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      This past September 11 was the seventh anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. How did the 19 Islamic fundamentalists who carried out these suicide missions move so far away from the original principle of Islam-negotiate.? And because most of them were Saudis, and as the Saudi royal family is the religious and political authority over all, what was their connection?  How did the original Islamic precepts of tolerance and inclusion become so perverted? It’s a sad and very complicated story nearly three centuries in the making. 

      By the time of Mohammed Ibn Abd-al-Wahhabi’s birth in 1703 the world’s main religions were in periods of major upheaval. Protestant fundamentalists threatened the Christian unity, while the Ottoman Empire was threatened by Arab interests. Wahhab was born in a remote village in central Arabia called Najd. A place of climactic extremes its only claim was as a Bedouin grazing spot for 500 years. When he grew up he began traveling throughout Syria, India, Iran, and finally to Baghdad with the goal of becoming a merchant. Along the way he came under the influence of some English entrepreneurs looking to get control of the Arabian Peninsula’s coastal ports. As he roamed he came to the conclusion that Islam was dying, the End of Days was nigh, and that only those who returned to his vision of Islam, as he claimed it was when the Prophet lived, would be saved. This meant rebellion against the failing Ottoman caliphate which was then in charge. They were having major problems themselves, having lost to the Christian European forces in 1683. Unfortunately Wahhabi’s ‘vision’ of those times was completely opposite to the Prophet’s reality. 

      All Muslims are required to observe the Five Pillars of Islam:  profession of faith in “There is no god but god; Muhammed is the messenger of God”; praying five times each day in the direction of Mecca (Makkah); the giving of alms (zakat), particularly to the needy; fasting during Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim calendar; and performing a pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj) once during their lifetime, if able. 

      Wahhabi’s three ‘pillars’ were:  practice Islam my way or else; no dead would be honoured; and all prayers must go directly to God-no Messengers (like the Prophet). Intercession by priest was considered idolatry.  His God now had human form, which was heresy.  The Sect demanded that all prayer times must be strictly adhered to, that special physical positions must be held throughout and that all Muslims must profess their faith- until then if you were born Muslim there was no question of ever having had to publicly declare it! 

      Wahhab saw himself as equal to, and then superior to, the Prophet. He declared that the Prophet could no longer be celebrated, that his name on any building was to be removed, and that the Prophet’s dictates of mercy and compassion were to be forgotten. Anyone who did not follow his rules was to be considered an idolater; not only were they to be killed, but their female relatives violated and their possessions confiscated. Books were burned. Muslim saints’ graves were dug up and their remains scattered. Women were stoned to death for ‘fornication’. Music and dance were forbidden.  

      In 1744, with half of Najd on his side and the other half angrily against him, Wahhab fled to the village of Dariyah, then under the thumb of a local thug and his gang, one Muhammed ibn Sa’ud, head of the Al Sa’ud family. 

      Before Wahhab arrived not much is known about the Sa’ud family. The British had their Empire eyes on the coastal regions of the Arabian Peninsula, like Aden and Kuwait. They had little interest in the interior, and the enterprising Sa’uds made sure to keep in their good graces while making raids on the Turks as often as possible. Not exactly known for their piety the Sa’uds began a loose type of power-sharing governmental system in 1747 where they would take care of all political matters and the Wahhabi all religious. As their family members intermarried they guaranteed that their descendants kept the power. To their minds their line now superseded the Prophet’s, who had named no successor nor started any dynasty of his own.  

      Their main goal-world domination! Wahhab saw himself as the sole religious authority in the Islamic world, and Sa’ud used this to maintain his own political authority. Totalitarianism became the family business. In 1801, their army razed the Holy City of Korbala in Iraq, slaughtering thousands. In 1802, they took Mecca. The word Jihad means struggle to promote the faith. To these two it meant murder any Muslim who refused to bow to them. Cemeteries and tombs were particular targets. Schools, books and mosques were looted and destroyed. Their motto seemed to be “if in doubt, wipe it out.” When they conquered Medina they stole the Prophet’s Treasure, a vast fortune that had been accumulating for over 1000 years. The hajj was now forbidden.  

      Wahhab left Medina in the hands of his successor Sa’ud bin Abd al-aziz, who informed the people they had no choice but to submit. Prominent citizens were killed to discourage the uproar throughout the Muslim world. They ruled by terror and this brought the hitherto uninterested British into the fray. Not liking the possible threat to India they attempted to get Kuwait back in 1755. In 1765 Muhammed died and left Dariyah to his son Abd al-Aziz. In 1786 the British, looking to protect their mail service, failed to take Kuwait from the Ottomans. In 1787 Ibn Abd al-Wahhab declared himself to be the leader of the entire Muslim world, and ordered a Jihad against the Ottoman Empire. In India a Bengali Wahhabi fomented a jihad against Punjabi Sikhs, which led to many against Hindus and British too.  

      In 1811, the Ottoman Sultan decided enough was enough and sent in Muhammed Ali Pasha, the Balkan-born governor of Egypt. Extremely proud of his Albanian heritage and a devout non-Wahhabi, his forces swept down and liberated Mecca and Medina. Then they continued on, sweeping throughout western Arabia and erasing the Wahhabi influence, or at least they thought they had. In 1818, Dariyah itself was destroyed. Al-Aziz died in 1814, and was succeeded by his heir Abdullah ibn Sa’ud, who was sent to Istanbul and executed.  

       After Ali Pasha crushed the Wahhabi attempt to conquer the entire Arabian Peninsula they retreated to a new settlement near Dariyah named Riyadh. The Sa’uds had been experiencing a lot of family infighting, but starting in 1865, under their new chief Sa’ud ibn Faysal, the alliance began a series of vicious raids to suppress all Ottoman supporters. They had a nasty secret weapon, one which Ali Pasha should have eliminated, but didn’t. 

      In a remote mountainous area near Yemen is a district called the Asir, populated then by over a million people who hated their Ottoman rulers and refused to recognize any authority but that of their chief. They had been ‘converted’ to Wahhabism years before. (They were eventually flushed out by Ali Pasha and reconverted to the original Islamic precepts, but they bided their time and converted back in the early 20^th century.) Kept away from all modern technologies, from culture and from other beliefs, their young men were vicious, uncompromising zealots who liked nothing better than a good session of torture and mutilation of the local Shi’a Muslims. Of the 15 Saudis who hijacked those planes and crashed them on September 11, 2001, 12 of them were from Asir, who apparently had decided if you can’t beat modern technology, corrupt it. 

      In 1902, under their new chief, 21-year-old Abdul-Aziz bin Abdu-Rahman Ibn Muhammed Al Sa’ud, the gang began a fresh campaign to regain control of Mecca and Medina. But first he murdered Riyadh’s ruler and set up his own capital city there. 

      In 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo started the First World War, which the Ottoman, British and Austro-Hungarian empires would not survive. In the meantime the British, looking to ensure their empire links stayed solid, weighed their options in whom to support-the Sa’uds or the ruler of Mecca, Sharif Husayn. Neither Husayn nor Sa’ud was that thrilled about putting in with the Allies against the Turks, who at least were still Muslim. The British sent in one T. E. Lawrence to support Husayn, but they had a couple of problems they didn’t seem to see as such. One was a Miss Gertrude Bell, expert on all things Arab and high up in diplomatic circles. She wanted to unite all Arabs together to defeat Palestine and Syria. Enter one Harry St. John (pronounced Sin Jin) Bridger Philby. He was an explorer, geographer and con artist extraordinaire, with a huge ego and even bigger hatred of his home country. Bell sent him to Riyadh to convince Ibn Sa’ud to protect Husayn’s forces as they went to attack his rival Al Rashid. It had been Al Rashid who Ibn Sa’ud had chased out to claim Mecca for himself.  

      In 1915, Ibn Sa’ud made a deal with the British. For arms and money Britain declared his part of the peninsula a Protectorate. Al Rashid sided with the Turks, who were in turn allied to the Germans. But instead of actually going after Rashid he did what he usually did, and would continue to do over another commodity-he played the British and Turks off against each other. 

      The British paid the agreed amount, but Philby, as his agent, grabbed it and used the money to fund Sa’ud’s new campaign to expand Wahhabi influence back into their old stomping grounds of Najd. Although Arabia was no longer considered strategically valuable, Philby was ordered to stop it. Britain had promised them an independent state and wanted to keep its word by stabilizing things as they were. Again they were forced to choose between King Husayn of Mecca or Ibn Sa’ud to be the new caliph of all Islam. The Hashemite descendants of the Prophet chose Husayn, the Wahhabis naturally chose Sa’ud. The British and French chose Sa’ud, who saw this as making his claim to the caliphate legitimate, and therefore justified his taking over Medina, Mecca and then the entire Muslim world-again. The British wanted nothing blocking full contact with their empire. Those parts of Africa and Indonesia under the control of Portugal and Holland cooperated with them. Despite their having Christianized parts of formerly Muslim India, Sa’ud accepted a knighthood in 1917. The pious Husayn and idealistic Lawrence never saw Sa’ud and Philby coming. If the British and French had chosen Husayn things would probably have gone much differently as the Sa’uds might have simply retreated harmlessly back to Najd.  

      In 1924, Husayn, displeased with their choice, and with the British-French government in Syria, officially recognized the new Soviet Union. The Wahhabis though saw Sa’ud’s hypocrisy of dependency on an infidel government to do what he wanted, when all dependency should be only on God, as a reason to turn against him. Back in 1912 an ultra-puritanical Bedouin Wahhabi militia had formed, whose motto was ‘Back to the Koran and on to the land’. Calling itself the Ikhwan they became the nucleus of a Wahhabi standing army. When he took over Sa’ud swept away the written constitution and civil law and replaced the Qur’an with his own special version, and the law with his own mood swings and the Sword. His edicts were that nothing was to be read but this Qur’an, no music, books or poetry were to be composed, and there was no law but his law. He used the Ikhwan as his enforcers. 

      Although Sa’ud was happy to use modern technology if it made things easier on him, the Ikhwan was not. They were deeply suspicious of all of it. Before a small force arrived in Mecca they had never before heard music. When an Egyptian group making the hajj arrived in full voice, they demanded that all these unbelievers be killed immediately. To keep these guys in check and make sure they didn’t go raiding into Kuwait, Iraq and Jordan like they wanted to, Sa’ud put two Wahhabis in charge of the League for Encouragement of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (secret police). 

      In 1927, Ibn Sa’ud was officially declared King of Hejaz and Nejd and its dependencies, as Nejd had been declared a kingdom that February. The Ikhwan sent him a wish list: loosen his ties with Britain, let them go raiding the neighbours, and eliminate everyone, especially Shi’as, who refused to accept their old-time Wahhabism. The new King decided a raid into Iraq wouldn’t be so bad. Iraq was ruled by Husayn’s son King Faisal, a secret vassal of the British. Of course he publicly commiserated with the British about the antics of those dreadful boys to stay in their good books. In 1929 the Ikhwan murdered an American missionary, initiating a nasty civil war and the Ikhwan were defeated.  

      In September 1932, the kingdom became known as Saudi Arabia, the only kingdom named after a living person. That year two American geologists, working for the Standard Oil Company of California, or Socal, discovered oil on Saudi land. Philby, still working the angles, quickly saw that this find was going to make King Sa’ud and therefore himself very, very wealthy. In one fell swoop Britain was out and the U.S. was in. Beginning in 1933, Socal signed an exclusive 60-year deal with the King for developing oil. In 1943 the company name became the Arabian-American Oil Company, or Aramco. In 1948 the king started a major updating of the agricultural framework. 

      So with an extremely wealthy but opportunistic royal family, which owned and still does all the energy resources, with Wahhabis running the justice, education and religious matters, ruling over a population who, unlike them, did not have the benefit of tradition or knowledge of the outside world until well into the last century, kept in isolation by religious extremism, with no working class or their own food production and backed by infidel U.S. financial interests, sooner or later something had to give. 

      Ibn Sa’ud and his favourite wife Hussah bint Ahmad Sudair of the powerful Najdi family had seven sons. Altogether he had 17 wives, hundreds of concubines and 36 sons. By the mid 20^th century there were around 5,000 royal princes.  

      Meanwhile, back in Asir, the long memory of the desert kept the hope of Jihad against all unbelievers strong in its fanatical youth. And they waited.  

      Next column will feature the story of one particular modern Saudi prince who personifies the dichotomy of this part of the world.  Well known philanthropist and businessman though he is, he still shows loyalty for his beloved Lebanon, his religion, and his royal grandfathers.

Anon until next time.