US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage hit the nail on the head when he declared to the Al Arabiya television network that the real target of the 9 November suicide attack on the Muhaya compound in Riyadh was the Saudi royal family and monarchical system of government. Both Washington and the House of Saud are unanimous that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda are behind the latest outrage which killed at least 18 persons and left another 120 injured.
If this is true, as seems likely, it is evident that notwithstanding the Taliban failure to establish itself in Afghanistan, bin Laden feels compelled to take his struggle to establish his brand of Islam right into the heartland of the Islamic world, viz., Saudi Arabia, where Hazrat Muhammad first declared his Prophethood. The realization that Osama means business, notwithstanding the recent withdrawal of American troops from Saudi soil, must have a sobering effect on Washington and Riyadh. It means that the renegade billionaire is not avenging a supposed insult to the Islamic holy lands, nor is he after the Americans or Westerners in general; rather he is waging an all-out war for power and glory.
It is a delicious irony that Osama is determined to topple the ruling House of Saud, which espouses the most orthodox form of Islam – Wahabi Islam – and actively finances fundamentalism all over the world. The grounds for his opposition to the regime are simply that it is not puritanical enough, oil wealth having made the sheikhs cling to lives of ease and western-style comforts. Thus, though Osama will garner support among disaffected sections of Saudi society, who want more democracy and development, he himself shall not be called upon to deliver either as he hustles the monarchy out of the gates of history.
Osama will only marshal the forces of discontent towards apocalypse; he cannot lead people back from the brink towards sanity, stability, and normal human progress. Had he the ability or desire to do so, he would have learnt some valuable lessons from the tragedy that visited the Afghan people under his inhuman Taliban. Yet the sections of Saudi society who can be expected to gather around Osama have also failed to learn from the Afghan calamity, and will now be complicit in the catastrophe that devolves upon their own lives when the monarchy is overthrown. Tribalism, gangsterism, warlordism et al shall be Saudi Arabia’s lot, as in the case of Afghanistan.
The Saudi regime’s attempts to contain the threat from Osama may serve only to exacerbate the crisis of its political legitimacy. Crown Prince Abdullah, who is in-charge of issues of day-to-day governance, is trying to soften the growing domestic opposition to the monarchy by ushering in reforms. Last month elections were announced to municipal offices, and will be held next year. The Prince also allowed television coverage of the deliberations of the Consultative Assembly, whose members are appointed by him.
But these measures towards democratization are unlikely to provide meaningful relief to the royal family, precisely because of Islam’s quixotic approach to issues of power and governance. Islam does not accommodate itself to established forms of government, such as monarchy or democracy, and remains mesmerized with that brief pristine era in which the Prophet was both religious preceptor and political ruler. Unlike other creeds, Islam has been unable to accept the separation of the religious and the secular realms, and the non-dominance of the faith in the public arena.
This has bequeathed a peculiar paradox. Though no successor could match the unique status of the Prophet – three of the four Pious Caliphs were murdered – Islam through the centuries retained a craving for the unity of the religious and political realms. While monarchy was a reality of the Islamic world, it was not consistent with Islamic precepts, and the ruler was ever wary of the clergy. The Islamic craving for a unified religious-political order intensified as Islam faced the challenge of the West and lost its domination of the high seas in the era of conquest and colonialism.
Post-World War II Islam has been uncomfortable with modern democracy. The establishment of pro-Western regimes in much of the Muslim world further exacerbated Muslim unease with non-Islamic forms of governance. This made opposition a paradox in Muslim countries – governments were hated for being dictatorial and oppressive, but no Islamic country could yield a credible political democracy. To be viable, the opposition to the regime had to be couched in a religious idiom, but when the clergy seized political power, there was no legitimate idiom with which to express or resist oppression by the ulema. Thus, though the travails of Iranian society under Ayatollah Khomeini are fairly well documented, the Muslim world has failed to learn the appropriate lessons and to this day there is no credible movement to demarcate the religious and secular spheres in Islamic society.
Perhaps it is just as well, therefore, that the incredibly well organized and tenacious bin Laden has taken his fight into the heartland of Islam. The fear of the Saudi royals is quite palpable, and is no doubt aggravated by the fact that the growing stress of events in Iraq has taken the swagger out of their American allies. Of course, the Saudi regime is moving fast to uncover and eradicate the terrorist cells. Huge hauls of arms, explosives and ammunition have been seized, the sheer scale and volume of which have sent shock waves through the country.
In the end, however, it will take more than efficient police or military action to combat bin Laden and the Al Qaeda. What is needed is an ideology that will counter Osama’s corrosive appeal and offer the people of the kingdom a way of life consistent with their desires and aspirations in the modern world. Unfortunately, Islam does not provide such an ideology; nor does it adjust to events or developments that were unknown or unmanifest at the time of the Prophet’s Revelation. The tragedy of the Muslim world is not that the Koran is not an all-encompassing document on the philosophy of life and politics, on the lines of India’s epic Mahabharata. The tragedy is that the Muslim world has failed to generate a consensus on the need to pontificate over and decide upon contemporary issues, themes and challenges that the Koran is silent about.
It is only natural that the religious clergy should resist such change and innovation as it would result in the eventual dilution of its power. What remains inexplicable, however, is that despite the repeated lessons of history, particularly over the last hundred years, the Muslim community remains wedded to the destructive notion of facing the contemporary world with solutions from the Stone Age. The Islamic world has so far proved incapable of evolving a social and political theory that will enable its adherents to build viable and stable societies and governments. Instead, it remains eternally hostage to charismatic agent provocateurs such as Osama bin Laden whose only promise to his people is that he will lead them to Apocalypse Now. Truly, it is a sad commentary on the Saudi people if they are willing to embrace such a man even after the disastrous consequences of Nine Eleven.
The Pioneer, 18 November 2003
