Islamic terrorism, when writing about this conflict. Gold creates an Imagined community in which the West, particularly the United States and Israel, belong, and Palestinians and other supposed terrorist groups and organizations do not. Additionally, he creates an Imagined community of Jewish Israelis in the state of Israel (which he sees as encompassing what many others would deem Palestinian land), of which Palestinians are not a part. A firm supporter of Israel’s actions in the Occupied Territories, Gold uses representations of Wahhabism in an attempt to explain Palestinian aggression toward Israel.
Assuming the land in question belongs to Israel and rejecting Palestinian claims, Gold has a rationale for looking for alternative explanations for what he sees as a long history of pro-Palestinian terrorism directed against Israel. Dismissing claims that pro-Palestinian groups could be motivated by political and/or economic aims and goals, for example, wanting a functional economy and Palestinian statehood, Gold finds that religion, specifically radical Islam and more specifically Wahhabism, is to blame for inspiring and motivating anti-Israeli violence. Gold’s blaming of religion in general is evident in the following extract:
The United States and its allies can win the most spectacular military victories in Afghanistan; they can freeze terrorists’ bank accounts and cut off their supplies of weaponry; they can eliminate terrorist masterminds. But even taken together, such triumphs are not enough to remove the terrorist threat, for they do not get at the source of the problem. Terrorism, on the scale of the September 11 attacks, does not occur in a vacuum. People do not just decide spontaneously that they are going to hijack an aircraft, crash it into a building, and commit mass murder (and take their own lives) because of some political grievance or sense of economic deprivation. No, there is another critical component of terrorism that has generally been overlooked in the West: the ideological motivation to slaughter thousands of innocent people.8
Contrary to what Gold claims, history shows us that political grievances have certainly motivated many hijackings and other forms of violence. As a firm supporter of Israel, Gold does his best to convince readers that Palestinian violence is religiously motivated and that many pro-Palestinian groups are getting their inspiration from the radical Wahhabi ideology exported from Saudi Arabia.
David Commins, who is a prominent scholar and whose book, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, appears on bookshelves around the world, also provides a representation of Wahhabism worth closely considering.9 A professor of history, Commins provides a good example of an intellectual using Wahhabism to create an Imagined geography. Throughout his book Commins represents Wahhabism as a religion for backward, uncivilized, and antimodern people. Commins claims Saudi Arabia, which is beholden to its Wahhabi religious beliefs, is struggling to resist (Western-led) forces of change, namely liberalization/democratization. Saudi students studying abroad in Western nations are returning home with Western ideas about government and society. However, the kingdom’s steadfast adherence to Wahhabism is preventing it from embracing these changes. Displaying the kind of Orientalism Said first pointed to, Commins shares the premise with many political liberals and neoliberals that Western-inspired economic and social globalization is a natural and progressive process that Saudi Arabia should embrace. Commins in part blames the kingdom’s Wahhabi religious beliefs for resisting these changes. Representations like these help inspire and motivate Western policy- and decision-makers, should they ever decide to invade Saudi Arabia ‘for its own good’ and in the name of progress.
Renowned British-American historian Bernard Lewis, who is well known for his associations with neoconservatives and is a former advisor to the George W. Bush administration, also constructs the Middle East as a backward and antimodern space in need of progress. Echoing the foreign policy initiatives of the recent Bush administration and adopting the role of an intellectual conceptualized by authors like Edward Shils, Lewis’s representation suggests that Western nations have the responsibility of bringing modernity to traditional societies. Lewis blames what he terms the Islamic revivalist/awakening movement, of which Wahhabism is a key part, for the Middle East’s failure to become more democratic and free. Again we see an ethnocentric intellectual creating an unflattering imagined space of the Middle East encouraging Western intervention.
Understanding Wahhabism through a Feminist Lens
Moving away from the prominent views of influential, older white Western men for just a moment, it also worth considering some alternative representations of Wahhabism appearing in scholarly articles. Margaret Gonzalez-Perez provides an interesting representation through the lens of the Western feminist intellectual tradition.10 Understanding that her role as an intellectual is to draw attention to the injustices and wrongs perpetrated against women, she writes about the experiences of female suicide bombers, specifically those used by al-Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, all of which she categorizes as terrorist organizations. Gonzalez-Perez claims these terrorist organizations are using radical, violent, jihadist and un-Islamic interpretations of Islam to help persuade women to carry out suicide bombings. She blames Wahhabism, the writings of thirteenth-century Islamic theologian Ibn Taymiya, and key twentieth-century Islamic ideologues like Sayyid Qutb for providing these terrorist organizations with perverted interpretations of Islam.
Gonzalez-Perez’s representation is interesting because she assumes that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and al-Qaeda are terrorist organizations of the same kind. Gonzalez-Perez’s categorization of Hamas as a terrorist organization in particular is very interesting. While Dore Gold and many other pro-Israeli scholars and neoconservative intellectuals would certainly agree with this assessment, there are those who would reject this categorization and instead understand Hamas as primarily a resistance and welfare organization. For example, Khaled Hroub in Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide makes the point that Hamas has been the victim of persistent and prevailing negative misconceptions, reducing it to a mere terrorist group.11 The real Hamas, argues Hroub, is a Palestinian resistance movement and an educational and social welfare organization. Only a small part of the Hamas organization, namely its military wing Izzedin al-Qassam, is dedicated to violently resisting the Israeli occupation. It is also worth reading Zaki Chehab’s description of Hamas’s social welfare intiatives in his book Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of Militants, Martyrs and Spies.12
Gonzalez-Perez obviously has very different political views from supporters of the Palestinian resistance. If she did treat Hamas as part of the Palestinian resistance instead of categorizing it as a terrorist organization akin to al-Qaeda and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, then it is possible that she would not have drawn the same conclusions regarding the role played by Wahhabism in influencing these ‘terrorists.’ Rather than looking for a religious rationale, Gonzalez-Perez might otherwise be searching for political and economic reasons for Hamas’s use of female suicide bombers. The important point to be made here is that one’s political prejudices have implications for how one understands and represents Wahhabism.
It is also significant that Gonzalez-Perez’s representation relies on an assumption that particular interpretations of Islamic texts, like those she claims belong to the Wahhabi religious doctrine, are un-Islamic and that those interpreting these texts are not real Muslims. This is a premise popular among those providing negative portraits of Wahhabism. In reaching these conclusions, Gonzalez-Perez assumes there is an objective and truthful interpretation of Islam that does not promote violence and strictly prohibits suicide bombing. She writes:
The female suicide bombers of nominally Muslim groups like Hamas, the PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad], and Al Qaeda are no more Islamic than the Hindu Tamil women bombers of Sri Lanka or the communist female suicide bombers of the Kurdish Workers’ Party in Turkey. They are not Islamic martyrs nor any other manifestation of orthodox religious faith.13
To help bolster her case, Gonzalez-Perez provides an extensive list of authors she believes provide truthful and objective interpretations of Islam. She also adds her own interpretation of Islamic
