By David Nordell
There was a delicious irony in the assassination attempt made against Prince Muhammad bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia just over a week ago. Muhammad, who is Assistant Minister of the Interior for Security Affairs, was only about a metre away from the suicide bomber, a member of a terror cell who claimed that he wanted to surrender personally to him and even convince other conspirators to do so; he was lucky to escape with nothing more than minor hand injuries.
But Prince Muhammad is not just one of the thousands of members of the Saudi royal family who populate the country’s government and business leadership, Saudi Arabia after all being the only country in the world that is named for its ruling family and actually run as a family business. He is also one of the sons of Prince Nayef, the long-time interior minister and now deputy prime minister, who many analysts consider to be the most likely candidate to inherit the throne when King Abdullah dies. And Nayef is one of the most irredentist of his country’s leaders, who has consistently opposed the gradual and hesitant policy of social and political reforms led by Abdullah, his half-brother. In religious terms, he is one of the most extreme Wahabists in the country’s top leadership, and was noted for once saying that the country’s small Shi’ite minority were "akfar min al-yahud" -- more heretic than the Jews.
The irony, of course, is in the fact that Saudi Arabia continues to be one of the main backers of jihadi terrorism in the world. Since Jihad International doesn’t, of course, publish audited management accounts, it remains impossible to know precisely which source of terror finance is responsible for funding which part of the massive global operation, and how these allocations change from year to year. But it does seem clear that Saudi Arabia -- both members of the royal family and other members of the elite -- is the main source of funds for dawa, Islamic propaganda directed both at Muslims, to persuade them to become more religious; and non-Muslims, to induce them to convert to the true faith. And without the many billions of dollars that have been poured into this propaganda effort over the years, to say nothing of smaller sums donated to Western universities in order to establish rather more respectable ’research institutes’ and chairs of Middle East studies that provide intellectual and political backing for the Muslim and Arab worlds’ imperialist efforts, the global jihad would have remained far poorer and weaker. There would have been fewer Salafi imams preaching hatred of Jews and other non-Muslims in mosques all over the Western world; there would have been fewer recruits to the cause in general, and fewer willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of Allah. For that matter, there would be fewer Middle Eastern financial institutions willing to transfer funds to terrorist organisations, as Arab Bank did a few years ago. The fact that the actual cost of weapons and explosives for terror operations is just the tip of this iceberg is irrelevant: all the money donated to terror groups, or for that matter raised through their criminal activities, is fungible.
The attempt on Prince Muhammad’s life must have brought home to the Saudi royal family, quite literally, the threat it has created not only to the rest of the world but also to itself. Saudi Arabia has been the target of terror attacks for years, organised and executed by extremist Muslim groups that oppose the country’s general strategic alignment with the United States and its willingness to provide bases for allied operations during the first Gulf war; and which believe that the royal family and its coterie of business elites are the source of corruption in the country and have robbed the general population of its oil wealth. But these groups, including the al Qa’eda-aligned group based in Yemen that dispatched the suicide bomber to kill Prince Muhammad, have also benefitted from Saudi largesse.
Saudi Arabia has indeed made some serious efforts to fight terrorists within its own borders, although one can possibly laugh at its attempts to ’re-educate’ some captured terrorists and return them to a less violent form of Islam. But so long as it continues to support dawa around the world, it will continue to shoot itself in the foot, because even it can control the messages from the schools and academic centres it finances, it can not begin to control the messages of ever more fanatic imams, except perhaps for those within its own territory; and these imams will in many cases continue to see the Saudi regime as an enemy and a legitimate target for violent action. Yet to stop financing dawa would almost be heresy: King Abdullah, the Guardian of the Two Holy Places, by definition has a moral commitment to promote the spread of Islam, and Wahabism is hardly the kinder, gentler Islam one finds in places like Indonesia.
I don’t know anything about Prince Muhammad’s politics and am not sorry that he escaped the attempt on his life so lightly. But it would have been poetic justice for Prince Nayef, until now one of the leaders of extremism in Saudi Arabia, had he lost his son to a terrorist suicide bomber. Maybe this incident will drive the message home -- especially so if he is to become king one of these days -- that he can not back extremism and fight terrorism at the same time, nor can he encourage terrorism abroad without it coming back to bite him at home.
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