One of the things that gets drilled into the minds of college students in the US—and I’ll assume everywhere—is ‘define your terms’. That seems a useful thing to do when it comes to talking about ‘the Saudis’.
Who are ‘the Saudis’ that we talk about, complain about, point fingers at, lambaste, or praise? Let’s see…
First, of course, is the entire population that considers itself ‘Saudi’. That includes those holding Saudi citizenship, whether present in the country or residing abroad.
Second, there’s the Saudi government. While the government actually contains non-Saudis in certain positions, it can be fairly claimed that the Saudi government is, in some circumstances, ‘the Saudis’.
Then there are the Al-Saud. Certainly, some of them identify themselves with the country-as-a-whole, wittingly or not, correctly or not. On some issues, such as royal succession, this might be an appropriate identification; on most issues, there are differences.
So, when we’re talking about ‘the Saudis’, it’s useful to have a clear idea in mind about just which entity is being discussed. Mixing and matching can lead to the wrong conclusions, I think.
Take the examples of ‘the Saudis support terrorism’ or ‘the Saudis fund terrorism’.
To my knowledge, which includes private and public discussions with a wide array of elements of the US government, the Saudi government does not support terrorism. (Yes, defining the word ‘terrorism’ would be useful. I’ll refer back to my post of Feb. 17, 2005 on The Riyadh Declaration for the purposes of this piece.) If a case could have been made that it did support terrorism, that case would have been made.There were hundreds of US (and other) analysts looking exactly into this question and they came up dry. The only allegations that survived were muttered outside of official reports and based on suspicion and a sort of logic that relied solely on thinking along the lines of ‘well, that’s what they could have done.’ Books such those from Robert Bear and Gerald Posner, which include many untrue ‘facts’, are based on this line of thought.
This does not mean that there are not individuals working for the Saudi government who support terrorism. My experience at the Ministry of Education, back in 2003, in which a secretary to the Minister passed on my and my associates’ business cards to a jihadi website prove that. But as the proverb has it, ‘One swallow does not a summer make.’
Similarly, there is a strong likelihood that some members of the Al-Saud may support terrorism, both ideologically and financially. Again, the existence of one or a few does not serve to correctly categorize the whole.
By definition, if any Saudi individual supports terrorism, then there is some degree of ‘Saudi support’ for terrorism.
That definition, though, is far too broad to be of any use. It’s like saying that since Tiger Woods had a lot of ‘girlfriends’, all Americans have lots of girlfriends. Some do, assuredly, but it would be pointless to try and argue that ‘Americans’ have lots of girlfriends. TV and films may make it seem so, but not really. Trying to use limited samples to exemplify the whole simply is not useful and is likely to lead to wrong conclusions. The same pointlessness results when other stereotypes are used, whether they’re about ‘rich Saudis’ or ‘brusque Frenchmen’ or ‘hot-headed Latins’ or any number of other overly broad characterizations. There is a stereotype that holds Saudis as supporters of terrorism, but it’s a false stereotype.
Relatedly, some equate Salafism or Wahhabism with terrorism. On the whole, they are not equivalents. I believe that it, in its discouraging of independent thought and its rigidity in interpreting the Quran, can provide a ground, dangerously, upon which terrorist tendencies can grow. That is not a good thing, but it is a different thing than terrorism itself. Wahhabism has certainly been used by terrorists to support their actions just as jihad or Islam itself has been used. Use by some does not equate with correctness, however.
The point of all this is to suggest that when we talk about ‘the Saudis’, we keep clear in our minds just which group we mean. Keeping it clear in writing can be tedious, but is, sometimes, necessary.
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January:06:2010 - 12:11
John,
I can see that you can become a very good professor of logic!
But in order to seriously analyse terrorism I think even you know very well that this post takes us nowhere.
When it is said Saudis support terrorism, I think it is understood – or at least I would understand it this way and I think it is not very difficult to understand – that one is not referring to Saudi government. If one was referring to the Saudi government, one would say so, especially if one doesn’t live in Saudi Arabia and hence, doesn’t fear the consequences of saying so.
I think it goes without saying that one means some Saudi individuals, not all Saudis, nor the Saudi government.
In the same way, when one talks about orthodox and rigid Saudi schools producing terrorists, one means that this ideology has a strong potential for turning people who learn this ideology into terrorists. It is not as if these schools tell their students to go and become terrorists, but the ideology they learn is sufficiently intolerant and full of hatred to induce them to become terrorists. Again, the meaning of this argument is quite clear. I don’t see any confusion in this.
What is important is to understand that there are gradations in Islamic orthodox schools – Deoband in India is orthodox but doesn’t produce terrorists, Saudi schools do so on a regular basis.
It is India’s misfortune that it doesn’t have enough “strategic” signficance for the world so it can’t blackmail the world into turning a blind eye towards it and Saudi Arabia happens to have that “strategic” significance to be able to blackmail the world, so that Saudi schools don’t get highlighted and Deoband gets highlighted instead.
I am the person who has been making these arguments on this blog and I honestly thought there was no confusion in the meaning of these statements as their meaning was quite clear. In fact I never imagined these questions could come up.
January:06:2010 - 12:47
Daisy makes some good points, better than getting into a debate about semantics. Yes, it’s good to define your terms. When I hear people say “the Saudis support terrorism” I tend to turn them off unless it’s clear by context that they mean in the way Daisy points out.
And that leads me to Daisy’s second point: the Saudi educational system has until only very recently become a serious enabler to the cause.
What I disagree with is equating this to stereotyping Hispanics.
There a reason why Saudi made it onto a public safety list: it was Saudis who invented the idea of using commercial jet liners as missiles. “The Saudis” have played a unique role in this mess and are only now recognizing the Frankenstein they played a key role in creating.
They way I see it, and I try to view this as objectively as possible: Saudi Arabia made a bed it has to sleep in. It’s gonna take more than a few years of King Abdullah uttering platitudes about reform to undo the damage to Saudi Arabia’s reputation.
January:06:2010 - 12:57
Again, I have to disagree. In the minds of many Westerners, in and out of government, there is a very real conflation of ‘Saudi’ with ‘Saudi government’. Allegation are flung about like confetti and the targets are diffuse. This serves certain political interests. Whenever a Saudi name comes up on a terrorism-related charge, you’ll find articles and TV appearances, within hours, ‘showing’ that X is related to Y who is married to Prince Z, thus demonstrating that the Al-Saud and the Saudi government are complicit in the act.
I tend to group these ‘sources’ in the Saudi-bashing category. There simply are a number of Western and American pundits who want to put the entire issue of terrorism on the backs of the Saudis. They make good money doing it, whether through book deals or speakers’ fees and have no reason to paint with other than broad brushes. Among those I number Stephen Schwartz, Gerald Posner, Robert Baer, and others.
If you grant that most Saudis follow some form of Wahhabism–a safe bet, particularly if you’re looking at Nejdis–then it’s not at all a logical conclusion to conclude that Wahhism produces terrorists: Most Saudis simply are not terrorists. It does, however, reward a certain kind of non-thinking, a willingness to not see grades of grey, but only black and white. Most Saudis do not allow this to color their views; many Saudis (and other fundamentalist Muslims) do. That is why there’s the split in the Deoband traditions. Those in India prefer to avoid violence; those in Pakistan and Afghanistan seem not to have trouble using terrorism as a tool of their interpretation of Islam.
Saudi schools certainly have been and continue to be in the spotlight, whether in Saudi Arabia or in the US. Various groups, from human rights organizations, religious freedom organizations, the US Congress, State Dept., Justice Department have all complained about Saudi schools and what they teach. Use the search box on this blog to look for ‘curriculum’ or ‘textbook’ to find just some of the many official complaints.
It’s not just foreigners complaining about the content of textbooks or lectures, though. Many Saudis are dissatisfied with the kind and content of the school system. They are unhappy that so much of the curriculum is focused on religion, at the expense of more substantive and directly useful information. Those complaints are found in the Saudi media as well as in private conversations with Saudis. The government has acknowledged the flaws and is acting (though not as quickly as many might like) to fix the problems.
Curriculum reform, methodology reform, textbook reform are all underway. The more difficult problem of monitoring what actually goes on in the classroom is being addressed, with teachers being fired for deviating from the curriculum in extremist ways. There’s a lot more to be done on this front.
January:06:2010 - 13:03
John, good idea to clarify.
Anonymous
The way I see it, many countries ’round the world made a bed…and EVERYONE is having to sleep in it.
That said- I also agree with you that Saudi has a lot more work to do. But it isn’t Saudi’s that are on the list- it is people TRAVELING from Saudi, whatever their nationality.
Daisy,
Saudi schools get mentioned all the time as problematic. And I DO think it important to clarify ones terms. It took several posts for you to clarify you think Saudi royals in the gov’t support terrorism. Still waiting for evidence on that BTW
January:06:2010 - 13:04
‘Well, that’s what they could have done.’
I think there is a great deal more Saudi Arabia’s rulers could do, both in public statements and in the pocketbook. But they haven’t done so; there are lines they simply won’t cross, especially when it comes to preserving “dignity”; the Saudis may not actively support terror groups, but usually blame the victim for inspiring the attack in the first place.
Contrast this Saudi approach with Konrad Adenauer’s 1951 acknowledgment that crimes had been committed “in the name of the German people” and thus Germans owed reparations to the Nazi regime’s victims. That got Germans off the hook (Adenauer did not call Germans ruled by the Nazis criminals) yet paved the way for the development of the modern, liberal, Germany of today.
January:06:2010 - 13:25
John,
I’m sorry I think I created a confusion – I was talking about Saudi Islamic religious institutions – although your point about Saudi school texts is valid too.
Again we fall in the same trap – I didn’t say all Saudis are terrorists, but rather that Saudi religious institutions are producing terrorists on a regular basis. Again please don’t take my statement to mean that all products of Saudi religious institutions are terrorists – but quite a few terrorists come from there.
Yes, from the kind of responses I got I realised that people in the West confuse these terms much more readily than Indians do. In most cases, I cannot imagine Indians confusing these statements. Perhaps multilingualism is good for comprehension ability. I apologise in advance to those who might feel offended.
It has never been my intention to place the entire blame on Saudi Arabia. I have just been arguing that Saudi Arabia’s share in the blame should also be acknowledged along with that of others, which I feel is not being done because of “strategic” reasons. And that is highly unfair. I would say pople who don’t want to criticise Saudi Arabia are not willing to see the greay tones.
My interpretation about “Deoband” in Pakistan-Afghanistan region is that their Islamic institutions may have grown out of Indian Deoband in history, but now they are only styling themselves Deoband only for the sake of legitimacy; what they are teaching is the Saudi style intolerant Islam, which has great potential to produce terrorists. Of course this hasn’t been researched so far but I feel this view needs to be analysed. I know that in South Asia, using an influential religious nomenclature only for the sake of legitimacy while the sect preaches something very different is quite common – in all religions.
January:06:2010 - 13:36
I agree. There is much more that Saudi Arabia (the government) could do. For reasons it sees as important, however, it has not. I don’t understand many of those reasons, those stemming from tribal relations, marriages, psycho-sociological values, and historical reasons, and probably wouldn’t agree with the conclusions. But I’m not the Saudi government.
I think the Saudi government needs to look into the country’s history–specifically, the Battle of Sabilla–for guidance. There, a fundamentalist group (the Ikhwan) who were interfering in the governance of the state, were violently suppressed. That’s much that current attitude toward Al-Qaeda, but more could be done in terms of those who facilitate extremism through their speech.
January:06:2010 - 13:55
I generally agree. But the split within the Deobandi isn’t just a latter-day event. It’s happened before and the most recent fission is a repetition, I think, of what happened with Abu Aala Maududi. There are strains of Deobandi beliefs and practices that are not at all harmonious with tolerance and acceptance of ‘otherness’, even within Islam, even within Indian Islam.
January:06:2010 - 13:56
Couple the comparative lack of Saudi initiative to improve matters with the realization that Saudi rulers possess all the means to covertly support terrorists without leaving a trace via their non-transparent control of governmental, NGO, financial, media, religious, and diplomatic resources, and one is left to wonder what the Sauds are really up to.
January:06:2010 - 13:59
What would the motivation be for Saudi rulers to support terrorists? Please. This keeps being suggested on this and other threads and no one provides motivation or evidence of any kind.
January:06:2010 - 14:04
The usual allegation is that the Saudi government (or princes, if you prefer) thought that if they supported terrorism abroad (i.e., not in Saudi Arabia) they could buy immunity for themselves. In a vague way, there might be some truth to that–proving that you’re a good Muslim by fighting the atheist Communists, for example. Beyond that, it doesn’t really hold water.
The other thread is that the Saudis are running a deep and secret plot to establish a new global Caliphate, with themselves at the head.
January:06:2010 - 14:26
Thank you John, for providing the “motivation”. It’s been hard to figure out- and if that’s what people were refering to, it would have taken me a very long time to get there.
January:06:2010 - 14:49
There is also the matter private support for organizations. Nobody can say with a straight face that terrorists are getting the money for PETN by selling girl scout cookies. And as somebody pointed out, Saudi Arabia’s incredibly opaque system makes it very easy to hide this financial support, be it from people in the gov’t or private citizens.
It’s kinda like that show “The Wire” where everyone is fine with the cops going after the drug dealers but people with power get uncomfortable when the cops start tracking the money.
I think if there was a complete auditing, we would discover a lot of rather inconvenient truths about where the terrorists are getting their money.
And until Saudis get over this arrogant “there’s only one kind of Islam, our Islam” nonsense — and they have A LONG way to go in this regard — the culture will always participate in takfiri causes and there will be people in that culture willing to give money to those they think are fighting for “the real Islam.” And the rest of the world will have to fight these Frankensteins.
And just to “define my term” :
I am referring to any Saudis who donates money carelessly (or purposefully without knowing precisely where the money goes), any Saudi who participates in the takfiri cause of condemning “innovations”, any Saudi who actively supports in any way terrorists acts or any Saudi who actively or tacitly supports jihadi causes because he or she believes there is only one form of Islam and the entire world should live under Shariah.
If you aren’t in those categories I’m not talking about you.
January:06:2010 - 15:11
JOHN IS RIGHT!
..and i’m going to stay on topic.
it’s a mental shortcut to load ‘saudi’ with as many negatives as possible. on the other hand, it takes effort to individualize. it takes even more effort, to isolate certain ideas regardless of who holds them.
January:06:2010 - 16:12
Thank YOU, John. Well said.
Regards,
Carol
January:06:2010 - 16:44
John–Excellent–and timely! LOL
I agree that defining terms is important, especially where some want slippage from of meanings to always be correct, or avoid being pinned down, even if the subtended meaning is clear.
Defining terms has nothing to do with playing semantics and everything to do with good communication. If one cares about a topic it would seem logical to take care to communicate clearly.
Daisy–thanks for reminding me of the term indo-centric, and now because of double checking the meaning of that, I’ve discovered hindu-centrism as well.
January:06:2010 - 17:15
@ 11 paragraph one and to the rest of everyone
Poem: Saudi Decision Makers
I say to Saudi rulers and decision makers of the past…not present… you are nothing but passive aggressive supporters; a sleeper cell of Al-Q
Why? Control and personal interest…
How could the Saudi decision makers have not seen?
How could that not see what was going on around them everyday constantly?
How could they not care about the future of their children’s children by the squandering of what was entrusted upon them?
No one allowed to question and no one allowed to call to accountability.
Book those responsible for the flood or become flooded with the anger at a Minaret at a far off sea?
How could they not see what was becoming a beast?
They saw and they fed this mighty beast with a smiling face and a sense of pride like there was nothing to hide.
The US knew it and kept quiet for what reasons I know not and it needed not be.
How could they not see that the mosques and schools and the very environment was a contaminated breeze?
The contaminated breeze affected people differently.
Not everyone was subjected to this contaminated breeze; thus why it is so hard or distasteful for some to believe
Those who had the money to spend on private schools and private pools to take a dip got a cooling from the fire of hell; so lucky and how sane they are and how sane they remain
But what about those who beliefs only burn like embers under their poor and disallusioned feet? Are they expected to take a slap in the face and turn the other cheek. These people are burning with their desires and upset for having believed liars.
Ah but wait they say some of these folks are wealthy; why would they then go flee in some cave or hide up in a tree?
Perhaps seeing their poor fellow man so beaten down and cheated they felt the need to take arms and take on the one power that enabled the mighty beast.
Some were sent overseas to set off messages and acts of hate that the rulers never believed would one day come back in their FACE as in a nightmare that never completes but keeps on replaying till awakened from its sleep.
But the manipulated of the past still believed still believe.
Nothing can wake them up from their own sleep.
A glimmer of hope…a glimmer of peace…a shadow of resentement does not shed relief.
A house, car a fancy beach nothing can undo what happened in the past and nothing is coming not even a “I am really sorry” or “We made a mistake” just take are rake and leave the leaves in their place.
Repairs and acknowledgement can only begin the repair, if not then we all have nothing left but to sow on own despair.
The rulers did not see that the plain people are unable to see and that they refuse to take this new belief and now instead are focusing on their own relief. Forgiveness does not come easily.
January:06:2010 - 17:20
Disclaimer on the above poem: I have written poems that people didn’t believe I wrote and don’t necessarily reflect my own personal beliefs but my ability to interject myself into another person’s perspective. E.g.. I can write about my life as I am experiencing it as a butterfly although I am not one.
January:07:2010 - 04:34
John,
Yes, that’s a perfectly plausible explanation of Deoband. Granted.
Thanks also for explaining the motivations behind royal support to terrorism.
January:07:2010 - 05:45
Sparky,
Welcome back. You are very creative! Your poem says a lot!