{"id":52681,"date":"2015-01-19T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2015-01-19T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=52681"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:13","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:13","slug":"saudi-arabias-history-of-hypocrisy-we-choose-to-ignore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/01\/saudi-arabias-history-of-hypocrisy-we-choose-to-ignore\/","title":{"rendered":"Saudi Arabia’s History of Hypocrisy We Choose to Ignore"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday [15 Jan 2015], a Saudi blogger will receive his second flogging for ‘insulting Islam’. A barbaric regime with a brutal record.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sir William Hunter was a senior British civil servant and in 1871 published a book which warned of \u201cfanatic swarms\u201d of Sunni Muslims who had \u201cmurdered our subjects\u201d, financed by \u201cmen of ample fortune\u201d, while a majority of Muslims were being forced to decide \u201conce and for all, whether [they] should play the part of a devoted follower of Islam\u201d or a \u201cpeaceable subject\u201d.<\/p>\n

Hunter identified a \u201chate preacher\u201d as the cause of this \u201cterror\u201d, a man inspired on a visit to Arabia by an ascetic Muslim called Abdul Wahab whose violent \u201cWahabi\u201d followers had formed an alliance with \u2013 you guessed it \u2013 the House of Saud. Hunter\u2019s 140-year-old volume The Indian Musalmans<\/em> \u2013 given a dusting of internet race hatred, murderous attacks by individual Sunni Muslims, cruel Wahabi-style punishments and all-too familiar proof of second-class citizenship for Muslims in a European-run state \u2013 might have been written today.<\/p>\n

Even before Hunter\u2019s day, the Wahabis captured the holy cities of Arabia and \u2013 Isis-style \u2013 massacred their inhabitants. Like Isis, they even overran Syria. Their punishments, and those of their Saudi military supporters, make the public lashing of today\u2019s Saudi blogger Raif Badawi appear a minor misdemeanour. Hypocrisy was a theme of Arabian as well as European history.<\/p>\n

\"Raif<\/a>

Raif Badawi has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes for \u2018insulting Islam\u2019 on his liberal website<\/p><\/div>\n

In those days, of course, oil had no meaning. The Saudi ruler was dispatched to Constantinople in 1818 to have his head chopped off by the local superpower \u2013 the Ottoman Empire \u2013 and the European states made no complaint. A young British army captain later surveyed the destroyed Saudi capital of Diriya \u2013 close to modern-day Riyadh \u2013 with satisfaction. But successive campaigns of Saudi-Wahabi conquest, and then the swift transition of oil from the vile black naphtha, in which Arabian sheep regularly drowned, into the blood vessels of the Western world, meant that the purist Wahabi violence \u2013 which included the desecration of mosques, the destruction of ancient Muslim tombs and the murder of \u201cinfidels\u201d \u2013 was conveniently separated from the House of Saud and ignored by Europeans and Americans alike.<\/p>\n

Erased, too, is history; including the fact that Mohamed Ibn Saud, the leader of the Nejd, even married Abdul Wahab\u2019s daughter.<\/p>\n

Our disregard of present-day Saudi-Wahabi cruelties and venality might astonish Sir William Hunter; the Wahabi Indian Muslims in his British Empire were led by an insurrectionist prelate called Sayyid Ahmed whose followers regarded him as the next Prophet and whose own pilgrimage to Arabia turned him into a life-long purger of promiscuity. His believers came from Afghanistan as well as India where his power lay in what is now Pakistan. In fact, he was proclaimed \u201cCommander of the Faithful\u201d in Peshawar. His men might have been the Taliban.<\/p>\n

Britain\u2019s wars against the Wahabis were as ferocious as Europe\u2019s today, though far more costly in lives. And if Hunter rightly identified the second-class status, lack of employment and poor education of the Sunni Muslims of India as a cause of insurrection \u2013 France, please take note \u2013 he also understood that India\u2019s Muslims were being asked to choose between pure Islam and Queen Victoria. The Hindus of India and the British rulers were at war with those whom Hunter, mindful of medieval Christian missions to Jerusalem, caricatured as the \u201cCrescentaders\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Ensaf<\/a>

Ensaf Haidar, centre, wife of the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, holds a vigil in Montreal, Quebec, urging Saudi Arabia to free her husband (Getty)<\/p><\/div>\n

Today, the Americans and Europeans \u2013 and of course, our own Prime Minister \u2013 like to draw a line between the \u201cmoderate\u201d, friendly, pro-Western, oil-wealthy Saudi Arabians who are praised for denouncing the \u201ccowardly terrorist attack\u201d in Paris, and their Crescentader Wahabi friends who behead thieves and drug dealers after grossly unfair trials, torture their Shia Muslim minorities and lash their own recalcitrant journalists. The Wahabi Saudis \u2013 for they are, of course, the same \u2013 cry crocodile tears over the murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists who lampoon their religion, while sympathising with the purists in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who slaughter journalists and aid workers, destroy ancient monuments and enslave women.<\/p>\n

All in all, a pretty pass. The Saudis are special, aren\u2019t they? Fifteen of the 19 hijackers of 9\/11 were Saudis \u2013 and George W Bush immediately arranged for leading Saudis (including some from the House of Bin Laden) to be freighted out of America to safety. Osama was himself a Saudi (later de-citizened). The Taliban were financed and armed by the Saudis; the Taliban\u2019s Organisation for the \u201cPromotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice\u201d was identical to the Saudi-Wahabi religious police in Riyadh and Jeddah. So precious are the Saudis to us, that Tony Blair was able to close down a British police inquiry into Anglo-Saudi bribery. \u201cNational interest\u201d was at stake. Ours, of course, not theirs.<\/p>\n

And we ignore, amid all this tomfoolery, the spread of Saudi money through the institutions of Sunni Islam in Asia, in the Balkans \u2013 take a look at the new Saudi-designed mosques that mock the wonderful old Ottoman institutions in Bosnia \u2013 and in Western Europe. Suggest that the Saudi authorities \u2013 not, of course, to be confused with their Wahabi fraternity \u2013 are supporting Isis, and journalists will be confronted not by sympathy for their oppressed colleagues, but by threatening letters from lawyers on behalf of the Saudi government. Even in the Levant, aid workers are frightened of the school-teaching in Saudi-funded refugee camps for Syrians.<\/p>\n

As Irish columnist Fintan O\u2019Toole pointed out this week, there are two words that must not be spoken in all the official rhetoric about Charlie Hebdo\u2019s dead: Saudi Arabia. \u201cA hundred billion dollars buys you a lot of silence,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe house of Saud runs a vicious tyranny that… while the Charlie Hebdo killers were going about their ultimate acts of censorship… was savagely lashing the blogger Raif Badawi for daring to promote public debate.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Wahabi grave smashers threaten to destroy the Prophet\u2019s tomb as a religious duty \u2013 just as they have smashed the graves of \u201csaints\u201d in Africa and the Middle East \u2013 but a cartoon of the Prophet is a provocation that deserves death.<\/p>\n

Sure, we all know the rubric. The Saudis stand in the forefront of the \u201cwar against terror\u201d, arresting, torturing (though we\u2019ll have to go softly on that one) and imprisoning \u201cterrorists\u201d, condemning Isis as \u201cterrorists\u201d, standing behind the French and the Europeans in their struggle against \u201cterror\u201d, along with the Egyptians and the Russians and the Pakistanis and all those other \u201cdemocrats\u201d in their \u201cwar against terror\u201d.<\/p>\n

Speak not a word about the Kingdom as a Wahabi-Saudi regime. It would be wrong to do so. After all, the Wahabis don\u2019t call themselves Wahabis, since they are \u201ctrue\u201d Muslims. Which is what the Saudis are, aren\u2019t they?<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 independent.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Saudis are special, aren\u2019t they? Fifteen of the 19 hijackers of 9\/11 were Saudis. Osama bin Laden was himself a Saudi. The Taliban were financed and armed by the Saudis; the Taliban\u2019s Organisation for the \u201cPromotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice\u201d was identical to the Saudi-Wahabi religious police in Riyadh and Jeddah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east-north-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52681\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}