Safar al-Hawālī

Safar ibn ʿAbd ar-Rahmān al-Hawālī ( Arabic سفر بن عبد الرحمن الحوالي, DMG Safar b. ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān al-Ḥawālī ; born 1950) is a Saudi Islamic scholar and preacher who belongs to the so-called Sahwa group. In the 1990s he criticized the political cooperation between Saudi Arabia and the United States of America and dealt intensively with the apocalyptic prophecies of American dispensationalism and Christian Zionism in his writings . After the American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, he tried to mobilize Muslims to resist the occupying power.

Training and work as a scholar of Islam

Safar al-Hawālī comes from the town of Hawāla in the Baha Province in southwestern Arabia and belongs to the Ghāmid tribe, who have their traditional tribal area here. He first earned a bachelor's degree from the Islamic University of Medina and then studied at the Umm-al-Qura University in Mecca , where he obtained a master's degree in 1981. In his master's thesis, which was supervised by Muhammad Qutb , the brother of Sayyid Qutb , he dealt with secularism , its origins and effects on contemporary Muslims. The main purpose of the work was to reject secularism, which al-Hawālī and his teacher viewed as incompatible with Islam. Al-Hawālī stated in his book that secularism was equivalent to the Shirk fought against by Mohammed .

Subsequently, al-Hawālī - also with Muhammad Qutb - wrote a dissertation on "The Phenomenon of Postponement in Islamic Thought" ( Ẓāhirat al-irǧāʾ fī l-fikr al-islāmī ), which he completed between 1984 and 1986. In it he castigated the lax and indulgent attitude of his fellow Muslims towards politicians who do not adhere to Islam as a Murji'ite attitude and called for a "declaration of disbelief" ( takfīr ) by these politicians in the sense of Sayyid Qutb. The criticism was directed primarily against those Muslims who, like himself, classified themselves as Salafīya . But his book also contains many accusations against the Ash'arite and māturīditische theology. In particular, al-Hawālī made the influence of the Ash aarite theologian al- Juwainī responsible for the fact that a lax understanding of faith had prevailed in Sunni Islam. He also branded the distinction between essence and accidents, adopted by the Ashʿarites and Māturīdites from Greek philosophy, as the cause of a number of theological distortions in the realm of Sunni Islam.

After al-Hawālī had already taught at his university for several years, he was appointed head of the Department of Doctrine of the Faith ( ʿAqīda ) in 1988 . His lectures on questions of faith were widely disseminated outside of his university via audio cassettes . By the time he was arrested in September 1994, al-Hawālī had produced around 800 such audio tapes.

Criticism of Saudi foreign policy

Al-Hawālī attracted a lot of attention after the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990, when he gave a public lecture entitled “Take refuge in God” ( fa-firrū ilā Llāh ) the Saudi “Council of Great Scholars” ( Haiʾat kibār al -ʿUlamāʾ ) under the leadership of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Bāz criticized and complained about the erosion of the Islamic character of the Saudi state. The council had previously approved the decision of the Saudi king to set up American military bases in Saudi Arabia in a fatwa , invoking the principle of the Darūra . In his lecture on August 30, 1990, Al-Hawālī criticized the Council's report as a major mistake because, in his opinion, it misunderstood the political reality. He interpreted the stationing of American troops as a targeted attempt by the USA to bring the oil reserves of the Gulf region under its direct control and to control Islam and later destroy it. Al-Hawālī's lecture was distributed on cassette tapes inside and outside of Saudi Arabia and appeared a year later, along with others of his lectures, in a book entitled "Uncovering the Worries of Ummah Scholars " ( Kašf al-ġumma ʿan ʿulamāʾ al-umma ) . Al-Hawālī formulated his distrust of the USA and Europe in 1991 in another book entitled "Truths about the Gulf Crisis" ( Ḥaqāʾiq ḥaula azmat al-ḫalīǧ ). In it, he dealt extensively with the history of American politics in the Gulf region and expressed the view that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the crisis it created were in fact part of a larger American plan for domination of the region that dates back to the 1970s.

Al-Hawālī became so well known for his positions that in 1993 Samuel P. Huntington listed him as an Islamist theorist of the clash of civilizations in the journal Foreign Affairs . Even Osama bin Laden was referring to in his statements on al-Hawalis anti-American writings. However, his criticism of cooperation with the United States caused anger among the Saudi leadership. During the Gulf Crisis, he received a visit from a team from the Saudi intelligence service at his university who asked him not to comment publicly on Saudi-American relations in the future.

Together with Salmān al-ʿAuda and Nāsir al-ʿUmar, al-Hawālī founded a group of scholars in 1990 who called for political reforms based on Islam in the Saudi kingdom. The monarchy reacted to this in 1991 with the formation of a commission of five scholars from the "Council of Great Scholars", who were supposed to reject the claims and arguments of al-Hawālī and his colleagues on the basis of Islamic law. Al-Hawālī, however, was not dissuaded from his ideas and was one of the signatories of the "Memorandum of Council" ( muḏakkirat an-naṣīḥa ), which called for political reforms in the kingdom and was presented to the Saudi king in mid-1992.

Another point on which al-Hawālī criticized the Saudi leadership was its participation in the Madrid conference , which was part of the Middle East peace process . Al-Hawālī viewed the peace process as an attempt by Israel to establish regional hegemony. From his point of view, the creation of the Palestinian Authority was aimed at diverting the anger of the people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip away from Israel and creating disunity among the Palestinians. In his political-theological study "Jerusalem between the true and the false promise: the Islamic standpoint on the Arab-Jewish peace project" ( al-Quds baina l-waʿd al-ḥaqq .. wa-l-waʿd al-muftarā: al-mauqif al-islāmī min mašrūʿ as-salām al-ʿarabī-al-yahūdī ), which was published as a book in Cairo in 1994, al-Hawālī also tried to refute the Old Testament, Jewish and Christian prophecies for Jerusalem, which he believed to be the real reason for the American support for Israel was considering.

Ban on teaching and imprisonment

From 1992 the relationship between the Saudi monarchy and the Sahwa group became increasingly tense. Interior Minister Prince Naif ibn Abd al-Aziz sent a letter to ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Bāz in September 1993 complaining about certain "transgressions" ( taǧāwuzāt ) in the lectures of al-Hawālīs and al-ʿAudas and the "Council of the great scholars "asked to examine them. After the council met in at-Tā'if and discussed the case, Ibn Bāz confirmed in a letter in reply to the Minister of the Interior on September 20 that the alleged matters were "transgressions". He recommended that the two scholars be encouraged to practice the tauba and that they should not repeat what they said. If the two scholars agreed, that would end the case. If they refuse, however, their teaching and public preaching permission would have to be withdrawn. Al-Hawālī and al-ʿAudah were summoned to the Interior Ministry that same month and reprimanded for their "transgressions" without being given the opportunity to defend themselves. Since the two scholars were unwilling to sign the confession they asked for and to forego political statements, they were banned from teaching and preaching as recommended by Ibn Bāz.

After a series of rallies in Buraida and Riyadh , the Saudi Interior Ministry had al-Hawālī arrested in September 1994 along with other preachers from the Sahwa group, citing Ibn Bāz's letter from the previous year. The arrest of the two scholars was not tacitly accepted by Islamist circles. At the end of 1994, Osama bin Laden wrote a letter to Ibn Bāz in which he made serious accusations for having made the arrest of al-Hawālī by the Saudi regime possible in the first place with his fatwa . In his declaration of war against the Americans on August 23, 1996, bin Laden referred to al-Hawālī and demanded his release. Ibn Baaz, the arrest of al-Hawali and al-'Auda was very unpleasant, already published in late September 1994, a fatwa in which he stated that these scholars honorable Sunni were scholars and therefore not as a heretic ( mubtadi'a ) or Kharijites maligned should.

Release, "day of wrath"

On June 25, 1999, al-Hawālī was released and allowed to resume teaching at the university. In late 2000 or early 2001, a few months after the outbreak of the Second Intifada , he published his book "Day of Wrath" (Arabic: Yaum al-Ġaḍab , "Day of Wrath"), an angry pamphlet against Christian Zionism. In it he declared the Middle East peace process to have failed in view of the shots fired at Muslims in the al-Aqsa mosque and responded to the apocalyptic interpretations of Israel in Christian-Zionist circles, which he turned against these groups themselves. Al-Hawālī dealt intensively in the book with the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation and tried to interpret the prophecies contained therein in such a way that they confirm Islam's claim to truth. For example, he said that the new Jerusalem of Rev 21: 2 can be identified with Mecca and the two evil animals in Rev 13 with Christian and Jewish Zionism . He paid particular attention to the vision of the 2,300 day desolation of the sanctuary in Daniel 8:14. He said that the beginning of this devastating time could be identified with the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem in 1967, and calculated its end for 2012. At this point in time he also expected the end of the State of Israel. The book was soon translated into English and distributed on various websites in both its Arabic and English versions.

Reactions to the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war

On October 15, 2001, a few weeks after the September 11 attacks , al-Hawālī published an open letter to the American President George W. Bush , in which he emphasized the traditional sympathy of the Arabs for the United States, but at the same time his disappointment on the change in American politics since the 1970s. The letter also stated that the shock that Muslims felt when they heard of the attacks was accompanied by a "tremendous wave of friends". After 60 American intellectuals had addressed the Muslim world under the auspices of the Institute for American Values with the declaration “What we're fighting for”, al-Hawālī wrote a response which he called “Letter from Mecca. What we defend ”( Risāla min Makka. ʿAn aiyi šaiʾ nudāfiʿ ) published on his website. In it he made a sweeping blow against Western philosophies and social theories and mocked the dispensationalist Armageddon mania.

According to a report by the Middle East Media Research Institute , al-Hawālī warned the Americans in an al-Jazeera broadcast in July 2002 against re-stationing troops on the Arabian Peninsula. From April 2003 he headed the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign (Arabic: al-Ḥamla al-ʿālamīya li-muqāwamat al-ʿudwān ), an international association of Muslims who wanted to take action against the American invasion of Iraq. However, the organization is also considered an extension of al-Qaeda . In November he signed an open letter with twenty other high-ranking Islamic clergymen describing the Iraqis' resistance to the American occupation as legitimate jihad .

Mediation efforts in Saudi Arabia

With regard to the use of force, al-Hawālī's position was ambivalent: while he advocated it abroad, he condemned it in his own country. When 34 people died in a series of suicide attacks by al-Qaeda in Riyadh on May 12, 2003 , he signed a statement with other important members of the Sahwa group condemning the attacks. Asia Times Online reported on November 21, 2003 of a meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah ibn Abd al-Aziz at which al-Hawālī offered to mediate between the House of Saud and the terrorist groups in order to avoid further bloodshed. On June 10, 2005, al-Hawālī was admitted to the al-Noor hospital in Mecca with a cerebral haemorrhage and operated on there.

Call for dialogue with the IS organization

In 2018, al-Hawālī published a new book entitled "The Muslims and Western Civilization" ( al-Muslimūn wa-l-ḥaḍāra al-ġarbīya ), which is over 3000 pages. In it he called for a dialogue with the IS organization and encouraged the resuscitation of suicide bombings as a means of jihad .

Fonts

• al-ʿAlmānīya, našʾatuhā wa-taṭauwaruhā wa-āṯāruhā fī l-ḥayāt al-islāmīya al-muʿāṣira , al-Hawālī's master's thesis on secularism, RAR file
• Ḥaqāʾiq ḥaula azmat al-Ḫalīǧ (o. O. 1991) digitized
• Ẓāhirat al-irǧāʾ fī l-fikr al-islāmī (Cairo 1996), al-Hawālī's dissertation PDF file
• Šarḥ al-ʿAqīda aṭ-Ṭaḥāwīya , commentary on the confession of aṭ-Ṭaḥāwī

literature

• Mansoor Jassem Alshamsi: Islam and political reform in Saudi Arabia: the quest for political change and reform. Routledge, New York, 2011.
• Mamoun Fandy: “Safar al-Hawali: Saudi Islamist or Saudi nationalist?” in Islam and Christian-Muslim relations 9 (1998) 5-21.
• Mamoun Fandy: Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent . New York: Palgrave 1999. pp. 61-87.
• Jean-Pierre Filiu: Apocalypse in Islam . Transl. by MB DeBevoise. University of California Press, Berkeley et al. a., 2011. pp. 107-110.
• Stéphane Lacroix: Awakening Islam. The politics of religious dissent in contemporary Saudi Arabia. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2011.
• Daniel Lav: Radical Islam and the revival of medieval theology . Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2012. pp. 86-108.
• Stefan Reichmuth: “The second Intifada and the 'Day of Wrath': Safar al-Hawali and his anti-Semitic reading of biblical prophecy” in Die Welt des Islams 46 (2006) 331–351.
• Guido Steinberg : Saudi Arabia: Politics, History, Religion . CH Beck, Munich, 2004. pp. 75-77.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam . 2012, p. 86.
2. ↑ See Alshamsi: Islam and political reform. 2011, p. 59.
3. ↑ See Alshamsi: Islam and political reform. 2011, pp. 67, 69.
4. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam. 2012, p. 87.
5. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam. 2012, p. 88.
6. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam. 2012, p. 101.
7. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam. 2012, p. 103.
8. ↑ See Alshamsi: Islam and political reform. 2011, pp. 36, 213.
9. ↑ See Reichmuth: “The second Intifada”. 2006, p. 350.
10. ↑ See Alshamsi: Islam and political reform. 2011, p. 84.
11. ↑ See Lacroix: Awakening Islam . 2011, p. 160.
12. ↑ See Fandy: Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent . 1999. p. 70.
13. ↑ See Alshamsi: Islam and political reform. 2011, p. 84.
14. ↑ See Fandy: Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent . 1999. p. 67.
15. ↑ See Samuel P. Huntington: “The Clash of Civilizations?” In Foreign Affairs 72 (1993) 22-49. Here p. 35.
16. ↑ See http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/military-july-dec96-fatwa_1996/
17. ↑ See Alshamsi: Islam and political reform . 2011, p. 117.
18. ↑ See Alshamsi: Islam and political reform . 2011, p. 118.
19. ↑ See Reichmuth: “The second Intifada”. 2006, p. 350 and Alshamsi: Islam and political reform . 2011, p. 118.
20. ↑ See Alshamsi: Islam and political reform. 2011, p. 119.
21. ↑ See Alshamsi: Islam and political reform. 2011, pp. 120f.
22. ↑ See the speeches of Osama bin Laden. Edited by Marwan Abou-Taam and Ruth Bigalke. Hugendubel, Munich, 2006. p. 35.
23. ↑ See archived copy ( memento of October 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) and the English translation of the text at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/military-july-dec96-fatwa_1996/
24. ↑ See Alshamsi: Islam and political reform . 2011, p. 133.
25. ↑ See Lacroix: Awakening Islam. 2011, p. 240.
26. ^ David Cook : Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2005. pp. 48f.
27. ↑ See Reichmuth: “The second Intifada”. 2006, p. 334f.
28. ↑ See Reichmuth: "The second Intifada". 2006, p. 334.
29. ↑ See Reichmuth: "The second Intifada". 2006, p. 348.
30. ↑ See http://sunnahonline.com/ilm/contemporary/0025.htm
31. ↑ http://americanvalues.org/catalog/pdfs/what-are-we-fighting-for.pdf
32. ↑ Memento at archive.org ( Memento from August 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
33. ↑ See Reichmuth: "The second Intifada". 2006, pp. 336, 349 and Trimondi: War of Religions. 2006, p. 399.
34. ↑ http://www.memri.org/report/en/print700.htm
35. ↑ Cf. Reuven Paz: "The“ Global Campaign Against Aggression ”: The Supreme Council of Global Jihad?" in PRISM Occasional Papers PDF ( Memento from February 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ).
36. ↑ See Raid Qusti: "Saudi Scholars Say Resistance in Iraq Is Jihad" in Arab News November 7, 2004 http://www.arabnews.com/node/257707
37. ↑ Syed Saleem Shahzad: "House of Saud plays a radical card" in Asia Times online November 21, 2003 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EK21Ak02.html
38. ↑ See Hassan Adawi: "Al-Hawali Recovering in Hospital After Stroke" in Arab News June 11, 2005. http://www.arabnews.com/node/268355
39. ↑ Hudā aṣ-Ṣāliḥ: Ḥīna daʿā Safar al-Ḥawālī ilā l-ḥiwār maʿa Dāʿiš fī Makka! in al-Arabiya.net August 2, 2018.