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Get Technical: Dichotomy a

contradictory or

conflicting

division or split.

MMXIX/MMXX / copyright 2003. A. Frye

Chapter

22

Under the Crescent Moon The Islamist Revolution

Conflicts at the Crossroads of the World

As you recall dear reader, at one time the Islamic world was a great cultural and political entity. Arab caliphs and Ottoman sultans spread the faith of Mohammed from Morocco to Malaysia, from the Iberian Peninsula to the hearts of Africa and Central Asia. Islam served as a unifying political force. After a medieval Arab empire collapsed in war and civil chaos, the Ottoman Turks created a new Islamic empire and caliphate between 1300 and 16001, but by the 19th century, as we have already seen, it was the turn of the Turks to suffer the cyclical disintegration of their once mighty empire. After World War I, the Turkish Empire collapsed and with that, the last caliph was deposed as well. Many observers – some of them Middle Eastern leaders like Ataturk and the Ba’athists - thought that Islam as a political ideal was a relic of the past. However, the dormant political power of Islam began to resurrect itself in the mid-20th century as Europe’s remaining Middle Eastern colonies regained independence. Religion and State have long been united in Islam; the separation of religion and the state is a relatively new and decidedly western idea. The Quran was a prescription for a just and orderly society. So it is no surprise that the Islamic world has been conflicted about modern, secular European political theories. Princeton historian Bernard Lewis writes:

“The Founder of Islam (Mohammed) was his own [emperor], and founded his own state…he did not therefore create – or need to create – a church. The dichotomy of king and church, so crucial in the history of Western Christendom, has no equivalent in Islam. During Mohammed’s lifetime, the Muslims became at once a political and religious community, with the Prophet as head of state…God’s approval of their cause was made clear to them in the form of victory and empire in this world… When Mohammed died in 632, his spiritual and prophetic mission…was completed. What remained was the religious task of spreading God’s revelation until finally all the world accepted it. This was to be achieved by extending the authority and thus also the membership of the community which embraced the true faith and upheld God’s law… In the experience of the first Muslims, as preserved and recorded for later generations, religious truth and political

1 Powerful Muslim states also existed in Mameluke Egypt (c.1100-1500), Safavid Persia (c. 1500-1700)

and India (c.1300-1750), but after 1517 the Turks were the Caliphs or protectors of Islam.

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power were indissolubly associated; the first sanctified the second, the second sustained the first. The Ayatollah Khomeini once remarked that ‘Islam is politics or it is nothing’...(though) not all Muslims would go that far.”2

In the 19th century, some modernizing leaders had argued that Islam could embrace the western ideals of tolerance, democracy, and technology. In Egypt (Mehmet Ali in 1805), Iran (the Pahlavi shahs after 1920), Turkey (Ataturk in 1923), and Pakistan (under Jinnah in 1947), nominally Muslim leaders rejected shari'ah and embraced modernization and westernization. Arguing against the modernist trend, traditionalist Muslim intellectuals warned that the secular and material basis of western society was antithetical and, ultimately, heretical from a truly Muslim point of view. This division between Modernists (who seek accommodation between Islam and western ideals) and Islamists (who reject most western culture and political theories in favor of a theocratic state)3 has led to deep rifts in Islam; the most violent Islamists – the Jihadis – call for holy war against the West.4 To understand the modern Islamic world it is necessary to understand that Islam is at a crossroads; it is in the midst of a civil war of ideas that often has real, physical, political, and violent effects. Revival and Revolution One of the first leading modern Islamist theorists came from British India. Dr. Mohammed Iqbal (1876-1938), a poet and intellectual who had studied in London,

argued that western science owed its true origin to medieval Islam. Iqbal said that Islam, like Christianity, saw scientific knowledge as an expression of God. However, he believed that the secularizing West had abandoned God and falsely separated earthly life from spiritual life, a division which Islam does not recognize. For Islamists like Iqbal, the great problem is secularization and philosophical materialism. Individual relativism in the area of ethics is not only heresy, but unjust and destabilizing to society and should be rejected. As Professor Lewis notes, “The very notion of something that is separate or separable from religious authority is totally alien to Islamic thought and

practice,” and he notes that the word “secular” originally did not even exist in Arabic.5 Iqbal inspired Muslims with a vision of theocracy saying, "Islam is not a church. It is a state conceived as a contractual organism." In other words, Islam is a social contract. Against the relativism and pluralism of modern western liberal democratic society, Iqbal declared that, for Muslim societies, Islam was an imperative, not an alternative. Iqbal predicted that the West would self-destruct, a statement that seemed prophetic after the First World War.

2 Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam 6-8. 3 Note the difference between Islam or Muslims (a religion with much variety) and the Islamists who have

a specific agenda regarding politics in the Islamic world. 4 “Jihad” can be translated as “struggle,” or it can be rendered as “war”; while many prefer to describe

jihad as a spiritual struggle, Many Quranic verses do use the word in the context of war, and Muslims have

historically interpreted them as verses about just war theory in defense of Islamic lands, or Dar-al-Islam

(the “House of Islam”).. Theologically it is used by some imams to refer to the struggle toward the

inevitable global victory of Islam. Perhaps both interpretations have validity since in Islam there is no

Cartesian separation of this world and the world of the spirit; indeed, Arabic has no word for secular.

However, both the Quran and Hadith (Muslim commentaries on Quranic tradition) forbid murder of

innocents during jihad. 5 Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam 10.

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Big Thinker

Iqbal’s intellectual arguments regarding the decadence of the West and the superiority of Islam began to spread throughout Islamic schools and universities and led to the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 by a 22 year old teacher, Hassan Banna. The Brotherhood spread the message that the Muslim world would

create a just society only through shari'ah, that Islam was a total worldview considering no toleration of half measures, that the West must be expelled from the Muslim world, and that pro-Western Muslims were heretical. The Brotherhood founded schools, established charities, encouraged Quranic studies, built factories, and engaged in political action both in British occupied Egypt and eventually in other Arab regions. By the 1930s, The Brotherhood had organized along military lines and collaborated with the Nazis against the pro-Western Egyptian king and his British protectors. By 1945, the Brotherhood had grown to half a million members, though Banna was assassinated by Egyptian officials in 1949. A few

years later, after Brotherhood members fired shots at Egypt’s secularist dictator Col. Nasser, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq staged reprisals against the Brotherhood. But the organization survived underground, and many of its leaders found refuge in oil-rich and Wahhabist6 Saudi Arabia. Thousands of Brothers became teachers and leaders in the expanding Saudi state. The West, focused on the Cold War, paid little attention to the Brotherhood until the late 1980s.7 In Pakistan, Abdul Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), a scholar, professor, and writer, declared that the West wanted to destroy Islam and called for universal jihad against all things Western. While they were not able to take over Pakistan, Mawdudi’s group, the Jamaat-i-Islami, pressured Pakistan’s secular leaders and elites to sponsor Islamic madrasahs, or schools, and to enforce shari'ah law. Mawdudi’s call for jihad echoed throughout the Islamic world. One of the most influential Islamist intellectuals behind the Islamic revolution was Sayyid Qutb of Egypt (1906-1966). Qutb had originally flirted with the ideals of western democracy and Arab nationalism and had supported Egypt’s Nasser. But as a

young man studying in America, he had been horrified by the “decadence” of the West.8 On his return to Egypt, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, got caught up in Nasser’s repression of the Brotherhood, and was imprisoned 1956. Heavily influenced by Wahhibism and Mawdudi, Qutb wrote a massive commentary on the Quran that has become the

inspiration for Islamist jihadis to this day. Qutb argued that the Quran taught war against anything that threatened the unity of Muslim society and that Islam and western

civilization were on a collision course. He condemned western materialism and secularism as well as Marxist ideas. Qutb argued that the Muslim community (the ummah) would only flourish if it returned to a cohesive society based on shari'ah. The most powerful evidence of western treachery

6 Wahhabi Islam is a strict and xenophobic interpretation of Sunni Islam that originated in the 1700s as a

reaction against foreign interference in the Islamic world; it is the official doctrine of Islam in the Saudi

kingdom. They are a branch of the larger Salafist movement of strict Sunni Muslims that call for revival

and renewal of Islam, both religiously and politically. 7 Washington Post article on the Brotherhood, 9-11-04; the Brotherhood operates in over 70 countries,

including in the USA where its college groups are on 150 campuses. 8 The strict (and somewhat naive) Qutb saw this so-called “decadence” as a student at Northern Colorado

Teachers College in Greeley, Colorado in the 1950’s, a town so quiet and conservative that one

commentator at the time warned that “one could die of boredom.” Qutb was especially shocked by coed

church dances and socials.

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Big Idea

for Qutb was American support of Israel. He called on the “pure remnant” of Islam to rise up and save the Dar al-Islam. Nasser had Qutb executed by hanging in 1966, but his death, or martyrdom, only increased his prestige, and his ideas seemed to have even greater weight after Nasser was defeated by the Israelis in 1967 – a sign of Allah’s displeasure at the secularist Nasser. By the 1970s, many Muslims once again saw Islam as a political ideology, not merely a personal faith. The Islamic Revolution coalesced around the following ideas: 1. The Quran is the basis for law, or shari'ah, and includes the revival of the

ulema, the role of Muslim religious-judicial scholars in creating a just society based on Islam. There can be no separation of the spiritual, cultural, political, and moral aspects of humans in Muslim society.

2. All Muslims are equal in the eyes of Allah, thus shari'ah promotes equality and justice; however, the divine nature of shari'ah means that individualism is not as important as obedience to Allah or the good of the community. 3. They rejected both Marxist and Western secular democracy as inappropriate for Muslim society. Said jihadi hero Osama bin Laden, “You (America) are the nation who…separates religion from your policies…you are the worst civilization in the history of mankind.”9 In fact, modern, Western culture is rejected as alienating man from Allah, a rift to be restored by the creation of a just society based on the tenets of Islam. The West is seen as degenerate and ultimately lacking any morality, leading to the Islamist moral resolve to fight a protracted struggle against the West. It doesn’t help that the Middle East remains ignorant of the West, receiving much of its perception via Hollywood’s worst, most garish output; the entire Arab world only translates 330 foreign books annually, one-fifth the translations of tiny Greece.10 Modernists of the pro-Western, pro-democratic, or Marxist types were, as Qutb had taught, traitors. 4. Islamists were hostile toward any foreign presence in Islamic lands, especially the geographic presence of Israel in the heart of the Islamic region. With the demise of the USSR, the United States is often targeted as the leader of foreign interference. This interference includes the influence of "decadent" western cultural values and characteristics offensive to the moral code of Islam, especially those concerning women’s roles, morality, and materialism, and what many Muslims see as "economic imperialism," the flexing of American and European financial muscle in Middle Eastern and other Muslim regions. 5. They proclaimed the concept of Pan-Islamism, or the unity or brotherhood of all Muslims (some optimistically thought that Sunni and Shia could unite against the West). The West provided a focus of resentment to better unify Muslims against a common enemy. Today, pro-American Muslim leaders, like the Saudi royals or Mubarak of Egypt, are seen by Islamists as collaborators with the West. In some Muslim nations, the Islamists are a majority, in others a substantial and powerful minority. While not all Islamists are violent jihadis, they applaud blows struck against the outsiders that they believe are undermining their culture. Islamist politics had always existed and had taken a modern form, but most outside observers did not notice their power until 1979. That year, three events shocked the world and announced the return of Islamism as a political force: First, jihadis seized the Grand Mosque of

9 Quoted in Crisis of Islam 159 10 “In the entire history of Islamic civilization, they have received only 100,000 Western books, less than

Spain translates in a single year! How could they understand us?” (Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 115,116). Or, we

might add, how we could understand them – how many of us have read anything written in the modern

Middle East?

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Mecca in a blow against the pro-American Saudi king; Second the pro-American Shah of Iran was overthrown by an Islamist revolution; and Third, a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan triggered a new jihad. 1979: The Attack on the Grand Mosque The Saudi kings had been close allies of the West since the 1930’s, but they are also the official protectors of Islam’s holiest sites in Mecca and Medina. They prided themselves on being righteous Muslims. Saudi leaders had allowed movies into the kingdom and allowed more education for girls; they were slowly moving toward some “Western-style” modernization. However, these changes and the closeness of the House of Saud with non-Muslims (and their vast and obvious oil wealth) had angered some strict Muslims. A group of jihadis had formed in Medina, and included several prominent Saudi intellectuals, veterans of the Saudi army, religious teachers, and leaders of old, noble Arab families. Heavily funded by wealthy donors, they gained military training and some popular support. On November 20, 1979, a couple hundred militants took over the vast Grand Mosque of Mecca, the holiest site in Islam. It is estimated that 50,000 pilgrims were present. The insurgents aired their demands from the mosque's loudspeakers throughout the streets of Mecca, calling for the cut-off of oil exports to the United States and the expulsion of all foreign civilian and military experts from Arabia. They proclaimed that their leader was the “Mahdi,” a messiah-like figure in Islamic teaching. The initial Saudi police attack on the compound was repulsed and Saudi King Khalid called in heavy forces. The resulting battle saw hundreds killed, but the militants were subdued and their leaders died. Afterwards, 67 prisoners were beheaded. Rumors spread (many by the Iranian religious leaders) that the whole thing was an “American and Jewish” plot. Riots against America filled the streets of Muslim cities from Tunisia to Indonesia, and American embassies in Libya and Pakistan were stormed and destroyed by mobs. The humiliation of the Saudi king inspired anti-Western militants around the world. Historian Kim Ghattas writes, “The two-week-long siege against the Grand Mosque in Mecca had also deeply damaged the kingdom’s standing in the Muslim world: The House of Saud had failed in its role as custodian.” But instead of cracking down on Islamist forces, King Khalid gave religious leaders and Wahabbists (strict Muslim) more power, believing "the solution to the religious upheaval was simple: more religion." The progressive reforms were reversed. Images of women in newspapers and TV were banned, movie theaters and music stores closed, and school curriculum was changed to add more hours of religious studies, eliminating classes on subjects like non-Islamic history. Gender segregation was extended "to the humblest coffee shop," and religious police were given more power. This would only lead to further radicalization of many young Saudis, including a son of the owner of the Saudi construction corporation that repaired the damaged mosque: the binLaden company. 1979: Trouble in Teheran The Islamic Revolution first succeeded in Iran. The Iranians are not Arabs; they are Persians who speak Farsi. An ancient and proud civilization, they embraced the Shi'a branch of Islam. As we saw in earlier chapters, the Pahlavi shahs, who ruled Iran for most of the 20th century, admired the West and emulated the secularism of Turkey’s Ataturk; Shah Reza Pahlavi II diminished the authority of Iran’s Shi’a religious leaders, called ayatollahs. The Shah, with Western advisers, used brutal police repression to maintain power which angered many Iranians. Finally, American President Jimmy Carter revoked aid to Iran in 1978 to protest the regime’s violation of human rights.

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Get Technical: Taliban means “student”

or “disciple;” most

Taliban were young and

had been trained in

madrasahs, Islamic

schools in refugee camps

in Pakistan. The Great

Game refers to the long

battle to control the swath

of land between Turkey

and India; the term was

coined by Kipling in the

19th century.

Seizing the moment and inspired by exiled ayatollahs, Iranian students rioted, and the uprisings began to erode the regime. The Shah, suffering from cancer, fled and died in exile several months later. Iran declared itself an Islamic Republic under the rule of Ayatollah Ruahollah Khomeini (r. 1978-1988), who was backed by young "Revolutionary Guards." The United States quickly realized the new government was hostile to the West. The Soviets hoped to move into the region, but the revolution was hostile to the Soviet brand of interference as well. Only gradually did the world realize that revolutionary Iran did not fit into any old Cold War categories; it’s revolution heralded a third political force in what had been a bipolar world. And just as the French Revolution had provided a new model for revolutionary masses in the 1700s, the Iranian model inspired many

beyond its borders. Iranian revolutionaries seized 52 staff members at the American embassy in Teheran and held them captive. President Carter and the U.S. could only watch helplessly as the hostages were paraded on TV in anti-American demonstrations while the Iranians rejoiced at the humiliation of the powerful United States. An embarrassing rescue attempt by U.S. commandos failed to even get close to Teheran, but finally, after a year and a half of political negotiations, the hostages were released. Meanwhile, as Americans accustomed to focusing on the threat of the Russian bear were puzzled by the Iranian revolution of 1978, the Russians were about to become the next prey of the “wolves of Allah.” Iran had been and still is a society whose large cities had experienced many western ideas and technologies. Many Iranians, especially western-educated professionals and the younger generation, want the luxuries of modernity – cell phones, satellite TV, material prosperity – while still maintaining their cultural pride. These modernizing Iranians are in conflict with older, more rural, less educated Iranians who back the stricter interpretation of the ayatollahs. 1979: The Wolves of Allah In December of 1979, the Soviets marched into Afghanistan to support its failing communist dictator. Afghan is a mountainous country, rarely controlled by the Afghan kings or anyone else, made up of 14 major language groups divided into feudal clans. It is a nation that seems more medieval than modern. But the one thing that has united Afghans is foreign invasion. The Soviets found themselves in a hornet’s nest of guerilla war. Because the Soviets were seen as atheistic infidels, Muslims from all over the Islamic world sent funds or even young fighters (as many as 50,000) to help the Afghan mujahadeen, or freedom fighters. After a long and bloody guerilla war, the Russians

returned home in 1988, hounded by the “wolves of Allah” as they fled through icy Afghan mountain passes. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the second event that stimulated the Islamic Revolution. Islamists took credit for the end of one of the two great secular superpowers when the USSR collapsed (1991), and the Afghan victory over the Russian superpower (ironically achieved with CIA help) inspired Muslims throughout the world. Many of the young soldiers from this war returned home to oppose their own leaders or traveled to join other jihads; one member of this cadre of experienced jihadis was a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. But after the Soviets left in 1988, the Afghan warlords turned on each other, and internal fighting erupted among tribal, ethnic, and linguistic groups. Out of the refugee camps and Islamic schools along

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the Afghan-Pakistani border came the Taliban, an Islamist group composed primarily of members under the age of 30 who proclaimed a strict adherence to Islam, based on the teachings of Mawdudi and Qutb. The Taliban eliminated most of the older warlords, many of whom were little more than abusive bandits. At first, Afghans welcomed the Taliban takeover, hoping it would restore order under shari'ah. But the Taliban instituted laws far stricter than the Quran prescribed, especially toward women. Women were not permitted to appear in public unless accompanied by a male relative, and then they had to be heavily veiled. While this was not too shocking in the conservative rural areas, urban Afghan women were accustomed to a more modern way of living. Taliban punishments for even minor crimes were harsh, and the strong-arm group ruled as a gang of thugs and enforcers in many areas. Even strict Muslim nations like Iran and Saudi Arabia condemned the Taliban as excessive. The Rise of Modern Jihad Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Islamist movement slowly but surely gained ground against the West, the Soviets, and against secularists in the Middle East. In 1981, Anwar Sadat of Egypt was gunned down by Muslim Brotherhood assassins in 1981. Sadat had aligned Egypt with the USA and had dared to sign a 1979 treaty with Israel; this made him a target for Islamists. In 1980, Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s secular (and Ba’athist) dictator, declared war on Iran. Many Islamists aw this as another battle between the righteous (Iran’s religious leadership) and the infidel. Hussein had risen through the Iraqi Ba’ath party ranks as an enforcer. He had eliminated his rivals within the party in the late 1970s and exercised an iron hold on Iraqi society. A Sunni Arab, he had viciously murdered Shi’a and Kurdish Muslims; he had also targeted Islamist activists. (The Kurds are Muslim, but not Arab; they live in the mountain areas of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq and make up about 20% of Iraq. They have long been suppressed and attacked by their neighbors and have no nation of their own – yet.) Like many dictators, Hussein tried to use propaganda and the hysteria generated by war to distract people from his cruel policies. detractors. Hussein hoped to seize Iranian oil fields near the border and to punish Iranian support for Shi’a and Kurdish rebels in Iraq. In retaliation, Iran’s Khomeini declared a jihad against Hussein. At Khomeini’s command, to clear the way for Iranian troops, teenage Iranian boys committed suicide by marching into minefields while singing hymns of martyrdom and detonating explosive land-mine devices. The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1989) was reminiscent of World War I, with trenches, massive infantry assaults, and the use of chemical weaponry. As the war ended neither side had gained territory, but a million people had been killed. After 1991, the collapse of the USSR only expanded the activities of jihadis. Beginning in 1994 the Russians faced an Islamic uprising in Chechnya, a Muslim province in Russia. Schools and subways inside European Russia were hit by terrorists in retaliation for the Russian attacks in Chechnya. In Chechnya, women suicide bombers – called “Black Widows” – appeared as a new innovation. In fact, as the Soviet Union collapsed, former pro-Soviet dictators in Libya, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Iraq suddenly “rediscovered” their religious passion, or at least they tried to convince their people of that they had. In Sudan an Islamist government engaged in systematic murder of thousands of Christian tribesmen in the south and west of Sudan. In Somalia collapsed

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in a several sided civil war between tribes, jihadis, and warlords. In Yemen, the Islamic north and formerly pro-Soviet south were reunited in 1990 under an Islamist regime. In the last decade of the 20th century, popular Islamist political parties appeared in the few Muslim states that allowed election, often achieving success at the polls. The growing urban poor in cities like Cairo and Istanbul hoped that an Islamic state would more effectively distribute wealth. In Tunisia, Turkey, and Egypt, the government, backed by the military, simply outlawed Islamist parties. In Algeria, the Islamist electoral victories of 1991 and early 1992 were canceled by the ruling, secular regime, triggering a low-scale guerilla war. This created a quandary for defenders of democracy: While still respecting the will of the people, can a democratic society allow an electoral victory of a party that wants to replace democracy with theocracy? Many fear that, as in Iran, an Islamist victory is a “one way” election, or as Bernard Lewis puts it, “One man, one vote, once.”11 Meanwhile, in Iraq, events were about to create new quandaries for the United States presence in the oil-rich Middle East. Desert Storm By the late 1980s, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, along with failing to defeat Iran, had lost the support of the Soviet Union. Like other secularists, he attempted to remake his

image as the defender of Arab nationalism and Islamic values. Most Islamists didn’t buy it. Looking to arouse nationalism and gain oil wealth, in the summer of 1990 Iraq attacked the pro-American sheikdom of Kuwait. American president George H.W. Bush Sr. (Rep. Pres. 1989-93) mobilized a multinational coalition that included Arab states; the Saudis, fearful of an Iraqi attack on their kingdom, welcomed the foreign military forces. The United States was further concerned because of

Hussein’s established chemical and developing nuclear weapons programs.12 Hussein tried to recruit Arab favor and aid by launching missiles against Israel, but the Israelis refrained from retaliatory fire. Even Syria and Iran stayed out of the fight, mostly because they despised Hussein. In February of 1991, Allied forces moved out of their defensive positions in Saudi Arabia and struck hard at the Iraqis, quickly recapturing Kuwait and pushing into southern Iraq while using air strikes to hit targets throughout Saddam Hussein’s realm. Bush had prepared himself for serious casualties, but Hussein’s troops collapsed in a retreat; even his elite Republican Guard was shattered.

11 The Crisis of Islam 112. 12 In the 1981, the Israeli air force had bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor that was developing weapons capability.

Sunni

SHIA

KURDS

Largely Shia and non-Arab

ALLIED

FORCES

Kuwait

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Get Technical: Scion: son of a

powerful family.

Expecting U.S. aid, the Kurdish minority in the north, and in the south the Shi’a Iraqis (who hated Saddam’s brutal, Sunni-dominated regime) rose in rebellion.13 But Allied forces stopped short of marching to Baghdad; Bush feared that occupying a Muslim nation might have turned the Arab world against the United States and created a quagmire of occupation. As the Americans withdrew, Kurds and Shi’ites were slaughtered by Saddam’s police in reprisals, leaving some of America’s allies in the region bitter at Bush’s quick disengagement. Islamists and many moderate Muslims interpreted the American withdrawal as another sign of Western lack of resolve or a treacherous abandonment of its Muslim allies. Meanwhile, many international experts feared he was planning to rebuild his chemical and biological stockpiles.

In 1991 a new jihadi network called al-Qaeda (“The Base”) emerged under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi mercenary mentioned above who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Bin Laden cited the

teachings of Wahhib, Mawdudi, and Qutb, and publicly called for a jihad against the West, Saud royals, and any other pro-Western Muslim government. Al-Qaeda propaganda promised a return to the days of the great Caliphates. Few paid attention to the group at first; it seemed to be

just one among dozens of little bands of fanatics. The scion of a wealthy Saudi family, bin Laden was expelled from Saudi Arabia. In the 1990s, terrorists targeted Western objectives, including the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, a U.S. destroyer in Yemen, and a truck of explosives rammed into a large U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing over 200 troops. President Bill Clinton (Pres. Dem. 1993-2001) also tried to intervene in Somalia where jihadis caused law and order to collapse, but drew back after several US troops were killed in the Somali capital Mogadishu in 1993.14 That year, terror struck closer to home as Islamists exploded a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center in New York. Though it caused little damage, it did shock Americans who had previously thought terrorism to be only a Middle Eastern issue. The Americans responded with airstrikes on terrorist bases in Sudan and Afghanistan, but to little effect. As the 20th century ended, Islamist terror seemed to be a far away problem for most Westerners. That was about to change.

9-11 and the War on Terror On September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda operatives, in a meticulously planned plot, hijacked four jetliners in the United States. Using the fuel-laden planes like guided missiles, two of the flying bombs rammed the World Trade Center towers, utterly destroying both skyscrapers, severely damaging several other surrounding buildings, and killing more than 2600 people, many of them firefighters and other rescue personnel. A third jetliner hit the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., killing 125 more. The fourth jet crashed before it could reach its intended target when courageous passengers overwhelmed the hijackers and caused the terrorists to either abort their mission or lose control of the plane.

13 Iraq is about 60-65% Arab and Sh’ite, about 25% Sunni Arab (Saddam’s own group and the traditional ruling class

in Iraq), and about 12-14% Kurd (the much abused peoples in the north), with a few Orthodox Christians (Chaldeans)

and Turkmeni Sunnis making up the remaining tiny percentage. 14 Known as the “Blackhawk Down” incident.

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The world was horrified, and comparisons were made to Pearl Harbor. Newly elected President George W. Bush (Jr.) (Pres. Rep. 2001-2009) declared a general

War on Terror and within weeks, the U.S. mobilized a UN coalition to strike at Afghanistan, where bin Laden had set up his command post. At the start of the so-called Afghan War (2001 – p), anti-Taliban forces known as the "Northern Alliance" were desperately holding on to less than 10% of the country. But U.S. air support and commandos turned the tide of battle and the Taliban collapsed. U.S. and other allied forces landed in the country and hunted down the remnants of al-Qaeda and Taliban forces to support the new Afghan government. But bin Laden escaped into the rugged

mountains of the Hindu Kush where neither the British, the Pakistanis, nor the kings of Afghanistan itself had ever held more than symbolic power over the wild, feuding, and rugged mountain tribesmen. Following 9/11, terrorists staged more attacks around the world from Indonesia to the Middle East and Europe, hitting subways and buses in London and Madrid, and resorts in Mumbai and Indonesia. Western intelligence hunted down dozens of al-Qaeda agents around the world. Hundreds were detained in Afghanistan and dozens captured or killed elsewhere. The al-Qaeda network is actually a loose collection of a variety of Islamic groups, veterans of the Afghan wars, and old, Cold War era terrorists. Divided into cells that often do not know each other, it has proven difficult to eliminate with a single blow. Like the mythological Hydra, as soon as one head is cut off, another appears in a different place. In fact, the war on terror is a war on an idea – as cells are eliminated and leaders arrested, the idea is carried on by others; it has become clear that war on terrorism is not a short skirmish, but rather a simmering, long-lasting conflict. Iraq Gets Rolled Meanwhile the younger Bush turned his attention to his father’s old foe in Iraq. Though Saddam was a secular tyrant, not an Islamist, Bush argued that Saddam had flouted the UN and the Gulf War cease-fire for too long, that he was hiding nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s), and that the Iraqi people were due for liberation. Bush had conflicting intelligence reports; some experts said Iraq posed no danger despite Saddam’s bluster, but a vocal minority within the administration believed the Iraqis were on the road to nuclear weapons. Some people hoped that Iraq could be a potential success story for democracy in the Middle East if only Saddam could be removed. Others feared a repeat of Vietnam. The Iraq War began in March 2003, as American, British, and other allied troops invaded Saddam’s realm. Within a couple weeks, the British seized Basra and the Americans drove northward to seize Baghdad and other key cities. In the far north, the Kurds (with U.S. help) extended their control of northern Iraq. Hussein’s regime collapsed and Iraqis celebrated his demise, though many Muslims were skeptical about the presence of infidel liberators in the land of Islam. By December of 2003, Saddam’s rapacious sons and most of his brutal advisors were dead or captured and U.S. forces found Saddam himself cowering in a hole; Hussein was later executed by the new Iraqi regime. As for the original reasons given by Americans for the invasion, though the Iraqis had biological and chemical weapons, there were no nuclear weapons, though even critics of Bush agreed that Saddam was a brute and few Iraqis mourned his destruction. But al-Qaeda, though decapitated in Afghanistan, managed to continue attacks around the world; the Iraqi invasion seemed to have had little effect except to create a vacuum of power into which al-Qaeda expanded.

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Though foreign forces were the early targets, the war in Iraq became a civil war, especially as Islamist jihadis (including foreign jihadis) saw Iraq as a key battle ground between the West and Islam. Sunnis fought Shi’a, secularists battled jihadis, Kurds opposed Arabs, and clans and tribes fought each other in cycles of revenge and reprisal. The American leaders and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seemed surprised and woefully unprepared for an extended and contentious occupation or the complexities of tribal and cultural divisions in Iraq. Islamists were especially angered about non-Muslim presence in Baghdad, once the capital of the greatest Arab empire. Says Lewis, “For Muslims, no piece of land added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced, but none compare in significance to Arabia and Iraq.”15 Though around 5000 U.S. and allied troops died in the Iraq War, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (combatants and civilians) died. The Americans sponsored an Iraqi constitutional council which held surprisingly popular elections in January 2005. The Shi’a had been the lower classes, but the democratic election put

them on top. However, the Americans were dismayed by the fact that Iran (Iraq’s Shia neighbor but America’s opponent) had a great deal of influence with the new Shi’a government and by the fact that Shi’a officials used their new power to pay back old grudges against the Sunnis. Sunni tribes turned against the elected government and the Americans while the Kurds just holed up in their heavily defended mountain citadel. Meanwhile, American public opinion soured on the war, and in 2007, Rumsfield resigned and new American commander General David Petraeus was able to win over many Sunni sheiks (local rulers) who were tired of al-Qaeda murdering their people. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama (Dem., Pres, 2009-2017) reduced troops and announced an end to

active US military presence in 2011, but a few special forces are still on the ground in the region combatting terrorists.

Simultaneously, NATO forces remain engaged in the ongoing Afghan War (2001 -?). Having sponsored a pro-Western regime, the West found themselves in a simmering guerilla war. The Taliban reappeared in both the Afghan countryside and the rugged border regions of Pakistan; al-Qaeda forces were in the region as well. The fact that heavily populated Pakistan had nuclear weapons made the thought of an Islamist takeover terrifying to Western intelligence. In fact, bin Laden himself was hiding in the heart of Pakistan, which is where American special forces found and killed him in 2011. Nevertheless, the NATO operation in Afghanistan is now the longest conflict in American history, though the Americans actually negotiated with the Taliban and came to a provisional withdrawal agreement in the spring of 2020.

Shattered Spring In December of 2010, an unemployed street vendor in Tunisia lit himself on fire after being slapped by a police officer. His suicide sparked an eruption of protests in normally stable, pro-Western, and moderate Tunisia against their long time President Ben Ali. Within days, Ben Ali had resigned. Within weeks, similar protests erupted across the Arab world. Egypt’s pro-American dictator Mubarak was forced to resign after days of protest in which dozens died, though the army generally stood aside during the protests. At first, many in the West hoped these events to be an “Arab Spring” in which democracy would spring up from the people of the Middle East. In Yemen, Bahrain,

15 In The Crisis of Islam, xxix

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Jordan, and even Syria, protesters were emboldened to protest were against corruption, poverty, and dictatorship. But in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, which had at first promised to play a limited role in the new government, swept to power in elections. Those who insisted that Islamists were a minority were once again stunned to see an Islamist party win a popular election. Encouraged by an Islamist victory, Islamist violence erupted against secularists (who were beaten or killed) and Egypt’s sizeable Coptic (Orthodox) Christian minority, whose churches were bombed and who faced firings and harassment. Laws began to change from Egypt’s formerly mild Quranic influences to a stricter form of shariah. The Brotherhood’s brief rule ended when army General Abdel al-Sisi led an army coup d’etat in 2014 and declared the Brotherhood outlawed. The Obama administration, despite its support for elections, was strangely silent about the military removal of Islamist rule in strategic Egypt.

In Libya, the erratic and brutal Moammar Qaddafi found himself facing an armed rebellion that divided the nation into civil war. In March of 2011, U.S., European, and Arab nations declared a no fly zone and launched airstrikes in support of the rebels after Qaddafi butchered civilians. By October of 2011, Qaddafi had been killed and the “Free Libyan” forces had won. But the nation disintegrated into warfare between various tribes and jihadi groups. In the chaos, the American ambassador was killed in a peacekeeping mission in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city.

Meanwhile in Syria, Bashir Assad (pictured with his ally, Putin of Russia [right]) had inherited the role of secular dictator from his brutal father Hafez al-Assad. The Assad clan was from the minority Alawite (Shi’a) sect and had dominated the mostly Sunni nation with force for decades. In 2011, Islamist Sunnis and secular Syrians revolted against the regime, led by army units that revolted against their overlord. The regime reacted with brutal force, shelling

EGYPT Dictator overthrown 2011; Revolutionary Islamist government replaced in army coup, 2013

Dictator pressured to resign 2010-11

South Sudan

secedes 2005-2011

Civil War: Dictator killed 2011

Iran Iraq

Ongoing civil war since 2011

Protests and riots War

Bahrain

Kuwait

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Somalia

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cities and civilians; over 400,000 had died by 2020 in the Syrian Civil War. The war became a confused multi-sided conflict between jihadis (including a new group called ISIS, see below), Kurds aligned with the West, rebel Syrians, and Assad’s loyalists. When Assad used chemical weapons, the world was stunned but, weary of failed and confusing wars and revolutions, chose not to intervene when Russia promised to guarantee the removal of chemical weapons; yet Russia was an ally of Assad. Meanwhile thousands of refugees fled the country. In 2017, Assad gassed his own people again and the new American administration of Donald Trump (Pres. Rep. 2017-p.) bombed a Syrian airbase. But the wily Assad not only survived but began to slowly grind down the rebellion. He was helped by the fact that Islamist rebel factions were killing secular rebels and sometimes even each other. And, in the midst of the Syrian civil war, a sudden and stunning development changed the world’s view of the war and gave a new dimension to the Islamic Revolution.

Just When You Thought it Couldn’t Get Worse… Out of the wreckage of Iraq and Syria, a rebel branch of al-Qaeda appeared, even as the jihadis mourned the death of bin Laden. Calling themselves by various names and proclaiming a caliphate, the “Islamic State” (or ISIL, or ISIS)16 emerged as more than a terrorist group. Rallying Sunnis who hated both secularism and the Shi’a dictator Assad, ISIS actually captured and held territory, setting up a government in conquered regions in Syria and Iraq. By 2014, they were nearing Baghdad and controlled a swath of land straddling the two devastated nations.

Within ISIS controlled territories, brutal public executions, rape and torture were used to terrorize enemies. Christians, Shi’a, and other minorities that did not adhere to a radical version of strict Sunni Islam were targeted. In Syria, the 2 million Christians were reduced to 500,000, fleeing ISIS execution. Christians from Libya and Egypt were beheaded on youtube; Christians in Iraq were crucified. Moderate Muslims were

16 The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant or The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; sometimes called

“Daesh” by its enemies, an transliteration of an Arabic acronym that sounds like the Arabic word for

“bigot.”

TURKEY

ISIS (2014-15)

SYRIA IRAN Lebanon

Israel

IRAQ Jordan

Saudi Arabia

KURDS Other rebels

Russian forces

Turkish forces

US forces

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butchered. Even al-Qaeda repudiated the methods of ISIS, who was led by a mysterious figure nicknamed “al-Baghdadi” (who was allegedly killed in an airstrike in 2019 Eventually, Iraqi and Kurdish forces slowly pushed back on ISIS gains in Iraq while various groups hammered on ISIS in Syria. By late 2017, ISIS had all but collapsed and its last stronghold fell in early 2019. Nevertheless, Syria continued to be torn apart. Russian forces backed the Syrian dictator Assad, Kurdish forces fought both ISIS and Assad, various Arab rebel groups fought Assad, ISIS and each other, Iranian sponsored Shi’a militia attacked Sunni Arabs or Kurds, the Israelis occasionally bombed threatening targets near its border, and, in 2018, the Turks invaded northern Syria in opposition to both ISIS and Kurds, now abandoned by their former American allies. In short, Syria disintegrated into a multi-sided mess than led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and refugees but the wily Assad survived as the dictator of his now devastated and fractured country. By 2018: Geopolitics and Islam In Turkey, long a secular state in theory, a member of NATO, and an applicant for European Union membership, a new Islamist leader named Recep Erdogan was

elected as prime minister in 2003. At first, he seemed to be a moderate. The Turkish economy boomed and Erdogan was an ally in the West’s war on terror. But he slowly began to bring more Islamic principles into law. Kurds and Christians faced discrimination, ultra-religious groups formerly kept out of politics were embraced by Erdogan, and nationalism was equated with religiosity. Critical journalists were harassed or arrested and Erdogan’s rhetoric became increasingly hostile to the West and to civil liberties in general; he worried observers with phrases like, “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.” In 2016, Erdogan narrowly escaped a military coup. He responded by arresting or firing thousands of officers,

judges, and bureaucrats and jailing journalists and others who opposed him. In April of 2017, Turks narrowly approved a revised constitution that gave Erdogan sweeping power; Turkey seemed to be slowly drifting toward an Islamic and nationalist dictatorship almost a century after Ataturk had tried the road of secular liberalism. Meanwhile Iran, the world’s largest Shi’a nation ruled by a “Supreme Council” of religious leaders, continued to oppose Western influence. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (r. 2005-2013) made provocative statements calling for the destruction of Israel, alleged that the Holocaust was a myth, and proclaimed that Iran would lead an apocalyptic final war of the worlds upon the return of the Mahdi (a Shi’a messianic figure). Today, the region’s latest concern is a growing conflict between the Shi’a power of Iran, and the Sunni champions, the Saudis. Iran has some Russian backing, while the Saudis are backed by the Americans. This Sunni-Shia Conflict had a variety of battle fields: In Lebanon they continue to back one of the region’s largest terror organizations, Hezbollah, which undermines the Lebanese government and has staged attacks in Israel and Syria. In Syria, Iranian backed militia’s such as Hezbollah of Lebanon back Assad, while the Saudis gave some support to Sunni rebels. The Shi’a seem to be winning. In Yemen, a Shi’a group, the Houthis, seized much of the country, but have been hammered by the Saudi military and its Gulf sheik allies.

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Most concerning was the Iranian drive for nuclear weapons. The Saudis warned that an Iranian nuclear program would drive the Saudis to acquire their own nuclear arsenal. Although the Obama administration negotiated a nuclear limitation deal in 2015, the Israelis, the Saudis, and many others feared that the West was making a Neville Chamberlain-esque mistake in trusting the Iranians; the Trump administration repudiated the deal. The whole Sunni-Shi’a divide is a reminder that The Islamist Revolution is certainly not monolithic, but contains rifts and layers beneath the baffling surface. Conclusions The Islamic world emerged from the imperial and Cold War eras struggling with its own identity. Just as the West cannot use its might and technology without regard for the rest of the planet, the Muslim world can no longer insulate itself from the non-Muslim world. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to underestimate Islam as a potent social and political force in the 21st century. Moderates within the Muslim world argue that Islam can evolve, even to the extent of seeing a liberalization of the faith. On the other hand, Islamists point out that democracy is the will of the majority, and that it is hypocritical for the democratic West to deny the majority’s desire for shari’ah law. Ideologically, many Muslims are attracted by the Islamic Revolution’s rejection of western hegemony and by its appeal to the historic values of the Quran. But many Muslims do not want a war with the West, they do not believe that the Quran mandates a theocracy, and they believe they can maintain their faith while coexisting peacefully with modern technology and a globalized world. All of this gets mixed up with nationalistic and ethnic movements and complicated by power plays of major powers in the region that controls much of the world’s energy resources. The Islamic Revolution is an internal conflict among followers of Allah about the future of Islam that not only involves the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims, but entangles

Sunni states opposing

Iran

Shia ruled

Iranian-sponsored

agents or guerillas

TURKEY

LEBANON SYRIA IRAQ IRAN AFGHANISTAN

EGYPT KUWAIT

PAKISTAN

SAUDI ARABIA QATAR

UAE

OMAN

YEMEN

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Words in courier italic font have been added by A. Frye.

Chapter 22 PRIMARY DOCUMENTS

The Muslim World’s Question: ‘What Happened to Us?’ By Kim Ghattas

January 25, 2020 Atlantic Magazine (Excerpt from her book, “Black

Wave”)

What happened to us? The question haunts us in the Arab and Muslim world. We repeat it like a mantra. You will hear it from Iran to Syria, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and in my own country, Lebanon. For us, the past is a different country, one not mired in the horrors of sectarian killings. It is a more vibrant place, without the crushing intolerance of religious zealots and seemingly endless, amorphous wars.

Though the past had coups and wars too, they were contained in time and space, and the future still held much promise. What happened to us? The question may not occur to those too young to remember a different world, whose parents did not tell them of a youth spent reciting poetry in Peshawar, debating Marxism in the bars of Beirut, or riding bicycles on the banks of the Tigris in Baghdad. The question may surprise those in the West who assume that the extremism and bloodletting of today have always been the norm. Without an understanding of what was lost and how it happened—and, crucially, why the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran played such a crucial role in this unraveling—a better future will remain elusive, and the world’s understanding of the Middle East will remain incomplete.

There are many turning points in the region’s modern history that could explain how we ended up in these depths of despair—from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. None, on its own, paints a complete picture. Instead, I look to 1979, when three major events took place: the Iranian Revolution, which culminated in the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Tehran in February; the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Saudi zealots in November; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, the first battleground for jihad in modern times and an effort supported by the United States. These acts occurred almost independently of one another, but the combination of all three was toxic, and nothing was ever the same again. From this noxious brew was born the Saudi-Iran rivalry.

The two countries had been friendly rivals until then, twin pillars in the American efforts to counter communism in the region. Then came the Iranian revolution. The House of Saud first praised the new leadership’s Islamic credentials and the adoption of the Koran as Iran’s constitution. But Riyadh soon sobered to the new reality: Khomeini, who emerged from the chaos of the revolution as its ultimate leader, had once described the Saudi royals as “camel grazers” and “barbarians.” More importantly, though a Shia, he had grand designs for leadership of the Muslim world, which is mostly Sunni. This provoked deep insecurities within Saudi Arabia, where the king is also the custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites. The two-week-long siege against the Grand Mosque in Mecca had also deeply damaged the kingdom’s standing in the Muslim world: The House of Saud had failed in its

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role as custodian. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Riyadh grabbed the opportunity to restore its credentials by funding and supporting what was seen then as a righteous war against the communists, while simultaneously channeling the energy of young Saudi zealots outward to a foreign battlefield.

A destructive competition for leadership of the Muslim world soon began, in which Iran and Saudi Arabia wielded, exploited, and distorted religion in the pursuit of raw power. That is the constant from 1979 onward, the torrent that flattens everything in its path. Nothing has changed the Arab and Muslim world as deeply and fundamentally as the events of 1979.

Other pivotal moments undid alliances, started or ended wars, or saw the birth of new political movements. But the radical legacy of 1979 did all this and more: It began a process that transformed societies and altered cultural and religious references. The dynamics unleashed in 1979 changed who we are and hijacked our collective memory, reengineering vibrant, pluralistic countries from Egypt to Pakistan, as both Iran and Saudi Arabia worked to rally the masses to their sides with money, propaganda, and proselytizing.

Searching for the answer to this central question—What happened to us?—I traveled from Cairo to Baghdad, from Tehran to Islamabad. I was met everywhere with a flood of emotions when I asked people about the impact the year 1979 had on their lives. I felt as though I were conducting national or regional therapy, sitting in people’s living rooms and studies: Everyone had a story about how 1979 had wrecked their life, their marriage, their education. Even those who were born after that year were affected. No one had asked them that specific question before, but there was a flash of recognition when I did, as though the disparate pieces of life events had suddenly come together and the puzzle finally made sense.

In Pakistan, the journalist Nadeem Farooq Paracha told me that with so many momentous events in one year, it felt as though the sky had fallen to earth, and he pointed me to other events that year in his own country. Pakistan’s new dictator, Zia-ul-Haq, in power since 1977, had his predecessor, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, executed in April 1979 and imposed Islamic law on a dominantly Sunni country, barely a day before Khomeini did so in Iran, a mostly Shia one. Zia was proud to beat Khomeini to it, one of many examples of leaders in the region trying to outdo one another on matters of religion. In Egypt, Ebtehal Younes, a professor of French literature and the widow of the progressive Islamic scholar Nasr Abu Zeid, told me it took her years to understand how 1979, the year Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, altered the trajectory not only of her country but also of her own life: It sent her and her husband into exile in the years that followed, as a wave of intolerance washed over Egypt and Abu Zeid was accused of apostasy.

The 1980s were defined by military conflicts: the Iran-Iraq war, which widened the schism between Iran and the (mostly Sunni) Arab world; and the ongoing war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which planted the seeds of violent jihad. Both helped turned the historical, theological divide between Sunnis and Shias into a modern-day weapon, by feeding sectarian divisions that led to a frenzy of sectarian violence that had previously not been the norm and that accelerated after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The 1990s were defined by culture wars born from the ashes of those battles, wars that played a defining role in reshaping the region. The opening salvo was Khomeini’s 1989 ruling that the novelist Salman Rushdie be killed for his book The Satanic Verses. The episode is remembered now only for Khomeini’s fatwa, but it actually began when conservative Sunni activists with connections to Saudi Arabia began a campaign against the book, with help from the Saudi embassy in London. The Satanic Verses had already been translated into Persian and was even on sale in Iran, but, eager to ride the

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wave of anger against the book, which had spread from India to Britain and back to Pakistan, Khomeini swept in with the fatwa, posing as the most righteous leader of the Muslim masses. His decision would have a tremendous impact on intellectual life in the Muslim world as religious intolerance rose and writers and artists faced increased accusations of apostasy, attacks, and assassinations. Even Egypt’s beloved Nobel Prize–winning author Naguib Mahfouz barely escaped with his life after a knife attack in 1994.

The darkness that engulfed the region afterward was described by the Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine as a black wave that had come from the Gulf and swept the region, shrouding women in black as the use of the Saudi-style abaya and niqab, previously unknown in countries like Egypt, began to spread. Dozens of Egypt’s beloved and famed actresses gave up low-cut dresses and big hairdos to don the niqab, with encouragement and alleged payment from rich Saudis. In 1985, a small minority of books published in Egypt were of a religious nature. By 1995, 85 percent of books on show at the Cairo book fair were religious.

In Lebanon, the black wave came from Tehran, as Iran began to export its revolution. The chador, the all-enveloping black cloth, spread in Shia villages and in the southern suburbs of Beirut. It had been previously worn only by deeply conservative women, mostly wives of clerics. Liquor shops were closed; music disappeared; the black flags of mourning for Imam Hussein, one of the most revered religious figures in Shia Islam, fluttered from lampposts; and the slogan “We are all Khomeini” was scribbled on the walls of posh Beirut shopping streets. The flags, the chador, the niqab, the sectarian hatred, and the threats of apostasy all shaped a new collective consciousness that is only now being challenged by the younger generation.

I encountered another recurrent question on my travels, one that surprised me, one that young Saudis and Iranians in particular were asking of their parents: Why didn’t you do anything to stop it? In those countries from which the ripples had emanated and in which life had been blunted since 1979, there was resentment toward the generation that had allowed it to happen. For Iranians, 1979 is an obvious turning point in the country’s history. For them, it wasn’t so much the slow realization of what had happened, but more the growing disbelief at the naïveté of their parents and grandparents, who had cheered on a revolution that replaced the tyranny of monarchy with the even worse tyranny of religion. The new system was politically but also socially and economically repressive, effectively freezing the country in time and disconnecting it from the world, seemingly forever.

In Saudi Arabia, the changes were more a case of arrested progress. With a deeply conservative desert interior and more outward-looking coastal provinces, the kingdom had been inching toward more relaxed social norms, with the introduction of television, education for girls, and a handful of makeshift cinemas. But 1979 was an opportunity for the standard-bearers of the ultra-orthodox Islam of the kingdom’s founding fathers—often referred to as Wahhabism—to impose their understanding of religion more strictly and to do so on the whole country. Awash with cash during the 1980s, Saudis could travel anywhere to go to the cinema and the theater, sit in cafés, and shop freely if they wanted to escape the darkness engulfing their country. But now their children want to know why their parents hadn’t protested when the music was silenced, when the male guardianship system was tightened, when the religious police started scaling the walls of private homes if they heard music inside.

There was a brief moment in 2018 when it looked as though the two foes were going to compete to undo the damage of 1979: the Saudis from the top down, thanks to Mohammed bin Salman, a crown prince opening up his country to the 21st century; and the Iranian people from the bottom up, thanks to their own determination to chip away at the system. Instead, the existing competition continued unabated, as though nothing and nobody were equipped to dissuade the leadership of

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either country from its own worst instincts. Syria, Yemen, and Iraq paid the price, as proxy wars raged in all those countries. People who raised their voices against their respective leaders in Iran and Saudi Arabia were also targeted. The most dangerous opponents were those who spoke softly and who presented the most credible alternative to the absolutism of the leaders—the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a hit team sent from Riyadh in October 2018; Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian human-rights lawyer, was sentenced to 38 years in jail and 148 lashes for defending women campaigning against the mandatory-veiling laws.

In October 2019, a (hopeful) moment came in Iraq and Lebanon with the extraordinary protests against not only corruption and poverty but also sectarianism. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated in both countries, almost in unison, for weeks on end. With music and dancing, with flowers, humor, and poetry, they let out a cry for life, braving bullets and beatings. The protesters declared their unity, across all social and sectarian divides, against those in power. In Lebanon, Sunnis in the northern town of Tripoli chanted in support of Shias protesting in the southern town of Nabatiyeh. In the Sunni city of Falluja, they held up banners to mourn the Shia protesters killed in the town of Nasiriyah. In Beirut, they chanted, “From Tehran to Beirut, one revolution that does not die.” There has been a growing anti-Iran aspect in the protests in Lebanon, targeted at Tehran’s proxy and ally, Hezbollah. In Iraq, the ire of protesters was directly aimed at Iran, and Shia clerics joined the marches to denounce Tehran’s influence while some demonstrators scaled the walls of the Iranian consulate in Karbala to hoist the Iraqi flag on its roof. Then protests erupted in Iran itself, a repeat of the 2009 and 2017 demonstrations. The response was brutal: The internet was shut off, and over the course of a few days at least 300 people were killed by security forces, many of them shot in the head.

The crackdown in Iraq, too, has been bloody, with more than 500 people killed. And one man who helped orchestrate the repression was Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. After he was killed in a U.S. strike in Baghdad on January 3, thousands of Iraqis celebrated the news. In Syria, too, they celebrated in towns that had suffered from the cunning wrath of Soleimani as he shored up the rule of the dictator Bashar al-Assad. Iran appeared briefly united in mourning, or in fear of what might come next: another strike, another war. But there was also relief and quiet celebration at the demise of a man who not only had caused so much devastation in the region in Iran’s name but had also been key in the crackdown against protesters in Iran over the past years. After the killing, protests paused briefly in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, only to restart with even more fury and more violence.

Saudi Arabia’s regional influence and role manifest very differently. Aside from the war in Yemen, Saudi impact remains more nuanced, and more insidious. The country also has no proxy militias against which to protest, but it has plenty of strong-arming, money, media wars, and has done untold damage to people’s understanding of their own religion, as the kingdom has sought to impose its own narrow and intolerant understanding of Islam on millions of Muslims.

Far too many progressive minds in the wider Middle East have been left to fend for themselves for decades, as they and their countries have been bludgeoned to death by forces of darkness—including leaders, such as Pakistan’s Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s, or Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi today, who often have tacit or open American support. And it bears repeating that the greatest number of victims of jihadist violence are Muslims themselves.

What happened to us? So many people of my generation and younger in the region are still asking the question, wondering why our parents didn’t, or couldn’t, do anything to stop the unraveling. But memories of our more diverse, tolerant past are not lost. Neither is our willingness to re-create such a world, not out of nostalgia but out of a belief that a better future is possible, separate from the one imposed by the leaders of Iran and Saudi Arabia and their foot soldiers. As the Danish philosopher

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Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “It is perfectly true … that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

Sultan Who Raged at the West Becomes a Hero in Erdogan’s Turkey By Selcan Hacaoglu Bloomberg March 18, 2018

Hacaoglu is a Turkish journalist; Bloomberg is an American news

service.

“Behind everything that’s harmful to this nation,” the Turkish leader said, “lies an order from the West.” That’s Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II17, in an episode of the historical TV drama watched by millions of Turks every Friday. And if they come away drawing parallels with contemporary politics, the country’s current ruler probably wouldn’t object.

“Are you watching ‘Payitaht’?” Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Turkey’s current leader) asked supporters at a recent rally, as he winds up for an election campaign that could crown his career. He spelled out why they should be. “Foreign powers are still seeking concessions from us,” the president said. “Never!” Abdulhamid, who was deposed in a 1909 coup, is enjoying an unlikely political moment in Turkey, where Erdogan is due to seek re-election to a newly empowered presidency in 2019, or earlier if elections are brought forward.

Enemies Everywhere

There are domestic and foreign reasons for the revival. Erdogan has sent his soldiers into former Ottoman lands in Syria, to fight Kurdish militants backed by the U.S., and on Sunday they took control of a key northwestern city. He’s also been quarreling over territory with European Union member Greece. Add the failed coup of 2016, and the various conflicts “are feeding into the narrative that Erdogan is besieged by enemies within and outside, like Abdulhamid,” said Oner Bucukcu, a political analyst at Afyon Kocatepe University in central Turkey. The sultan was forced to cede imperial territory in eastern Europe amid a series of wars.

Of course, the countries that figure as “enemies” in this scenario are, on paper, Erdogan’s allies. Turkey is a member of NATO and an applicant to join the EU. Lately it’s pursued an increasingly independent foreign policy, befriending Cold War enemy Russia and boosting trade with Iran. Still, “like Abdulhamid, Erdogan is a very pragmatic leader,” Bucukcu said. “He’s unlikely to snap off ties.”

‘Divide and Conquer’

Meanwhile, in some of the countries that formed part of Abdulhamid’s domain, Turkey’s forays have been viewed with suspicion. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, talking to Egyptian newspaper editors earlier this month, accused Erdogan of trying to resurrect Ottoman claims to regional dominance -- and reportedly labeled Turkey as part of a “triangle of evil.” Syria is demanding that Erdogan withdraw his troops. Iraqi leaders have in the past clashed with him over a Turkish military presence there.

17 Frye students may remember his nickname, “the Damned,” levied by the Young Turks and Ataturk,

modernizers who followed the Sultan in history.

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Admirers of Abdulhamid inside Erdogan’s government see a Western hand at work fomenting such splits, and the idea is striking a chord. A survey by Istanbul’s Bilgi University found heightened fears that “European states now want to divide and conquer Turkey.” The country’s enemies “are trying to cut the bond between the Turkish Republic and the Arab world and the land of Islam,” Culture Minister Numan Kurtulmus said in September. He said there are “extraordinary similarities” with the sultan’s times.

‘Red Sultan’

Some of Erdogan’s rivals have jumped on the connection too, and sought to turn it against the president, who’s maintained Turkey’s so-far futile bid for EU membership. “If Sultan Abdulhamid was alive today, he’d be working to create an Islamic Union and not to enter the EU,” said Temel Karamollaoglu, leader of the (Islamist) Saadet Party. Abdulhamid was labeled the “red sultan” in Europe, blamed for mass killings of rebellious Armenians around the turn of the century. He also refused to open Palestinian lands to Jewish settlers. A European Parliament report faulted the TV series about the sultan for conveying an “obvious anti-Semitic message.” His reign hasn’t always been celebrated in modern Turkey either. The country’s founders (like Atatürk) repudiated him as an autocrat who ran an extensive spy network and muzzled his critics through press censorship.

But Erdogan’s political roots are in an Islamist movement, and he’s been chipping away at Turkey’s secular, republican traditions during his 15 years in power. That includes a new focus on the Ottoman era. His government has laid on a series of events this year to mark the 100th anniversary of Abdulhamid’s death. The president spoke at one of them, a conference held in the sultan’s hilltop palace at Yildiz in Istanbul, overlooking the Bosporus.

Too many Turks, misled by the West, have cut the country off from its Ottoman roots, Erdogan said. “History isn’t just a nation’s past, it’s the compass for its future.”