Chapter 145. Petro-Islam and Global Jihad: Wahhabi Export, Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State

The same year that brought a Shi’a jurist to power in Tehran (Chapter 144) also set in motion the Sunni forces that, over two decades, produced al-Qaeda and, after another decade, the Islamic State’s caliphate of 2014. This chapter follows that chain through the library’s sources. It runs from the eighteenth-century pact between a preacher and a desert dynasty, through oil money and Cold War strategy, to the Afghan jihad and its global offspring. The main sources are Christopher Davidson’s Shadow Wars, Kim Ghattas’s Black Wave, Osama bin Laden’s statements as edited by Bruce Lawrence, and the RAND study Beyond al-Qaeda. Glenn Beck’s thesis that “it is about Islam”, the claim that Wahhabism was a British invention, and Mehran Keshe’s warning of a planned Saudi-Iranian war are set beside them, each attributed.

The Saudi-Wahhabi Compact

The reference shelf gives the foundation: in 1744 the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the local ruler Muhammad ibn Saud of Diriyah made a pact uniting religious reform with political power. It produced the first Saudi state, which the Ottomans destroyed in 1818, a second state in the nineteenth century, and the present third kingdom [Wikipedia: History of Wahhabism]. Jane’s Sentinel dates the modern state to 1902, when “King Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, known as Ibn Saud… captured Riyadh, the dynasty’s ancestral capital, from the rival Al-Rashid”, and lists the “discovery of oil deposits” in 1930 as the next milestone. Ghattas instead dates “the discovery of oil” to 1938 [Ghattas, Black Wave, #72495, Part I]. It notes the kingdom’s role as custodian of Islam’s holy places and its balancing between rhetorical support for the Palestinians and its alliance with the West: Riyadh “pledge[d] funds to aid the Palestinian people” while avoiding an oil confrontation [Jane’s Sentinel Country Risk Assessment: Saudi Arabia, #367631].

On terms, Thomas Horn, citing the historian Tim Furnish, notes that “‘Wahhabi’ is apparently considered an insult by Salafists”. He describes Wahhabism as “the subset of Salafism founded by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792)”, which “was allied to the House of Saud in the late eighteenth century and still is today” and “rejected modern influences on Islam” [Horn, I Predict!, #74299, ch. 1].

Cold War Alignment: Oil, Fatwas and the CIA

Davidson’s thesis, set out in chapters titled “Searching for an Islamic state – Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood”, “The CIA’s Baby” and “Britain’s caliphate”, is that Western states knowingly cultivated Islamist forces as a counterweight to Arab nationalism and communism. He writes that, succeeding his father in 1953, “Saud bin Abdul-Aziz al-Saud was quick to assure the US that things would be business as usual and conveniently requested the Wahhabi religious establishment to issue a fatwa or religious ruling that forbade Muslims from accepting aid from the Soviet Union”. He adds that Aramco, “still mostly staffed by US nationals”, funded “a ‘print shop and broadcasting station in Riyadh for the propagation of religious tracts'”. Of the next king he writes: “with his mother a direct descendant of Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab, Faisal was a man after the CIA’s heart”. Faisal founded the Islamic University of Medina in 1961, “before even setting up the kingdom’s first television station”, as a counterweight to Nasser’s al-Azhar [Davidson, Shadow Wars, #66972]. Taylor, quoting Stephen Dorril, adds that MI6 planned to use the Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser [Taylor, Brexit: European Union, American Empire, #62532].

Ghattas measures how far the export grew after 1979. Saudi funding for the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) was “$250,000 a year” in 1962. “By 1980, the spigot had opened: funding jumped to $13 million. By 1999, WAMY would have spent $22 billion on ‘services to Islam'” [Ghattas, Black Wave, #72495, Part I].

A counter-narrative reverses Davidson’s chronology. PART 1 – The Truth About Pizzagate, citing a YouTube channel as its “source”, states: “The British spy met with Abdul Wahab and planned to create a brand of FAKE ISLAM that would later be known as WAHHABISM… designed to undermine traditional Islam so the British could have a foothold on the Arab world” [Unknown author, PART 1 – The Truth About Pizzagate, #78829, part 12.1]. The text names no source beyond the YouTube channel. The same story is told in the Memoirs of Mr. Hempher, The British Spy to the Middle East, which, according to the reference shelf, first appeared in Turkish in 1888 in Ayyub Sabri Pasha’s Mir’at al-Haramayn. Bernard Haykel called it “an anti-Wahhabi forgery, ‘probably fabricated by one Ayyub Sabri Pasha'”, while it “still enjoys some currency” in the Middle East; Ayatollah Montazeri in 1987 denounced the Wahhabis as “a bunch of British agents from Najd” [Wikipedia: Memoirs of Mr. Hempher, The British Spy to the Middle East].

1979: Mecca, Islamabad, Peshawar

For Ghattas, 1979 is the hinge. The armed occupation of the Grand Mosque by Juhayman al-Otaybi and his followers ended “just before dawn on Tuesday, December 4, 1979, exactly two weeks after Juhayman and his men had hijacked the Holy Mosque”. “270 people had died, according to their official numbers. The Saudi government admitted to 127 troops killed and 450 injured, with 117 rebels dead, in addition to 26 pilgrims”. Western estimates were higher. The monarchy’s response, in Ghattas’s account, was to give the ulema more power at home and abroad. “A month after the Soviet invasion, the Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal, who had just overseen the operation to take down Juhayman in Mecca, traveled to Peshawar”, where the Saudis saw both a threat and “an opportunity” [Ghattas, #72495, Part I].

Pakistan moved in parallel. “On February 10, Zia had made a forty-eight-minute speech and announced he was imposing Nizam-i-Islam on Pakistan, effective immediately”. The next day, “the same day that Khomeini declared his victory in Iran”, bars and breweries were shut. Zia “promised he would set up a state-run zakat fund”, although zakat is “a charitable contribution of 2.5 percent of one’s yearly income, mandated by God but rarely imposed by governments” [Ghattas, #72495, Part II].

Financing the Afghan Jihad

Davidson writes that “under its new intelligence chief, Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, Saudi Arabia had agreed to match all US funding for Afghanistan, dollar for dollar”, with the grand mufti Abdul-Aziz bin Baz involved in mobilisation. He cites David Kaplan’s five-month US News investigation (2003), whose “unequivocal conclusion was that the primary sources of funds for the 1980s jihadists were Saudi Arabia’s ‘quasi-official charities’, including many of the same US-approved but poorly scrutinized institutions that had been set up in the 1960s”. He adds that US and British intelligence engaged in “propaganda and other psychological operations in Afghanistan”, and that bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam sent “road shows” around the Gulf to raise money for the Maktab al-Khidamat [Davidson, #66972, “Mobilizing jihad”].

Bin Laden in His Own Words

Lawrence’s edition introduces Statement 3, “Declaration of Jihad”, dated 23 August 1996, as “the longest of bin Laden’s early statements… subsequently dubbed the ‘Ladenese Epistle’. It comes in the form of a juridical edict authorizing defensive war (jihad) against the Americans for their continued presence in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”. Its full title is “A Declaration of Jihad against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries” [Lawrence (ed.), Messages to the World, #73066, Statement 3]. The preceding statements cite Qur’an 9:38-39, and later ones list grievances over Palestine (the “Land of the Prophet’s Night Journey”), Iraq, Chechnya and Afghanistan [#73066]. Davidson cites the journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, who visited bin Laden in 1996, to the effect that “the Saudi funders also requested that bin Laden issue a statement declaring that the king of Saudi Arabia was a ‘true Muslim'”. Davidson reads this as evidence that “powerful Saudis were still keen to keep al-Qaeda onside” [Davidson, #66972]. The US counterinsurgency manual draws a similar lesson about narrative: “In the Al Qaeda narrative, for example, Osama bin Laden depicts himself” within a story of Islamic history, and “commanders must consider the presence of religious extremism in the insurgents’ ideology” [US Army/USMC, Counterinsurgency Field Manual FM 3-24, #37026, ch. 1 and “Religious and Cultural Dimensions of Insurgency”].

From the Global Jihadist Movement to the Caliphate

The RAND study defines its subject as “al-Qaeda and the universe of jihadist groups that are associated with or inspired by al-Qaeda”, distinct from “traditional or local jihads” against local adversaries. Its acronyms include the GIA (Armed Islamic Group, Algeria), the GSPC (Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat), the EIJ (Egyptian Islamic Jihad) and the GICM (Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group). Its conclusion: “No one tool is likely to be decisive against al-Qaeda. An effective strategy… will necessarily employ a complex mixture of military, intelligence, financial, political, legal… and even social instruments” [Rabasa et al., Beyond al-Qaeda, #368002, Summary].

Glenn Beck’s It Is About Islam traces the line to the Islamic State. “Though American air strikes killed Zarqawi in 2006, al-Qaeda in Iraq… took Naji’s advice to heart”. Abu Bakr Naji’s Management of Savagery had advised creating as much “savagery” as possible so that the Sykes-Picot borders would dissolve. The jihadists “declared open season on Iraq’s Shia, whom they call rafidun… ‘rejecters'”. Beck notes that in 1924 “Kemal Atatürk… abolished the Caliphate. Suddenly, for the first time since the seventh century, there was nobody left to claim the title of caliph”. He presents Baghdadi’s sermon at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, which he dates to “June 28, 2014, the first day of Ramadan”, as its restoration. “The establishment of the Caliphate is another sign to Islamists of the impending end of days”, Beck writes, and Dabiq “will be the site of the most consequential battle in the history of mankind” [Beck, It Is About Islam, #63847, ch. 4 and “The Caliphate and the End Times”]. Horn explains that “Islamic eschatology (from the Hadith) points to the town of Dabiq, Syria, as a fester-pot of the Muslim Malahim (apocalypse; Armageddon)”, and describes ISIS videos of a tank advancing on the Colosseum: “This is your last crusade” [Horn, #74299, ch. 1]. The group named its magazine Dabiq after the prophecy [Wikipedia: Dabiq (magazine)].

Davidson offers the competing reading in “Enter the Islamic State – A Phantom Menace”. His sections run from “Al-Qaeda’s limits” through “Iraq – the incubation chamber” and “The caliphate restored” to “The resurrection of Saddam Hussein”. He argues that occupation policy and regional sponsors incubated the movement, rather than doctrine alone [Davidson, #66972]. J. M. Berger’s Extremism, citing Charles Lister’s The Syrian Jihad, frames ISIS as an offshoot of al-Qaeda that split from it, and analyses how extremist movements build “exclusive identities” with “rigid boundaries between in-groups and out-groups” [Berger, Extremism, #75678, ch. 3]. Rhet Ops finds that ISIS keywords are “filled with religiously tinged terms for IS’s enemies” [Rhet Ops, #67631, Part II].

The Internal Muslim Argument over Jihad

Muslim voices contest the jihadist reading. In Frederick Forsyth’s novel Afganul, the scholar-character says (in Romanian translation) that “jihadul există, dar el are reguli” (“jihad exists, but it has rules”): it is either a personal struggle to become a better Muslim, “lacking any aggression”, or armed defence of Islam, and terrorists “prefer to erase all the rules from the text” [Forsyth, Afganul, #22821, ch. 2]. Unbrainwashing Yourself argues that military jihad “must be declared by a certain authority figure, studied extensively, and judged to be absolutely necessary to protecting the religion”, and that “a jihad is not meant to be a war waged on other religions” [Unbrainwashing Yourself, #62457, “Islam: A Religion of Jihad?”]. The reference shelf distinguishes classical jihad doctrine from modern “jihadism” [Wikipedia: Jihadism].

Keshe’s Warning

In KSW 198 (16 November 2017) Keshe announced that the “War between Iran and Saudi Arabia has been planned for 100 years” and that supporters “need to prevent [it] with their souls”. He said: “There is a huge conflict setup between Iran as a Shia country and its allies, and the Sunni countries, Saudi Arabia and their allies”, and appealed to “the leaders of the Iranian government… and the Saudi leadership and the rest of the Islamic world”, saying that “the line of descendants of Mohammad doesn’t change” what unites them [Keshe, KSW 198, #377841]. This is his warning and his appeal for Islamic unity. In structure it matches Ghattas’s description of a forty-year rivalry, though Keshe attributes the conflict to deliberate planning.

Key points

• The 1744 pact between Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the House of Saud, renewed by Ibn Saud’s capture of Riyadh in 1902, joined Wahhabi doctrine to Saudi power. Salafists regard “Wahhabi” as an insult (Horn, citing Furnish).
• Davidson argues that Washington and London cultivated Wahhabism and the Brotherhood: an anti-Soviet fatwa (1953), Aramco’s religious print shop, and Faisal as “a man after the CIA’s heart”.
• The Pizzagate text claims Wahhabism was a British invention, citing a YouTube channel [#78829]. The same story appears in the Hempher memoir (1888), which Haykel, as reported on the reference shelf, calls an Ottoman anti-Wahhabi forgery [Wikipedia].
• Ghattas makes 1979 the hinge: the Mecca siege (270 dead officially), Zia’s Nizam-i-Islam and Turki al-Faisal’s trip to Peshawar. WAMY’s funding rose from $250,000 (1962) to $13 million (1980).
• Saudi Arabia matched US Afghan funding “dollar for dollar”, and Saudi “quasi-official charities” were the main funders of the 1980s jihadists (Davidson, citing Kaplan).
• Bin Laden’s 1996 “Ladenese Epistle” was a juridical edict for defensive jihad against US forces in Saudi Arabia. RAND concludes that “no one tool is likely to be decisive”.
• Beck reads ISIS as doctrinal and apocalyptic (Naji, rafida, Dabiq, the 2014 caliphate). Davidson reads it as a product of state sponsorship. Other voices insist that jihad “has rules”. Keshe warned of a planned “100-year” Saudi-Iranian war.