JK: Winds of Change.NET's Cairo correspondent Tarek Heggy (see his Winds article archive) reminds us that intelligence failures have happened before. This segment follows Part 1: "Dreams of the Arabs", Part 2: "A Word in the Palestinian Ear", and Part 3: "Rejecting Progress".
Thus Spoke My Eccentric Friend
by Tarek Heggy in Cairo, Egypt
When we were young Leftists in the second half of the Sixties, a peculiar friend of us became, amongst our group, known as "our eccentric friend" – was an exceptionally well-read Marxist. His world changed on June 5th, 1967, however, and he migrated to an adamant denial of all ideologies and a belief in "science and progress." During the past year, I began to put in writing his enthusiastic outpourings during our discussions, and the resulting article contains some of his observations taken down in the course of four meetings that took place within last month (August, 2004).
Part 4: MI-6's Intelligence Failure
Tonight, my eccentric friend was fond of asking awkward questions and speculating on what would have happened if history had taken a different course.
He started by asking us to envisage the following alternative scenario of events.
Nearly ninety years ago, he began, British intelligence was divided on itself between two schools of thought. The first, propounded by the India desk of MI-6, was that Britain should support Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, who was extending his dominion westwards across the Arabian Peninsula after capturing Riyadh in 1901. The most prominent advocate of this line was John (later Abdullah) Philby, father of the famous British mole Kim Philby. A senior MI-6 operative, the younger Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 when publicly revealed to have been a double agent for the KGB.
The second, propounded by the Egypt desk of MI-6, argued in favour of supporting Al-Sharif Hussein, who ruled Hijaz from Mecca, to ensure that he and not Ibn Saud would win the power struggle in the kingdom of the Arabs. The most prominent advocate of this line was T.E. Lawrence, immortalized in books and on film as Lawrence of Arabia.
If the second line had prevailed, my eccentric friend continued, Al-Sharif's descendant, the reigning Jordanian monarch Abdullah, would have today ruled over the Kingdom of Arabia, an area comprising what is now known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Had things worked out that way, Wahhabism would have been nipped in the bud and things would have been very different in the Arabian Peninsula.
However, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud's victory over his Hashemite rival and his successful takeover of most of the Arabian Peninsula, including the key cities of Najd and Hijaz, opened the door wide to the spread of Wahhabism. This extremist doctrine, based on the teachings of Ibn Taymeya, gained converts not only in the Arabian Peninsula but, thanks to petrodollars, throughout the world. Most of the Islamic centres and schools established in the last forty years in various parts of the world were built with a combination of Wahhabi zeal and an unlimited supply of oil money. Small wonder then that a serious student of Islamic jurisprudence will not find a trace of the Hanafi, Shafei or Malki doctrines or of the Shiite creed in these centres and schools.
After this lengthy expose, my eccentric friend proposed calling on British Intelligence to declare a period of mourning for its intelligence, which deserted it at such a crucial moment with consequences for the world at large.
Next - Part 5: What's In A Name?
For more of Tarek Heggy's writtings in English, please visit www.t-heggy-site-contents.org and for Tarek Heggy's writings in French please visit www.metransparent.com/authors/french/tarek_heggy.htm.