Reaping the whirlwind
It was a matter of time before the terrible wind that originated in the Arabian Peninsula returned to its point of origin. The jihadists had struck far and wide. They had taken the Wahhabi creed, stretched it to the breaking point, and turned it into an instrument of combat. Where the creed had once taught obedience to the rulers, it now turned its wrath on the "infidels" defiling the sacred earth of Arabia. In Arabia, it was a time of denial. In the year behind us, the bubble in which the Saudi kingdom was sheltered burst, and today there is a running war between the forces of order and zealots who have put down roots in a realm that once thought car bombs and kidnappings were the lot of other lands.
The truth is that a battle of considerable urgency now rages in the Saudi kingdom. These are not "Zionist agents" who now play havoc with the stability of the Saudi realm, as Crown Prince Abdullah recently asserted. They are children of Arabia, born to disappointment, awakening to a new era of austerity. They are young men without the necessary skills for the modern economy, falling back on the consolation of religious zeal. Their anger is rancid--it takes in embattled secularists in Arabia itself, the rulers, and, the surprise of it all, the establishment religious scholars written off by the die-hards as accomplices in the moral "pollution" of Arabia. On a popular Islamic website in Arabia, a fatwa was posted recently specifying the conditions under which a Muslim may mutilate the corpse of an "infidel." The grim deed could be done, the religious edict said, if it could terrorize the enemy or lift the hearts of Muslim warriors. Islam is severe on those who would desecrate the dead, but the jihadists, it seems, have worked their will even on their faith.
The dream of modernism has atrophied in Arab-Muslim lands, and in Arabia itself that dream is now in the throes of a deadly struggle. The custodians of the realm know the stakes. Now and then, they speak of these jihadists as alien to the soil of their land. But this evasion will not do. There are worldly people, within the dynasty itself and in the educated classes, who know that a price is being paid for indulging the forces of ruin. A year ago, as this cycle of terror within Arabia began to play out, there were Saudis speaking of the "Talibanization" of their society, warning that the radicals were on the verge of running away with the faith. Order is indivisible, and so is this scourge of terror. You can't bless terror in the streets of Jerusalem and condemn it in Arabia: Once emboldened, as they have been in recent years, the religious extremists were bound to think that the battle for Arabia itself might yet be won.
A terrible wind. Nowadays, there is a telling of Arabian history that stresses the novelty of this struggle between order and religious bigotry. But, in truth, Saudi history offers a precedent in the war that was fought out, in the late 1920s, between the founder of the modern Saudi state, Ibn Saud, and the Ikhwan (literally, the brothers), religious-tribal warriors who had been instrumental in the early triumphs of Ibn Saud. The work of conquest completed by the mid-1920s, the Ikhwan began to bristle under the new system of control. They had helped build a state but now wanted none of its discipline. And they had no patience for national boundaries. British power was nearby, in Jordan and Iraq and Kuwait, and in the sea lanes of the Persian Gulf; the Ikhwan sought holy warfare against these British infidels. Literalists in matters of the faith, the Ikhwan believed that jihad knew no rest and no boundaries.
In the end, the sword decided the matter. For the wily desert chieftain, it was either the normal political world, a chance at peace and a measure of prosperity, or the hell of the Ikhwan's utopia. In a decisive battle, in early 1929, the Ikhwan were crushed. Today, thoughts of that battle are recalled by Saudis who have had their fill with the proponents of intolerance and terror. Now, as in that seminal moment in 1929, the state has to draw a line for the forces of extremism. This terrible wind blows at will. It has no need of what Israel does in its struggle with the Palestinians, and it pre-dates this willed, simulated rage over the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The Pied Piper who summoned these men to this terrible, merciless war, Osama bin Laden, made no secret of what he wanted: a totalitarian state built on virtue and terror, a regime that would put the wealth of oil at the service of a war against the infidels--and their local collaborators. This war against extremism can be won. But the alibis and evasions will have to be swept out of the way first.
This story appears in the June 28, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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