by Abu Dharr (Opinion, Crescent International Vol. 45, No. 2, Jumada' al-Akhirah, 1437)
Bani Saud have caused havoc in the Muslim world. Their policies have resulted in the killings of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and displacement of millions of others. Their removal has become imperative otherwise Muslims will continue to pay a steep price.
It is shocking that there are still some Muslims in the world who think the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a promoter of Islam, when in reality it is destroying it. This campaign of destruction is carried out through its Wahhabi lessons in absurdity — the bottom line of which is that all Muslims are kafirs unless they are Wahhabis; and no Jews or Christians are Ahl al-Kitab unless they are the ruling Zionist and imperialist elites!
You have to tip your hat to the underhanded Brits who sponsored the Wahhabis for over two centuries. The Saudi subsidiary of colonialism and now imperialism is not satisfied with pronouncing kufr on Ash‘aris (the majority of Sunnis), Sufis, Shi‘is, and Ibadis; they have taken up arms to kill the “other” Muslim who of course in their Wahhabi-centric world is everyone except them!
In all the mainstream books on Islam, opposition to an unjust and oppressive (zalim) ruler is to be avoided. The “reasoning” behind this political ijtihad holds that opposition to tyrants, when the result is not guaranteed to be in favor of the rebels, will lead to fitnah (sedition), the consequences of which could be socially devastating and potentially annihilating. So we the Muslims (the majority) have a history enshrined in fiqh that does not permit us to carry arms against kings and tyrants — as long as they pray!
We have serious reservations about this type of understanding but the fact of the matter is that it has acted as a barrier for more than 13 centuries between Islamic people(s) delegitimizing and overthrowing corrupt dynasties, kingdoms, monarchs, and despots who rule and hide behind that barrier.
In today’s world there is a Saudi monarchy that claims an Islamic honorific status. It does not tire of telling people (Muslims) that it is upholding the banner of Islam and defending the history of the Muslims. But then it (Saudi Arabia) under the cover of an “Arab Spring” militarily and in some countries with boots on the ground sneaks into Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Libya to overthrow rulers or to stop any popular trend that seeks to address the wholesale and institutional injustice in these countries. What happened to that “Islamic” understanding that lived on for more than a millennium that says it is prohibited (muharram/haram) to oppose the rulers because the result would be fitnah?
This has been going on for the past five years. The number of those killed in this Saudi-centric warfare is in the hundreds of thousands. Those who have been displaced and uprooted are in the tens of millions. And we still have happy-go-lucky Muslims who believe that Saudi Arabia is an Islamic bastion!
Then we go to another mentality that says that the only way the Muslims will get their act together is if both Islamic Iran and (imperialist) Arabia get their act together. They go on to say that this proxy warfare between Islamic Iran and (Zionist) Arabia only serves the interests of Israel. We agree that the slaughterhouse policies in the Muslim East work to Israel’s advantage. But what we don’t agree with is that Saudi Arabia is against Israel. How can that be? Israel occupies two Saudi Arabian islands — and the Saudi rulers have never, not even once, spoken out about liberating their own occupied lands. These islands occupied by Israel in 1967 are Tiran and Sanafir; they are strategically located in the Strait of Tiran at the mouth of the Gulf of ‘Aqabah. These islands technically and legally belong to Saudi Arabia and they have been under Israeli occupation since the war of June 1967 when they were captured from Egypt, which had temporarily stationed its forces there.
What was called the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty negotiations about the status of Tiran and Sanafir were particularly delicate because of the Saudi claim, officially supported by the United States, to the islands. The treaty stipulated that Israel will withdraw from the islands in April 1982, after which they will be part of an area supervised by the United Nations or other international forces. And up until this day the Saudi royals, who are too busy spending their time discharging their carnal urges in cabarets and casinos, don’t want to be reminded or bothered by a couple of islands so that they do not interfere with their sensual strategic priorities. Saudi Arabia is in the Israeli camp. How long will it take the Muslims of the world to discover this fact?
For the past few generations the talk of the town was about an Arab-Israeli conflict. In that conflict, Saudi Arabia was for all practical purposes a spectator. Now the talk of the town is about a Sunni-Shi‘i conflict and for all practical purposes Saudi Arabia is at its best: spewing takfiri propaganda, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to purchase weapons of war (a bonanza for the military industrial banking complex, the profits thereof channeled into the Zionist treasury) and slaughtering innocent men, women, and children in a radius of a thousand miles around Makkah.
The Saudi diplomats and politicians displaying a lack of maturity and a surplus of ignorance threw their own fiqh to the wind and are the ones who are lighting the fuse of multiple fitnahs all over the place.
As the fires of sectarianism rage in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen the Saudi arsonists are beginning to feel the heat. They — an excellent combination of cry-babies and uncle Toms — are begging their masters behind the scenes. They want master colonialism (Britain) and master imperialism (America) to come to their rescue. You can see them sweating, imploring, and virtually praying for relief from London and Washington. Where is their definition of tawhid? And of course these cold-blooded Anglo-American politicians have a ready answer: everything has its price. And so the terrified Saudi officials are draining their coffers, depleting their reserves, and bankrupting their economy to retain their masters’ services. Realizing that London and Washington are going for the economic “kill,” the Saudi reactionaries are shopping for survival in Tel Aviv. The Saudis’ last resort seems to be the number one enemy of all the Muslims and oppressed peoples in the world: Zionist Israel.
Of course, there are ways out of all this Saudi cooked up mess. The first one is for the Muslims of the world to come to their senses, open their eyes, use their brains and pass judgment on the corrupt Saudi clan: that the regime in Arabia is illegitimate, its functionaries are outlaws, and it has to go. If this becomes the consensus of the Muslims from all corners of the world, the Saudi dynasty will have to be prepared for its funeral services.
Another way out of this Saudi fabricated sedition of sectarianism is for the Saudis to publicly and courageously embrace their twin in occupied Palestine. This will, once and for all, concentrate the minds and munition of an awakening Ummah on both the obvious and the obscure enemies. And once that is done, we can begin to argue whether they are entitled to a janazah prayer.
And finally, Islamic Iran is the only power that can militarily degrade the Saudi regime back to its desolate origins in Najd and Dir‘iyah. But that would risk a wider sectarian war. The thimble amount of knowledge among the Muslims of today would immediately interpret such a development as a “Sunni-Shi‘i” war. And so it becomes understandable for Islamic Iran to withhold its firepower — even though a Saudi regime six feet under will serve all the Muslims provided that independent, anti-Zionist, and anti-imperialist Muslims assume future responsibilities of an Arabia without Saudi. We respect the restraint the Islamic Republic of Iran has shown in the Saudi-generated disasters in and around Jazirah al-‘Arab.
So the responsibility of purifying Arabia from its rusty rulers and lusty leaders falls upon non-Shi‘i and non-Iranian Muslims. In that stretch of (Sunni) Islam the public mind and the public square has to undergo political maturation to see through all the political devices of deceit and religious stratagems of fiqhi trickery that the masters of Saudi Arabia have been using against a united Muslim front in the making.
Here is the problem in a nutshell: Islamic Iran can finish off the Najdi Bedouins but will not (because it will have fallen into a sectarian trap). The other Muslims will not finish off the Najdi nomads (because their ignorance defines the Saudis as some bona fide Sunnis). Between these two positions we have a politico-military playground where imperialists and Zionists are having a heyday.
Of course, Allah does not change the state of affairs of a people until they change their inner selves (13:11).