Heresy and History
Codevilla, Angelo M.
I Ieresy and I listory The war on terror will be won only when Islam's Wahabi heresy is defeated by orthodox Islam. Europe's own religious history shows why. BY ANGELO M. CODEVILLA AZILY,...
...By 1803 Mecca itself fell to the Wahabis, and parts of present-day Iraq a few years later...
...The princes who captured Munster's Bockelson exhibited him as a dancing bear, tortured him, and hauled his body in a cage to the top of the cathedral...
...V. AN NY FAITH'S HERESIES are first of all problems or that faith, and only then for others...
...The movements had names such as Cathars, Free Spirits, Bogomils, Albigensians, Anabaptists, Ranters, Joachites...
...But their ideas and practices followed a pattern: Denunciation of obvious inequities, proclamation of a unique divine message that absolute purity and purification would bring absolute remedy, establishment of a totalitarian regime within the movement...
...If medieval Muslims had let the Christian heretics succeed against them, the heretics might have used their newfound prestige to defeat their main enemy in Europe...
...So it was that by the 1830s Wahabi jihads were taking place even in the Indian subcontinent...
...Just as important, orthodox preachers explained the heretics' errors far and wide...
...The 1208-1229 war between the southern French nobility and much of the rest of Christendom was about little else...
...The leader would be revered, even unto drinking his bath water...
...The premise of the University of Chicago's 1988 "Fundamentalism" project—that there is danger in the tendency of many people around the world to adhere to the fundamentals of their faiths—does not apply...
...Always is it possible for one to claim that his alienation from the world, his enmity toward it, is the authoritative sign of a divine call to a death struggle to transform earth into heaven...
...But they lump that sect with "radical" or "fundamentalist" Islam, and throw up their hands over whether terrorism is a natural consequence of Muslim fervor or not...
...In the 11th century, after Pope Gregory VII fought worldliness in the Church, and Pope Urban II proclaimed the Crusade to conquer the Holy Land, countless self-appointed Propheta preached a gospel of redemption: The poor, because of their purity, were to take the lead in the destruction of God's enemies...
...In the end, the Wahabi heresy intimidates Muslims around the world because it is fueled by U.S...
...In sum, the West has let the Wahabis set up bases outside the reach of their Muslim enemies, has let its terrorism run rampant, and has safeguarded its main base, Saudi Arabia, from the natural consequences of its rulers' Faustian bargain...
...That is due in part to the support the heretics enjoy, nonetheless powerful for being indirect, from the West in general and America in particular...
...ANGELO M. CODEVILLA Gulf...
...W"-EVERTHELESS, just as the Muslim world was not _..._ entirely irrelevant to the struggles of medieval Christianity, today's West willy-nilly has some influence on intramural Muslim struggles...
...Hijacked...
...A small minority ever got to fight the Muslims...
...The wars between what became known as Sunni and Shi'a Muslims in the 18th century were strictly about power...
...Hence, statements such as Thomas Jefferson's that whether my neighbor believes that there is one God, many gods, or no god at all neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, are applicable only to Jefferson's peculiar circumstances...
...The bargain was sealed by Wahab's marriage to Ibn Saud's daughter...
...Now at them, at them, and at them...
...Hence the end of the age of religious heresies in Europe came when the Reformed churches—followed by the Catholic Church after the Council of Trent—emphasized austere living...
...The pattern repeated itself on more sophisticated levels...
...What had once been taken as tribal booty was now demanded as Zakat (the charitable payments required as one of the five pillars of Islam...
...MAY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27 HERESY AND HISTORY impossible for the Ottoman Empire—at the height of its power in the early 16th century—to play a role in defeating the Anabaptist heresies that roiled Germany...
...When the princes of the affected areas realized that they too would be involved in the heresy's endless wars they decided to become defenders of orthodoxy and join to destroy the heresy's host regime...
...No other form of Islam enjoys anything like the flood of money that comes from Saudi sources, and almost none has developed a violent cadre to back up its demands...
...Rather than respecting them as "people of the book," as misguided followers of the One God, Wahab called them polytheists, "devil worshipers," and sorcerers, to whom the biblical punishment of death was applicable...
...Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven...
...Then the movement's alliance with some regime, or its capture of power somewhere, led to terror against internal dissent, war with outsiders, and eventually the destruction of the movement...
...To Istanbul, Wahabism and the Saudi state were identical...
...18.Angelo M. Codevilla is professor of international relations at Boston University and a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...The glaring case is Iraq's Saddam Hussein—an atheist, theologically speaking the personification of everything Wahabism lives to destroy—who persecuted Islam to the limit of his power, but who nevertheless managed to make himself the leader of an Islam increasingly redefined as violent anti-Westernism...
...The Saudi royals' money, we must not forget, is theirs only because America's best and brightest think it proper to assign property rights to persons who contribute nothing to the product...
...Hence, for example, their promiscuity was grim business...
...This always involved humiliating as well as killing the leaders...
...Such thoughts filtered down to the masses through clergy and nobles who were willing to use them to cement a following in revolutionary situations...
...Those who folThe poverty of some is always a ready pretext for indicting others...
...Successful anti-Western terrorism has been its main instrument of that attraction...
...Hus was more than that, but Mussolini was only interested in his revolutionary element...
...They humiliated him, tortured him, beheaded him, and threw his body to the dogs...
...Ye are not of this world...
...There would be "one shepherd, one sheepfold, one faith...
...In our time, however, Western civilization has not given that kind of indirect support to Muslim orthodoxy against the Wahabi heresy...
...He surrounded himself with an armed guard, lived in luxury, and wreaked destruction on northern French and German towns—the clergy, the rich, the Jews...
...However, violence tends to follow only when religious differ22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 HERESY AND HISTORY ences become the basis of political quarrels...
...On the contrary: rather than giving the Wahabis defeats, the West has given them victories that have strengthened the movement's hand immeasurably in its decisive intramural battles...
...No orthodox Muslim would accredit the Saudis' lifestyles as Muslim...
...This is the core of Islam, and its glory...
...The theological differences came later...
...The Saudis' Wahabism makes them the natural enemies of all the world's orthodox Muslims, especially Shi'ites...
...That the Saudi family could mount a theological campaign against Wahabism is as inconceivable as its adopting the Spartan lifestyle that Wahabism preaches...
...By the time Wahab died in 1791, the Saudi/Wahabi influence had reached the Persian Wahab destroyed the tombs of the Prophet's earliest disciples because they had become objects of veneration...
...Muntzer's heresy united orthodox Christians of all persuasions against him...
...Muntzer urged the peasants as they happily ravaged the land...
...MAY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 25 HERESY AND HISTORY message of purification—knowledge that this was the last of three ages that would end in the destruction of a sinful world, with the exception of the elect...
...Also, the Wahabis attract all rulers of Muslim peoples who live un-Muslim lives because, just as medieval Christian heretics supported their hierarchs' outrageous lives, they buy secular support by selling religious legitimacy...
...They take one, or more, of the faith's central tenets and twist it into a warrant for overthrowing the norms and practices first of the ordinary faithful, then of mankind...
...Sooner or later, however, the heresy makes more enemies than the host regime can handle, and the war ends with the destruction of both the heresy and the regime...
...That destruction, however, had to be accomplished in a manner that discredited both regime and ideas...
...Everything is pure to the pure," became the motto...
...The only book Benito Mussolini ever wrote praised the burnt heretic, Jan Hus, as a precursor of secular, nationalistic socialism...
...Without the Wahabis, the Saudi royal family would not be lords of the peninsula, or of anything at all...
...The subsequent would-be Crusaders, fewer and fewer of whom expended less and less effort actually to get to the Holy Land, slaughtered Europe's rich because they were rich, expecting thereafter to live in plenty...
...America's elites, however, have supported the Saudis against the Iranians because they understand only the categories of "moderate vs...
...Thus the destruction of the Albigensians was due as much to St...
...The popular side of these movements was summed up in a German book at the beginning of the 16th century...
...Teachings such as these, as well as the struggle between good and evil, are part of the bedrock of Christianity...
...And in fact, the Western world never lacks people who, in the name of God, point to the imperfections of others as warrant for their own claims to perfection, power, privilege, and the undoing of their enemies...
...B E YE PERFECT, as my father in heaven is perfect...
...The Ottomans, using French military equipment and greater manpower, defeated the Saudis, leveled their capital, and took the Saudi leader, Abdullah, prisoner...
...Only the [former] victims will be spared...
...They filled the city with people drawn by the twin promises of loot and salvation, cleansed the churches of books and ornaments, despoiled the rich, enforced polygamy on the women who could not flee, established a reign of terror, and made war on the outside—only to be crushed by it...
...HILE THE BLOODTHIRSTY PREACHING Of Thomas Muntzer did not bring about the German Peasants' war of 1525 all by itself, Muntzer was its only leader...
...Hence Wahabism assured its combatants of the manifold blessings of Muslim martyrdom and set them to war with the entire world...
...The Book of Daniel is a legitimate part of the Old Testament, and the Book of Revelation a legitimate part of the New...
...When Westerners react to Wahabi terrorist acts by indicting ordinary, traditional Muslim practices—veils, sexual customs—they make it even more difficult for orthodox Muslims to go after the heretics...
...T HERE IS NO GOD BUT GOD...
...Ibn Abdul Wahab, born around 1700 in a remote 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 village in a remote region of Arabia, was early impressed with the central tenet of Islam, as well as with the deviations from it both of the Ottoman Empire's sophisticates, who, in Abdul Wahab's view, had adopted Christian ways, and of village simpletons who idolized shrines and trees...
...The history of Christian and Muslim heresies teaches the combination of sword and sermon that is necessary to defeat them...
...Here is a brief sampler...
...Wahab's teaching about Jews and Christians was of the same sort...
...Indeed, in our time, some orthodox Muslims have forgotten how deep is the Wahabis' hatred for them and rather take pride every time a Wahabi-inspired terrorist act humiliates and cows the West on behalf of Muslim causes...
...Whereas in Londonistan, in France, or in America's streets and prisons, Wahabism is an irritant, in the Islamic world it is one of the two main challenges to ordinary life (the other being the corrupt, Western-imported, secular, nationalistic socialism, against which Wahabism rages...
...By the same token, today the notion that secularist Americans might teach Muslims right and wrong about Islam is silly...
...ANGELO M. CODEVILLA lowed these calls set about destroying Jews in Europe as well as bishops and clergy who got in their way, before streaming eastward to fall upon Eastern Christians...
...Wahab declared ancient Islamic scholars "unbelievers" and "polytheists," those who held not only to Shi'a Islam, but also to the Sufi spiritual tradition and Islamic law, and burned their books...
...But of course, once pure, most of these flagellants would start purifying the world by murdering the usual suspects while themselves enjoying the spoils...
...But Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Marxist textbooks around the world celebrated him...
...The Wahabis' warfare involved exterminating men, women, and children...
...This kind of heresy sets itself apart by entitling the heretics to do whatever they want...
...Weak governments cannot possibly take sides against a sect whose exploits excite their peoples' 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 atavistic pride more than they do...
...He and his army of 3,000 were crushed...
...The cage remained there for centuries...
...Dore Gold in Hatred's Kingdom explains that "[T]ribal raiding could now be carried on as a religious cause...
...Western elites, religiously challenged as they are, don't understand the mixture of threat and temptation that the Wahabis pose to the Muslim world because they do not know how analogous Christian heresies have roiled Western civilization...
...government understood Wahabism it expected the power of the Saudi family to restrain its extremism...
...The wars in the 16th and 17th centuries between what came to be known as Catholics and Protestants turned on theological points that had coexisted peaceably until they were taken up by rivals for power...
...What drives "fundamentalists" is the tendency to affirm orthodoxy...
...Hence Wahabi support for outrageously corrupt Saudis...
...They arose in varied circumstances...
...Medieval Muslims, after all, gave orthodox Christianity a big, indirect hand by defeating the Crusades...
...Only Christians can understand enough about what is and is not proper to Christianity...
...The religion is being redefined...
...fundamentalist" and see neither Shi'ites nor Wahabis, neither orthodoxy nor heresy...
...Such heresies tend to strike Faustian bargains with rulers or would-be rulers...
...Nor were they vigilant when the heirs of Abdullah came back to reestablish the family's power base, which of course included Wahabism...
...He wrote that Islam is "...above all a rejection of all gods except God, a refusal to allow others to share in that worship that is due to God alone (Shirk...
...Unlike the Ottomans, the British were unable to mount even the military dimension much less the political and religious dimensions of the offense needed to defeat a heresy such as Wahabism...
...Its leaders, including a Dutchman, Jan Bockelson, proclaimed the usual The subsequent would-be Crusaders, slaughtered Europe's rich because they were rich, expecting thereafter to live in plenty...
...The Koran is adamant about monotheism: "Kill those who ascribe partners to God, wheresoever you find them...
...The same goes for Muslims...
...But affirming monotheism is also the core of the Wahabi heresy...
...Fundamentalism binds the fundamentalist...
...Finally, for such preaching to be effective, it had to be accompanied by efforts on the part of church and nobility to address some of the legitimate accusations made against them...
...By 1912 Wahabi cells existed as far as central Asia...
...Affirming the oneness of God has been Islam's gift to regions of the world where it displaced polytheism, while raising its converts to a higher plane of life...
...Between 1811 and 1818, however, the Ottoman Empire struck back...
...Oman and Bahrain paid tribute...
...This heresy can be defeated only after the destruction of Saudi rule—preferably by other Muslims...
...The clergy, the Jews, and others must be slaughtered for their sins...
...They did not teach orthodox Islam and insist that it be taught, much less did they live it...
...Murderous heresies arise as revolutionary movements...
...The flagellant movement involved Propheta who led masses of people on processions in which they would purify themselves and the world by whipping their bodies...
...Some religious differences, however, necessarily imply political violence...
...Between the 11th and the 17th centuries, Europe suffered arguably more from heresies than from plagues...
...Wahab destroyed the tombs of the Prophet's earliest disciples because they had become objects of veneration...
...Yet all these have been points of departure for horrid heresies...
...BY ANGELO M. CODEVILLA AZILY, AMERICAN ELITES PERCEIVE THAT MODERN TERRORISM has something to do with the Wahabi sect of the Arabian Peninsula...
...In 1533-35 the Anabaptist sect took over the German city of Munster...
...In Islam as well, heresy has arisen out of moral outrage and matured into murderous political enterprises...
...Dominic's preaching as to the armies of Christendom...
...By 1912 Wahabi cells existed as far as central Asia...
...In short, violent heretics are winning their war with Islamic orthodoxy...
...But this ends up not being Christianity at all, because the god is the Germanic Thor...
...By these bargains, the politicians (who are as likely to use the heresy only as a tool as to believe in it) gain the heretics' 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 support, the claim to absolute moral legitimacy vis-à-vis their other followers, plus leverage against their neighbors—all in exchange for providing the heresy a base for war with the rest of the world...
...At a higher level yet, the movement was characterized by the Free Spirits—educated people who believed that two principles vied for control of the world, that by their own efforts or intellectual insight, their oneness in substance with God, combined with the fact that most people did not understand that oneness, made them incapable of sin...
...Other Propheta preached the same gospel unconnected to the Crusades, and followed the same pattern: having purified themselves by their opposition to the impure, they would then partake freely of their spoils...
...Some ideas necessarily are political, and necessarily matrices of mass murder...
...The Ottomans, however, failed to discredit Wahabism doctrinally...
...By contrast, the heretics we are concerned with slip the bounds of orthodoxy and endow themselves with boundless, revolutionary discretion...
...The core of his "party" were intellectuals like himself...
...For them, indulging their wrath, or indeed any of their passions, is the path to holiness...
...Even those Americans most virulent against the Ten Commandments would be compelled to guard their pockets, legs, and more against neighbors whose commandments commanded them to reverse the Ten: Thou shall kill, steal, swear falsely, take thy neighbor's wife, etc...
...Shirk is evil, no matter what the object, whether it be king or prophet or saint or tree or tomb...
...One of the region's tribes, however, found him useful against the others, and gave him shelter...
...Insofar as the U.S...
...Their leaders became the terrorist chieftains of their day...
...The Wahabis attract other Muslims as well as threaten them...
...From the northern edges of black Africa, to Bosnia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the eastern islands of the Philippines, estimates of the percentage of the new mosques and schools financed to Wahabi specifications vary from a third to three-fourths...
...The Wahabis inflicted a historic massacre on the Iraqi city of Kerbala...
...To prove that they had really purified themselves, they must do what is forbidden to the run of mankind...
...Besides, thought the Brits, what power could these or any Arabs wield against Her Majesty's Empire...
...His quest for purity alienated his village's authorities, including his father...
...More than shielding the Saudi regime, Americans enabled it to spread Wahabism to a heretofore unimaginable extent when, in 1973, they agreed to give Saudi Arabia the power to set the world price of oil...
...Killing those who would not accept his version of the faith (and Saudi sovereignty), as well as taking their possessions, was good...
...The Saudis are bonded to the tiger they ride...
...Typic-ally the major slaughters associated with events such as the Parisian Jacquerie of 1358, the Flanders revolt of 1323, and the English Peasants' revolt of 1381 involved one kind or another of Free Spirits...
...The poverty of some is always a ready pretext for indicting others...
...THE CONTEMPORARY SAUDI STATE arose from Ibn Saud's alliance with the British against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Ignorantly, the British believed the Saudis' protestations that their hatred of the Ottomans for their Islamic impurity did not also imply enmity toward Christians...
...The American policy-makers who took over stewardship of the region from Britain never understood the problem...
...But somehow the otherwise ultra-strict Wahabis do...
...God had sent a message to a corrupt world: only the elect would escape his harsh judgment, on condition that they purify the earth...
...The British began to find out when, after the war, they watched impotently as the Saudi/Wahabi combination swept Britain's Hashemite clients from the Arabian Peninsula...
...Not only is this book and the behavior of its followers reminiscent of Nazis, Nazism's chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, devoted a chapter of his Myth of the Twentieth Century to it...
...In the debates surrounding the great religions, charges and countercharges of heresy are motivated as often by secular motives as by religious differences...
...The intelligence office of the oil company ARAMCO is said to have explained Wahabism as the Muslim equivalent of Unitarianism...
...If one's neighbor were a Thuggee, an adept of the Hindu sect that worships Kali, the goddess of death, by killing as many people as possible, one might work for his conversion to Unitarianism...
...For any Sunni Muslim, life has to look richer, safer, more purposeful, on the Wahabi side...
...In 1251 an eloquent Hungarian preached a crusade exclusively of the pure and poor...
...Significantly, Wahab legitimized Jihad against fellow Muslims for the first time...
...Wahab's version of Islam became the official creed wherever the Saudi family ruled...
...It would have been By the 1830s Wahabi jihads were taking place even in the Indian subcontinent...
...The point of all this is that even the best and brightest of officials need to know what they are about and, with that, do no harm...
...Iran, the great power of Shi'a Islam, is Wahabism's main enemy...
...In fact, anti-Western terrorism results from a war within Islam that is more serious for Muslims than for the rest of us, because the Wahabis' ideas imply irreconcilable enmity against other Muslims first, and then against others...
...If they fail to define what it means, the heretics will do the defining...
...The Wahabis held their nose and supported him too...
...Coeligionists are the heresy's first targets, and the only ones with the combination of knowledge, incentive, and legitimacy to deal with it...
...The Saudis' Wahabism makes them the natural enemies of all the world's orthodox Muslims, especially Shiites...
...This was not lost on nobles, some of whom harnessed this frenzy, and one of whom made himself its king, living in luxury and feared by all...
...money directed to them through Saudi Arabia by American judgment, the validity of which is not self-evident...
...These are the ones that concern us...
...That was the house of Saud...
...The notion that the Saudi royals could earn non-Islamic legitimacy as democratizers is fantasy...
Vol. 37 • May 2004 • No. 4
