attack’s author, Osama bin Laden, was born and bred in the kingdom. But the Bush administration chose to ignore and bury the evidence of any state involvement. The long-term bilateral relationship, based on the kingdom’s custodianship of the holy oil fields, was not to be disrupted.

Nevertheless, Saudi legitimacy came under fire. The kingdom’s prestige among fellow Islamic regimes suffered, because Al Qaeda was widely perceived as a product of Saudi Arabia’s official Wahhabi ideology and was known to receive much of its financial support from within the country. In an effort at damage control, the regime became preoccupied with confronting its domestic enemies while simultaneously labelling the terrorists “foreign", “ignorant of Islam", and, yes, even “Zionist".

This scheme had some success in portraying home-grown jihadis as members of external, rootless, transnational groups. Saudi terrorists were described as al fi’a al dhallah (the group that has gone astray). To distract attention further, the Saudis also began to denounce the country’s Shia minority ever more vociferously as a “fifth column" of Iran’s terror-sponsoring regime.

But, despite heightened vigilance, domestic Saudi terror cells became active within the kingdom following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The following year, Osama bin Laden described the ruling Al Saud family’s control of oil revenues as “the biggest theft in history". On Osama’s orders, oil installations, the oil city of Khobar, the interior ministry and the police headquarters in Riyadh were all attacked.

The worldwide attention and criticism that the 9/11 attacks brought to Wahhabism put the Saudi royals on the defensive about the religious creed that had long legitimized their regime. In particular, the concept of al-walaa’ wa al-bara’ (loyalty to the system and hostility to outsiders), a central component of the Saudi educational curriculum, was savaged because it included a duty to engage in jihad to protect the moral order. Following US requests, references to the concept were removed from textbooks in 2004. But that is about as far as “reform" of the Saudi educational system and its curriculum of fanaticism went.

Another failure was the kingdom’s effort to win over the hearts and minds of captured terrorists. In the mid-2000s, it was praised for creating a model system for reintegrating Saudis who had been detained at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay. But the supposed cure—more knowledge of Wahhabism—proved only to promote the disease: the men who created Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were graduates of the Saudis’ rehabilitation programme.

Not even the marginalization of Al Qaeda by the Arab Spring offered respite to the kingdom. True democracy, of course, cannot co-exist with Al Qaeda; but it also cannot co-exist with an obscurantist monarchy enthralled to a fundamentalist ideology. Osama’s death came at the very moment when much of the Muslim world was expressing through public protests that it had no desire to see regimes built upon his Wahhabi-inspired brand of fanaticism.

Yet Saudi Arabia took no solace from this, because the regimes toppled by the Arab Spring had been bulwarks of its regional security policy. In a further denial of reality, the kingdom has recoiled from the new regimes as if they were apostates.

Here, once again, Saudi confusion has mimicked American confusion, or vice versa. The US has either hesitated to embrace the Arab Spring revolutions (Egypt was a particularly striking case) or has given silent assent to their suppression, as in Bahrain. Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s unilateral military intervention in Bahrain to suppress the revolt there—albeit carried out under the umbrella of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s “security" pact—was tacitly supported by the US.

Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda has been marginalized, but not by Saudi Arabia, which nurtured the terrorists, or by the US, which waged wars against Osama and his acolytes. Instead, it has been eviscerated by the courage and dignity of ordinary Arabs from Damascus to Sana to Tripoli. Perhaps if the Saudi royal family could grasp that simple fact, it would no longer need to deny the true sources of the Kingdom’s insecurity.

Mai Yamani’s most recent book is ‘Cradle of Islam’

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011 www.project-syndicate.org

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Politics News and Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates & Live Business News.
More Less
Published: 08 Sep 2011, 01:15 AM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App