Saudi Arabia donated $100 million to the UN last week so it's unlikely the UN will demand a halt to its beheadings:
8/22/14, "Saudis Must Stop Exporting Extremism," NY Times op-ed, Ed Husain, Council on Foreign Relations
"ISIS Atrocities Started With Saudi Support for Salafi Hate."
"Along with a billion Muslims across the globe, I turn to Mecca in Saudi Arabia
every day to say my prayers. But when I visit the holy cities of Mecca
and Medina, the resting place of the Prophet Muhammad, I am forced to
leave overwhelmed with anguish at the power of extremism running amok in
Islam’s birthplace. Non-Muslims are forbidden to enter this part of the
kingdom, so there is no international scrutiny of the ideas and
practices that affect the 13 million Muslims who visit each year.
Last week, Saudi Arabia donated $100 million to the United Nations
to fund a counterterrorism agency. This was a welcome contribution, but
last year, Saudi Arabia rejected a rotating seat on the United Nations
Security Council. This half-in, half-out posture of the Saudi kingdom is
a reflection of its inner paralysis in dealing with Sunni Islamist
radicalism: It wants to stop violence, but will not address the Salafism
that helps justify it.
Let’s be clear: Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,
Boko Haram, the Shabab and others are all violent Sunni Salafi
groupings. For five decades, Saudi Arabia has been the official sponsor
of Sunni Salafism across the globe.
Most Sunni Muslims around the world, approximately 90 percent of the
Muslim population, are not Salafis. Salafism is seen as too rigid, too
literalist, too detached from mainstream Islam. While Shiite and other
denominations account for 10 percent of the total, Salafi adherents and
other fundamentalists represent 3 percent of the world’s Muslims.
Unlike
a majority of Sunnis, Salafis are evangelicals who wish to convert
Muslims and others to their “purer” form of Islam — unpolluted, as they
see it, by modernity. In this effort, they have been lavishly supported
by the Saudi government, which has appointed emissaries to its embassies
in Muslim countries who proselytize for Salafism. The kingdom also
grants compliant imams V.I.P. access for the annual hajj, and bankrolls
ultraconservative Islamic organizations like the Muslim World League and
World Assembly of Muslim Youth.
After 9/11,
under American pressure, much of this global financial support dried
up, but the bastion of Salafism remains strong in the kingdom, enforcing
the hard-line application of outdated Shariah punishments long abandoned by a majority of Muslims. Just since Aug. 4, 19 people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia, nearly half for nonviolent crimes.
We
are rightly outraged at the beheading of James Foley by Islamist
militants, and by ISIS’ other atrocities, but we overlook the public
executions by beheading permitted by Saudi Arabia. By licensing such
barbarity, the kingdom normalizes and indirectly encourages such
punishments elsewhere. When the country that does so is the birthplace
of Islam, that message resonates.
I
lived in Saudi Arabia’s most liberal city, Jidda, in 2005. That year,
in an effort to open closed Saudi Salafi minds, King Abdullah supported
dialogue with people of other religions. In my mosque, the cleric used
his Friday Prayer sermon to prohibit such dialogue on grounds that it
put Islam on a par with “false religions.” It was a slippery slope to
freedom, democracy and gender equality, he argued — corrupt practices of
the infidel West.
This
tension between the king and Salafi clerics is at the heart of Saudi
Arabia’s inability to reform. The king is a modernizer, but he and his
advisers do not wish to disturb the 270-year-old tribal pact between the House of Saud and the founder of Wahhabism (an austere form of Islam close to Salafism). That 1744 desert treaty must now be nullified.
The
influence that clerics wield is unrivaled. Even Saudis’ Twitter heroes
are religious figures: An extremist cleric like Muhammad al-Arifi, who
was banned last year from the European Union for advocating wife-beating
and hatred of Jews, commands a following of 9. 4 million. The kingdom
is also patrolled by a religious police force that enforces the veil for
women, prohibits young lovers from meeting and ensures that shops do
not display “indecent” magazine covers. In the holy cities of Mecca and
Medina, the religious police beat women with sticks if they stray into
male-only areas, or if their dress is considered immodest by Salafi
standards. This is not an Islam that the Prophet Muhammad would
recognize.
Salafi
intolerance has led to the destruction of Islamic heritage in Mecca and
Medina. If ISIS is detonating shrines, it learned to do so from the
precedent set in 1925 by the House of Saud with the Wahhabi-inspired
demolition of 1,400-year-old tombs in the Jannat Al Baqi cemetery in
Medina. In the last two years, violent Salafis have carried out similar
sectarian vandalism, blowing up shrines from Libya to Pakistan, from
Mali to Iraq. Fighters from Hezbollah have even entered Syria to protect
holy sites.
Textbooks
in Saudi Arabia’s schools and universities teach this brand of Islam.
The University of Medina recruits students from around the world, trains
them in the bigotry of Salafism and sends them to Muslim communities in
places like the Balkans, Africa, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Egypt, where
these Saudi-trained hard-liners work to eradicate the local, harmonious
forms of Islam.
What
is religious extremism but this aim to apply Shariah as state law? This
is exactly what ISIS (Islamic State) is attempting to do with its
caliphate. Unless we challenge this un-Islamic, impractical and flawed
concept of trying to govern by a rigid interpretation of Shariah, no
amount of work by a United Nations agency can unravel Islamist
terrorism.***
Saudi
Arabia created the monster that is Salafi terrorism. It cannot now
outsource the slaying of this beast to the United Nations. It must
address the theological and ideological roots of extremism at home,
starting in Mecca and Medina. Reforming the home of Islam would be a
giant step toward winning against extremism in this global battle of
ideas."
"Ed Husain is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior adviser to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation."
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***As the author notes, the UN just accepted a $100 million check from the Saudis for "counterterrorism." The UN isn't going to make the Saudis do anything.
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