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Trying to answer the question “What happened to us?” led me to the fateful year of 1979. Three major events took place in that same year, almost independent of one another: the Iranian Revolution; the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Saudi zealots; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the first battleground for jihad in modern times, an effort supported by the United States.
Sunni Muslims, the traditional bourgeois merchant class, city dwellers who also swelled the ranks of the bureaucracy; and Shia Muslims, forgotten and downtrodden, who tilled the soil for potatoes or cannabis in the Beqaa Valley or picked tobacco in the south.
The struggle opposed two visions for the succession: one religious, through a line of the prophet’s descendants known as imams (leaders of prayer); and the other, more earthly, centered on power, caliphs (literally, “successors”), chosen by consensus among wise men. The
He wore the black turban, which signaled that as a cleric he was also a descendant of the prophet, a sayyed;
A new iteration of a partition plan first put out in 1937 was put forward at the UN, creating two states: one Arab and one Jewish. A new UN census determined that the Jewish population of Palestine had grown to one-third, with the other two-thirds a mix of Muslim and Christian Arabs, but the plan divided the land in half between Jews and Arabs. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved the Partition Plan. On May 14, 1948, as the last British troops departed, Jewish leaders declared the creation of the State of Israel on the land apportioned to them by the UN plan.
Palestinians felt they were being made to atone for Europe’s sin of the Holocaust by sacrificing their own land.
But in 1967, during six days of war, the Arabs lost more land: Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, including the walled old city that is home to Al-Aqsa mosque, as well as Egypt’s Sinai and Syria’s Golan Heights. Jerusalem was under Jewish rule again for the first time in two millennia.
The new text, published on June 14, envisaged an executive presidency whose power was vested in the people, not in a monarch. A committee of religious leaders would have limited veto power over laws. Men and women would be equal under the law. In Bazergan’s document, there was no reference to the wilayat al-faqih.
The discovery of oil in 1938 launched the transformation of a mostly desert kingdom into a modern country.
In 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt struck a deal with the Saudi monarch, sitting aboard the USS Quincy on the Great Bitter Lake. The two men agreed that Saudi Arabia would provide America with unimpeded access to exploit the oil, in exchange for military protection and support.
Only after 9/11 did the term Salafist become known worldwide, used exclusively to denote the stricter outlook with Salafist jihadists resorting to violence to impose their views.
Ibn Abdelwahhab sought refuge in the settlement of Dir’iya, ruled by Muhammad ibn Saud, founder of the dynasty, and suggested they combine forces. Under the banner of religion and war against anyone who did not abide by Ibn Abdelwahhab’s version of Islam, the two men could expand both territory and wealth. Preaching and military raids would go hand in hand, bringing in land, loot, and zakat, the mandatory alms. The marriage of convenience led to intermarriage between the two families, starting with Ibn Abdelwahhab’s daughter and Ibn Saud’s son.
Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO),
Wahhabism remained deeply anti-Shia;
But Iranian women in Iran had gained many rights under the shah, including the right to vote, to run for office (in 1963), and to wear whatever they wanted. In an effort at modernization, the shah’s father (the first Pahlavi to rule) had briefly tried to ban the veil altogether in 1935, but that forced conservative families to keep their daughters at home for modesty. The move was quickly reversed.
The two countries were both part of the Safari Club, an alliance of intelligence services started in 1976 along with Morocco, Egypt, and France, which fomented anti-Soviet operations and coups from Angola to Afghanistan.
In September 1971, he had already amended the constitution by making the shari’a a source of legislation. In 1980, a year after the Iranian Revolution, he would make it “the principal” source of legislation—a change no future leader would ever dare undo, for fear of being branded an enemy of Islam.
Pakistan was founded in 1947 as a homeland for Muslims on the Indian subcontinent, born out of the partition of India, but it was also a home for many minorities.
Pakistan was born amid horrendous violence and indescribable dislocation—around 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to Pakistan, while 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs left for India.
The name Pakistan was an acronym combining the first letters of the different provinces that made up the new country. But in Urdu, the language of the new nation, it also means “the land of the pure,”
For Pakistan it was the 1971 loss of East Pakistan, today’s Bangladesh.
Historically and culturally, Pakistan felt closer to Iran, on its western border, than to the countries across the Arabian Sea.
Meanwhile, on earth, whole systems of thought were being altered: in the UK, in May 1979, Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party, became the first woman to serve as prime minister. In China, Deng Xiaoping was consolidating his rule and opening up Communist China. They introduced a market revolution on opposite sides of the planet. In the United States, Republican Ronald Reagan would become president in 1981, ushering in a decade of social conservatism in the United States and marking the end of America’s own era of leftist revolutionary fervor.
In 1983, Zia and the Council of Islamic Ideology worked to introduce a number of laws that would reduce women to half citizens based on the shari’a: their testimony was equal to only half a man’s in court; their lives were worth half a man’s in blood money.
Suicide was also forbidden, haram in Islam, but willingly making the ultimate sacrifice in battle and dying a shaheed, a martyr, was a quest that Hezbollah recruits began seeking with enthusiasm.
Four years into the war with Iraq, 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, their bodies hurled into the air by the explosions.
One of the pillars of Islam, zakat is a charitable contribution of 2.5 percent of one’s yearly income, mandated by God but rarely imposed by governments (except for a handful, like Saudi Arabia).
Sunni and Shia Islamic law differ in certain aspects, and by imposing shari’a as he was doing, Zia was mandating a Sunni reading of Islamic law. For Shias, ever since the partisans of Ali had opted not to pay allegiance or taxes to the first caliph after the prophet, zakat could only ever be a voluntary individual act, it could not be levied by the state. Small differences in the reading of Islamic law, which had never been an issue in decades of communal life, were suddenly causing a major rift in Pakistani society.
The author was signaling that Iranians weren’t really Muslims but Zoroastrians (magi being a term for Zoroastrian priests)
King Fahd announced he was officially replacing the title of His Majesty the King with that of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. First introduced by Saladin during the Crusades, the title had never been officially used, until King Fahd, who—with his reputation as a gambler and playboy—needed
caliph of the Ottoman dynasty, Abdulmejid II, into exile. Sharif Hussein briefly laid claim to the title of caliph but soon lost the support of the British (one of his sons became king of Iraq, the other founded the monarchy that still rules in Jordan).
On the morning of Sunday, July 3, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air flight 655 over the Strait of Hormuz as the plane made its way to nearby Dubai. There were 290 civilians on the plane, including sixty-six infants and children. No one survived. Their lifeless bodies floated in the sea amid the wreckage of the plane.
Nasr was sued for separation in the family affairs court under a principle in Islam known as hisba, which allows any Muslim to sue in court if he believes Islam is being harmed—a loophole Islamists had just discovered and would abuse for years.
Everything was now determined by halal or haram, permitted or forbidden in religion.
By September 15, it had become clear that more than a dozen of the attackers were Saudi. On September 27, Robert Mueller, the head of the FBI, made public the faces and names of all the attackers. The kingdom had a schizophrenic reaction. Silently, many Saudis had come to understand that the repressive culture and closed society they lived in produced men like the hijackers. They knew they had collectively allowed intolerance to grow and flourish around them, and they had done nothing to stop it, not as a society and not as a government.
After the attacks of September 11, Saudis were forced by the United States to exercise more control over where their money for charity and proselytizing was going—a lot of it was outside state control. There were some three hundred private Saudi charities sending $6 billion a year to Islamic causes around the world. Every day, wealthy Saudi individuals donated an estimated $1.6 million to charity, and some of it ended up in the wrong hands. According to one estimate, almost $60 million donated to legitimate Saudi-based charities went astray, with $2 million per year going into the coffers of
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jails. “Physical pain touches only the surface, you must never let it break your spirit,”
In Arabic, Allah is used by Muslims and Christians alike to say God, but in Pakistan, where Urdu was laced with Persian words, it had always been Khoda, Persian for God. Those taking a stand insisted on calling their prayers namaz rather than using the Arabic salat, and for them Ramadan was still ramzan.
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.
fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 had been Saudi.
