[Nettime-bold] Re: Islamic world trapped in historical impasse

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>]

We are probably going to see failure of both Pakistan and Saudi 
Arabia in the next chapter of this development. This will go down 
like the Eastern Europe went down once, state by state. Saudi 
Arabia and Pakistan had the most potential to go down like former 
Yugoslavia - violently.
ivo

Date sent:      	Sat, 29 Sep 2001 12:32:17 -0400
Send reply to:  	International Justice Watch Discussion List
             	<JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
From:           	Daniel Tomasevich <danilo@MARTNET.COM>
Subject:        	Islamic world trapped in historical impasse
To:             	JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU

Saudia Arabia is the spiritual home of Wahabism that is driving
bin Laden and his followers. Hopefully there will be more
focus on Riyadh than Kabul.


   We in the West have based our political strategy in the Islamic world
   on an alliance with Saudi Arabia (not to mention hitching our
   economies to its vast oil reserves). But there is a timebomb ticking
   away. Bin Laden aims to topple the Saudi regime and turn Arabia into
   the base for his assault on the West. Even if we kill bin Laden, the
   struggle to transform Saudi into a cockpit for Wahabite extremism will
   continue.


Daniel
(article not for cross posting)
-------------------------------------------------------------

   The Scotsman         September 28, 2001, Friday

        ISLAMIC WORLD TRAPPED IN HISTORICAL IMPASSE

   BY: George Kerevan

   FORGET Afghanistan.     The key to Islam is Saudi Arabia. Forget the
   debate over the rights and wrongs of America's support for the state
   of Israel. The hatred towards the United States felt by the young
   Islamic intellectuals who look to Osama bin Laden for leadership is as
   much to do with its backing of the current Saudi regime as it has to
   do with the occupation of the West Bank. And our ultimate ability to
   reconcile the Islamic world with Western-style modernisation, on which
   might depend the peace and prosperity of the entire globe over the
   next century, lies in Riyadh not Kabul.

   Let us begin by trying to understand the central impetus behind the
   friction between the Islamic world and the West that led to the
   atrocities in America on 11 September. Palestine is a totem of this
   friction, not its cause. The fiercely proud Islamic community -
   roughly a third of humanity - is trapped in a historical impasse. For
   it is the West and Western values that have triumphed globally: our
   economic model, our science, our individualism, our notion of women's
   rights and our sexually-charged consumer culture. Leave aside for a
   moment quite how this has happened, but the Islamic - and particularly
   the Arab - world is an economic failure. The average per capita yearly
   income of the Islamic nations is now barely GBP 2,000 - a tenth of the
   rich West. In 1950, Egypt and South Korea were peasant economies on a
   level pegging. Today, capitalist Korea, without Egypt's cheap
   electricity, is five times as rich.

   This reality is what hurts Islam's young intellectuals who fly planes
   into the icons of international capitalism. Worse, the Arab countries
   tried for a generation between the Fifties and the Eighties to
   modernise (aka create Western industrial economies) and failed. The
   head of this movement was the charismatic Gamel Nasser in Egypt.

   Nasser believed in socialist central planning which only resulted, as
   it did in Eastern Europe, in bureaucracy, waste and corruption.
   But Nasser had one blindingly important insight. He knew you had to
   bridge adopting Western modernisation (albeit skewed by Dr Marx) with
   some ideological balm to soothe the realisation that the Islamic world
   was thereby admitting its economic and cultural dead-end. Nasser
   sought to overcome this psychological barrier by advocating a militant
   Arab nationalism premised on the eventual political unification of the
   Arab world.

   Nasser's mythological Arab unity dissolved in conflict between the
   various military cliques who seized power across Islam in an attempt
   to build the chimera of Arab socialism (and waste their oil revenues
   in the process). In the Western democracies, we did not grasp what
   would happen with the eclipse of Nasserism. Sadly, Islam's young
   intellectuals easily flipped from Parisian Marxism to religious
   fundamentalism - not such a chasm to leap. Admitting you have "failed"
   twice in a row is hard on personal identity, especially in a martial
   society. It's the kind of mental crisis that can resolve itself too
   easily in martyrdom.

   So across Islam, the bright young university men - not Dr Marx's
   proletariat - have sought a psychological retreat from what they
   perceive as Western cultural victory by adopting a purist, modern
   version of Islam called (but not by them) Waha-bism.

   Enter Saudi Arabia, the spiritual home of Wahabism. This cult was
   created by Mohammad Ibn Wahab at the end of the 18th century. Wahab
   led an extreme fundamentalist revival of Islam based on its own texts
   - for example, Wahabis think that the Iranian Shi'ites, who revere
   different Islamic historic writers, are a heretical sect founded by
   Jews to destroy Islam. Wahabism, unlike mainstream Islam, also
   relegates women to an inferior role. Osama bin Laden is a devoted
   Wahabite, as are the Taleban.

   Ibn Wahab joined forces with the Arabian Arabs against the Turkish
   Ottoman Empire. In the 19th century, one of these, Ibn Saud, adopted
   Wahabite doctrines as his official creed. During the First World War,
   Britain aided the Saudi family to eject the Turks and take control of
   the Arabian peninsula. Then came oil riches.

   For today's passionate young Wahabites, their creed represents a
   revivalist purity and reaffirmation of their great heritage. But it is
   also a "successful" model: for it was the pure Wahabite faith that
   drove out the Turks and won independence without recourse to Western
   ideas (if you forget Lawrence of Arabia).

   But the new Wahabites have an enemy beyond the West - the current
   Saudi regime itself. Extremists such as bin Laden and his ilk see
   their spiritual home as now corrupt and pro-Western.

   We in the West have based our political strategy in the Islamic world
   on an alliance with Saudi Arabia (not to mention hitching our
   economies to its vast oil reserves). But there is a timebomb ticking
   away. Bin Laden aims to topple the Saudi regime and turn Arabia into
   the base for his assault on the West. Even if we kill bin Laden, the
   struggle to transform Saudi into a cockpit for Wahabite extremism will
   continue.

   The reality of the Saudi economy is that without oil revenues it is an
   utter basket-case waiting to melt down, precipitating the overthrow of
   the existing royal family and its replacement with a fundamentalist
   regime. For the past 20 years, Saudi economic growth on average has
   been a pathetic 0.2 per cent per annum. The national income per head,
   once as large as that of the United Sates, has dropped remorselessly
   to today's third-world $ 7,000.

   Many of the 15 million Saudis have not noticed this catastrophic
   economic failure because the government keeps them in uneconomic jobs
   subsidised by massive foreign borrowing. The country has turned from
   being a net creditor in the Eighties to being a net debtor on a large
   scale, possibly running into several hundred billion dollars.

   The cash empties down two drains. Firstly, a vast network of
   inefficient state-owned industries, from petrochemicals to services,
   that makes the old Soviet Union look entrepreneurial. The other
   subsidy black hole is the all -powerful monarchy itself. This is
   centred on the remaining 24 sons of the kingdom's founder, Ibn Saud,
   who died in 1953. Most are in their sixties and seventies, leaving the
   dynasty ageing dangerously. As much as 40 per cent of government
   revenues go to the family.

   But Saudi Arabia has one of the fastest-growing populations in the
   world. Some 110,000 Saudis come into the workforce each year and only
   40,000 find jobs. Unemployment stands at 14 per cent, and 20 per cent
   among young Saudi men. Mix unemployed youth, official corruption and
   Wahabite extremism and you have all the makings of the situation that
   overthrew the Shah of Iran. In May, gangs of Saudi youths rioted at
   the new Feisaliyya shopping complex in Riyadh.

   Here is our problem. We in the West have no policy for creating
   free-market democracy in the Islamic countries - which essentially
   means destroying Wahabism. Worse, the linchpin of our anti-terrorism
   coalition is an ultra -conservative but wobbly Saudi Arabia, the
   official home of Wahabism.

   A week after the attack on New York, Saudi's ailing King Fahd flew to
   Switzerland for medical treatment. He's still there. Back home, there
   is talk of friction between Crown Prince Abdullah (aged 77) and
   defence minister Prince Sultan (aged 76). Keep your eyes on Riyadh.

     _________________________________________________________________


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