Western Imaginings. Rohan Davis

Wahhabi religious beliefs, is struggling to resist (Western-led) forces of change, namely liberalization/democratization. Saudi students studying abroad in Western nations are returning home with Western ideas about government and society. However, the kingdom’s steadfast adherence to Wahhabism is preventing it from embracing these changes. Displaying the kind of Orientalism Said first pointed to, Commins shares the premise with many political liberals and neoliberals that Western-inspired economic and social globalization is a natural and progressive process that Saudi Arabia should embrace. Commins in part blames the kingdom’s Wahhabi religious beliefs for resisting these changes. Representations like these help inspire and motivate Western policy- and decision-makers, should they ever decide to invade Saudi Arabia ‘for its own good’ and in the name of progress.

      Renowned British-American historian Bernard Lewis, who is well known for his associations with neoconservatives and is a former advisor to the George W. Bush administration, also constructs the Middle East as a backward and antimodern space in need of progress. Echoing the foreign policy initiatives of the recent Bush administration and adopting the role of an intellectual conceptualized by authors like Edward Shils, Lewis’s representation suggests that Western nations have the responsibility of bringing modernity to traditional societies. Lewis blames what he terms the Islamic revivalist/awakening movement, of which Wahhabism is a key part, for the Middle East’s failure to become more democratic and free. Again we see an ethnocentric intellectual creating an unflattering imagined space of the Middle East encouraging Western intervention.

Understanding Wahhabism through a Feminist Lens

      Moving away from the prominent views of influential, older white Western men for just a moment, it also worth considering some alternative representations of Wahhabism appearing in scholarly articles. Margaret Gonzalez-Perez provides an interesting representation through the lens of the Western feminist intellectual tradition.¹⁰ Understanding that her role as an intellectual is to draw attention to the injustices and wrongs perpetrated against women, she writes about the experiences of female suicide bombers, specifically those used by al-Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, all of which she categorizes as terrorist organizations. Gonzalez-Perez claims these terrorist organizations are using radical, violent, jihadist and un-Islamic interpretations of Islam to help persuade women to carry out suicide bombings. She blames Wahhabism, the writings of thirteenth-century Islamic theologian Ibn Taymiya, and key twentieth-century Islamic ideologues like Sayyid Qutb for providing these terrorist organizations with perverted interpretations of Islam.

      Gonzalez-Perez’s representation is interesting because she assumes that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and al-Qaeda are terrorist organizations of the same kind. Gonzalez-Perez’s categorization of Hamas as a terrorist organization in particular is very interesting. While Dore Gold and many other pro-Israeli scholars and neoconservative intellectuals would certainly agree with this assessment, there are those who would reject this categorization and instead understand Hamas as primarily a resistance and welfare organization. For example, Khaled Hroub in Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide makes the point that Hamas has been the victim of persistent and prevailing negative misconceptions, reducing it to a mere terrorist group.¹¹ The real Hamas, argues Hroub, is a Palestinian resistance movement and an educational and social welfare organization. Only a small part of the Hamas organization, namely its military wing Izzedin al-Qassam, is dedicated to violently resisting the Israeli occupation. It is also worth reading Zaki Chehab’s description of Hamas’s social welfare intiatives in his book Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of Militants, Martyrs and Spies.¹²

      Gonzalez-Perez obviously has very different political views from supporters of the Palestinian resistance. If she did treat Hamas as part of the Palestinian resistance instead of categorizing it as a terrorist organization akin to al-Qaeda and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, then it is possible that she would not have drawn the same conclusions regarding the role played by Wahhabism in influencing these ‘terrorists.’ Rather than looking for a religious rationale, Gonzalez-Perez might otherwise be searching for political and economic reasons for Hamas’s use of female suicide bombers. The important point to be made here is that one’s political prejudices have implications for how one understands and represents Wahhabism.

      It is also significant that Gonzalez-Perez’s representation relies on an assumption that particular interpretations of Islamic texts, like those she claims belong to the Wahhabi religious doctrine, are un-Islamic and that those interpreting these texts are not real Muslims. This is a premise popular among those providing negative portraits of Wahhabism. In reaching these conclusions, Gonzalez-Perez assumes there is an objective and truthful interpretation of Islam that does not promote violence and strictly prohibits suicide bombing. She writes:

      The female suicide bombers of nominally Muslim groups like Hamas, the PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad], and Al Qaeda are no more Islamic than the Hindu Tamil women bombers of Sri Lanka or the communist female suicide bombers of the Kurdish Workers’ Party in Turkey. They are not Islamic martyrs nor any other manifestation of orthodox religious faith.¹³

      To help bolster her case, Gonzalez-Perez provides an extensive list of authors she believes provide truthful and objective interpretations of Islam. She also adds her own interpretation of Islamic texts that she categorizes as objective and truthful. Gonzalez-Perez writes:

      Within Islam, the rules of engagement and conduct of war have been established by over one thousand years of scholarly interpretation and precedent. According to the Qur’an and Islamic tradition, warfare is the domain of the state and can only be authorized by the executive of an established government [37: 124]. . . . Mainstream scholars are unequivocal, “The rules of Islam are clear. Individuals cannot declare war. A group or organization cannot declare war. War is declared by the state. War cannot be declared without a president or an army. . . . Otherwise, it is an act of terror” [22: 2].¹⁴

      Gonzalez-Perez’s representation raises many of the key issues pertinent to this book, particularly whether there can ever be an objective interpretation of religious texts and social phenomena like Wahhabism, and the key role political prejudices plays in the sense-making process. The issues regarding the objective interpretation of texts is something I want to explore more in the next section when I examine the work of scholars making sense of Saudi school textbooks.

Saudi School Textbooks and the Problem of Translation

      There is a group of Western scholars that includes Eleanor Abdella Doumato and Michaela Prokop whose representations of Wahhabism are based on their translations of Saudi Arabian school texts written in Arabic.¹⁵ They see these as having been influenced by Wahhabi religious ideology. Doumato and Prokop have studied these texts, searching for evidence of anti-Western sentiments and extremist ideas with the aim of establishing whether or not there is a relation between the kingdom’s school curriculum and modern Islamic terrorism. Saudi school texts have been the focus of much criticism. For example, in his witness testimony to the US Senate’s enquiry into terrorism financing (the same hearing in which Dore Gold testified), executive director of the Investigative Project, Steven Emerson, criticized passages he found in Saudi school texts that were distributed in the United States with “the full imprimatur of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”¹⁶ He stated:

      I refer to the curricular used in grades 4 through 11, but let me just cite a quote from the 7th grade class Book 5. The book says, “‘What is learned from the Hadith?’ and teaches, ‘The curse of Allah be upon the Jews and the Christians.’” Grades 8 through 11 continue to emphasize the notion and piousness of the jihad, and in grade 11 it warns against taking the Jews and Christians as friends or protectors of Muslims.

      I think this, unfortunately, helps develop a whole generational mind-set that leads to terrorism, noting that terrorism is really the culmination of indoctrination and recruitment. Much of that indoctrination is entirely legal, with terrorism being the violent, illegal expression ultimately and representing the culmination of the indoctrination and recruitment.¹⁷

      Those