CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN ISLAMISTS IN THE REGIONAL AND GLOBAL CONTEXTS: WAHHABIS, MUSLIM BROTHERS, AND AL-QAEDA

The 1990–1991 Gulf War of the US-led coalition forces against Iraq had far-reaching global and regional implications. Islamists – that is, those for whom religion had become a part of political discourse, organizational affiliation and political struggle – sharply diverged in their assessments of that war. While the Wahhabis supported the Saudi government, which invited the US troops and their allies, the Muslim Brothers and the related Sahwa Movement in Saudi Arabia condemned the deployment of non-Muslim forces to the land of the two Holy Places and the war against ‘Muslim Iraq’ with the assis-tance of non-Muslim soldiers, as well as questioned the very legitimacy of the government of Saudi Arabia, which made such a decision. Previous dogmatic disagreements – such as those over attitudes towards the Sufis or the application of Sharia law – had not previously hindered the cooperation between Brothers and Wahhabis on the basis of the struggle against nationalism, communism, socialism, laicism, the penetration of culture and other Western values. Yet, the former dogmatic divisions deepened, and the politicization of Islam revealed the sharply anti-Western positions of the Islamists from among the Brothers and the Sahwa. The Sahwa movement in Saudi Arabia was defeated. But it was replaced by extremists from Al-Qaeda and other organizations that declared a global jihad against the United States and other Western countries and called to re-bel against the governments that were ‘serving the interests of the West,’ in-cluding in Saudi Arabia, which forfeited their Muslim legitimacy. The jihadist movement became a terrorist one. It was paradoxical, but true: jihadists had a certain social base among Salafis (Wahhabis) in a number of countries. Su-perficial socio-political reforms in Saudi Arabia did not change the situation. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in the United States delineat-ed the differences between the Islamists that were ready to cooperate with the West and jihadist terrorists who perceived the West as an enemy. The events of the Arab Spring did not change this situation. However, the struggle for leadership in the region turned into a confrontation between Saudi Arabia and its allies, on the one hand, and the coalition of Turkey, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood, on the other, which was accompanied by the fluctuations in the regional influence of one or the other side. This confrontation was tearing apart both the Middle East and the whole world. Only in ear-ly 2021 did the coalitions achieve some degree of consensus, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar seemed to have restored relations.