 Civil Society > Global Village Versus Faith Tensions
Saudi jihadists target
infidels, Muslims alike
By Raid Qusti
Commenting from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Terrorist incidents in Saudi Arabia are more or less becoming everyday news. Every time I hope and pray that it ends, it only seems to get worse.
Looking back at April, at least six terrorist incidents that started on the evening of April 12th in Riyadh’s Al-Faiha district. Terrorists barged into a villa and took refuge there. Police surrounded them and a shootout took place. One officer was killed and one terrorist was gunned down, but only after the carnage left a neighborhood in tatters: walls riddled with bullets, cars peppered with bullet holes, glass and blood on the asphalt. A day later, terrorists killed four policemen on the Riyadh-Qasim highway after stealing a police car. On the same day, authorities discovered two GMC trucks packed with explosives ready for a major terrorist attack.
On April 19th, terror suspects driving two other GMC trucks full of explosive content failed to stop at a checkpoint in Ramah, some 90 km from Riyadh, and police gave chase. The men abandoned their vehicles and managed to escape in a third truck. Authorities later found out that the two trucks were also rigged with enough explosive to wipe out an entire neighborhood. And who can forget April 21st, when a suicide bomber blew himself up along with the bomb-laden truck he was driving just outside the traffic police department, taking the lives of six people (including a child) and injuring 150 others?
Suicide bombings, GMC trucks packed with explosive, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades; to me it sounds more like the streets of Kabul or Fallujah, not Riyadh, Jeddah or Yanbu.
Each time I recall the terrorist incidents over the past year, I remember what a Saudi official told a group of guests in a foreign embassy gathering: “This is just a black cloud that will pass in time,” he said. That was a year ago, even before the November 8th Muhaya compound bombings and the mess we are seeing today. I wish I could see that same person again today to ask him what the weather forecast will be for next year. More black clouds and showers of truck bombs and rocket-propelled grenades?
One explanation for why all this is happening was brought up by the editor-in-chief of Al-Riyadh newspaper, Turki Al-Sudairi, on a program about determining the roots of the terrorist acts. He said that the people carrying out these attacks shared the ideology of the Juhaiman movement that seized the Grand Mosque in the 1970s. Their ideology included accusing others of being infidels and giving themselves a free hand to kill them, be it Westerners, whom they felt should be kicked out of the Arabian Peninsula, or the Muslim believer who does not follow their path. They disappeared in the 1980s and 1990s from the public eye and have again emerged with their destructive ideology.
But the question Al-Sudairi forgot to bring up is: What are we Saudis going to do about it? If we as a nation decline to look at the root causes, as we have for the past two decades, it is only a matter of time before another group of people with the same ideology springs up. Have we helped create these monsters? Our education system, which does not stress tolerance of other faiths, let alone tolerance of followers of other Islamic schools of thoughts, must be reevaluated from top to bottom.
Saudi culture itself and the fact that most of us do not accept other lifestyles and impose our own on other people is another. And that from the fourth to the twelfth grades we do not teach our children that there are other civilizations in the world, and that we are part of the global community, and only stress the Islamic empires over and over must also be reevaluated. And last, but certainly not least, the religious climate in the country must change, a matter stated by our own minister of Islamic affairs but that has remained a mere statement without implementation.
Raid Qusti writes for Arab News in Jeddah. Reprinted with permission.
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