Kirkpatrick Shines a Light on House of Saud

Regularly on this page I have praised the reporting of David Kirkpatrick, the Gray Lady's Cairo bureau chief who covered the Tahrir Square revolution in 2011 as well as the military-led counterrevolution in 2013 and everything that went on in between. He is a rare journalist in the mainstream press in that he does not not first adhere to whatever the company line is at the time and then sculpt his writing to suit that purpose; rather, he propounds a thesis and then sets to proving it. The thesis Kirkpatrick chooses to articulate seems to be of his own making and not yoked to the State Department talking points in circulation.

Of course there is always the possibility that Kirkpatrick is an intelligence agency asset -- just a very good one -- an example of how the CIA, though much maligned, is one step ahead of the competition. I prefer to think of him as a very shrewd operator, a reporter who knows the ropes and who can press right up to the censor's red line. He is -- and this for a salaried worker of the Gray Lady is incredible -- reliable.

Kirkpatrick's offering in today's paper, "ISIS’ Harsh Brand of Islam Is Rooted in Austere Saudi Creed," is a must read. The House of Saud is finally getting some of the mainstream attention that it deserves:

For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement of Sunni Islam. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group’s territory have shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van. 

Kirkpatrick goes on to outline the divergence between Al Qaeda and Islamic State, which is grounded in Saudi Wahhabism; ISIS is the more faithful scion of al-Saud:

This approach is at odds with the more mainstream Islamist and jihadist thinking that forms the genealogy of Al Qaeda, and it has led to a fundamentally different view of violence. Al Qaeda grew out of a radical tradition that viewed Muslim states and societies as having fallen into sinful unbelief, and embraced violence as a tool to redeem them. But the Wahhabi tradition embraced the killing of those deemed unbelievers as essential to purifying the community of the faithful. 

“Violence is part of their ideology,” Professor Haykel said. “For Al Qaeda, violence is a means to an ends; for ISIS, it is an end in itself.” 

The distinction is playing out in a battle of fatwas. All of the most influential jihadist theorists are criticizing the Islamic State as deviant, calling its self-proclaimed caliphate null and void and, increasingly, slamming its leaders as bloodthirsty heretics for beheading journalists and aid workers. 

The upstart polemicists of the Islamic State, however, counter that its critics and even the leaders of Al Qaeda are all bad Muslims who have gone soft on the West. Even the officials and fighters of the Palestinian militant group Hamas are deemed to be “unbelievers” who might deserve punishment with beheading for agreeing to a cease-fire with Israel, one Islamic State ideologue recently declared.

“The duty of a Muslim is to carry out all of God’s orders and rulings immediately on the spot, not softly and gradually,” the scholar, Al Turki Ben-Ali, 30, said in an online forum.

***

The Islamic State’s founder, Mr. Baghdadi, grafted two elements onto his Wahhabi foundations borrowed from the broader, 20th-century Islamist movements that began with the Muslim Brotherhood and ultimately produced Al Qaeda. Where Wahhabi scholars preach obedience to earthly rulers, Mr. Baghdadi adopted the call to political action against foreign domination of the Arab world that has animated the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and other 20th-century Islamist movements. 

Mr. Baghdadi also borrowed the idea of a restored caliphate. Where Wahhabism first flourished alongside the Ottoman Caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded shortly after that caliphate’s dissolution, in 1924 — an event seen across the world as a marker of Western ascent and Eastern decline. The movement’s founders took up the call for a revived caliphate as a goal of its broader anti-Western project. 

These days, though, even Brotherhood members appear almost embarrassed by the term’s anachronism, emphasizing that they use caliphate as a kind of spiritual idea irrelevant to the modern world of nation-states. 

“Even for Al Qaeda, the caliphate was something that was going to happen in the far distant future, before the end times,” said William McCants, a researcher on militant Islam at the Brookings Institution. The Islamic State “really moved up the timetable,” he said — to June 2014, in fact. 

Adhering to Wahhabi literalism, the Islamic State disdains other Islamists who reason by analogy to adapt to changing context — including the Muslim Brotherhood; its controversial midcentury thinker Sayed Qutb; and the contemporary militants his writing later inspired, like Ayman al-Zawahri of Al Qaeda. Islamic State ideologues often deem anyone, even an Islamist, who supports an elected or secular government to be an unbeliever and subject to beheading. 

“This is ‘you join us, or you are against us and we finish you,’ ” said Prof. Emad Shahin, who teaches Islam and politics at Georgetown University. “It is not Al Qaeda, but far to its right.”

The story concludes by Kirkpatrick bringing it back to Saudi Arabia and the dilatory response of the clerics there in criticizing ISIS:

Some experts note that Saudi clerics lagged long after other Muslim scholars in formally denouncing the Islamic State, and at one point even the king publicly urged them to speak out more clearly. “There is a certain mutedness in the Saudi religious establishment, which indicates it is not a slam dunk to condemn ISIS,” Professor Haykel said. 

Finally, on Aug. 19, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, the Saudi grand mufti, declared that “the ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way, but are the first enemy of Islam, and Muslims are their first victims, as seen in the crimes of the so-called Islamic State and Al Qaeda.”

To paraphrase a writer Thomas Friedman quoted in his column yesterday, "How can we expect the Saudi royal family to condemn ISIS when they believe the exact same thing?"

The shortcoming of Kirkpatrick's piece is that it fails to mention the longstanding relationship between Wahhabism, the Muslim Brothers, Al Qaeda and the United States. But the fact that more stories are appearing in the press tracking Islamic State back to its sponsors within the House of Saud I take to be a positive development.