Hans Rustad Interessant anmeldelse av en host av bøker om Saudi-Arabia i siste New York Review of Books. Anmelderen Max Rodenbeck dekker Midtøsten for the Economist. Han vet øyensynlig mye, og ironiserer over enkelte av forfatterne som skriver bok om et land de aldri har besøkt. Punkterer en del myter om landet: som at det skal ha 800 milliarder dollar investert i USA (way too much), og om de tette båndene mellom Saudi-Arabia og Carlyle Group. Innledingen er god:
Late in the year 1818, the people of Constantinople witnessed the execution of a bandit chief who had been captured in the arid badlands of Arabia. Tried and convicted by the Ottoman Empire’s highest sharia court for heresy as well as brigandage, the rebel was dragged to the gate of the sultan’s palace. The decapitation itself was swift, but his severed head was then placed in a giant mortar and ceremoniously pounded into pulp; his body spiked on a tall pole and displayed, a sunken dagger pinning the sentence of irtidad—excommunication—to his bloodied chest for all to see.
The unfortunate Arab chieftain happens to have been an Al Saud,[1] a direct forebear of the present-day rulers of Saudi Arabia, the place that is perhaps most readily associated with the practice of beheading in the modern world (at least, until terrorist snatch teams elsewhere began recording their sordid parody of divine justice on grainy video). In fact, the condemned man was Abdallah ibn Saud ibn Abdul Aziz ibn Muhammad ibn Saud, the reigning Saudi emir of the time and a great-grandson of the founder of the first Saudi state
Kriktere av dagens Irak-krig er opptatt av å trekke frem britenes bitre erfaringer i landet, fra 1920 og ut over, avlest i tallrike gravsteiner over falne britiske soldater. (fremhevet av Robert Fisk bl.a.). I jihad-parlance er USA crusaders, men hvorfor er det ingen som snakker om arabernes egne crusades i nyere tid. Hvem kjenner saudiernes sacking av Kerbala?
But the early Saudis pushed things too far. In 1801 they sacked the Shia holy city of Karbala in Iraq, destroying its gold-domed shrines, slaughtering thousands of its inhabitants, and carrying off wives, daughters, and possessions. Such booty was theirs by assumed right, since the Wahhabists’ ultra-Sunnism taught that the Shia could not claim to be fellow Muslims. Their veneration of tombs was held to be a form of idolatry, a sin punishable by death. So when, in 1806, the Saudis overran the Ottoman garrisons of Mecca and Medina, cities holy to Sunnis and Shias alike, they again smashed every tomb they could find, forcibly applied their strict rules, and whipped, robbed, or murdered pilgrims who disobeyed.
Her er vi inne på den puritanske siden av whahabismen. Var det noen som snakket om manikeisk om Bush? Her tolereres ikke en gang gravmæler. Ikke musikk. Man kan bare tenke seg hvor mye den ikonoklastiske siden av islamsk kultur har medøført av rasering av kulturminner oppover i tiden. Denne atemporale volden er med oss idag. Dagens islamister ser ikke med lengsel tilbake på gullalderen innen islam, slik bløthjertede liberalere kanskje tror. De går tilbake til årene rundet profeten og like etter hans død. Det som kom etterpå er urenheter, slagg, tilføyelser og bevegelse bort fra den rette vei. Dennne renhetstanken er noe av essensen i Saudi-Arabia, det eneste land som har Koranen som grunnlov. Det er skremmende å høre hva ungene lærer i skolen.
Almost half of Saudi state television’s airtime is devoted to religious issues, as is about half the material taught in state schools.[9] Nine out of ten titles published in the kingdom are on religious subjects, and most of the doctorates its universities awards are in Islamic studies. Yet even without such Wahhabist saturation, Saudis would be keenly aware that their heritage imposes distinct responsibilities. This is, after all, the birthplace of Muhammad and of the Arabic language, the locus of Muslim holy cities, the root of tribal Arab trees, and also, historically, a last redoubt against foreign incursions into Arab and Muslim lands. The kingdom is in many ways a unique experiment. It is the only modern Muslim state to have been created by jihad,[10] the only one to claim the Koran as its constitution, and one of just four Muslim countries to have escaped European imperialism. Of the others, Iran is Shia, Turkey opted by itself for secularism, and Afghanistan is a wreck.
Where present-day fanaticism creeps in is when this uniqueness is felt to be under threat; when it is sensed that the Saudi dream of an Islamic utopia is fading. What unites the kingdom’s conservatives—and they come in many stripes, from suicidal jihadists who seek to recreate a global Islamic caliphate, to pacifist puritans, to the loyalist Wahhabi scholars who pack the judiciary and the education system —is a determination to sustain this dream. And despite the unpleasantly coercive nature of Islamic practice in the kingdom (few among the world’s other 1.2 billion Muslims think that forbidding women from driving is anything but absurd), a surprising number of ordinary Saudis, including women, endure the annoyance because they happen to share the dream.
Rodenbeck sier noe er på gang, men eksemplene han nevner på reform, tyder snarere på at det er et skritt frem og to tilbake:
Changing books is just a start. One Riyadh schoolteacher describes being disciplined by his principal after an eight-year-old student fingered him for telling his class that music is not necessarily sinful. By contrast, a teacher in the same school received a commendation for ordering his students to amend newly distributed government textbooks, altering a passage that described a young girl and boy as being «friends» so as to make both characters male. Even in a children’s schoolbook, apparently, «mixing» among the sexes re2_kommentars taboo.
Uten å ha kontakt med de religiøse bildene og forestillingene i vår egen religion, tror jeg det er vanskelig å forstå hva Saudi-Arabia handler om. Som en prins sa i en dokumentar på Arte: islam er nesten del av vårt DNA, det gjennomsyrer alt vi gjør.
Saudi-Arabia er unik innen islam. Det er landet med de to helligdommene, og måten det ble til på i nyere tid, minner om grunnleggelsen:
Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, father of the current king, conquered the territory between 1902 and 1926, largely by the use of fanatical Wahhabist warriors known as the Ikhwan. The historian R. Bayly Winder comments: «The numerous and striking similarities between Wahhabism and Islam itself, including such points as original locale, doctrinal emphasis, pattern of military success, Arabness, iconoclasm, and Puritanism, are so marked that one is inclined to view Wahhabism as a kind of ‘second coming’ to Arabia.» See Saudi Arabia in the Nineteenth Century (St. Martin’s, 1965).
——————————————————————————–
