By KAMEL DAOUDNOV
Credit
Kelly Blair
Black Daesh, white Daesh. The
former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common
heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better
dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia.
In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands
with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price:
preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of
forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy
that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the
ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.
Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism
that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate
centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born
in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with
women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and
ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery
and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and
freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.
The West’s denial regarding Saudi
Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to
notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture.
The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born
jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist
Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books,
and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.
One might counter: Isn’t Saudi
Arabia itself a possible target of Daesh? Yes, but to focus on that would be to
overlook the strength of the ties between the reigning family and the clergy
that accounts for its stability — and also, increasingly, for its
precariousness. The Saudi royals are caught in a perfect trap: Weakened by
succession laws that encourage turnover, they cling to ancestral ties between
king and preacher. The Saudi clergy produces Islamism, which both threatens the
country and gives legitimacy to the regime.
One has to live in the Muslim
world to understand the immense transformative influence of religious
television channels on society by accessing its weak links: households, women,
rural areas. Islamist culture is widespread in many countries — Algeria, Morocco,
Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania. There are thousands of Islamist
newspapers and clergies that impose a unitary vision of the world, tradition
and clothing on the public space, on the wording of the government’s laws and
on the rituals of a society they deem to be contaminated.
It is worth reading certain
Islamist newspapers to see their reactions to the attacks in Paris. The West is
cast as a land of “infidels.” The attacks were the result of the onslaught
against Islam. Muslims and Arabs have become the enemies of the secular and the
Jews. The Palestinian question is invoked along with the rape of Iraq and the
memory of colonial trauma, and packaged into a messianic discourse meant to
seduce the masses. Such talk spreads in the social spaces below, while up
above, political leaders send their condolences to France and denounce a crime
against humanity. This totally schizophrenic situation parallels the West’s
denial regarding Saudi Arabia.
All of which leaves one skeptical
of Western democracies’ thunderous declarations regarding the necessity of
fighting terrorism. Their war can only be myopic, for it targets the effect
rather than the cause. Since ISIS is first and foremost a culture, not a
militia, how do you prevent future generations from turning to jihadism when
the influence of Fatwa Valley and its clerics and its culture and its immense
editorial industry remains intact?
Is curing the disease therefore a simple matter?
Hardly. Saudi Arabia remains an ally of the West in the many chess games
playing out in the Middle East. It is preferred to Iran, that gray Daesh. And
there’s the trap. Denial creates the illusion of equilibrium. Jihadism is
denounced as the scourge of the century but no consideration is given to what
created it or supports it. This may allow saving face, but not saving lives.
Daesh has a mother: the invasion of
Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial
complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will
be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future
generations and raised on the same books.
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