Re: Blaming Other Nations for Ons Own Problems
“Unfortunately, we are still in denial,” journalist Jamal Khashoggi said. Writing in Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat in June, he said: “It is time we asked ‘what went wrong’ and let’s search within ourselves.”
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But Turki al-Hamad, a well-known Saudi liberal, argues that the clerics are ill-suited to the task. Writing in the London-based al-Arab newspaper recently, he said: “How can [our scholars] respond [to] Isis . . . and all the other parasites which have sprung up on the margin of Islam, when its germs grew among us and within our homes and it was us who nurtured its thought and rhetoric until it grew?”
Mr Qassim and others point to a tendency within the Saudi establishment to blame the rise of Isis on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group founded in Egypt, whose form of gradualist Islamist politics based on elections poses a direct challenge to the Saudi system. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates supported the overthrow of the Brotherhood in Egypt last year, and Riyadh banned the organisation earlier this year.
Abdullah bin Bijad al-Otaibi, a columnist with theSaudi-owned pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat, argued recently that Isis owes more to the Brotherhood than to Wahhabi teaching, which is rooted in Salafist tradition, or the following of early Islamic practice.
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Mr Otaibi argues that violent groups in Egypt that predated al-Qaeda, such as al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, were “a pure Brotherhood product”. He says they were inspired by the writings of Sayyed Qutub, a radical Brotherhood theoretician who taught that modern Islamic societies lived in a state of pre-Islamic ignorance of religion. Mr Qutub’s call for jihad to overthrow secular governments has informed both extremist and more mainstream Islamist ideology.
But Isis’s ultra-violence against religious minorities is also viewed by political analysts and critics as an amplification of Wahhabi hatred for the Shia branch of Islam.
Anti-Shia discrimination remains widespread in Saudi Arabia, despite the king’s efforts over the past decade to foster more tolerant interpretations of Islam and to appoint some local Shia to the country’s advisory council.