THE CULTURE: ROOTING OUT TEACHINGS OF INTOLERANCE
Cracking heads and crunching data aren't the only ways to combat terrorism; there's also the matter of changing minds. Most Saudis greatly resent the implication that Wahhabism, the puritanical brand of Islam practiced in the kingdom, has any connection to terrorism. Still, some are beginning to acknowledge that Saudi culture has bred an antipathy toward non-Muslims ("infidels" in Muslim parlance) that can lead to violence. After the May 12 attacks, the newspaper al-Watan made just that link in a series of articles and cartoons. That proved to be too much for the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars. After it complained to Prince Abdullah, al-Watan's editor, Jamal Khashoggi, was fired. That, however, has not silenced Turki al-Hamad, a Saudi columnist for the London-based paper Asharq al-Awsat. "The official clergy in Saudi Arabia denounce violence, but the theoretical base of Wahhabism is a problem," says al-Hamad. "It is not enhancing or encouraging violence directly, but if you analyze the creed itself, you will reach these results." Al-Hamad goes so far as to argue that Saudis should "renounce" Wahhabism. His views have made him the subject of a number of fatwas issued by Saudi clerics calling for his death.
Whether Prince Abdullah accepts that there is a cultural problem or just thinks he needs to improve his P.R. with the West, he has begun to address his country's reputation for chauvinism. TV's Channel 1, which like all Saudi media is state controlled, has begun to air a program called War on Terrorism. It has featured footage of the Sept. 11 and May 12 attacks as well as old speeches by Saudi leaders urging respect for foreign countries. In an effort to cool the rhetoric in Saudi mosques, authorities say they have arrested nine militant clerics. If any preacher now advocates violence, Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told TIME, "they are removed immediately."
Saudi spokesmen say they have fired 2,000 so far (all mosque positions are government appointed), although they have declined to produce a list. But Abdul Rahman al-Matroudi, Vice Minister of Islamic Affairs, insists that they were not dismissed for their teachings but for "turning up late, not turning up at all, this kind of thing." al-Matroudi allows that as many as 3,000 imams are being retrained in mosque study circles after they were deemed insufficiently prepared to promote the new emphasis on tolerance.
Since the campaign began, worshippers in Riyadh and Jidda have reported hearing sermons promoting tolerance, denouncing terrorism and warning against radical interpretations of the doctrine of jihad. On a recent Friday, the sermon was mundane at Jidda's Juffali Mosque, which is next to Chop-Chop Square, so called for the work of the executioners who practice there. On the agenda were the importance of good deeds, kind words and the rejection of pagan customs.
Saudis are wondering how long the imams will stay in line. "When they speak about tolerance, the words don't come out easily," says a senior provincial official. "What we are hearing is only a facade. You can smell the disgust they feel in mouthing their new rhetoric." Sometimes it expresses itself plainly. Says Jordan: "We have noticed lately in influential mosques the imam has condemned terrorism and preached in favor of tolerance, then closed the sermon with 'O God, please destroy the Jews, the infidels and all who support them.'"
Like the mosques, Saudi schools have been the subject of scrutiny. Saudi textbooks have been laced with passages that not only extol the supremacy of Islam but also denigrate nonbelievers. An eighth-grade book states that Allah cursed Jews and Christians and turned some of them into apes and pigs. Ninth-graders learn that Judgment Day will not come "until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them." A chapter for a 10th-grade class warns Muslims against befriending non-Muslims, saying, "It is compulsory for the Muslims to be loyal to each other and to consider the infidels their enemy."
With these excerpts suddenly being quoted in the U.S. media after 9/11, the Saudis launched a review of their curriculum. The program 60 Minutes quoted Foreign Minister Saud that he was relieved to find that only 10% of the material was "questionable" and 5% "abhorrent"—a result that might not have comforted a top diplomat of many other nations. The Saudis vowed to excise the objectionable portions, and Prince Saud insisted to Time that "the books have been changed for the new school year." The U.S. embassy has asked for a rundown of changes but to no avail, according to Jordan. "We continue to have some concerns about the curriculum," he says.
What kinds of changes are the Saudis making? Education Minister Mohammed al-Rasheed told TIME that the government had scratched the entire fifth chapter of a 10th-grade text that described how Muslims and non-believers were historical enemies. An excerpt detailing "ways to show hatred to the infidel" charges that "it is forbidden to show happiness during the holidays of the infidels." The minister noted that three Koranic messages encouraging tolerance would be included in Saudi texts. One of them says, "Allah forbids you not, with regard to those who fight you not for your faith nor to drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly and justly with them. For Allah loveth those who are just."
Al-Rasheed insists the old curriculum had "nothing to do with people being violent." Still, the modern, globalized world, he says, requires greater acceptance of other cultures. In a speech this week opening the new school year, he plans to tell students, "There is no future for us unless we are tolerant people, cooperating with others and seeking knowledge wherever it is."
THE MONEY: STILL SPREADING A RADICAL MESSAGE
How saudis educate their citizens is one issue; what they teach other Muslims around the world is another. Apart from channeling money to foundations that have assisted terrorist groups, Saudis have for years supported institutions abroad that propagate Wahhabism. Mohammed al-Khilewi, a Saudi diplomat who defected to the U.S. in the mid-1990s out of opposition to his country's policies, told Time in a statement provided by his lawyer, Michael Wildes, "The Saudi government spends billions of dollars to establish cultural centers in the U.S. and all over the world. They use these centers to recruit individuals and to establish extreme organizations."
Many of the madrasahs, or Islamic schools, in Pakistan that produced Taliban extremists and affiliated Pakistani radicals are Saudi funded. So are some of the more strident Islamic schools in Indonesia called pesantren, after a strain of Islam close to Wahhabi thinking. Abu Nida, a cleric in Piyungan, Indonesia, says Saudi funding—he won't say from which group—enabled him to start his Bin Baaz Islamic Center. "The first prerequisite is that you have to be a Salafi pesantren to receive the money," he says.
Bosnia is a relatively new target for the Wahhabis. The Saudis have spent some $400 million there since 1993, initially to help Bosnian Muslims fight the Serbs and then to rebuild the country and to missionize. The thrust of their message is that Bosnia's comparatively secular Muslims have strayed from the true path. A book distributed by Active Islamic Youth, a group in Bosnia founded with Saudi aid, is called Beliefs That We Have to Correct. In a high-profile case last December, a Bosnian Muslim who claimed to be a member of Active Islamic Youth (the group denied it) murdered a Christian Croat father and his two daughters on Christmas Eve in what locals say was a hate crime. Saudi teachings, complains Mohammed Besic, a former Bosnian Interior Minister, "are poisoning our youth." More recently the Saudis have focused on nearby Kosovo. Half of the $1 million the Saudi Joint Relief Committee spent in the two months after the 1999 war there went to sponsor 388 religious "propagators" intent on converting Kosovars to Wahhabism.
Diplomats in East Africa say Saudis' influence in the region is minimal but growing, especially in Tanzania, where fundamentalists have taken over 30 of the 487 mosques in the capital and have begun bombing bars and beating women who go out without being fully covered. According to a Western intelligence report, the Saudis are spending about $1 million a year in Tanzania to build new mosques and buy influence with the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi Party. "We get our funds from Yemen and Saudi Arabia," says Mohammed Madi, a fundamentalist activist. "Officially the money is used to buy medicine, but in reality the money is given to us to support our work and buy guns."
The wahhabi outreach goes beyond the Muslim world. In March 2002 Ain al-Yaqeen, an official Saudi magazine, wrote that the royal family wholly or partly funded some 210 Islamic centers, 1,500 mosques, 202 colleges and 2,000 schools in countries without Muslim majorities. Cambodia is one such place. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Cambodia's Muslims, who make up 5% of the population, turned to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to help rebuild their mosques and schools. Accompanying the aid were teachers from those countries, with the result that today 10% to 15% of Cambodian Muslims are Wahhabis. Many go to Saudi Arabia to study. "They come back and are filled with fire and want to change the way we do things," says Soi Ponyamin, a commune chief in the village of Svay Khleang.
Saudi proselytizers are also interested in Muslims in the U.S. and other Western countries. Says Antoine Sfeir, the Lebanese-born editor of the Parisian quarterly Notebooks of the East: "Their message to Muslims in Europe and America is so extreme and intolerant: 'Do not accept their ways, and do not consider yourself as one of them. You only exist as a Muslim, respecting Muslim values alone.'" Abdulaziz Sachedina, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia who spent much of his career in Canada, says that most Sunni community centers in Canada receive Saudi funding. Carl Sharif El-Tobgui, a Ph.D. student at McGill University's Institute for Islamic Studies, which specializes in the worldwide spread of Islamic culture, estimates that 10% to 20% of Canada's 580,000 Muslims adhere to Wahhabism.
Saudi gifts to build or improve mosques and community centers in the U.S. generally come with strings attached, says a U.S. official. "It's conditioned on the preaching of Wahhabism." According to Washington-based Khalid Duran, president of the Ibn Khaldun Society, a Muslim cultural association, virtually every Muslim child in the U.S. receiving religious instruction in Arabic is using Saudi textbooks. "Students are being indoctrinated into this feeling that a Muslim is automatically a better human being," he says. A seventh-grade Saudi text in use in the U.S. and obtained by Rita Katz, executive director of an institute called the Search for International Terrorist Entities, explains a Koranic verse thusly: "We have to be careful of the infidels, and we can ask Allah to destroy them in our prayers."
Al-Matroudi, of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, is vehement that the government never attaches ideological strings to its overseas aid and does not promote Wahhabism abroad. "No, no, no," he says. "(We have) nothing to do with that at all. Our understanding is for our own country. These people who are asking for help, we never ask them to practice Islam according to our understanding." Foreign Minister Saud says it's possible there are individual Saudis who have contributed money to Wahhabi schools abroad. "But if there are," he says, "we want the information. The man will go to prison. These are the new regulations" He adds, "The next time somebody comes and asks us to finance anything in their country, we will obviously refuse."
THE OUTLOOK: HOW FAST CAN THE SAUDIS CHANGE?
Does Prince Saud mean it, or was the statement made in pique? Credibility, these days, is a central issue between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Republican Senator Richard Shelby, former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, says he sees the Saudis taking positive steps since May 12 but notes, "If history is a judge, I don't know how long the intensity of their effort will last."
For many in the U.S., including in the halls of government, patience with the Saudis is running thin. "More and more people are saying, 'It's time to sit on the Saudis; it's time to hit them hard,'" says a State Department official. Frank Gaffney, a conservative foreign-policy analyst, has some ideas on how to do that: "You put them on notice that this kind of behavior is completely unacceptable. You can break off diplomatic relations, you can impose economic sanctions, and you have, ultimately, the option of seizing the oil fields militarily if you have to."
That's easy to advocate when you're not in office. The hard-liners in the Bush Administration, most of them neoconservatives, would like to put greater pressure on the Saudis to reform, but they don't go so far as to propose regime change. The fall of the House of Saud is too scary to contemplate, because any alternative regime would probably be more regressive. It's one measure of the essential conservatism of the Saudi people that their country, despite the lack of freedom, produces very few political refugees. By Saudi standards, the Saud regime is liberal. "If you want to marginalize the Saudis, cut them off and turn your back on them, you are simply inviting another Taliban type of regime," says Ambassador Jordan.
For that reason, it seems unlikely that the Bush Administration will adopt a tougher policy toward Riyadh. While the neocons have won most of the internal debates so far in this Administration, this time they are fighting without their powerful godfather, Vice President Dick Cheney, on board. Cheney's pragmatism on Saudi Arabia is informed by his experience as an official in the Nixon Administration in 1973, when the Saudis protested U.S. support for Israel by embargoing oil sales to the U.S. for five months, causing the worst gasoline shortages in U.S. history. From Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and, significantly, his father, President Bush is hearing a singular line from his most important foreign policy advisers: that he must engage with the Saudis, work with them to bring about change and not alienate them. Indeed, when President Bush spoke to Abdullah for 20 minutes by phone last week, say U.S. and Saudi sources, he went out of his way to compliment the Prince on Saudi Arabia's efforts to combat terrorism.
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