Middle East Focus: How the West Was Duped: Helping Fundamentalism from Yemen to Afghanistan and Back…………..

Arabia Deserta

How the West Was Duped: Helping Fundamentalism from Yemen to Afghanistan and Back…………..

“In his excellent exploration of Jihadism in Yemen (23-24 August), Ghaith Abdul-Ahad traces the rise of al-Qaida there back to a gradual process of radicalisation resulting from the return of generations of volunteer fighters from conflicts abroad: the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980s, through to the wars against the Taliban and the war in Iraq in 2003. But he fails to go back far enough. In the 1960s there was a serious conflict between the forces of radical Islamic fundamentalism centred in Saudi Arabia and secular Arab nationalism based in Nasser's Egypt. A proxy war was fought in Yemen and, fearful of losing access to the huge resources in the region, the British and Americans supported the Islamic fundamentalists……” The Guardian

The West supported the Saudis (and Jordanians) in the Yemen proxy war in the 1960s, a war between the Republican forces led by Abdullah al-Sallal and the royalist tribes loyal to the medieval Imamate. That war seriously bloodied the secular liberal Arab forces, the first defeat for the secular Arabs led by Nasser and a victory for the Saudi-Jordanian absolute monarchies. It probably helped plant the seeds of expanded fundamentalism. As the old song says, “A fool never learns”: the West did the same thing in Afghanistan later in the 1980s, to even greater disastrous results as we now know.

Many Egyptian right-wing Islamists, mainly Muslim Brothers or Ikhwan at the time, fled to Saudi Arabia during the 1950s and 1960s, where they were welcomed by the royal family as enemies of their enemy; Nasser’s secular “leftist” republic. They were welcomed by the Wahhabi royals and their ulema clergy political partners. In the long run, the investment in these wayward Egyptian fundamentalists proved profitable to the Wahhabis. Once Nasser was dead and with Sadat in power, the Islamists started to gain in Egypt. After Sadat died and the long Mubarak night descended on Egypt, the Islamists gained even more influence: just like in the Saudi model, the Islamists have a nearly free hand in education and social mores and the courts as long as they let the rulers rule and handle the money. Egypt today is a quasi-Wahhabi state where many women wear the burqa or niqab and polygamy is quite common (both unheard of in the secular days of Nasser or even King Farouk).
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