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Shakir, Wahiyib, the one man who shows his face.
An ISIS "enforcer".
Photo courtesy www.telegraph.co.uk |
WHO exactly is ISIS or Da’ish –
or to give it its latest acronym
– the IS? The Islamic State in Syria (or
the Levant), which governs a self-proclaimed Caliphate in the conflict-torn
zones of Syria and Iraq, lays claim to a holy war against imperialism.
Due to
its distorted understanding of
Shari’ah, over
100 of the world’s top Islamic scholars (including the Muslim Judicial Council)
have roundly condemned
ISIS. Even Al-Qaeda has disowned the organisation.
To say that ISIS
is a disturbing development
in a region already teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster is an understatement.
ISIS’s chillingly staged YouTube clips have assaulted all standards of decency.
And
whilst ISIS has elicited justifiable denunciation, this doesn’t really explain who it
is. This is because reportage on
ISIS is occurring without any contextual framework.
For this, we first go to the 7th century when a group in Iraq broke away from the Islamic mainstream.
Known as the Khawarij – literally “those who go out” – this sect embraced a
stark and simplistic theology in which a merciful deity became a vengeful one.
Interestingly,
the Prophet Muhammad [pbuh] had predicted
the rise of the Khawarij. He even said that its
offspring would
emerge in our times, and that their understanding of religion would not descend
below their collar bones.
The
Khawarij believed that anyone who did not subscribe to their worldview was
an unbeliever, a sinful kafir who could be killed.The early Caliphs had to put down the
Khawarij by force.
In the
late 18th century, Muhammad’s [pbuh] prophecy would bear fruit when a central Arabian
scholar,
Ibn Abd ul-Wahhab, would claim to be a renewer of Islam. He would preach that
his view was the only authentic one, and that anybody disagreeing with him was
an unbeliever whose blood was halal.
Spurning over 1,000 years of classical knowledge, he was duly ignored as a
crackpot until Ibn Sa’ud – a chieftain craving political power – realised he
could harness ‘Abd
ul-Wahhab’s rabid discourse to
unite the disparate
Bedouin tribes.
Ibn
Sa’ud rallied the
Bedoiun tribesmen, known as the “ikhwan”, under the banner of neo-Kharijism, or
Wahhabism. It was tactically convenient, because anybody
disagreeing with him could be put to the sword.
The Wahhabis over-ran
the Middle East, smashing historical tombs, vandalising libraries and dismembering
thousands of Shi’ah and Sunnis in Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula.
The Ottomans, who then ruled
the Levant from Istanbul, sent Egypt’s Ali Pasha to deal
with the Wahhabis.
When his forces
razed the Sa’udi
capital Da’riyyah (modern-day Riyadh) to the ground in the 1830’s, there were wild
celebrations in Cairo.
It was
only after the fall of the Caliphate in 1923 that the Wahhabis were able to regroup and
conquer the Arabian Peninsula.The emergence of the Sa’udi monarchy in the 1930’s witnessed
the conquest of the Sharifs, Prophet Muhammad’s descendants, who’d ruled
western Arabia for centuries – and who, to this day, resent the Sa’udi dynasty.
The self-declared Sa’udi monarch, ‘Abd ul-‘Aziz, had
to face a restive constituency as his ikhwan were suspicious of modernity. The Sa’udi
saving grace was oil wealth; it allowed dissident energies to be diffused into
the marketing of Wahhabi ideology worldwide. But not even this was enough. In
1979 there was a rebellion in Mecca.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Reagan
administration’s harnessing of the mujahadin, saw Saudi Arabia co-operating
with the Pakistani secret service and the CIA. Hundreds of militants, who would
otherwise have filled the prisons, were conveniently dispatched to fight
communists.
In Pakistan, the Saudis bankrolled thousands of
Wahhabi religious schools, which would in turn spawn the Taliban. The US and
Saudi-sponsored mujahidin, whom Reagan ironically compared to the country's
founding fathers, were destined to form the core of Al-Qaeda after the Afghan
conflict.
This narrative is a missing link, for after the war
Shaikh Abdullah ‘Azzam – the godfather of the Afghani jihad – was assassinated
for refusing to issue a decree that the holy war be expanded beyond
Afghanistan. Ideologically, it marked a critical turning point, for a suspect
in ‘Azzam’s killing was Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, destined to be one of Usama bin
Laden’s closest confidantes.
The internationalisation of the Wahhabi jihad is well
known, but its underlying reason for focusing on the US is less acknowledged.
This happened when Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait in 1990. Usama bin Laden
offered to settle the matter with Al-Qaeda, but was spurned by the Royal
family, who went with the American alliance.
The sight of US boots, on what Al-Qaeda regarded as
holy soil, became a bridge too far. It marked a rift between Bin Laden and the
Saudi state, and the extremist Wahhabi genie was effectively let out of the
bottle.
Al-Qaeda (initially a database of foreign Afghan
fighters) never went beyond being an ideological franchise played for its
propaganda value. Few, if any, of the Wahhabi groups in Asia, Africa and the
Levant ever had direct contact with Al-Qaeda central.
More significantly, these movements flowed into
political vacuums caused by dictators and imperialist meddling. Iraq is a case
in point where former US pro-consul, Paul Bremner, will go down in history as
the primary purveyor of Iraq’s woes.
Bremner arrived after the invasion and fired some
250,000 Baathist forces, some of whom were competent bureaucrats. By obliterating
the organs of state, and indiscriminately destroying its infrastructure without
even a wink at transitional justice, Bremner summarily flushed Iraq down the
toilet.
With Gulf States sponsoring jihadist groups due to fears
of a “Shi’ah crescent” descending upon them from Syria and Iraq, the picture is
almost complete. Disgruntled Baathist elements – some of them Saddam’s killers – have
joined the jihadist groups, which have coalesced under ISIS.
Essentially a group of the disaffected led by the
vengeful, ISIS is said to number no more than 100,000 men. But it does have
money, arms, territory and media savvy. And that is what makes it a formidable
foe right now. ISIS has thrown down the gauntlet, and from here on in, it’s a
case of fasten the seatbelts.
