How charity begins in Saudi Arabia
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - With the Pakistan government approving a US$100 million program to reform about 8,000 religious schools, or madrassas, by introducing subjects taught at normal schools, the spotlight once again falls on the seminaries, and twin accusations that they turn out radical Islamic students and draw funds from charities associated with terrorism.

Pakistan's executive committee of the National Economic Council approved the funding "to bridge the gap between formal and madrassa education", according to Finance Minister Shuakat Aziz. Aziz said that formal education would be introduced in 8,000 private seminaries and that the government would provide them with grants, salaries for teachers, the cost of text books, teacher training and equipment.

Under the new madrassa program, formal subjects including English, mathematics, social studies and general science would be introduced from primary to secondary levels, while English, economics, Pakistani studies and computer science would be introduced at high school level, Aziz said.

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf has for some time campaigned for the reform of the religious schools. But the campaign largely failed after madrassa leaders and Islamist organizations rejected government legislation requiring the schools to register and broaden their curricula beyond rote Koranic learning.

Under the madrassa reform program, a special committee will be constituted, headed by a government functionary, which will oversee and look after education, financial matters and policies.

The program was drafted on the advice of the United States government, which has also advised other Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia.

According to a senior official in Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, US authorities are concerned that private Islamic charities finance the madrassas, where, according to them, radical Wahhabi theology is taught promoting militancy and jihadi sentiment among Muslim youth. Certainly, many of the Taliban who took control of Afghanistan in 1996 had emerged from Pakistan's madrassas.

In an attempt to break this nexus, the US government initially targeted the charities, and a number of prominent ones were banned, including the al-Rasheed Trust of Pakistan, the al-Akhtar Trust (Pakistan) and the al-Haramain Foundation, a world-wide Islamic body based in Saudi Arabia.

When these bans did not prove effective in bringing the madrassas under control, after detailed discussions with the leadership of different Muslim countries, US authorities decided that it would be better for the local government's role in the Islamic institutes to be made stronger. Under this idea, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are the first two countries to take concrete steps in this direction.

Change will not come without still resistance, though. The Islamic institutes believe that in the entire Muslim history, they have always remained free from government intervention and have functioned independently. Muslim charities, the main component of Islamic economics, have been the financial source for the institutions, never government funding. The institutions argue that it is this financial and political freedom that has allowed them to keep Islam's jurisprudence free from the whims of political rulers.

Islamic charities
After September 11, the US came down hard on Islamic charities as they were suspected of channeling funds around the world in support of al-Qaeda. Initially, all charities run by Wahhabis were thoroughly investigated as Osama bin Laden subscribes to this particular branch of fundamentalist Islam. Chief among these charities was the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. Families of the victims of the September 11 attacks, in which 15 of the 19 suspected hijackers were Saudis, filed a lawsuit accusing several Saudi charities - including al-Haramain - of bankrolling terrorism.

On March 11, 2002, then treasury secretary Paul O'Neill issued a statement saying: "Today, on the six-month anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we take a new step in war on terrorist financing, making our first joint designation of a financial supporter of terrorism. Today we are blocking the accounts of the Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina branches of the Saudi Arabia-based al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. While the Saudi headquarters for this private charitable entity is dedicated to promoting Islamic teachings, we and our Saudi Arabian allies have determined that the Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina branches of al-Haramain have been engaged in supporting terrorist activities and terrorist organizations such as al-al-Qaeda, AIAI [al-Itihaad al-Islamiya], and others.

"Few deceits are more reprehensible than the act of collecting charity from well-intentioned donors, and then diverting those funds to support hatred and cruelty. As I said during my visit to the Gulf, misusing charity funds to support terrorism harms the people who gave the donation, harms the people who should have received it and is dangerous to us all. Organizations that pervert the name of charity are an affront to us all, and we will find them, expose them, and shut them down. Today the Saudi government is joining us in this blocking action. We have had significant cooperation in blocking accounts of those named by the United States, and our European allies have made designations of their own. As the first joint blocking we've undertaken, today's action is a sign of the growing strength of the anti-terror coalition, appropriate to mark the six-month anniversary of the September 11 attacks ..."

However, after several months of follow-up investigations, alleged links between al-Haramain Foundation and al-Qaeda were found to be tenuous. Even the Washington Times published a correction in its November 24, 2003 edition: "The Times, in its September 15 editions, reported that al-Haramain was listed in a Presidential Order in 2001 allowing the United States to block the resources of individuals and institutions determined to be involved in possible terrorists acts, and that al-Haramain allegedly has suspected ties with al Qaeda. The Times, in its September 19, 2003 editions, had an editorial discussing the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc (USA) as an example of 'suspicious Saudi charities'. Al-Haramain (Saudi Arabia) has had branches at various places around the world. The branches in Somalia and Bosnia were closed at the demand of the United States, which asserted that those two branches were tied to al-Qaeda. On March 11, 2002, treasury secretary Paul O'Neill stated that the Saudi headquarters is dedicated to promoting Islamic teachings. The Ashland, Oregon-based al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc (USA) was not mentioned in a Presidential Order in 2001 or any other Presidential Order regarding possible terrorists acts. The al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc (USA) has not been identified as being involved in actual or possible terrorists acts or with having any ties to al-Qaeda. The Times regrets any inference to the contrary in the article."

This followed a report that US authorities had filed criminal charges against a Saudi student who ran a Montreal-based Internet site that was allegedly used to recruit and raise money for Islamic terrorists. Charges of providing material support to terrorism were filed in the US District Court in Boise against Sami Omar al-Hussayen, 34, a computer student at the University of Idaho. Although the indictment didn't identify the official who registered the site, registration records show it was Soliman al-Buthe, a Saudi businessman who helped establish the Oregon branch in the US in 1997. Al-Buthe appears on an Federal Bureau of Investigation watch list concerning those with financial dealings that might involve terrorism. 

Asia Times Online spoke to al-Buthe, who is a private citizen and serves as a board member of the former US affiliate, al-Haramain International Foundation, Inc (USA), based in Ashland, Oregon, US. His comments in this interview are not to be construed as those of a board member, manager or any kind of official with managerial control over the head office of al-Haramain.

ATol: You are a board member of the al-Haramain Foundation. Could you tell us a bit about it.

Al-Buthe: The hierarchy of al-Haramain has always been a public document, even available on its web-site [the site currently cannot be accessed]. The patron is the Minister of Islamic Affairs [Saudi Arabia], and the general manager, Sheikh Aqil al-Aqil, has had a distinguished career in charitable services. [Since this interview, Saudi Arabia has dismissed Sheikh al-Aqil. No official explanation was given for the decision. But one press report said that some of the organization's collection boxes had been found in the possession of recently arrested suspected Saudi militants.]

ATol: How do you get money for your operations?

Al-Buthe: Private donations from generous Saudis have sustained our operations. All of our active fundraising is done in the kingdom. While we are a private foundation, many government officials have contributed to our programs.

ATol: It is a general perception that Salafi Muslims use these organizations to preach their theories of Wahhabism? Is this correct?

Al-Buthe: If you were to ask 100 people from 100 different countries to define what a Wahhabi is, you would very likely get 100 different answers. This is because the Wahhabi ideology exists more in the imaginations of people than it does in the real world. Al-Sahwkani and al-San'ani were leading scholars of the Zaidi Shi'ite sect who lived in Yemen during the 18th and 19th centuries. Nevertheless, many Yemeni Sunnis who follow the Shafi'i school of thought accuse anyone who follows these two scholars of being "Wahhabis". Likewise, we find that Brailvies in India accuse Deobandis of being "Wahhabis", while the Deobandis in turn call the Ahli Hadith in India "Wahhabis". During British rule in India, liberation movements that sprang up at the turn of the last century were accused of being "Wahhabis" by the courts. In the Caucasus, all Islamic movements were labeled "Wahhabi" by the Soviets, regardless of their ideological orientation. In Saudi Arabia, the Shi'ite minority belong to two sects - the Imamiyyah and the Ismailiyyah - while the Sunni majority follow any of their four orthodox schools of thought, namely the Hanbali, Shafi'i, Hanafi and Maliki schools.

The imams in the Prophet's mosque in Medina have at one time or another been followers of different schools of thought. There was Sheikh Muhammad Hasan, a Shafi'i of Ethiopian descent, Sheikh Muhammad Thani, a Maliki of Nigerian descent, Sheikh Muhammad Ayyub, a Hanafi from Burma [Myanmar], and Sheikh Abd al-'Aziz bin Salih, a Hanbali native of Central Arabia. Few people ever bothered to make a distinction between these imams on account of their various schools of thought. In fact, few of them even bothered to find out which schools of thought they followed, because there are really no substantial differences between them. The Sunni schools are not comparable to the Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox denominations in Christianity.

The term "Wahhabi" was first used as a label to describe those who followed the 18th century scholar Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab. In truth, Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab did not come with any new school of thought. In fact, he was a typical Hanbali [the school followed by most native Saudis]. He did not call to anything that Sunni scholars had not been calling towards for ages. What set the followers of Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab apart from the others was their ardor in prohibiting what they considered heretical innovations in religion and their staunch condemnation of many superstitious practices that were widespread among the Muslims of their time, like the wearing of amulets and the seeking of blessings from presumably sacred rocks and trees.

ATol: Why are Muslim charities being banned by the US one by one?

Al-Buthe: It is all about domestic and international politics, and as two recent reports by the UN and the General Accounting Office of the US Congress show, US policies are not so successful. This political aspect is the nature of the work. Charities often carry out their humanitarian work on the battlefield. They engage in activities like evacuating and treating the wounded, aiding refugees, assisting those fleeing from the hostilities, and minimizing the suffering of the civilians who are caught in the crossfire. They cannot do these things without the cooperation of the belligerent parties.

After September 11, the US decided that all the freedom fighters from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir etc and those who provided relief work in any of these hotspots were potential suspects in the "war on terror". Indeed, on September 11, 2001, it was widely reported that President [George W] Bush told his top advisors in the White House that he wanted to go after the terrorists' money. With that approval and unlimited budget, they began a world-wide effort at identifying money trails, usually through charities and demanded US banks and foreign countries monitor, freeze or even confiscate suspicious banking.

US officials says that it is not a war against Muslim charities and that, indeed, they have designated a few non-Muslim charities from the Spanish Basque region, Ireland and South America as terrorists since September 11 as well. But the logic is the same. When the US wants to please any foreign government, whether Israel, Spain, the UK, Columbia or any ally, it uses the power of designation to help that country stop money flowing to various groups.

ATol: What is the history of Islamic charity organizations?

Al-Buthe: It is all about the religious obligation to donate, primarily sadaqah and zakat, the religious requirement for all Muslim to give two-and-a-half percent of their assets held for one year in charity. Since the beginning of Islam, it was essentially a full-time job for someone to manage the collection and distribution of this money to eligible categories of recipients. In fact, as evidence of the need to organize the work in a professional manner, one of the eight categories of eligible recipients of zakat is the one who administers it [amil]. If it did not need its own workers to run it, it would not likely have been a category.

ATol: Why is id necessary to establish offices of these organizations in Europe and America?

Al-Buthe: Since the 20th century, Islam has been the fastest-growing religion in the West, not only through immigration from Muslim countries but also through voluntary conversions by Europeans and Americans. To deal with the needs of their growing communities, Muslims in the West had many needs: to build centers and schools; translate and publish the Koran, Hadith and other religious books into English and a number of languages; educate their fellow countrymen on Islam; and other priorities for keeping their religion growing in a non-Muslim world. They have turned to us, in the birthplace of Islam, as a source not only for money but also religious knowledge and guidance. In order to manage the work in countries throughout the West, we identified local people who would be the best representatives for Islam to their fellow countrymen.

ATol: What has been the impact of the ban on such organizations as al-Haramain?

Al-Buthe: For al-Haramain, in non-Muslim countries, the primary impact has been the delay or closure of da'wah activities such as book distributions, translations into foreign languages of Islamic books and centers to educate non-Muslim about Islam. In developing countries, schools, orphanages, hospitals have been closed or scaled back. In many cases, construction of new mosques and other projects has been curtailed. In the case of US Muslim charities, we do not have any first-hand information, but this article sheds light on the difficulties they have faced with the US bans. [Al-Buthe refers to a report by the Qatari news service alJazeera outlining the hardships suffered by Muslim charities in the US]

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