A Quietist Jihadi by Joas Wagemakers

Author:Joas Wagemakers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

Al-Maqdisi goes on to recount the story of the Ikhwan, whom the first king of the present Saudi state, Abd al-Aziz, defeated at the Battle of Sibilla in 1929. Al-Maqdisi not only clearly sides with the Ikhwan against the king, thereby placing himself in a longer tradition of Wahhabi-inspired opposition against the Al Saud, but also claims that the latter have betrayed the original pact between Muhammad b. Saud and Muhammad b. Abd al-Wahhab that was the basis of the first Saudi state. He juxtaposes the strict teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab on dealing with non-Muslims with the policies of King Fahd and concludes that ‘there is no difference between this state and the other Arab ght regimes’.93 He goes on to make his case against Saudi Arabia using Wahhabi concepts (such as al-wal wa-l-bar, which we will deal with in the next two chapters) and sources and shows that he is clearly knowledgeable about Wahhabi writings. Moreover, his detailed arguments, particularly in books such as Al-Risala al-Thalathiniyya, show that he follows a Salafi and even Wahhabi way of thinking that clearly goes beyond the relatively shallow reasoning of Qutb and Faraj.

In interviews with former visitors to Bayt Shubr and experts on Islamism in Saudi Arabia, it turned out that–apart from the content of al-Maqdisi's frame as expressed in his diagnosis, prognosis and motivation–the five factors distinguished earlier were indeed very important in explaining al-Maqdisi's influence. Although nobody mentioned the importance of tawd and the relationship of everything al-Maqdisi writes to this concept, considering the fact that his followers are all Wahhabi-Salafis, it must be assumed that this was indeed important. The range and interrelatedness of his writings were explicitly acknowledged, however, with one Islamist saying that al-Maqdisi's books are very coherent, never contradict themselves and are argued from a single starting point.94 The empirical credibility and the experiental commensurability of his frame were also important factors, with interviewees referring to his argument about the American soldiers and his willingness to openly mention broadly acknowledged problems in the current Saudi state as examples. Similarly, al-Maqdisi's own credibility was not in doubt either, not so much because he was seen as a great scholar but because of his clear appearance as a Wahhabi-Salafi ‘knowledge seeker’ (lib ilm), unlike someone such as Qutb.95

The most important of the five factors, however, was al-Maqdisi's close adherence to the Saudi-Wahhabi intellectual tradition. The fact that he used Wahhabi sources, arguments and concepts, placed them in the context of the history of Saudi Arabia and openly showed his own Najdi roots was acknowledged as an explanation for his influence among both the visitors to Bayt Shubr and the members of QAP.96 Some mentioned that al-Maqdisi made the ideas of takfr of the Saudi state ‘acceptable’ to Saudi jihadis97 and that the latter would simply not have been receptive to Egyptian or Syrian ideas.98 In fact, one interviewee told me that al-Maqdisi, unlike major Saudi scholars such as Ibn Baz, represented the real Wahhabi tradition of the aimmat al-dawa al-Najdiyya (the imams of the Najdi propagation of Islam).

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