The Last Straw

In 1812 Sultan Mahmut II sent an order from Topkapi that the wahhabis should be removed from the cities of Makkah, Madinah and Jeddah. It must be noted that the period of Mahmut’s rule, 1839-76, known as the Tanzimat, was, according to the confirmed Islamic perspective (differentiated from an Orientalist reading of events) the point of irreversible decline and fall of the Osmani Dawlah, otherwise known as the Ottoman Empire. This period was the one of disastrous ‘reforms’ from which the Muslim world has yet to recover. The modalities of Islamic governance, law and civic practice that had propelled a civilisation previously unequalled in its capacity to protect and assure the prosperity and freedom of its members, were traded in for a corruption-riddled French bureaucracy, and with it the most destructive of all alien innovations, an interest-bearing bank debt now payable in fiat money to the banks in France, and soon afterwards to those of England. On the back of the success of the Napoleonic Wars that saw the Russians defeated at Austerlitz, the Tanzimat government, having entered into ‘compromise’ with the French, found itself thrust into the Russo-Turkish war (1806-1812). The continual loss of territory as well as the rapidly eroding political prestige of the once powerful Muslim world had begun. It would not be until the heroic rise of the last authentic Sultan and Khalif, Sultan Abdulhamid II, that the banner of Islam would be raised again. For a short but glorious thirty-three years the light of the 7^th century miracle that had burst out from the city of Madinah on the Arabian Peninsula would shine again. In 1908 Sultan Abdulhamid would be deposed, and with that tragic event began 100 years of immitigable failure.

Returning to 1812, in the back-drop to Mehmut II’s order to dispel the wahhabi menace from the holy cities, we can recognise the inevitable ‘bad weather’ that was appearing throughout the entire Muslim world. There was then, as there is now in the 21^st century, no doubt to the pusillanimity and the maleficent behaviour of the deviant anti-Islamic sect commonly referred to in today’s media as ‘orthodox’ or ‘conservative’ Islam. With the collapse of the unifying core of knowledge that had lent power and strength to the Muslim world, the low pressure zones could not but bring about all the terrible storms and disasters that continue to this day to heap humiliation and contempt upon a people who sold away their religion.

The Khedive of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, received his instruction from Istanbul and discharged an expeditionary force to drive out and subdue these rebels. Abdullah ibn Sa’ud, tribal leader and warlord, who was the head of this movement, was captured and, we are told, subdued, and thereupon reaffirmed his allegiance to the Sultan. For the next few years the Hijaz remained relatively free of the wahhabi menace, while their activities continued in the hinterland of the Arabian Peninsula.

It should be noted that all the losses of territories in the Balkans and Eastern Europe were racing ahead, as was the mounting foreign debt owed to the banks. Any rapprochement between the Tanzimat government in Istanbul and their new ‘friends’ involved a further plunging into the abyss. The only time they would loose more and gain less would be when Mustapha Kamel, in his feeble attempt to appease the English at the time of WW I, would surrender the broken remains of what had been a most magnificent civilisation. Within a short period Abdullah ibn Sa’ud was once again sending out raiding parties from the wahhabi stronghold of Dhar’iyya and terrorizing the Muslim inhabitants of tented settlements and small towns. Consequently, in 1818, a second expedition was led by the Khedive’s son, Ibrahim Pasha, crossing from the Red Sea coast along 600 miles of desert to the coast of Dhar’iyya, and there laid siege to and defeated the Saudis. The wahhabi leader was taken prisoner and sent to Istanbul to appear before a court of law.

As a rebel against the Khalif, Sa’ud would simply be executed for high treason; an acknowledged punishment that has existed in nearly all society throughout history, and, moreover, has its precedent within Islamic Law. The rebel would be permitted to perform two raka’ts (a pair of ritual prostrations), as befits a Muslim before facing his death. Nevertheless, upon the insistence of the not yet impotent ulema, they argued that first Sa’ud’s Islam must be verified. This led Sa’ud to stand before the Shaykh al-Islam and be questioned by a body of highly respected scholars. The great Hanafi ulema found Sa’ud to be completely out of Islam, an extreme heretic (zindiq) by admission of his own beliefs, and thereby sentenced him without the privilege of performing two raka’ts. The Amir of the people of Najd was publicly beheaded at Topkapi.

Within time the leadership of the wahhhabi movement devolved to the notorious and equally nefarious Abdal’ Azziz ibn Sa’ud, who based himself in their historical homeland, the region known as Najd, from where they continued their war against Islam. Meanwhile, Britain, who was by then well ensconced in Egypt, having established a permanent presence from the mid nineteenth century, with Lord Cromer, of the Baring banking family, as Governor General, were now, at the opening of the twentieth century, actively perusing new alliances on the Arabian Peninsula. They had no trouble ingratiating themselves to their soon to be vassals. The flattering financial support of the British to Ibn Sa’ud added further impetus to their expansionist plans to control the entire peninsula. Fortified with British guns and a steady flow of money the Sa’udis were using the emblazoned and enraged wahhabi missionaries, named the Mutawwas, to force the remaining Bedouin Arabs into submission and allegiance to the House of Sa’ud. The newly settled Bedouins were placed in fixed colonies or camps called Ikhwans, which can be seen as the prototype for the Israeli nationalist kibbutz.

The Ikhwan colonies, the first of which was established around 1912 at Artawiyya, banded together peoples from the multifarious tribes that had previously travelled freely throughout the land, each one with their unique cultural and linguistic heritage that was expressed through a rich and variegated poetry and oral tradition. Forged into settled camps of zealots and fed on a daily diet of wahhabi doctrines, they found themselves cut off from their past, the roots of their memory of historical Islam severed, and their bonds of loyalty and brotherhood replaced by a new binding force of an extremist ideology.

A second colony was then established at Ghutghut, and as they had done at Artawiyya, the Sa’udis appointed a governor to run it. At its height the Ikhwan movement was comprised of some 200 settlements, and it was with this army of men Ibn Sa’ud was able to establish his hegemony over the Hijaz. By 1929 the two most powerful wahhabi governors, Faizal ad-Dawwish and Sultan ibn Bijad, had come to realize that the Sa’udis were themselves driven by an rapacious lust for wealth along with an obsessive ambition for their own tribal homogeneity – something that had been ripped away from all other tribal groupings. Together they rose up in rebellion. Faizel ad-Dawwish was captured and taken prisoner, but upon recanting was forgiven and set free, only to resume his insurrection against the tribe he had helped put in power. Ibn Bijad was also captured and subsequently imprisoned in Riyadh. Dawwish fled to Iraq but was shortly thereafter picked up by the British and handed back over to their Sa’udi friends. The Ikhwan settlements were razed to the dust, Artawiyya and Ghutghut blown into oblivion, while the doctrinal seeds of sedition against historical Islam had survived, lodged in the breasts of dispossessed and disenfranchised zealots. There you have the progenitors of the 21^st century suicide bombers.

The wahhabis, who had put a rebel zindiq into power, became an embarrassment to their English friends who had made them kings. Many will recall the more famous and glamorous Lawrence, immortalised by Hollywood, but in real life abandoned by his Government, as England dropped their support for T.E. Lawrence’s friend, Sharif Hussein of Makkah, to put their full force behind Sa’ud. On January 8, 1926 the rebel Najdi declared himself ‘king’ having been formally appointed by Britain and then officially recognized by them in 1927. When Winston Churchill, sitting on a barge on the Nile, broke the good news to Ibn Sa’ud that he was now recognized as the King of Arabia, Ibn Sa’ud said : “Sa’udi Arabia!” In 1932 the country’s name was officially recorded. The Saudis would in time prove equally embarrassing to their soon to be American friends, but not before the enormously lucrative ARAMCO (Arab American Oil Company) would bring unprecedented wealth to first the Americans then the Kingdom.

An overland trade route was opened from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf named the Darb an-Nasara or the Christian’s Road. Isolated airports and walled compounds that eventually developed into entire cities were constructed by the Bechtel Group. Inside these duty free zones all the societal and religious rules were removed. Likewise, in the gaudy Las Vegas styled palaces of the ruling family, the whisky could flow. Today Bechtel has moved aside for Halliburton, and the Saudi royal family are again attempting to distance themselves from the ‘strict wahhabi doctrines’ that have become synonymous with the perpetrators of the famous attack in New York on two sky-scrapers.

Between the heady days of Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell (not Lawrence) in Arabia and today, many moves in this compelling ‘great game’ have been made. Jordan also got an English appointed king, so did Iraq, Syria and Egypt. Kuwait was later carved out of Iraq and it too was given its own a king, related to the ones in Saudi Arabia. By the mid 20^th century many of those then decrepit and decayed pseudo monarchies were replaced with modern secular governments that this time had been hatched by the Americans, as US hegemony had come to replace the faded British Empire. The invasion of Kuwait for their having engaged in ‘slant drilling’ into Iraqi oil fields, and the subsequent Desert Storm that ensued, and then the toppling of the criminal Saddam Hussein a decade later in Operation Iraqi Freedom, can been seen within a deeper historical background.

As the Global Economy remains in the throws of un-diminishing aftershocks, a most extraordinary development has occurred with one of the largest and most prestigious banks, one which is based in the UK. As it has been unequivocally determined that by the unrestrained and unconscionable greed of bankers and other related persons in the financial markets, a most foul and un-natural disaster befell the world. The fall-out continues as the great financial houses of America and Europe continue to collapse, spreading into other related industries dependant on the limitless expansion of credit. The collapse of the US housing market did not ‘start it all’, but rather the utterly irresponsible lending practices that were (while it lasted) wildly lucrative, and completely legal! Now Detroit’s Big 3, actually rather small and they have been for quite some time, are partitioning the US Government to bail them, as they did with Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, and on and on. Of course, this is State interference in the Free Market Economy, an absolute mortal sin within the sanctity of liberal Democracy, and in case everyone has forgotten, why the Cold War was fought, or why we were told it was fought. The introducing of parastatals to prevent the rampant theft of a country’s natural resources was why Achmed Sukano in Indonesia and later Salvadorian President Allende, both democratically elected, were overthrown by CIA backed coups. It is what was removed from the table when the ANC were handed political power at the end of the apartheid government in South Africa. It is thrown in the face of Putin by die-hard Reaganomics Republicans.

The politicians had been well paid to keep their noses out of The Market. Now they are being blamed for not having seen it coming. Quite frankly they have served their constituencies well, if you understand that the ones they have so ignominiously served were those that paid them, not (and we can not be so naive) those that vote for them.

The above mentioned prestigious UK bank, unlike the majority of their counterparts on both sides of the Atlantic, have gone to the oil rich Arabs, some of the very ones whose families were made kings by order of the British Crown at the hand of an exceedingly witty and most particularly inebriated Government Minister. And is it not fitting that this great institution of 19^th century global imperialism and 20^th century usury capitalism (that has orchestrated devastating wars against ordinary, albeit unfortunate, Muslim peoples) should now be propped up by those very same Arabs? Can this be the last straw?