Blood in the oil

Even as the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) shocks the conscience of the world with barbaric violence and punishment of prisoners, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is burnishing its credentials as a citadel of inhumanity. Within the first 10 days of his reign as the new monarch, King Salman Al Saud has already permitted five beheadings of convicts in public squares.

Thus far in 2015, the Saudi state has put 17 persons to the sword and it is well on course to best its own gory statistic of 87 such executions carried out in 2014. Besides beheadings, the Saudi repertoire of justice includes ritualised public spectacles of stoning to death, killing by firing squad, chopping off limbs and lashings of “criminals” framed by a harsh Sharia legal system.

Decapitations, floggings and immolations by the ISIS are indeed abhorrent and against basic norms of civilisation. US President Barack Obama has aptly condemned the ISIS as “a brutal vicious death cult that in the name of religion carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism.” But the Saudi monarchy, which is a close strategic ally of Washington in West Asia, gets a pass from Mr Obama. The American President, who flew to Riyadh in person last month to meet the new monarch Salman, said on record that “we need to balance our need to speak to them (Saudis) about human rights issues with immediate concerns we have in terms of counter-terrorism or dealing with regional stability.”

The distinction Mr Obama has drawn between the ISIS and Saudi Arabia rests on the notion that while the former poses a threat to the regional strategic order, the latter is a stabilising entity whose repressive abuses can be ignored. For ages, the Saudi royalty has maximised its hold on power by sustaining this differentiation between what it does domestically to its own people and which sides it chooses in foreign policy.

Having scored points in Washington and with fellow Arab dictatorships as a staunch preserver of the status quo, i.e. by rolling back Shia Iran’s influence, keeping the global oil market under control and purchasing American weaponry, the kingdom gets a free hand to bludgeon its people through a primordial and medieval interpretation of Islam derived from the Wahhabi school of thought.

There is a direct link between regime survival and the spree of beheadings that never stops in Saudi Arabia. Just as the ISIS uses decapitation to spread fear in the minds of its enemies and enforce discipline on the population under its de facto state spread over Iraq and Syria, the Saudi royals oversee rough Sharia justice to keep the clerical establishment (Ulama) and the security services (of which the religious police or Mutaween are the most notorious) happy and loyal to the descendants of King Abdulaziz, the first monarch of Saudi Arabia.

If King Salman’s succession last month after the death of King Abdullah was relatively smooth, it is thanks to the Sharia-based consensus that the royal family has forged among key stakeholders by means of a repressive legal system. The same Grand Muftis — senior-most religious authorities in Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi theological order — who ordain that severing the necks of wrongdoers is halal (lawful), are the ones who decree that opposition to the monarchy is haram (prohibited).

After Islamist terrorists launched major bombings in Riyadh in 2003, the Grand Mufti proclaimed that it is a religious obligation for Saudi citizens to obey their kings “even if they are oppressive, because he who rebels against the prince rebels against God.” Since the Arab Spring revolts of 2011, the Saudi monarchy is accelerating Sharia-based infringement of human dignities with the goal of crushing dissent and scattering anti-regime elements.

The Saudi interior ministry claims that its penal methodology is legitimate and fully justified since “we do it as a decision made by a court” through a proper process, unlike the ISIS which the Saudis accuse of smiting at necks “based on arbitrary choices”. But the United Nations maintains that criminal justice procedures in Saudi Arabia are “in flagrant disregard of international law standards.” For a monarchy obsessed with prolonging its rule, external opinion from a neutral body like the UN hardly matters as long as the conservative clerics and security forces at home are satiated and the United States keeps mum.

Given the ideological similarities among Salafis and Wahhabis of various stripes who dispense appalling violence in the name of justice, the comparison between the ISIS and Saudi Arabia is logical and fair. In fact, the kingdom is not so much a peer of the ISIS in sanctioning degrading behaviour as its progenitor.

The ISIS is a present-day reincarnation of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and it is an open secret that the Saudi royals had a foundational hand in the rise of Al Qaeda. Latest sensational allegations by the US-imprisoned Al Qaeda operative, Zacarias Moussaoui, reconfirm that highly placed Saudi elites funded Osama bin Laden and plotted attacks against Western targets in the early years of that terror outfit.

The same sick culture of decapitation which Saudi Arabia originally copyrighted as state policy has spread to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the ISIS and other jihadist groups in Libya, Nigeria, Mali and Somalia. It is not only Saudi money that spawned and inspired hateful Islamist movements across the world but also the Saudi project of “purifying” Islam and taking it back to its 7th century roots.

Following ISIS’ recent gruesome beheadings of Japanese captives in Syria, Muslims in Japan urged the news media not to label the terrorist group “Islamic State”, as “this type of action is not a Muslim action.” Twitter hashtags like “#ISIS_are_NOT_Muslims” have also made the same point.

But we need to ask a more fundamental question: Is Saudi Arabia truly Islamic? Isn’t it a core contradiction that the custodians of the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina, the House of Saud, are not really “Muslims”, as defined by moderates and liberals? Does the status of a country in the global oil market absolve it from being held accountable for grave injustices? Once these incongruities are brought to the forefront of international discourse on terrorism, we can find light at the end of the tunnel.

The writer is a professor and dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs