Author: Dave Montgomery, Knight
Ridder Newspapers
Publication: www.azcentral.com
Date: December 5, 2003
URL: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1205SaudiExtremism05-ON.html
At the al Hayer prison outside Riyadh,
young inmates suspected of terrorist leanings undergo a unique form of
rehabilitation: Islamic scholars lecture them on tolerant Islam, trying
to purge their minds and souls of violent extremism.
The deprogramming is part of a Saudi
government campaign to dismantle the religious hatred that has made the
kingdom a breeding ground for terrorism - and spawned two deadly suicide
bombings over the past six months.
Saudi officials say they have "re-educated"
thousands of Muslim clerics, shorn intolerant dogma from school textbooks
and posted undercover agents in mosques known for vengeful diatribes against
Americans and Jews. Two extremist clerics arrested for pro-terrorist statements
repented on government television.
There are many, however, who are
skeptical of the campaign's likely success, at least in the short term.
They say the root cause of Saudi Arabian terrorism lies in the well-entrenched
Islamic fundamentalism that Saudi leaders have allowed to flourish since
the 1970s. In short, they say, the government is swimming against the tide,
one it helped create.
"Three decades of religious teaching,
religious preaching, in the mosques, in the schools, it's not easy to fight
in just a year or two," said Turki al Hammad, a U.S-educated novelist who
lives in the Persian Gulf city of Dammam. "This problem is still in the
heads, in the minds."
Khalid al Ghanammi, a former extremist
scholar who underwent a philosophical reversal to become a liberal speaker
and writer, said his e- mail and late-night phone messages offer abundant
evidence that extremism still thrives in Saudi Arabia.
Ghanammi once lectured young followers
on Islamic fundamentalism and embraced the anti-Western tenets of Osama
bin Laden's al-Qaida. He began to change after watching TV news reports
of the 224 people killed in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa
in 1998. Two years later, he began denouncing extremist teachings.
Now, he said, former followers call
him nightly to assail his writings and make thinly veiled threats. One
man sent him a poem that said he was destined for hell. Three men called
him last week to express support for a Tunisian man who killed his wife
because she was a singer, a violation of a fundamentalist Islamic ban on
music.
Though most Saudis were repulsed
by the terrorist attacks within the kingdom, Ghanammi said he believes
that many of his countrymen share the radical, anti-Western views espoused
by al-Qaida. "A lot of people sympathize with them and the percentage is
high," said the father of five. "To say the percentage is low is not telling
the truth."
The birthplace of the prophet Muhammad
and the home of Islam's two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia
is one of the world's most rigid Islamic societies, adhering to a religious
code enforced by Islamic police known as muttawah. It is also the cradle
of Wahhabism, a puritanical strain of Islam that was born with the creation
of the first Saudi state in the mid-1700s.
Fundamentalists began consolidating
power about two decades ago when the Saudi ruling family, considered less
conservative than the general population, sought to placate them to pre-empt
the threat of an Islamic revolution, such as the one in Iran in 1979. They
became increasingly vocal after the 1991 Persian Gulf War when the presence
of thousands of U.S. service personnel, including women, drew intense opposition
for ostensibly corrupting Islamic values.
Over the past decade, particularly
after the U.S.-led war in Iraq this year, mosques have become forums for
angry anti-U.S. rhetoric and strident attacks on Israel. The same themes
often infiltrate Islamic schools, with at least tacit acceptance by the
government.
Saudis were jarred into taking a
harder look at the potential dangers after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks and the revelation that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. But
the crackdown didn't begin unfolding until coordinated bombings on three
residential compounds in Riyadh on May 12 killed 35 people, including nine
Americans.
Riyadh was rocked by another attack
on Nov. 8, this one aimed at a predominantly Muslim compound where 18 people,
including five children, were killed.
Saudi leaders blame both attacks
on al-Qaida.
"A lot of people were astonished
- it cannot happen in this country," Abdulrahman al Matrodi, deputy minister
of Islamic affairs, said in an interview last week. "Sometimes you do cry
when you see someone is killing himself, and at the same time he has killed
kids, ladies, elderly people, ordinary people. ... And you know yourself
this is totally against Islam."
Al Matrodi, whose ministry is overseeing
the campaign against extremism, traces the spread of terrorism to thousands
of Saudi men who went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight against Soviet
occupation and returned with "filthy minds" and a blind adherence to al-Qaida-style
doctrine.
The challenge now confronting the
government, he said, is how to expel "the disease and illness in their
mind" and convince potential terrorists that they are violating the peaceful
teachings of Islam.
"You fear whether it's going to
continue or not, when it's going to stop, how it's going to stop," he said.
Between 3,000 to 4,000 of the estimated
70,000 clerics in Saudi Arabia have been re-educated and warned against
sermons that stray beyond Islamic values, al Matrodi said. Those who use
the mosque to make a "political stand" are dismissed, he said.
One watershed moment came days after
the November bombing when one of Saudi Arabia's most influential radical
clerics, Sheik Ali al Khudair, appeared on government television to withdraw
religious proclamations supporting terrorism. Al Khudair was jailed after
expressing support for the terrorist cell that carried out the May bombing.
Another jailed cleric, Sheik Nasser
al Fahd, appeared in a subsequent interview to make a similar retraction.
Both men insisted their statements were voluntary, though their supporters,
in a flurry of statements on the Internet, maintained the clerics were
pressured by the government and probably tortured.
Investigators are also using clerics
to assist in interrogations of hundreds of terrorist suspects arrested
as part of an assault on al-Qaida cells throughout the kingdom. Judges
and scholars are also brought into the al Hayer prison to lecture terrorist
suspects in their late teens and early 20s, say Saudi officials, confirming
a report in the Saudi Gazette.
Saudi officials also contend they
are responding to international demands to cleanse textbooks of hate-filled
religious messages that serve to create future generations of extremists,
though critics insist that much more remains to be done. Earlier this year,
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., demanded that Saudis reform their education
curriculum after citing textbooks containing references to "the filth of
Zionism" and describing Jews as the "people of treachery."
While the campaign has unquestionably
had a tangible impact - most notably quieting once-fiery sermons from the
mosques every Friday - members of Saudi Arabia's liberal intelligentsia
say political extremism is still widespread and may never disappear.
Hussein Shobokshi, a Jeddah businessman
and former TV show host, recalled the outpouring of extremist anger when
he wrote an article describing a fanciful dream in which his daughter picked
him up at the airport - a no-no in a land where women aren't allowed to
drive. He lost his job on the show and couldn't get future articles published.
Shobokshi contends that a thin line
separates the terrorists from the fundamentalists. "The problem is differentiating
between the extremists who carry a gun," he said, "and extremists who spread
the word."
