Road to Islamic State was paved by America’s Faustian bargain with Saudi Wahhabism

Sameer Arshad in Times of India

In the aftermath of the Paris carnage, US president Barack Obama led the usual counterproductive finger-pointing telling Muslims to ask themselves how extremist ideologies took root. Obama’s point is perhaps valid, but that is only a part of the problem. The West needs to answer far more serious questions. Besides waging destabilising, unjust wars and propping up despotic regimes in the Muslim world, it bears responsibility for planting cancer, which Daesh or the so-called Islamic State (IS) is a symptom of, in the process.

It is unfair to collectively blame Muslims for IS since they are and have been the worst victims of the mindless violence of the creed it represents for three centuries. Daesh has its roots in 18th century preacher Abd-al-Wahhab’s doctrine, which rejected Islamic pluralism enshrined in the Quran and declared war on Muslims other than Salafis.

The Ottoman Empire, which represented contemporary mainstream Muslims, resisted this challenge tooth and nail. It in fact coined the term Wahhabism to describe Wahhab’s creed and to underline it fell outside Islam’s pale. Thanks to the West’s myopic foreign policy goals and lust for oil, the creed has come a long way since the 18th century when even Wahhab’s brother and father rejected his doctrine. The creed has been defined mainly by hostility towards Islamic mysticism and seeking death for ‘deviant’ Muslims.

Beyond his family, Wahhab’s teaching found few takers. The vandalism inspired by him infuriated neighbouring tribes, who forced Wahhab to take refuge in Dariyya after threatening to kill him. Wahhab’s flight proved the turning point in his career as Dariyya chieftain Muhammad ibn Saud got into an irrevocable alliance with the preacher in 1747, under which he pledged his family would promote Wahhabism. It laid the foundation for Saudi Arabia on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1932.

By the time Wahhab died in 1792 his followers had become lethal. They declared a war on mainstream Islamic sects by branding them polytheists. Taking ‘deviant’ Muslim lives was justified along with seizure of their properties and enslaving their women and children. This prompted the Mecca qadi to denounce Wahhabis as non-Muslims and bar them from entering Islam’s holiest city. The Ottomans condemned Wahhabis as Kharjites (defectors) and banned them from performing Hajj.

But the Saudis have honoured their pact with Wahhab by using petrodollars to export his creed through a cultural offensive which has undermined Islamic pluralism, triggered fratricidal sectarian conflict and birthed terrorist groups like al-Qaida and IS. The US has been complicit as the principal backer of Saudi Arabia.

This has helped America satiate its thirst for oil and use Wahhabi doctrine for short term goals like defeating USSR in Afghanistan. In the 1970s, the US used the Saudi alliance to counter Egyptian pan-Arab socialist Gamal Abdel Nasser and post-revolution Iran. In the process it often patronised the nihilistic forces that have now turned their guns on the West.