The Saudi Executions and Nation-building

Izeth Hussain

"So-called Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it." – Salman Rushdie.

The news of the public executions by beheading of five Sri Lankans, and the subsequent exhibition of their crucified bodies in Riyad, would have provoked shock, horror and outrage among most non-Muslim Sri Lankans. As for the Sri Lankan Muslims themselves, they would have reacted with the same mix of emotions, but in their case those emotions would have been compounded by deep anxiety. That deep anxiety would have sprung from the expectation that those executions would have been taken as revealing something essential about Muslims all over the world, including the Sri Lankan Muslims. They would have expected an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment in Sri Lanka as a consequence.

One of my major purposes in this article is to show that those executions were far from being typical of the Islamic world, and that they are so remote from the norms prevailing in Islamic societies that they have to be regarded as aberrant Saudi behaviour. My other purpose is to comment on the significance for nation-building of the admirably restrained Sinhalese reaction to the executions.

A possible misconception that has to be got out of the way at this initial stage is that Saudi Arabia is the centre of the Islamic world. This misconception is an understandable one because what is today called "Saudi Arabia" was the land of the Prophet, all Muslims perform their prayers while facing in the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, and all Muslims have to perform the Haj pilgrimage which is one of the "five pillars of Islam" by going to Mecca. Certainly Saudi Arabia is hallowed territory for Muslims because of its association with the Prophet. Consequently the Kaaba is the central symbol of Islamic transcendence for the ummah, the charismatic community of the Muslims all over the world. But all that does not mean that the Saudi Arabs or their monarchy or their theologians constitute the centre of the Islamic world. Mecca and the Kaaba do not have the kind of significance that the Vatican has for the Catholics.

The fact that Saudi Arabia does not have anything like centrality in the Islamic world is shown precisely by the practise of the Islamic law on theft. There are the two famous paragraphs in the Koran enjoining the cutting off to hands for theft. A point to be emphasised is that it is an injunction, something of a categorical order with no ifs and buts about it. It may seem to be a needlessly cruel form of punishment, but we must remember that in the Arabia of that time most people’s possessions consisted of no more than what was required for bare subsistence, so that under certain conditions theft could amount to killing a person. That would be particularly true of societies living under desertic or semi-desertic conditions. I have in mind the fact that in the American Wild West the punishment for stealing horse was a death by hanging.

However, even though the injunction was Koranic — that is to say that it was no less than the word of God — and even though very severe punishment for theft could often have seemed to be justifiable, the injunction was most often observed in the breach. It might be supposed that the injunction would have been strictly applied in the early days of Islam, particularly under the Rashidun Caliphate — that is of the first four Caliphs — when according to Islamic tradition Islam was practised in all its pristine purity. Accordingly the second Caliph, Omar, ordered the cutting off of the hand of a thief. But he was told thereafter that the theft was committed because of extreme hunger under conditions of famine. Caliph Omar immediately revoked his order.

If such was the gap between precept and practise under the Rashidun Caliphate, it should not be surprising at all that the punishment of the cutting off of hands was far from being the universal practise in the Islamic world. It seems to be very rare indeed in the contemporary Islamic world. The last time I heard of an attempt to revive it was when one of Pakistan’s backward military dictators, the late Zia-ul-Haq, ordained it. It was a failure because Pakistani doctors refused to perform the requisite operations. Those Pakistani doctors were far more representative of the contemporary Islamic world than its American-backward dictators.

It should be useful to record as — a way of countering the demonisation of Muslims in the contemporary world — that notwithstanding the severity of the Koranic injunction the punishment for theft in some Muslim societies has been far less punitive than in non-Muslim societies. Sri Lankans were surprised to find that in the Maldives hotel rooms were left unlocked because the incidence of theft was so rare. In the event of its occurring the name and other details of the culprit were announced on the radio, after which he would be socially ostracised. There was no question of cutting off his hand, or causing him any physical injury.

It might be supposed that the Maldives was a very special case because its economy was undeveloped and its society could have been exceptionally homogenous. But a French tourist tells me that on a visit to Turkey a few years ago he found that there too hotel rooms were left unlocked, and in the very rare case of publicity followed by social ostracism. Turkey as most readers will probably know has been the most advanced, in terms of the economy and modernity, of all the Muslim countries.

The material provided above should enable a fair and balance judgement on the Saudi executions. The Saudi authorities have claimed that their punitive measures were strictly in accordance with Islamic law. I am assured by persons who are well up on the subject that those measures cannot possibly be justified under any known system of the Sharia. That does seem to be the case on common-sense grounds. The Koranic injunction goes no further than the cutting off of hands. The Saudi authorities have gone much further by imposing the death penalty, after which they claim that that is in accordance with the Divine Law! True, the culprits in this case had engaged in armed robbery, which certainly carried the threat of death. But the fact remains that no one at all was killed. The public beheadings followed by the exemplary exhibition of the crucified bodies were punitive measures that cannot be justified in terms of the Sharia, and were far in excess of the norms in the rest of the Islamic world. The judgment on those punitive measures can be straightforward. They were shockingly un-Islamic.

The above suffices in my mind to establish beyond any dispute that the horrors perpetrated were a Saudi aberration, something in a class apart, and not something that can possibly discredit the wider Islamic World and most certainly not the Sri Lankan Muslims. I will conclude with some observations to show that Saudi Arabia is an aberration in the contemporary Islamic world. It seems to me important for various reasons for non-Muslim Sri Lankans to have a more sophisticated understanding of the Islamic world than what prevails at present. I have in mind a propensity to judge the Islamic world by its more backward manifestations, partly the result of the demonising process that has been going on in the Western media.

The peculiar Saudi understanding of the Sharia is probably to be explained by the fact that the Saudis practise the Wahabi version of Islam. Wahabism, an extreme fundamentalist form of puritanical Islam, had its inception in eighteenth century Arabia, and since then has intermittently been a bit of a nuisance to the rest of the Islamic world. It had a major boost in the last century with the rise of the Saudi monarchy in 1916, however, despite the immense power of propagation implied by Saudi oil wealth, Wahabism has remained a peripheral phenomenon in the Islamic world.

How peripheral it is was brought home vividly to me when my family had a visit from two devout orthodox Muslim ladies in their seventies about two days before the executions. It happened that at that time I had been reading Tabarai’s great Chronicle, which was about two days before the executions. It happened that at that time I had been reading Tabari’s great Chronicle, which was written about 250 years after the death of the Prophet. I cited material from that book and other sources to suggest that the extraordinary veneration and that near deification of the Prophet had not been prevalent in early Islam. I also cited the fact that there is nothing like that veneration of the Prophet in Saudi Arabia, where I have been told even the Prophet’s birthday is not celebrated. The point of interest is that throughout that discussion one of those devoutly orthodox ladies kept on exclaiming. "But those Saudis are Wahabis, no!" I had to remind her that nevertheless the Wahabis are accepted as fully Muslim by the rest of the Islamic world. She conceded the point, but it was clear that in her mind the Wahabis are at the outermost periphery of the Islamic world.

A curious fact is that though Wahabism is an extreme form of Islamic puritanism, the Saudi elite is widely notorious for its luxurious life-style. It does seem that the despots of the Islamic world find in fundamentalism an effective way of keeping the people backward and controllable. Otherwise the paradox of devolution to Wahabism combined with a luxurious life-style is difficult to explain.

The truth is that Saudi Arabia, the supposed centre of the Islamic world, is at its outer periphery in the spiritual realm. It occupies the same position in the secular realm as well. It is seen widely as the greatest Islamic friend of the greatest enemy of the Islamic world, the US. Latheef Farook’s book ‘War on Terrorism’, exceptionally well-informed and a devastating exposure of the anti-muslim imperialist drive behind the war on terrorism spear-headed by the US, contains an illuminating chapter on the Saudi special connection with the US.

It contains the following sentence which reflects a widespread perception in the Islamic world, "Throughout the Cold War, the Saudi rulers aligned themselves, first in secret, and then in public, with the US despite its policy, which has been openly hostile towards the Arabs and the Muslims especially in its unstinted support to Israel, which occupies Islam’s third holiest shrine, Masjid Al Aqsa in Jerusalem and is causing misery to millions of Palestinians."

We Muslims all over the world have reason to be deeply grateful to the Saudis for all that they have done as the custodians of the holy places of Islam, more specifically for generously making it possible for ever-increasing numbers of Muslims to go on the Haj pilgrimage. But the Saudi special connection with the US can only be regarded as degrading to the world of Islam. I will not argue the case in detail. Instead I will cite just two facts while recalling that for the Saudi power elite Britain can have a special place as the auxiliary of the US. The first fact is that a group of Sri Lankans were executed for committing theft, even though they had not killed anyone. The second fact is that in 1997 two British nurses were convicted for murder in Saudi Arabia, but thereafter they were set free to go home.

I will now conclude with some observations from the perspective of nation-building, beginning with the claim that this article itself is a contribution to nation-building. It removes the misconception that Saudi Arabia is the centre of the Islamic world, and that what happens there declares something essential about the Islamic world. This article therefore militates against the formation of negative images of the Sri Lankan Muslims as a consequence of the Saudi executions.

But what I want to focus on in conclusion is the impressive contribution to nation-building made by anti-racist Sinhalese through their reactions to the Saudi executions. In the media there were at first expressions of shock and horror with banner headlines in the Sinhala papers, reactions that was easily understandable and indeed reaction that was justifiable from a civilised point of view. But that reaction could have led to an anti-Muslim campaign resulting in violent incidents and even anti-Muslim rioting.

That initial reaction was followed quite quickly and abruptly by silence on the executions. That could have been the consequence of governmental prompting, but that prompting could not have been so effective if there had not been a concurrent understanding among media personnel and members of the public of the dangers inherent in the situation.

I have not come across any statement or article setting out the rationale for that silence. I will try to do so here as it could promote an understanding of what is involved in nation-building in Sri Lanka. First of all there would have been an understanding among media personnel and sophisticated members of the public of the thesis advanced in this article, that Saudi Arabia is in a class apart and that the executions should not therefore prejudice Sinhalese-Muslim relations.

Certainly the situation of the Muslims would have been seen in relation to the national crisis, that is the threat posed to the unity of Sri Lanka. The SL Muslims have been steadfastly with the Sinhalese against the break-up of Sri Lanka. As a consequence, it is possible that the Eastern Province Muslims may some day have to face ethnic cleansing. Certainly, if not for the heavy Muslim presence in the EP the threat to Sri Lanka’s unity would be much greater in my view. And of course the external dimension would have figured in the calculations leading to the playing down of the issue of the executions. The Islamic world includes Saudi Arabia, but it also includes Pakistan which gave us the really decisive help after the Elephant Pass debacle in 2000.

It is surprising five years and more since 1975 practically every year witnessed anti-Muslim ructions ranging from the trivial to the serious, the latter including the Puttalam Mosque massacre of 1975, the Galle riots of 1982, the Hulftsdorp riots of 1993, culminating in the Mawanella riots and the Udathalawinna massacre. After that there appears to have been an abrupt cessation of the ructions. I believe that part of the reason is that there had come about among the Sinhalese at decision-making levels a recognition that Sinhalese-Muslim amity and co-operation is one of the requisites for the preservation of Sri Lanka’s unity. It is that perspective that the admirable Sinhalese restraint over the Saudi executions should be seen, and recognised as a welcome contribution to nation-building.