The perception of Islam today by many non-Muslims is that it is a 

fanatical and violent religion. That is a superficial view which ignores 

the fact that there are two models of Islam, one that is uncompromising 

and extremist in its views and another that is tolerant, moderate and 

humanistic.

--Al-huda Editor

Tolerant and Intolerant Islam

.....on how extremism emerged in the contemporary world.

As early as the first century of the Muslim calendar, Islam has known 

radical sects who demanded blind adherence to their rigid reading of the 

articles of faith, side by side with mainstream Islam, whose adherents

eschew violence and extremism and do not profess to hold a monopoly on 

Truth. The phenomenon began with the emergence of the Khawarij 

(Seceders) in 660 AD, (the middle of the first Hejira century), a sect 

which preached a dogmatic interpretation of Scripture and practiced a 

version of excommunication by branding those who did not adopt its 

teachings as heretics. This was the first such sect but by no means the 

last, and throughout the history of Islam the quiet of religious life 

was broken many times by marginal groups who tried to impose their 

extremist views on the majority by violent means. A comprehensive 

history of these groups has been compiled by my friend, Professor 

Mahmoud Ismail Abdul Razzaak, in an authoritative reference work 

entitled "The Secret Sects of Islam." The author devotes special 

attention to the Qarmatians, who carried away the Black Stone of the Ka' 

bah and kept it in a remote area in the east of the Arabian Peninsula 

for over a century.

Alongside the groups and sects whose members insisted on a literal 

interpretation of holy texts and laid down strict rules governing all 

aspects of life, there was the general trend represented in the main 

Sunni schools (the most important being the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafite and 

Hanbalite, and their offshoots, Al-Laith and Al-Tebarry), as well as the 

Shiites, who are split into a number of sects. The most important Shiite 

sect is the Imammeya, or Ithna'ashariyya, (i.e. Twelvers), so called 

because they accept as imams twelve of the descendants of Ali ibn-Abu 

Talib (according to their belief, the twelfth imam, who disappeared 

about 874 AD, is still living and will return). Within this general 

trend there emerged prominent proponents of deductive reasoning, like 

the great jurist Abu Hanifa, who accepted just over one hundred of the 

Prophet's Hadiths as apostolic precept, as well as uncompromising 

champions of tradition, like Ahmed ibn-Hanbal, whose book, Al-Musnad, is 

a compilation of over ten thousand Hadiths. The conservative ibn-Hanbal 

served as the bulwark of orthodoxy and tradition against any 

intellectual endeavor, and for a time exerted a considerable hold on 

public imagination. Although his influence eventually waned, in its 

heyday tradition reigned supreme and very little room was left for 

reason. The two main disciples of ibn-Hanbal were ibn-Taymiyah and 

ibn-Qaiym Al-Juzeya, who, like their mentor, allowed no scope for reason 

or independent thinking, but insisted on a dogmatic adherence to the 

Hadiths as authoritative sources of all matters spiritual and temporal, 

laying down strict guidelines to govern every aspect of everyday life.

In addition, the world of Islam was the scene of a battle of ideas 

between Abu Hamid Al-Ghazzali (Algazel), a strict traditionalist who did 

not believe the human mind capable of grasping the Truth as ordained by 

God, and Ibn Rushd (Averoess), who championed the primacy of reason. The 

exponents of these two schools waged a bitter battle in which the first 

salvo was fired by Al-Ghazzali with his book, The Incoherence of the 

Philosophers. Ibn Rushd answered with his brilliant treatise in defense 

of rationality, The Incoherence of the Incoherence. But despite his 

spirited defense, the outcome of the battle was clearly in 

Al-Ghazzali's  favour, and the great majority of Islamic jurists adopted 

his ideas, interpreting the precepts of Islamic law by appeal to the 

authority of tradition and spurning deductive reasoning altogether. 

Islamic jurisprudence was dominated by the Mutakallimun, or dialectical 

theologians, who asserted the primacy of tradition (naql), as advocated 

by Al-Ghazzali, over that of reason ('aql), as advocated by Ibn Rushd. 

But though Ibn Rushd's ideas were rejected by the Muslim world, they 

took root strongly in Europe, particularly France, which embraced his 

vision of the primacy of reason wholeheartedly.

Thus Muslims can be said to have known two different understandings to 

Islam, as it were, one based on a rigid, doctrinaire interpretation of 

holy texts and the violent repression of free thought, the other on a 

moderate and tolerant understanding of Scripture which allowed for the 

acceptance of the Other. The first was espoused by the secret sects 

(limited in number and influence) which emerged in remote areas of the 

Arabian Peninsula and can best be described as the Bedouin model. The 

second took hold in the more intellectually vibrant climate that

prevailed among the peoples descended from ancient civilizations in 

places like Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and the Levant, which I call the 

Egyptian/Turkish/Syrian model of Islam.

Until the mid-eighteenth century, this was the model adopted by most 

Muslim communities outside the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. But 

that was before the rise of Wahhabism, a puritan revival movement 

launched by Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab from Najd, where he was born in 

1703. In 1744, he forged an alliance with the ruler of Al-Dir'iyah, a 

tribal chieftain by the name of Mohamed ibn-Saud, who became his 

son-in-law. The alliance led to the first incarnation of the Saudi 

state, which, by 1804, had expanded to control nearly one million square 

metres of the Arabian Peninsula. It was a short-lived incarnation, 

lasting only until 1819, when Mohamed Ali's son, Ibrahim Pasha, led a 

military expedition which destroyed Wahhabi power and razed the capital 

of the first Saudi state, Al-Dir'iyah, to the ground.

Mohamed Ali's decision to send first his son Tousson then his son 

Ibrahim Pasha, known for his military skills, to destroy the first Saudi 

state had implications going far beyond the political or military 

ambitions of one man. It was in fact an expression of a 

cultural/civilizational confrontation between the two models of Islam, a 

confrontation the enlightened Egyptian/Turkish/Syrian model decided to 

take to the heartland of the obscurantist, extremist and fanatical 

Wahhabi model. Mohamed Ali, who was extremely impressed by the European 

model of development and saw no contradiction between the mechanisms by 

which it had come about and his Islamic beliefs, believed the Wahhabi 

understanding of Islam stood as a major obstacle in the way of the dream 

he had nurtured since coming to power in 1805 (and until he abdicated in 

favor of his son Ibrahim in 1848) to place Egypt on a similar road to 

development.

Years after the defeat inflicted on them by Ibrahim Pasha (who captured 

their leader and sent him to Egypt, then to Istanbul where he remained 

until his death), the Saudis reemerged as a political force in the 

eastern region of the Arabian Peninsula. Basing themselves in Riyadh, 

they began to meddle covertly in political affairs. This placed them on 

a collision course with the al-Rashid family in Ha'il, and the two sides 

were soon locked in battle. The Saudis, under the leadership of Abdul 

Rahman, father of the founder of the current Saudi dynasty, King Abdul 

Aziz, were defeated in 1891. Abdul Rahman fled to Kuwait with leading 

members of the House of Saud, where they remained in exile until 1902. 

During this period, they were the guests of Sheikh Mubarak al-Sabbah,

who played an important role in the formation of the young Abdul Aziz. 

Born in 1876, Abdul Aziz, who came to be known as Ibn Saud, was 

encouraged in his dream to recapture Riyadh by the ruler of Kuwait. In 

1902, Ibn Saud (Abdul Aziz) seized Riyadh and waged a 30-year campaign 

to assert his dominion over the Arabian Peninsula. In 1925 he entered 

first Mecca then Medina, and, in September 1932, the 56-year old 

proclaimed himself king over the Kingdom of Najd and Hejaz, later to 

become the first kingdom named after its ruling dynasty, Saudi Arabia.

Concomitantly with the birth of the new kingdom, which officially 

adopted the doctrine of Wahhabism, came the discovery of vast reservoirs 

of oil under its deserts. This provided the Wahhabis with a virtually 

endless source of funds which they used to propagate their model of Islam.

Three decades after the creation of Saudi Arabia and the discovery of 

oil, many things had changed in the world:

One, Saudi Arabia had built up a huge fortune that enabled it to further 

the cause of Wahhabism not only within its own borders but throughout 

the Arab and Muslim world. Its efforts proved successful, as many once 

moderate Muslims were gradually won over to the harsh version of Islam 

preached by the Wahhabis.

Two, beginning in the 'sixties, Egypt suffered a reversal of fortune at 

all levels, including a decline in its general cultural climate, 

allowing Wahhabi influence to infiltrate the venerable institution of 

Al-Azhar. The defeat of June 1967 opened the door wide to groups which 

espoused the Saudi understanding of Islam and who translated their 

radical views into political action, often at the point of a gun. Three, 

in the context of the Cold War, the West in general and the United 

States in particular adopted a number of misguided policies towards the 

region, including turning a blind eye to the spread of Wahhabi influence 

in the Arab and Islamic world, and even occasionally supporting radical 

groups inspired by the Wahhabi doctrine to achieve their own political 

ends, such as ending the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

The assassination of President Anwar Sadat by an extremist group was a 

wake-up call which alerted the world to the growth and spread of the 

Saudi-backed Wahhabi model of Islam and the retreat of the Egyptian / 

Turkish / Syrian model. A succession of similar events attested to the 

dangerous spread of this model in most societies with a Muslim majority, 

in Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Pakistan, Afghanistan 

and Indonesia. On the morning of September 11, 2001, a group of fanatics 

belonging to the Wahhabi brand of Islam launched attacks on New York and 

Washington that illustrated how the members of this sect view the Other 

in general and Western civilization in particular.

For the average European or American unfamiliar with some of the facts 

presented in this article, it is easy to believe that Islam, violence 

and terrorism go hand in hand. But those who have a more thorough grasp 

of the issue know that this perception of Islam has taken hold only 

because a puritanical, fundamentalist model of Islam, which was marginal 

and ineffectual before oil wealth put it on the map, has managed, thanks 

to petrodollars, to make the world believe that its interpretation of 

Islam is Islam. The doctrinaire version of Islam propounded by the 

Wahabbis had no followers among the Muslims of the world before the 

expansion of Saudi influence following the oil boom. Millions of Muslims 

in Egypt, Turkey, the Levant, Iraq, Indonesia and throughout the world 

remained immune to the appeal of the fanatical, violent and bloody 

message of what was a small and obscure sect bred in the intellectually 

barren landscape of the eastern Arabian Peninsula. All that changed with

the massive influx of petrodollars into the coffers of Saudi Arabia, 

which used its new-found wealth to propagate the message of its 

home-grown Wahhabi sect with missionary zeal. Hence the emergence of 

militant Islam as a force to be reckoned with on the world stage, a 

force that now represents a dangerous threat to world peace, to humanity 

and to Islam and Muslims. Half a century ago, the Muslims of Egypt, 

Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey were models of tolerance who believed in 

a gentle and enlightened Islam that could, and did, coexist peacefully

with other religions and cultures. Following the decline in living 

standards they have suffered since at the hands of despotic and corrupt 

rulers, they have become easy prey for the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.

The perception of Islam today by many non-Muslims is that it is a 

fanatical and violent religion. That is a superficial view which ignores 

the fact that there are two models of Islam, one that is uncompromising 

and extremist in its views and another that is tolerant, moderate and 

humanistic. It is also a naïve view that can lead to dangerous decisions 

like the ones which informed the West's policies when it turned a blind 

eye to the spread of Wahhabism and established close links with radical 

Islamic movements like the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Finally, there is no need to point out to the neutral reader that the 

existence of Qur'anic texts which can be used to evidence the violence 

of Islam is unimportant, because there are enlightened interpretations 

of the same texts which link them to specific circumstances and events. 

At the end of the day, any text, even if it is divine, requires a human 

agency to interpret it, and the real test is how the mind elects to 

interpret it. Moreover, there are also many Qur'anic texts which 

proscribe the use of violence and aggression against those belonging to 

other faiths and creeds, and calls on Muslims to treat them fairly and 

humanely. But texts should not be the focus of debate here, not least 

because this would allow extremists on the other side to justify their 

use of violence by invoking Old Testament texts exhorting believers to 

violence, notably in the Book of Joshua, son of Nun.

What needs to be done at this stage is to champion the cause of 

enlightenment by supporting moderates and promoting the humanistic 

understanding of Islam that once prevailed among the vast majority of 

Muslims. Efforts in this direction must go hand in hand with a counter 

offensive against the rigid, doctrinaire, even bloodthirsty, version of 

Islam that first appeared among isolated communities separated from the 

march of civilization by the impenetrable sand dunes of the Arabian 

desert. Geographical isolation coupled with a narrow tribal outlook is a

lethal mix that cannot possibly shape a humane and tolerant perception 

of the Other. The time has come for the Saudi government to part ways 

with Wahhabism and to realize that the alliance between the House of 

Saud and the Wahhabi dynasty is responsible for the spread of 

obscurantism, dogmatism and fanaticism, poisoning minds with radical 

ideas opposed to humanity, progress, civilization, cultural continuity 

and pluralism, the diversity of opinions and creeds that is one of the 

most important and enriching features of human life.