Wahhabism: The Infernal Gate of Modern Jihad

In Karbala, about 100 km south of Baghdad, Iraq, a local market was full of shoppers and people talking on the street when suddenly a scream was heard, then another and another.

A group of men dressed in black carrying swords and black flags had broken into the market, killing anyone they found. Children, women, the elderly, and adults.

Then they advanced street by street until they took control of the entire city. Some accounts say that about 4,000 people died that day.

The men dressed in black who carried out the massacre were not from the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS). This massacre occurred more than 200 years ago and the group was led by one of the first rulers of Saudi Arabia, who had just formed a new religious movement, Wahhabism.

Wahhabism, a strict and conservative form of Sunni Islam, is today the official religion of Saudi Arabia. 

Historically, Wahhabism has always been described as the “mother” of all fundamentalist movements. This ideology is a very old radical current in Islam, extremely literal in the way it approaches the text of revelation, and tends to condemn other Muslims and non-Muslims who do not share this ideology.

This branch of Islam dates back to the 19th century and the most influential figure within this religious sect is Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, a preacher born in a remote region of the Arabian Peninsula in 1703.

Al-Wahhab believed that Muslims had strayed from the true message of Islam and he was horrified by what he saw in Mecca, the holy place for Muslims, with nobles dressed extravagantly, smoking hashish, and listening to music. Essentially, Al Wahhab was a fundamentalist who wanted to "purify" Islam by referring to the basic principles of the faith. 

Gradually his ideas spread. But not everyone agreed and he was eventually expelled from his town.

However, he soon found refuge with a man who ruled a neighboring town, Muhammad ibn Saud, with whom he reached a cooperation agreement in 1744. With this accord, the foundations to start laying the foundation for the creation of a new country; Ibn Saud committed to supporting Al Wahhab both politically and militarily, and, in exchange for this, Al Wahhab would give Ibn Saud religious legitimacy.

As a result, Al Wahhad believed that jihad was justified against non-believers, even against Muslims who did not follow their true version of the faith. Subsequently, they took control of one city after another in the region. Muhammad ibn Saud reigned and Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab preached and enforced what he believed to be the correct practices of Islam.

Thus, they had lists of all the congregants and made sure that everyone went to the mosque five times a day to pray. It was an imposition of the faith that they applied almost like vigilantes, an intolerant version of the faith that does not exist in traditional Islam. 

However, the alliance of Al Wahhab and Ibn Saud continued to capture territories. By the end of the 18th century, they had control of almost the entire Arabian Peninsula. In this way, the union between Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism was established; endlessly.

Today, however, there remains a fierce debate among scholars as to whether Al Wahhab advocated violence with his teachings or whether his ideas were manipulated by Ibn Saud and his supporters.

In 1932, the Wahhabist descendants of Muhammad ibn Saud renewed their impetus with a new agreement, with which they strengthened their power to form the country we know today as Saudi Arabia. With this agreement, the Wahhabists were given full control of the social and cultural life of the kingdom, which meant that they would oversee the country’s educational and judicial system.

On the other hand, the al-Saud family would have total control of international relations and the management of the economy. In return, the Wahhabist clerics had to preach to Saudi citizens to obey their leaders; and this kept the al-Saud happy because it guaranteed compliance at the domestic level.

Thus, whenever the government tried to make a change in the country, big or small -such as introducing television in the kingdom or allowing women to receive formal education - it had to be a consensual decision alongside the clerics. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, many revolutionary ideas began to emerge in the Arab world, and to protect themselves from these ideas the Saudi leaders thought that the rigorous application of Wahhabism was a good antidote because they offered an alternative narrative on how to obey political and religious leaders without interfering in the national/local policies.

Saudi leaders invested millions of dollars in educational campaigns, built thousands of mosques, printed millions of copies of the Quran to distribute for free, and established Al-Madinah University so that scholarship students from around the world could study Wahhabism and then return to their countries to teach it.

Thus, what in the 18th century was only a local movement, 200 years later became a global ideology.

However, some claim that by exporting Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia voluntarily recruited jihadists for the Islamic State. 

In my opinion, what we saw was the spread of “revolutionary language” that has inspired some individuals to commit atrocities in the name of Islam. For example, when Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union, Wahhabism was used by the Saudi regime to inspire young people to join the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet infidels. The Saudis were said to have paid to send thousands of young men to fight in Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden.

However, it is a mistake to see Wahhabism as the only relevant Islamic influence in the 20th century, since other political movements have emerged and have also inspired extremist groups in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. 

The arrival of the Muslim Brotherhood, who had been exiled from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq (during the 1950s and 1960s), and who were initially supported by Saudi Arabia, was key since many of them became religious teachers. This fusion of Wahhabism with the organizational capabilities of other Islamist movements led to the creation of a new Islamic trend called 'the Islamic awakening'.

With this new “inclinatio”, the tone of many Muslim clerics around the world has changed in the last 30 years as a result of globalization. Because many clergymen had problems with what they saw as the expansion of American culture, with its Hollywood films and satellite televisions, they responded to this phenomenon through fear. Propagating 'the fear of God' in the minds of young Muslims to prevent Western values ​​from entering their rooms was the chosen recipe in this process.

This 'fear of God' yielded a generation of people who feel guilty and who think that they must redeem themselves. Many of these young people were left very vulnerable and joined groups like IS or Al-Qaeda who in contrast offered them something that no one had ever offered them before: “total absolution”.

Because in Islam the reward you receive in exchange for martyrdom is total absolution, many young people have followed this path. 

However, this guilt that many Muslims grow up with is not enough to turn someone into a violent extremist. Without a doubt, this is only the first stage of the long journey that leads someone to adopt extremist Islam. Losing all sense of identity, in addition to faith, and then identifying yourself with the martyrs of the Qur’an who were persecuted, is what fuels young people to pursue this idea.

Original Wahhabism and today’s extremism have the following psyche: you pray, fast, and do not hesitate for a second to kill someone. All for the survival of these ideas. Unquestionably, this is how a prejudiced and psychopathic jihadist is formed. This is the kind of individual that Wahhabism needs.

This historical context of the past and present is what explains Fattah’s statement that: “the Wahhabi movement created dissension in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf in part because it sought to 'purify' Islamic societies through violence." 

Unquestionably, Wahhabism is an ideology that marked the social and political dynamics of the Arab world and that has laid the foundations for modern jihadism.