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Palestinians felt they were being made to atone for Europe’s sin of the Holocaust by sacrificing their own land.
Perhaps, some people thought, God had forsaken Muslims; perhaps a return to religion was the answer.
the philosopher Michel Foucault traveled to Iran and wrote long dispatches in which he described the calls for an Islamic government as a utopian, romantic ideal,
The religious police started to strictly enforce prayer times, wielding their whips and righteousness. Known as the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,
Though Foucault recognized Islam as a “powder keg” that could transform the region and the global equilibrium, he still found in the revolution the spirituality that he missed in the West. For him, the veil was just a detail, an inconvenience.
Foucault would never recant his support for Khomeini, nor acknowledge the damage done to personal and intellectual freedom.
mighty Persian Sassanid Empire had succumbed to Arab conquest in 636 during the Battle of al-Qadisiyya.
removed from the gruesome details marring the birth of the Islamic Republic,
Leftists saw only the power of the masses bringing down a tyrant—like
A year after the poet’s death, Iqbal Bano, a national icon, obtained rare permission to hold a concert in Lahore.
Bano wore a sari, a dress forbidden under Zia both because it was associated with enemy India and because it showed a woman’s midriff. And then she lent her voice, powerful but melodious, controlled but emotional, to the most defiant of all of Faiz’s verses, written in 1979 in protest at Zia’s authoritarian Islam. Hum dekhenge,
Israeli businessmen would drive up across the border to explore business opportunities in Lebanon. None of it would last. The liberators would become hated occupiers very quickly.
There were many reasons why the period of enlightenment ultimately faltered, including colonial repression but also repeated American-instigated coups that helped bring strongmen to power across the Middle East.
Faiz was no atheist. He was spiritual in the practice of his religion; Islamic imagery and allegories permeated his writings.
The left in Lebanon would soon be eliminated ruthlessly, just as they had been in Iran.
Iran was sending waves of weaponless young boys to their death. Wearing red headbands and armed only with a metal key supposed to open the gates of heaven, thousands of teenage boys walked across minefields to clear the way for tanks,
Karbala cannot be used to justify “war, war until victory,” against Iraq or others. Bazergan said that Khomeini had strayed from “the objective realities and the lessons of the apostles and the imams.”
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto married an Iranian Shia. He did not shy away from Shia symbolism—his own name, zulfiqar, was the name of Imam Ali’s sword with its split tip.
If Beirut was the supermarket of the left in the 1970s, where Marxists, communists, Egyptians, Iraqis, and all the Palestinian factions debated and theorized,
Peshawar was the supermarket of the Islamists in the 1980s
The venom spouted from the mosques’ loudspeakers echoed across the city, coming into people’s homes through open windows or cracks in the doors, impregnating people’s consciousness.
music was haram, forbidden. “Listen to music,” the teacher had told Sofana when she was just six years old, “and you will have melted iron poured into your ears on Judgment Day.”
Pakistan’s army, powerful before, was now so entrenched in politics that they didn’t even need a general in the presidency to rule the country. Bhutto was replaced by a Zia protégé and friend of Saudi Arabia, Nawaz Sharif,
was a ruthless, cunning politician who would
always pushing to continue Zia’s Islamization and sectarianization of the country.
On February 15, 1989, after weeks of slowly drawing down their forces, the last Soviet troops crossed the Termez Bridge over the Amu Darya River in the opposite direction than the one they’d driven in December 1979—out
Foda was shredding the Islamists’ credibility in public. The time had come to get rid of him.
Two illiterate men who had never spoken to him or read his work sped by on a motorcycle and fired seven bullets into his back. They shot and injured his fifteen-year-old son, too.
“Who are the second-best-paid women in Egypt?” “Belly dancers, because Saudi tourists throw banknotes of a hundred dollars at their feet while they are dancing.” “And who are the best-paid women in Egypt?” “The converted belly dancers, because Saudi sheikhs transfer banknotes of a thousand dollars to their account if they stop dancing.”
In the mid-1980s, there was a mosque for every 6,031 Egyptians; by the mid-2000s there would be one for every 745. Taxi drivers played less Umm Kulthum and more Quranic recitations.
By the end of January 1991, half a million American troops had descended on the kingdom
There were female soldiers driving trucks. Foreign correspondents, including women, were flocking to the country, staying in hotels, unaccompanied.
the Saudis would come to believe they had been fooled and that the moderates and the hardliners were in fact the same, or at least acting in concert.
Osama bin Laden had been Jamal’s friend; they had spent time together in Peshawar and in Afghanistan. Jamal had been one of the first to interview the tall, lanky, rich Saudi.
realities flipped and historical identities were switched, when the strong began to feel like victims and the oppressed began to subjugate.
In a Sunni majority country, where Shia mosques were being blown up on a regular basis, it was somehow the Sunni gunmen who felt like the underdog—yet
The apostate, the murdered man, was Salmaan Taseer, the nephew of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the poet of love, the same Taseer who had continued to protest against Zia in the streets of Lahore during the 1980s,
Taseer was described as a “liberal extremist.” Every one of his faults was put back on the table: his secular ways, his divorce, his son with an Indian woman. Munawar Hasan, the head of Mawdudi’s Jamaat-e Islami, was unequivocal: “Salmaan Taseer is himself responsible for his own killing.”
the aggressive, violent harassment of women on the streets. As a young woman in the 1960s, her own mother had walked the streets of Cairo in a skirt and short sleeves and no one had batted an eyelid.
ISIS was Saudi progeny, the by-product of decades of Saudi-driven proselytizing and funding of a specific school of thought that crushed all others, but it was also a rebel child, a reaction to Saudi Arabia’s own hypocrisy, as it claimed to be the embodiment of an Islamic state while being an ally of the West.
The West was always eager to believe its own orientalist trope: that what Arab countries really needed were enlightened despots to lift up the illiterate masses, an idea the despots entertained gladly to justify their rule, claiming their citizens were not ready for democracy.
It is deeply troubling to expect that all Muslims should apologize or take responsibility for a minuscule fraction of those who share their faith.
The largest number of victims of jihadist violence are Muslims themselves within their own countries.
