Mansur Al-Nuqidan (*)

Last Sunday, on the 21st May, a judge in Saudi, known for his interest in astronomy, was summoned. He was informed of the content of a lawsuit filed against him by a number of preachers and Imams of the mosques and his teaching colleagues, on the accusation of perverting and corrupting students and demanding that he be proscribed from teaching and exiled from the region. This move on their part came after he had delivered a lecture to his students during the total eclipse of the sun in the previous March. In it he pointed out that eclipses of the moon and the sun were two of God’s devices used to scare his worshippers, and it was not necessarily because he was angry with them or wanted to punish them for their sins. He cited the sayings of a number of commentators, such as Imam al-Qartabi and others.
The Saudi Salafi religious milieu, after the second Gulf War in 1990, witnessed something of a student rebellion against their elders. This was clear in the stubbornness of the oppositionist political debate formulated in all of the discourses and studies, voice recordings and pamphlets which convey a point of view opposed to the Fatwa [legal opinion] of the senior Ulama regarding the presence of foreign forces. After a round of criticism (to summarise the collection of issues dealing with the relationship of the ruler with the Ra’iya (flock, community), public money, and the borders and regulations of obedience for what is accepted as right) it was anticipated that this review from the depths of the Wahabi house, that exploited foreign discourse, would include a broadening of the room for manoeuvre in order to extend the jurisprudential heritage and doctrinal inertia that had for long decades been a direct cause of the emaciation of the other Sunni doctrines. However, the whirlwind of change remained restricted to all those brief and muddled ideas which were not transcended except at the level of slogans. With the end of  the nineties the Permanent Council for the Mufti [Deliverance of Legal Opinions] issued a number of statements of forgiveness in the cases of people who they considered to be ‘hammam al-bayt’ because of their disagreement with the dominant section within the official Fatwa institution, in issues barely worth mentioning which were in any case in accordance with another view within the circle of the Hanbali doctrine, which is the official doctrine for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The head of the Islamic Jurisprudence Congregation, the Mufti of Saudi Arabia in 1999, issued a statement jointly with three members of the Fatwa in which they asked a researcher who had composed a tract about the permissibility of cutting off one’s beard - which was an issue that the Assembly of Jurisprudents had been over within the regulations of ethics and permissible acts – to repent and apologise for what he had written. The Ministry of Communications confiscated the book and banned its distribution.

After the events of 11th September, the reaction of the Saudi officials was to deny that fifteen Saudis had participated in the attack, and the oblique admission did not come until almost a year later. With the second explosions of 12 May 2003 in the capital Riyadh, the Saudi newspaper ‘al-Jazira’ published the opinion of a Saudi writer that the bodies of those who had undertaken the attack, whose names had been announced, belonged to people who had been killed previously, and their bodies had then been used by the enemy foreign services. But operations and aggressions attacking Saudi security personnel in more than one region continued, and the involvement of names of Shaikhs who held teaching positions in the mosques and composed books encouraging those operations and giving legal cover to them, finally pushed the officials to announce clearly that there was a problem and that the greater responsibility lay with the ‘Ulama and scholars. This was perhaps the first time that scholars had been mentioned in official discourse – they were weak in performing their duties and neglected their tasks to warn against the Takfiri thought that was thriving wherever it went unchecked, and many of the people of the country were polarised.

The Saudi authorities – until now – have been dealing with the Shaikhs issuing the Takfir Fatwas against a number of writers, literati and poets associated with new revivals, and the promulgation of Takfir Fatwas against the Shi’a in the middle of the nineties – with coldness and disregard, sometimes casting blame on the victims of those Fatwas for being devoid of judgement and maturity. They have thereby avoided appeasing matters and provoked those who had issued the Fatwas, who had not exempted from their Fatwas those Islamists who disagreed with them and had exercised independent judgement. The PhD thesis of a former Professor in Doctrine at the Umm al-Qara University about ‘The phenomenon of postponement in the modern age’, accused all of Fahmi Huwaidi, Khalis Jalabi, Hassan al-Turabi and even al-Jabri of unbelief. In the period between 2000 and 2002 Internet forums, schools and mosques witnessed the dissemination of Takfir Fatwas against some of their prominent figures, and the authorities continued to disregard them. As for the ‘Ulama of the religious institutions, these Fatwas conveyed their power of persuasion by proxy without their being subjected to the embarrassment and difficulty of announcing them as long as they did not cast doubt on the legitimacy of the regime, or declare the Wali [ruler] of the Muslims to be a Kafir [unbeliever], or one of the powerful members of the royal family. With the explosions of 12 May 2003, they were on the security list of wanted people after investigations revealed their involvement in Fatwas for blowing things up and killing that targeted the government and its security apparatus and foreigners’ living complexes.

Today the statements of officials reflect two contradictory positions:
First: The ‘Ulama and the proponents are undertaking their duties with regard to Takfiri thought by means of advisory and guidance committees, whereby hundreds of people have been released who have been rehabilitated and have reviewed their ideas.

Second: After every security operation undertaken by armed Islamists complaints are made about the negligence of the ‘Ulama and scholars in carrying out their jobs.

Over the last few years calls have increased for the path to be cleared for all kinds of religious factions and doctrines to see the light as a first step in a journey of a thousand miles towards preparing a climate of tolerance and openness. Some have suggested that  ‘the Committee of the Office of the Mufti’ which represents the local jurisprudence committee allow various options for jurisprudential ijtihad to release the stranglehold and persecution of those who are suffering – including regions, groups, and doctrines that represent a large proportion of Saudi society. Such a step would facilitate a climate of openness by means of reaching solutions springing from jurisprudential traditions, and creating a healthy climate that would allow independence to the individual and reduce the overbearing oppressive pressure of extremist voices. These options would create a foothold enabling the media to disseminate, broadcast, and thus be accepted, and would create the conditions for openness by means of solutions springing from the Islamic civilisation’s history at its peak. This call was repeated in front of Sharia specialists and scholars in more detail and in the newspapers, at meetings and national dialogue sessions. It was made by people who represented non-traditional views and were more inclined towards modernity and enlightenment, and it stemmed from their consciousness that this was the most productive and least damaging substitution.  No one would contest that it must be legitimately Islamic, so it was an extension of all that wealth and variety which the Islamic Umma had witnessed over previous centuries, and the recent decades in the two sacred shrines [Mecca and Medina]. However, the matter appeared more complicated when it emerged that the dominant presence of extremist thought can be traced back to a lot of reasons with varying contributions towards forging an exacerbating cultural and social climate. The tragic truth was that extremism had become the sustenance for this climate, tempting and seducing it, and this made any kind of business impossible. Such an environment bred extremism and violence.

With the communications revolution and the marketing of satellite dishes, the mountains of political constants for the Saudi viewer were exposed to convulsions, and piles of jurisprudential restrictions were dusted off. The Saudi religious institution was entangled in its own depths, and with the institution of the Qatari channel al-Jazira, the weekly programme by Dr Yusuf al-Qardawi consolidated its bases every day and its popularity grew. The programme of the office of the Mufti broadcast by Saudi television did not control one of the judges itself whilst al-Qardawi asked for repentance for its misguidance of the Umma with its Fatwas.

On 12 December 1924 the first meeting was convened between the ‘Ulama of the Hijaz from different doctrines including a number of Najid ‘Ulama from Riyadh and al-Qassim. As is the case with dialogues containing different factions who were motivated by political desire to sit at a table of dialogue, a joint statement was issued with everyone’s agreement on a collection of ideas that had provoked disagreement and Tafkir and bloodshed. Needless to say that on the whole it tended towards favouring the interests of the ascendant Wahabi religious and political power and in the background of the scene were the armies of the Bedouin Brotherhoods making hearts tremble after the bloodbath witnessed in al-Ta’if in which a Shafa’ai Mufti had been killed along with several households from the guard of the Ka’aba.

However, King ‘Abdul ‘Aziz’s issuance of an order to unite the two mosques of Mecca and Medina under one Imam in prayer and to cancel the multiplication of groups within the two shrines in accordance with every doctrine – which was carried out – was a step welcomed by most of the ‘Ulama for the sake of uniting the Umma around one Imam. Then the issuance of royal decree one year after the Statement of Mecca sanctioning Hanbali jurisprudence in the judiciary of all of the courts under the authority of Najid and the Hijaz before the announcement of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1930 finished off all of the hopes that followers of the jurisprudence doctrinal schools had dallied with that they would have at least a presence in legal pronouncements and instruction within their geographical areas and within their social following in addition to possessing their previous privileges which had started to waste away year after year.

One of the paradoxes was that one of the senior ‘Ulama of the Hijaz and the first signatory of the joint statement – Muhammad Habib Allah al-Shanqayti – of the Maliki doctrine – was one of the first to be persecuted and prevented from pronouncing legal opinions after that. He was summoned to Riyadh after pressure had been exercised on King ‘Abdul ‘Aziz either to call on him to repent or to kill him, but the King arranged for him to be given some money and secretly indicated to him that he should take refuge in Egypt for a period of time until the tumult of the sheikhdoms had calmed down. Something like this also happened to another acquaintance of al-Shanqayti – Muhammad al-Khudr – who was prevented from making legal judgements and instructing after a controversy between him and the ‘Ulama of Riyadh over the allegory in the Holy Quran.

Today, it is difficult to try to remember who remained alive from amongst the Malaki, Shafa’ai and Hanafi ‘Ulama who in the period before the establishment of the Kingdom were aware of the amazing dominance of fear that has until recently prevailed. This was not because they were involved with political enemies of the rule, and not because they set up domes which they walked around. No, it was fear that some of the books by the Imams of their jurisprudential doctrines as well as books on mysticism and books which they had been bequeathed would be confiscated, and they took measures to prevent this by burying them and hiding them in secret closets built with the foundations of the house, as was the practice with Maliki doctrine adherents.

In 1906 al-Safat square in Riyadh witnessed the killing of a young religious savant, ‘Abdullah Bin ‘Ali Bin ‘Amru – thirty eight years old – after years of competition and opposition between himself and the Riyadh ‘Ulama on issues they disagreed upon. The most important was their Takfir of the princes of the Aal Rashid and the Ottoman State, as well as other jurisprudential matters. It was after he had returned to his birthplace in Barida after years of learning amongst the ‘Ulama of the Hijaz from different doctrines, the disagreement between him and the ‘Ulama of the Aal Salim in Barida, and the heirs of the Wahabi doctrine in al- Qassim after the emigration of their forefathers from al-Daraya after its fall under the protection of Ibrahim Pasha. A Fatwa was issued for his murder for dividing Muslims and stirring up civil unrest. This Fatwa was in accordance with the whim of the aspiring prince ‘Abdul ‘Aziz Bin Saud only four years after he had taken Riyadh. At the peak of the struggle between him and the Aal Rashid in Ha’il, Ibn Rashid was killed in that year, and this guaranteed the finishing off of any dissenting voices even if the disagreement was over political struggles.

At the start of the middle of the eighteenth century the state of the Aal Saud had weakened and it was hardly able to recover from the crushing blow of the Egyptian campaign several years before. Fighting broke out between the people of the ruling house and as a result the Emirate of the Aal Rashid emerged in Ha’il and ‘Abdullah Bin Rashid embarked on ruling it. With the multiplication of economic resources for the small emirate that fascinated the traveller and the reinforcement of its relationship with Iraq and al-Sham [Syria] and the Ottomans, and its gateway onto the Hijaz, its cultural wellbeing was reflected in the printing of a collection of the most important books on custom at the expense of the rulers of the emirate. With the important rise of that oasis, a collection of Shi’a Iranian traders settled there who were known as the al-Mushahida, or the al-Mushahidin. In a poem in which Suleyman Bin Sahman (1931) satirizes the rulers of Ha’il and their populace, he mentions that one of the justifications for pronouncing Takfir on its rulers was the presence of the al-Mushahida traders (dissenters) who practised their customs with the acceptance of their rulers and the people, in addition to other vile (according to the poem) practices, such as spreading music and games and an etiquette that is reflected in love poems!

The victims of that introversion were not only from the group of adversaries and dissenters; even supporters and defenders of the doctrine from the founding house of Shaikh Muhammad Bin ‘Abdul Wahab itself were affected – for in 1794 al-Daraya witnessed the beheading of a young intellectual – Muhammad Bin ‘Ali Bin Ghuraib – the very son-in-law of Bin ‘Abdul Wahab after one of them had asked him about the money plundered from the Bedouin and the regions whose people were considered polytheists because they took a hostile stance to the Wahabi calling. His response, after a pause, was to prohibit violating this money and if it was seized in the name of Jihad then it could not be other than dubious to legalise what God had forbidden. For this Fatwa, Bin Ghuraib was killed, as it is conveyed by the historian Ibn Bashir, after he had been put in chains and was publicly executed.

A number of towns in Najid witnessed the banishment or exile of others, either because they disagreed with the prevalent school or for behaviour that embodied the jurisprudential propensities that they gave more weight to. This is what happened to Shaikh Ibrahim al-Jasser, one of the ‘Ulama and guardians of the Hadith, who was the recipient of the blatant aversion and hostility of his peers and some of the Sheikhs who were not persuaded by his stance on a number of issues. The most important of these was his moderate stance towards ‘the state’ – and this was an expression used by Imams of the Wahabi calling when they were talking about the Ottoman Caliphate. Al-Jasser’s position was contrary to the Takfiri stance of the ‘Ulama of the Aal al-Shaikh and their supporters, in addition to a lot of jurisprudential ideas which did not meet with their approval. They forced him to migrate from his settlement and his birthplace when he was advanced in years and suffering from the illnesses of old age, and they sent him to Kuwait to pass away soon after in the town of al-Zubair in southern Iraq in 1919.

In 1939 Shaikh ‘Abdul Rahman as-Sa’adi published a contentious tract explaining Quranic verses and the Hadith, and he also made a legal pronouncement that triple (declaration of) divorce was only one. This had been said by some of the senior Hanbali ‘Ulamaa such as Ibn Taymiya and his student Ibn al-Qim. With the request of some of the ‘Ulama to try as-Sa’adi and punish him, King ‘Abdul ‘Aziz summoned him, and there are prolific numbers of stories recounting the details of what happened to him. One of them indicates that the King showed his disinclination to prolong his discomfort, as was the case with others like Ibn ‘Amru, and he suggested that he go to Yemen – i.e. the area to the south of Saudi in Asir and Tahama to explain Tawhid (unity) to them and instruct them in the religion and to avoid the sayings that had caused irritation and disagreement. That is one of the stories but what is certain afterwards is that Ibn Sa’adi committed himself to silence, preferring to remain among his children and his students in ‘Aniza, and he contented himself with making secret legal judgements for those who believed him on issues of divorce. This was the same account that subsequently pursued two senior Saudi ‘Ulama, Shaikh Bin Baz and a student of as-Sa’adi Shaikh Muhammad Bin Uthaymin. As usual, Shaikh Muhammad Bin Ibrahim did not hesitate to use his influence and sway to prohibit them from making legal decisions, as his printed Fatwas testify, and no one was allowed to declare that Fatwa until after the death of Ibn Ibrahim in 1969.

It is needless to say that the Wahabi stance on the Takfir of the Ottoman Caliphate was a political stance that found a religious cover. However, it was shifted about many times within the period of tension and attraction between the Caliphate and the rebel Emirate that did not refrain from rejecting its legitimacy while extending its own influence over the Hijaz and Mecca and Medina. However, in 1856 Turki Bin ‘Abdullah sent a petition to the supreme leader in Egypt in which he yielded his fidelity and obedience to him. This was, however, not accepted by the Pasha of Egypt, who called on him to present himself. Suleyman al-Dukhil, the founder of the Riyadh-Baghdadiya newspaper, mentions that he spoke more than once with King ‘Abdul ‘Aziz Bin ‘Abdul Rahman about benefiting from the Ottoman constitution after the reformatory constitutional ‘Tanzimat’ that had been undertaken. The King encouraged a rapprochement of points of view but ‘Abdul ‘Aziz’s step was met coldly by the Caliphate state that was preparing for a new era in the hands of Attaturk. 

But still, all of this legacy of Takfiri Fatwas over jurisprudential or political issues has gone on as though they were mainstream issues of faith and doctrine. Even today they still bear fruit for followers of the doctrine and students faithful to the legacy of their ancestors. They are treated with sanctity like all of those opinions that fill our legacy,  pronouncing Takfir on dissenters and fads and fancies. We ignore the other aspects of that conflict, and by simply perusing the ideas of Abu Muhammad al-Muqadassi who is described as the spiritual father of the Jihadi Takfiri Salafi, one may see how the Salafis fundamentally relied on the heritage of the ‘Ulama of the Najidiya calling.

In 1941 Shaikh ‘Abdullah Bin Zaid Aal Mahmud moved from Riyadh to Qatar as one of the most bright-minded and imaginative students of the Mufti of Saudi, Muhammad Bin Ibrahim. However, the existing environment [in Riyadh] was not conducive to his intellect, and it appears that on his second return from Doha to Riyadh in 1939 after he had met Shaikh Muhammad Bin Man’ia it became clear to him how suffocating the environment was. This after he had found unexpectedly more than once that his positions reflected to his Shaikh and to his colleagues his inclination towards independence. When he moved from Riyadh to Qatar (which is of Maliki doctrine) as the chairman of their courts, an intellectual and a Mufti, on the wishes of the prince, Shaikh Qassem, he was granted greater freedom and he was able to stretch his abilities far from the climate of Riyadh. But this was not the end of the story, for his independent judgements on the rituals of the Haj and the Mahdi, and the complexity of the concept of predestination and divine decree were considered subsequently by his Shaikh and some of his peers to be deviation, and reactions extended more or less from the period of his move until the eighties in ruthless language and there were violent reactions to his Fatwas by his Shaikh and ‘Ulama from amongst his Saudi peers.

Shaikh Saleh Bin ‘Abdul ‘Aziz Bin ‘Uthaymin, who occupied the post of Assistant Secretary General to the League of the Islamic World, was exiled from his birthplace after his Fatwa on the permissibility of a man praying in his house – and this is one of the two about Imam Ahmad Bin Hanbal, and the approach of the Imams of the other four doctrines – and his Fatwa on the permissibility of smoking in an environment where a comparison was made between smoking and not praying in the mosque, and between sensuality (al-Fojoor) and immorality. The person who neglected dawn prayers (al-Fajr) in the mosques was punished by defamation and having his shmagh or ghatra (scarf) confiscated after he had been forced to take them from his head to the Imam of the community. If he was not a dignitary but an individual of no standing then he would be caned. 

With the Saudi government’s establishment of works to enlarge the mosque of the shrine at Mecca in the fifties (AD), a problem arose in dealing with Ibrahim’s sanctuary, the proximity of which to the Ka’aba comprised an obstacle to the sectarians. Shaikh ‘Abdul Rahman al-Mu’allami (died 1962) wrote a study that licensed moving it a few steps back – as it is today – and Shaikh Suleyman Bin Hamdan, the teacher in the mosque of the shrine (died 1977), composed a letter proclaiming al-Muallami a disbeliever and accusing him of calling for the destruction of the sanctuary outside the mosque and comparing him with the carrion that must be cleaned out of the ancient house. The political leadership wanted the matter to be settled in favour of moving the sanctuary after an antagonistic jurisprudential campaign against any dissenting voice, pushing the Mufti Shaikh Muhammad Bin Ibrahim to participate in the battle, settling the disagreement in favour of al-Mu’allami. Suleyman al-Hamdan composed a book in which he proclaimed the Iraqi cleric Muhammad Mahmud al-Suwaf and the Pakistani thinker Aba al-Ala’ al-Mawdudi to be unbelievers. Shaikh Muhammad Bin Ibrahim himself ended the contract for the Syrian Hadith cleric Shaikh Muhammad Nasser ad-Din al-Albani to teach in the Islamic university in 1963 and exiled him from Saudi because he disagreed with a number of university professors on a number of jurisprudence issues.

Shaikh Yusuf al-Qardawi mentions that after the publication of his book – ‘The Permissible and the Forbidden in Islam’ a number of ‘Ulama in Saudi tried to prevent his book from being published internally and he spoke to Shaikh Ibn Baz who reached a compromise to allow the distribution of the book. At the same time Dr. Saleh al-Fazwan, currently a member of the Association of Senior ‘Ulama, started to compose a book containing what al-Albani started. This may be the first time that an exception was made and it was not repeated for the hundreds of religious books that had been banned from being distributed or published. In a conversation with a former member of the Supreme Council for Media, Dr Rashid al-Mubarak, in 2001, he informed me that a number of the ‘Ulama had presented a list of three thousand books, most of which were books on heritage, demanding that they be banned from publication and that they be confiscated and not reprinted.

Shaikh al-Albani’s book – ‘al-Hijab’, or ‘al-Jalbab’ was not in agreement with the traditions and customs of the ‘Ulama of the official institution. Although the wisdom that everything but the face and the hands should be covered was the better known in the Hanbali doctrine, the book was still banned for many years because it contravened the traditions of most of those in the Association of Senior UIama, or more precisely, the most powerful wing in the Association.

In 1992 investigations by the security apparatus revealed that one of the women’s centres in Saudi had started to print and distribute al-Albani’s book ‘al-Hijab’, and this was one of the justifications for clamping down on that centre. Even today observers note how a saying related to a jurisprudential issue which has authority in the jurisprudential heritage and the Fatwas of the Imams practising Ijtihad that diverge from what is recognised by the official ‘Ulama of the Fatwa is a warrant for an accusation of degeneration or secularism, or considered an aberration. For this reason, the distribution of the book ‘The Liberation of the Muslim Woman’ by ‘Abd al-Halim Abu Shaqqa was banned – and it was only an abridgement of the Correct Hadith in the six books and explanations of the ‘Ulama.

As far as is known the Saudi Association of Senior ‘Ulama is composed of 16 members who are appointed by the King himself. The choice of the deceased King Fahed Bin ‘Abdul ‘Aziz of Dr ‘Abdul Wahab Abu Suleyman as a member, and he is a Maliki cleric in the Hijaz, was a severe blow to some of them. His appearance and clothes are completely different from the traditional form of the Shaikh, and he is clean-shaven and wears a head piece. But sadly the presence of people like that has never had any effect. We never saw Abu Suleyman as the Mufti on the television screens, and there are no reports in the newspapers covering his news, with the exception of the al-Watan Saudi paper in 2000 – 2001, and a barely perceptible mention in the Hijaz and Medina papers.

In around 1921 a butcher in the middle of Saudi was subjected to having his moustache plucked out. His whiskers had covered his upper lip, and this was an offence contravening the Prophetic Sunna in the view of the Bedouin clan who swallowed the  Wahabi doctrine whole because they were preconditioned to initiate the role of faithful combatants in the armies of the aspiring King ‘Abdul ‘Aziz Aal Saud. Their justification was that they had used force for the vanity of that poor man.

It is true that this story was and still is a vaguely humorous occurrence, but there was a path of events after it and the escalation in their violations in the name of Hisba [Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong] and the glory of religion and combating the unbeliever met no resistance. They were opening up one village after another until the moment of collision and then destruction in the battle of al-Sabla in 1929 after their aggressions had reached neighbouring states, after King ‘Abdul ‘Aziz signed a covenant demarking the borders with Kuwait and southern Iraq. They plundered convoys in the name of Jihad and booty, and made us realise that there is only a thin line that is difficult to control between the private jurisprudential view that allows its master to pronounce 'hisba' on others and verbally forbidding them, and the forbidding of the offender by force with the hand. And the offence may not be an incarnation of evil or a musical instrument, but it may be a wrong saying or a thought or a doctrine which is followed by another grade of compulsion and physical and chaotic aggression that goes to the stage of shaking up the entire being.

The brotherhoods of the al-Ghatghat and the al-Artawiya, who comprised the terrible striking force in the army of the founding King ‘Abdul ‘Aziz Bin ‘Abdul Rahman Aal Saud for almost twelve years, on the outskirts of Mecca in 1926 swept away all that was in their path of the armies of al-Sharif Hussain, and dozens of gruesome stories have been preserved in the popular memory of the people of that area, whilst one of the participants from the brotherhood in that horrible battle talks of how the custodian of the Ka’aba was within a whisker of being slaughtered like the ewe whose neck is slit at the jugular, had he not taken control of himself and cried out the testimonies.

Today Saudi is experiencing countless incidents of aggression, outrages and violations that the newspapers publish, occupying a great deal of the Internet forum debates between members of the Association ‘Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice‘, encouraged by speeches, Tadlil [proclamations of misguidance] Fatwas, the Tafsiq [proclamations of sinfulness] statements constantly issued by dozens of doctrinal and Shari’a professors, judges, preachers and teachers – with the absolute silence of the government. From on 1988 the influence of the ‘Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong’ began to grow. With the start of 1991, other Saudi towns witnessed forceful attacks on a number of foreigners in their residential complexes, and they were driven like cattle and beaten in the centres of the Association. That year Riyadh saw the biggest attack by the Association in the shadow of the Gulf War.

The Takfiri Fatwas against the Shi’a Isma’ilis that were broadcast in the middle of the nineties took an escalatory path, culminating in the bloody events of Najran in 1999, after the Association’s raid on one of the Ismaili mosques and confiscation of their books. It goes without saying that the past ten years have witnessed the circulation of unannounced Fatwas allowing lies to be told about the Shi’as who work in the field of education.

Until the period when the formation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was announced in 1932, the ‘Ulama of Riyadh and al-Qassim were watching the Muslims of Syria and Iraq and Egypt with doubt and suspicion. Even if they were not Kafirs whose faith was in tyrants, they lived in the states of unbelievers that flew the flags of the states of crucifix. And this was at the time when foreign embassies were waving their flags on the western shore in Jeddah to the west of Saudi, 80km from the mosque of the shrine, foretelling that a new era was being heralded in, and announcing that the glory of the first combatants - who at the beginning of the eighteenth century had forbidden the Egyptian bearer accompanying the Kiswah [silk covering] of the Ka’aba from Egypt along with drums and chanting - had gone never to return, after a repeated attempt to do the same in 1927 which resulted in confrontation between the Egyptians and the Brotherhood, killing dozens in Mina. Several years later Majid Bin Khathayla, one of the leaders of the Brotherhood close to King ‘Abdul ‘Aziz whose claws had been clipped and had tasted the mild sweetness and generosity of the King, rapturously recalled the beloved memories to himself and the nostalgia of the past when he wondered: If this man abandoned us would we fight the infidel and continue the Jihad?

Ten years after the incident of the Egyptian bearer the founding King received his Islamic guests and delegations in Mina on Eid in 1937. His army and his private guard displayed their skills to the sounds of drums and music and the noise of the Lucifer, and those white Leagues contained within them who were retrained by the rest of the Bedouin fighters concealed their wrath and sought God’s forgiveness.

In 1817 the Egyptian forces levelled the walls of al-Dariya of the rebel Wahabbis such as Suleyman ‘Abdullah, grandson of the founding Shaikh Muhammad Bin ‘Abdul Wahab. Others fled to ‘Amman and elsewhere. Others from the family of Aal al-Shaikh and Aal al- Saud were taken captive and sent to Egypt. At the time one of the great ‘Ulama of Riyadh in 1838, Shaikh ‘Abdullah Bin Saif urged the people to listen and obey and not to defy the new Wali al-Amr. The Pasha suggested that Ibrahim the son of the Shaikh should be dispatched to Egypt to study at al-Azhar at the expense of the high ruler in appreciation for the illustrious services offered by his father. In the meantime, others from the Wahabi house were preparing to return to their birthplaces and they waited twenty years in exile, and they studied for the first time under the ‘Ulama of al-Azhar the arts of the sciences such as applying the principles of logic which they considered a sin and a deviation from correct tenet. Despite the twenty years that ‘Abdul Latif Bin ‘Abdul Rahman Bin Hassan spent at al-Azhar, after his return to his birthplace in 1846 he did not reflect a thing of that relative openness or acceptance in the sphere of Ijtihad, and his books and tracts opposing the Wahabis were the biggest source borne down on by Suleyman Bin Sahman in his many responses that were full to the brim of proclamations of Takfir against those ‘Ulama of the Islamic countries who disagreed on the basics or the details of the Wahabi calling.

In 1965 the rejection that greeted the founding Television and Broadcasting corporation and the Fatwas issued to forbid it by some of the ‘Ulama were the cause of a protest in front of the Television building. One of the members of the royal family participated in it, and he was killed in a clash with the security forces. At the same time, dozens of disaffected brothers in Medina started to smash up mannequins in a number of market places in Medina and attack photography outlets.

In 1991 I witnessed the riot that took place in the al-Haram mosque in Mecca al-Mukarrama and the persecution of the cleric of the Hijaz, Shaikh Muhammad ‘Alawi Maliki, when the government intensified the security around him to protect him from persecution by the people. They were incited by that famous exceedingly long Fatwa issued by Shaikh ‘Abdullah Bin Mani’a, a member of the "Committee of Senior Ulema,"  in 1982, pronouncing him a Kafir (unbeliever), calling for his blood to be shed and demanding that the punishment of apostasy be imposed if he did not revoke his polytheist ideas and put the prophet in the place of the prophets, according to that Fatwa.

A collection of speeches was prepared and given by Dr Nasser al-‘Amr, Professor of Doctrine at the al-Imam Muhammad Bin Sa’ud Islamic university in 1991, cautioning against satellite dishes and what is known as ‘direct broadcasting’. This was backed up by the tract and a series of lectures and Fatwa by one of the ‘Ulama to the effect that whosoever allowed them in his house was a pimp who wanted to debauch his wife and children. Hundreds of thousands of copies of this Fatwa were printed and stuck on the doors of mosques and entrances to schools and colleges, and it was the biggest incentive for people to start using rifles to destroy those devices on the roofs of houses.

Summary:
This is an historical list of stories, events and incidents, an account that reflects how jurisprudence has become narrowed, and extremist and rejected divergence in the matters it has come across over the past fourteen centuries. This is the cultural and social cradle and climate in which every day the tendrils of the dissenters, the Takfiris and the bombers appear, settling on action rather than theorizing. And yet hopefully this will be useful to researchers and followers, even though I know that many of those accused of violence and terrorism in our region hold that corruption, political despotism, deprivation, and economic and social factors combine to create the climate in which the phenomenon of violence thrives. Even though I know that there is a perspective which points out that extremism and closed understanding vied in ancient times and the monopoly of this thinking is well established in Saudi, the country did not witness any terrorist incidents in previous ages. I would nevertheless like to point out that violence takes several forms in an escalatory path, beginning with words, and ending with violence and bloodshed and destruction of installations. I would mention once again that the subject of the paper deals with the effect of the cultural environment, and the indirect reasons for terrorism and violence, in the belief that just because the conditions and preludes are present that does not necessarily dictate the existence of violence and terrorism, and vice-versa, even when those conditions are not present, there may nonetheless be violence. Their requirements may differ, as the fundamentalists convey, for one of many reasons. The Jihadi Takfiri Salafis were firmly established on Takfiri thought that was given sustenance, assistance and foundations by Fatwa and books which previous papers have addressed to prove their effect on our cultural history and civilisation.

What is going on in Saudi today is not a struggle between secularism and Islam, or between Liberalism and Islamism, or between westernisation and fundamentalism. No, it is a struggle – if we may call it such – between tolerance of Islam and extremism, between magnanimity in jurisprudence and between introversion and ignorance and the accumulation of customs that are considered our ethics and traditions to the extent of making the implementation of the Shari’a impossible. It is a suffocating crisis and a volcano on the point of eruption, and I see no ray of hope on the horizon. 
 
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(*) Journalist specialized in Islamic Movements, Saudi-Arabia.