Saudi Arabia has been blamed for funding some terrorist groups, but to balance things it is worth pointing out the West’s role in the support of these terrorist organizations.
During the late seventies several events took place almost simultaneously which affected the growth and development of what was later to be called Islamic terrorism. The first was the Islamic revolution in Iran, which led to an enormous outflow of revolutionary rhetoric and fervor which influenced Muslim youth greatly and offered them an alternative to Marxist rhetoric and revolutionary methods. This showed that social revolutions can be achieved using concepts and principles derived from Shariah and that Islam is capable of motivating the masses as effectively as the French or Bolsheviks were while remaining true to its own intellectual traditions.
To make things worse for the West, the Iranian revolution was led by Ayatollah Khomeini; that he was a cleric turned all their ideals of secular humanism on their heads.
The Iranian revolution was actually a reflection of a growing self-assertion by the Ummah of its capacity to provide solutions for its various problems from within its rich and long cultural and intellectual traditions.
Another example of that was the beginning of a movement of applying Islamic law to banking and other financial activities, which led to the first Islamic banks being established at about the same time. This was an event of great importance as it addressed a major shortcoming in Islam’s proposed solutions for the problems of the modern world, which was the lack of economic and financial structures.
All these events occurred at the time of the West’s profound loss of confidence in itself and a growing malaise with seemingly insurmountable problems engulfing the world such as poverty, war, and social disintegration.
The West was (and still is) at a loss to address these problems from within its intellectual traditions. The burgeoning Islamic renaissance was seen as a disturbing challenge to the West’s hegemony. This was also, after all, the time when Soviet-style communism (the West’s alter ego) was starting to come apart at the seams.
The West decided to try an old method developed during the colonial era, which is to promote and support fringe groups within the Islamic world to act as destabilizing forces. The idea being to fight Islam with distorted versions of Islam in order to sow confusion among the Muslims. An example of this was in Syria, when they promoted a sect called the Nusairi, which collaborated with colonial forces and continues to rule Syria to this day. The Druze sect in Lebanon and the Ismailis on the Indian subcontinent are other examples of this method.
The attack on the Grand Mosque in Makkah by a fringe group in Saudi Arabia attracted the West’s attention to the group they mistakenly (or deliberately?) called “Wahhabis” as a likely candidate for their support. This fringe group had all the necessary qualifications: Extreme xenophobia, hostility to all Muslims not of their sect, complete ignorance of the world around them coupled with a profound lack of interest in anything outside of their culture, and last but not least a willingness to use violence as a means of spreading their message.
The problem for the West now was how to get the Saudi government to cooperate. The West played up Saudi fears of the revolution in Iran, especially after the attack on the Grand Mosque in Makkah by some of the followers of the sect. They convinced them to send these extremists to fight in Afghanistan (which had just been invaded by the USSR), thereby getting rid of them.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Today, however, the West and whole world are faced with the destructive force of this Frankenstein monster.
It is instructive, however, that despite the US’s vaunted power and its invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq for the purpose of destroying terrorist organizations, the alleged leaders of these organizations are still free and operating essentially under the very nose of the US.
Curious, no?
Arab News Opinion 1 June 2003
