A recent fatwa posted on a popular Islamic Web site in Saudi Arabia explains when a Muslim may mutilate the corpse of an infidel.
| Whew! I was hoping someone would clear this up. |
The ruling, written by a Saudi religious sheik named Omar Abdullah Hassan al-Shehabi, decrees that the dead can be mutilated as a reciprocal act when the enemy is disfiguring Muslim corpses, or when it otherwise serves the Islamic nation. In the second category, the reasons include "to terrorize the enemy" or to gladden the heart of a Muslim warrior.
| There's a fatwa you could drive a donkey through. |
| Basically, whenever the impulse moves you... |
The religious ruling was evidently posted to address questions about the conflict in Iraq, but is not limited by geography. In fact, in each of two gruesome attacks in Saudi Arabia last month that left 25 foreigners and 5 Saudis dead, a Western corpse was dragged for some distance behind a car. One was the body of an American engineer in Yanbu on May 1, the other a British businessman in Khobar last weekend. That a cleric can post such an argument in an open forum goes a long way toward explaining how the most radical interpretations of religious texts flourish in Saudi Arabia.
| We've noted here before that any idiot can issue a fatwah, and many idiots do... |
Even prayer leaders in Falluja, an Iraqi city not known for its love of things American, were swift to condemn the mutilations of four dead United States contractors in April as outside the bounds of Islam.
| Something to do with the nearby location of US Marines. Soodi clerics likewise should be so lucky one day. |
Fatwas like this one help pave the way for bloody assaults against foreigners that have plagued Saudi Arabia for the past year, many Saudi intellectuals believe.
The stakes are higher here than anywhere else because the world price of oil hinges on perceptions of Saudi Arabia’s stability. Still, the government remains overly cautious and completely ineffective in confronting its home-grown radicals, Saudi analysts and even a few princes say, although the security forces have done important work in tracking down extremists. "We are still using soft language when we talk about the problem of Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia," said Suleiman al-Hattlan, a Saudi columnist and author. "We have not addressed the ideology of these groups, which is the same one the government is promoting. They attack just the individuals."
| Think you might have fingered the problem there, Sully... |
Both the government and its critics point out that Saudi Arabia has come a long way since the attacks against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, when the interior minister would barely acknowledge that most of the 19 attackers were Saudis. The first suicide bombings in Riyadh in May 2003 changed that attitude. In an unprecedented move, the names and even the pictures of the kingdom’s 26 most-wanted men, 18 of whom are still at large, were widely distributed. They include Abdulaziz Issa al-Muqrin, the reputed Qaeda boss in the kingdom, who has gloated on the Internet about the attack in Khobar, in which three of four attackers escaped. But the attempt by some to expose and uproot the ideological and theocratic influences used to justify attacks was suppressed by the religious establishment. Instead, the official line became that the terrorists were infected with an alien ideology, imported by those who fought in Afghanistan or Chechnya, and that the religion espoused by Saudis is a peaceful one. "The problem is that the official religious establishment does not admit that there is a problem inside Wahhabism itself," said Abdullah Bjad al-Otaibi, a former radical turned reformer.
Important princes echo the official line. "The perpetrators of these heinous crimes are influenced by ideologies alien to our country and to the nature of our people, who throughout the ages advocated tolerance and coherence," Prince Mohammed bin Fahd, governor of the Eastern Province and the son of King Fahd, was quoted as saying in Saudi press reports after the Khobar attacks. Even the most open-minded in the religious establishment are reluctant to concede that the violence within the kingdom might be the fault of Saudis themselves. "Those militants are the outcome of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Sharon and the American policy in the region; they are angry against anything foreign and want to retaliate against anything foreign," said Muhsen Awaji, a prominent Islamist lawyer. "It was not Wahhabism which produced them, it is the other circumstances in the region."
"What circumstances?"
"Um, other circumstances." |
| It's never their fault... |
There is no doubt that the United States, by its actions in the Middle East, has helped turn everything American into a target. But there are indications that some Saudis, including some ruling princes, are at least aware that blaming outsiders is not an adequate response to the violence that has come to the kingdom. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, published an extraordinary article Tuesday in Al Watan, a newspaper run by the descendants of King Faisal, in which he called the domestic Saudi effort against terrorism feeble. "It has nothing to do with America or Israel or the Christians or Jews," Prince Bandar wrote. "So let us stop these meaningless justifications for what those criminals are doing and let us stop blaming others while the problem comes from within us." Elsewhere in the article he noted that the kingdom’s religious scholars "have to declare jihad against those deviants and to fully support it, as those who keep silent about the truth are mute devils."
| He's not planning on a return home, is he? |
There has, in fact, been a profound silence in the kingdom in the wake of the attacks in Yanbu and Khobar, in which foreigners were the main targets and Muslims were pointedly spared.
Web sites popular with the more religious Saudis brimmed over with condemnation for the April bombing of the traffic police headquarters in Riyadh because all the victims were Saudis, while virtually ignoring the two subsequent attacks. That leads some Saudi intellectuals to conclude that the religious establishment, or at least its more militant elements, basically support Al Qaeda’s goal of driving all foreigners out of the Arabian peninsula and establishing a Taliban-like caliphate.
"They know many people support them, so they want to force them into it," said Jamal Khashoggi, who spent many years writing about Islamic militants before becoming an adviser to Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to London. "One of them said to me once, ’We will drag you into jihad by your beard.’ ’’ |