The Problem with Islam
Yangon, Myanmar, November 29th, 2015
Salaroche

So what is the matter with Arabian Islam? Why are so many suicide-killers sprouting up in their midst? Why are most Middle Eastern Muslim regimes either hardline authoritarian or brutally totalitarian? And why is the Arabian Sunni branch of Islam the training and recruiting grounds for ISIS, Al-Qaida, and other extremist groups?

Over the past 15 years, Arabian Islamic terrorism has been casting a bloody mantle over western societies to the point where, at the moment, no one possessing a modicum of factual information doubts there is something in Islamic scriptures that lends itself to murderous terrorist interpretations.

And now we have ISIS, which is in fact a different terrorist creature. Its thrust is definitely political but its ideology is clearly drawn from Muslim scriptures, not from any nationalist or socialist philosophy. As they have made it clear to the world, their intentions are to establish a totalitarian Islamic theocracy in the Levant fashioned after the medieval Caliphates of the first and the second millennium.

Daesh is the culmination of a relatively new strand of destructive extremism. Before Islamist terrorists started bombing different western embassies and hotels in different countries in the 1980s, most other terrorism had been of a different kind. Ireland’s IRA, the Basques’ ETA, Uruguay’s Tupamaros, Peru’s Shining Path, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, and other such rebel groups, staged violent acts of rebellion that may have easily fallen in the category of terrorism, but they all did it under the nationalist or Marxist banners, not under the guise of religious beliefs.

ISIS extremism is evidently propelled by Muslim religious zealotry, but comparing it to its preceding Caliphates may be doing a certain injustice to those early Muslim regimes, as Islam has previously shone as a cradle for science and studies. In the past, Muslims have been keen on learning from other cultures, they delved into psychiatry, ophthalmology and philosophy, they were the precursors of algebra, studied the stars, and discovered galaxies. Unlike ISIS, they were not obscurantists bent on destroying cultural heritage sites or oppressing other religions. They conquered and lived in Spain for over 700 years, yet during that time Judaism and Christianity thrived in that country.

So, what happened to Arabian Islam in these past few decades? Why is the Muslim resurgence of late driven by such senseless violence and nihilism? 

For starters, we could admit that not all Muslims are created equal. ISIS is a Sunni organization as much as Al-Qaida is, which raises the question of the different sectarian interpretations that Muslim scriptures can lend themselves to. But why would the Arabian Sunni branch of Islam be the breeding grounds for anti-western terrorism while the Shi’a branch is not, or at least not as much? Not that the world’s Shi’a leaders in general are western-loving free-thinking liberal creatures either; they are widely known to impose very hardline readings of the Quran on their own peoples too, just take a look at the oppressive sociopolitical environment the dominant Shi’a regime has implanted in Iran.

By some counts, Sunni Islam is embraced by approximately 90% of world Muslims, which again raises the question of why would any such overwhelming majority want to rock the Muslim boat across the world? In the abstract, it would make more “sense” if it were the Shi’as who were revolting against the Sunnis, but the ISIS case in Iraq and Syria is the other way around, even as the Shi’as are the majority in Iraq.

Arguably, a highly influential factor in this equation is the ethnicity of those jihadists, which are vastly Arabs. To the extent the world has witnessed thus far, in the Muslim world the concoction that most stands to boil up to explosive results contains two basic ingredients: Arab ethnicity and Sunni denomination. Take one of those two factors out of the equation and the probability of obtaining a jihadist individual decreases substantially, albeit not completely.

It may well be that across time Arab Muslims have been much more exposed to western influence than most other Muslim ethnic groups have, hence the hatred that many of them have developed against western ways of living which, with their democratic liberalism and plurality of ideas, clash loudly against many of the inflexible core Muslim religious tenets. This may explain why Afghanistan in the 1980s served as cradle for Al-Qaida among the Arab resistance fighting against the failed Soviet invasion and why the disastrous American invasion of Iraq eventually begot ISIS.

In other words, it seems that the closer Arab Muslims get to any foreign show of force that exposes their technological and economic inferiority the more they seem to resent the fact that their civilization has not evolved at an equal pace, particularly in view of the liberal social mores that pervade all advanced civilizations of the day, which in and of themselves invalidate theirs (i.e., “why are those ‘infidels’ rewarded with such technological wonders and progress while we remain in underdeveloped or developing stages?”)

Such clash of principles seems to generate in the Arab-Muslim world a fervent desire to turn around time back to those ages in which they were able to impose their own black and white concept of reality upon anyone professing the same religion, which were the large majority of Arabs, hence the mediaeval brutality with which ISIS now treats those among their own brethren who may disagree with them. Brute force, they seem to think, is the only means to roll back the wave of western-born social secular liberalism that has enveloped the largest portions of the world.

Something similar may be said of other non-Arab Muslim extremist organizations such as Southeast Asia’s “Jemaah Islamiyah”, the terrorist group responsible for the 2002 and 2005 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, whose leaders were also trained and indoctrinated in Afghanistan during and after the inception of Al-Qaida.

Approximately 90% of Indonesia’s population is Muslim, which amounts to over 200 million Indonesian adherents to Islam, making it the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. Only a small minority of them professes to be of the Shi’a persuasion, while close to 90% practices one version or another of the Sunni doctrines. To their chagrin, however, and despite their majoritarian Muslim status, Indonesia is a republic with a secular government established back in 1945, which may easily be the reason that some of the Sunnis in their midst have sought advice and training from their Afghani and Saudi Wahhabi teachers and have gone to blow themselves up on Indonesian soil taking with them dozens of foreigners and locals.

But what about the question of why are Sunnis much more prone to violence today than Shi’as are? Well, to begin with, since Sunnis constitute the clear Muslim majority in the world and since they have been for centuries a dominant force in the Muslim corridors of power, it follows that they should be the ones to most resent the decay and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, in abolishing the office of the “Caliph” in 1924, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first president of the Turkish republic that took shape upon the remnants of the Empire, only inflicted insult to injury on the Sunni leaders, thereby generating the slow but relentless conservative backlash that has reached its most recent violent expression in the form of ISIS.

Most importantly, and as it is by now well-known, within the Arabian Sunni branch Wahhabis are the most orthodox of them all; they are the real hardliners within Islam. Osama bin Laden was a Wahhabi leader and ISIS’s leadership is drawing inspiration for their extremism from that religious doctrine too. Wahhabism is based on ideas of religious purity dating from medieval times and its seat of power has been for centuries in Saudi Arabia, whose government presently sponsors it and has declared it the official form of Sunni Islam within its borders. Since Wahhabism is a sub-branch of Sunny Islam, it looks much like the real reason behind the recent bloody resurgence stemming within Sunni ranks.

So we could point to the existence of Wahhabism in the Arabian peninsula as the culprit for breeding more violent movements within the Sunny branch than within the Shi’a branch, but such assertion would only beg the question of why did Wahhabism spring up among the Sunnis and not among the Shi’as. Finding an answer to that question would require looking into the alliance formed between Muhammad Abdul Wahhab and Muhammad bin Saud back in 1744.

But let’s first take a short bird’s view over Muslim history. The Shi’a are the followers of the Caliph Ali, who was the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, and are also the followers of the subsequent Imams up until the 12th of them, the Mahdi who went into occultation sometime in the middle of the 10th century A.D. In contrast, the Sunni are the followers of Abu-Bakr, the Prophet’s father in law and confidant, and they shared their allegiance to the Imams only up until the fourth of them. Since then the Sunnis have adhered as literally as possible to the word of Islamic law as written in the Quran and the Sunnah, while the Shi’a have listened to some other interpretations of those writings as expounded by religious leaders or Ayatollahs.

Abdul Wahhab, the father of Wahhabism, was an 18th-century Arabian Muslim preacher determined to eradicate any reformist or innovating tendencies within Islam. This meant accusing any other Muslim sect, including the Shi’as, of heresy whenever they deviated from the Sunni interpretation of the law. Bin Saud was the leader of a small Arabian town called Ad-Diriyyah that, when forming an alliance with Abdul Wahhab, added the glow of religious legitimacy to his small Emirate, which in turn allowed him to grow larger in power within the Arabian Peninsula.

Later in history, in the early 20th century, as Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, the founding father of present Saudi Arabia, was engaged in the territorial expansion of his small Emirate across the Peninsula, his religious allies, the Wahhabi clergy, sought to impose conversion to Sunni practices on the Shi’a population in al-Hasa, but ibn Saud placed political considerations above religious demands and refused to enforce such conversion. In the long run, such and other similar acts of statesmanship allowed Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud to consolidate his power over the territory now known as Saudi Arabia. In exchange, however, the Wahhabis were consequently charged with taking care of religious matters within the new kingdom.

Thus we have that, in the 18th century, Abdul Wahhab wanted to send Islamic practices back in time to the 7th century interpretation of Islamic law; in the 20th century we had Wahhab’s followers still wanting to impose their conservative religious views upon their Shi’a brethren, and now, in the early 21st century, we have the self-anointed new Calipha of the Sunni world, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, better known as ISIS, still trying to impose the same Wahhabi archaic view of Islam upon any and all Muslim believers in the Arab world.  

To many conservative movements of today, i.e., Russian “Putinism”, North Korean “Kimism” Chinese “Communism”, and other similar “isms” of the past, the use of force and oppression appears as the only means to keep their populations from embracing liberal ideas of human rights, principles of democracy, and equality of the sexes. Roughly along those lines, ISIS is a conservative movement of an extreme kind, brutally bent on imposing its antiquated Wahhabist interpretation of Islam in all corners of the Levant and even beyond if the rest of the world allows them to.

The reason that Muslim extremist ideas breed, grow, and thrive within the Arab Sunni branch of Islam, therefore, is that the outdated Wahhabi brand scheming at its core makes the whole branch stubbornly reluctant to reform and adapt to the changes humanity as a whole has undergone over the past few centuries. This is not to say that Wahhabism is the sole foul element poisoning the Sunni Muslim belief system. Islam in general and Arabian Islam in particular would need to take a long and deep look into their doctrines if they are ever to find ways that may allow their guiding principles to coexist in peace with those of the rest of humanity.

For, as long as Arabian Wahhabist Sunny Islam refuses to reform, as long as Muslim extremists keep longing for the times when mass murder for religious reasons was acceptable to their ancestors, and as long as they refuse to see the serious harm they inflict upon their own religion and upon the rest of humanity with their blind interpretation of their religious texts, peace in this world will remain clearly elusive.

Salaroche

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Salaroche has lived in the city of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for a few months and in the oasis-city of al-Hofuf, in the province of al-Hasa, Saudi Arabia, for a few weeks.