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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kim Ghattas
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February 3, 2021 - January 7, 2024
Where they make a wasteland, they call it peace. —Agricola, Tacitus (Roman senator, d. AD 120)
“What happened to us?” The question haunts us in the Arab and Muslim world.
The question may also surprise those in the West who assume that the extremism and the bloodletting of today were always the norm.
My aim was to understand when and why things began to unravel, and what was lost, slowly at first and then with unexpected force. There
Sunnis and Shias killing each other, Saudi Arabia and Iran locked in a fight to the death. They will insist that both the killings and the rivalry are inevitable and eternal. Except for the “inevitable and eternal” part, none of these explanations is wrong, but none, on its own, paints a complete picture.
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. The combination of all three was toxic, and nothing was ever the same again. From this noxious brew was born the Saudi-Iran rivalry,
While many books explore the Iranian Revolution, few look at how it rippled out, how the Arab and Sunni world reacted and interacted with the momentous event.
Across this Greater Middle East, the rise of militancy and the rise of cultural intolerance happened in parallel and often fed into each other.
Although geopolitical events provide the backdrop and stage for Black Wave, this is not a book about terrorism or al-Qaeda or even ISIS, nor is it about the Sunni-Shia split or the dangers that violent fundamentalists pose for the West.
Instead, these pages bring the untold story of those—and they are many—who fought and continue to fight against the intellectual and cultural darkness that slowly engulfed their countries in the decades following the fateful year of 1979.
The irony is that the Iran of the fundamentalist ayatollahs owes its ultimate birth pang to cities of sin and freedom: Beirut, capital of Arabic modernity, once known as the Paris of the Middle East; and Paris, birthplace of the Age of Enlightenment.
The Iranian cleric had agitated against the shah of Iran for over a decade and spent time in prison in Tehran. He was sent into exile and arrived in Najaf in 1965, where he languished in anonymity for thirteen years,
Sadr, the magnetic, turbaned Iranian cleric with green eyes, known as Imam Sadr; Hussein al-Husseini, the witty, mustachioed Lebanese politician, in a suit; and Mostafa Chamran, the Iranian physicist turned leftist revolutionary in fatigues. Only one of them would survive the crush of what their dreams unleashed.
In April 1975, Saigon would fall to the Communists. That same month, war would erupt in Lebanon and the fire of the Cold War would move from Southeast Asia to the Middle East.
1974, as
“How many years must some people exist, before they’re allowed to be free?”
Baalbek was an underdeveloped backwater. Some of its dwellings were less than salubrious—open sewage ran in some of the streets. There was no secondary school, but there were open fields of cannabis all around the city, which meant both money and poverty—and a lot of guns.
The history of Lebanon’s Shia community is said to stretch back to the early days of Islam, the oldest community outside Medina, where, after the prophet Muhammad died, some had chosen Ali, cousin of the prophet and husband of his daughter Fatima, as the rightful heir. They were known hence as the partisans of Ali, shi’at Ali.
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.
There would be Shia empires but, overall, the history of Shiism is the history of a minority in opposition, of sacrifice and martyrdom.
When Shah Ismail I founded the Safavid dynasty in Persia in the fifteenth century, he forced his Sunni subjects to convert to Shiism almost overnight.
Under Ottoman rule, the Shias of Lebanon continued to maintain a defiant autonomy, but eventually they had to submit to their role as a minority in the Sunni empire. When modern Lebanon came into existence, the boundaries between Shiism and Sunnism were often fluid, from a religious and even an identity perspective.
Imam Sadr had come to wake them. He had moved to Lebanon from Iran in 1959 to shine a light on Shia dispossession and help establish schools and dispensaries, just like a missionary. Sadr’s ancestors had come from Lebanon, like all the al-Sadrs in Iraq, Iran, and beyond.
the time Imam
a country with eighteen different sects, the Shia community was one of the three largest, and yet they rarely rose through the ranks of the bureaucracy; they were passed over for promotion, shoved into lesser jobs.
The Baalbek rally marked the launch of the Movement of the Disinherited, which Sadr had recently founded with his friend Husseini, a multi-confessional movement that was the result of more than a decade of work.
the prophet, killed in battle in Karbala in the year 680. The party of Ali had largely accepted that the prophet’s successors would be caliphs chosen by wise counsel. Then one caliph passed the reins to his son, Yazid. There was wide discontent with this act of nepotism, and Hussein rebelled against the injustice, facing off with his followers against the army of Yazid.
But as with every historical event, there were different interpretations. Some historians dismissed Imam Hussein’s endeavor as a tale of failure; some saw a battle between two fallible men each seeking power; others described Hussein as a rebel standing up for justice against tyranny.
The dominantly Shia south of Lebanon, dotted with Sunni and Christian villages, was caught in the crossfire of a regional conflict. Lebanon was home to tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees, stateless since the end of the British mandate over Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 on parts of the territory. Among the refugees, since the 1960s, were Palestinian guerrilla fighters
The Lebanese army was no match for Israel’s Defense Forces, and the weak Lebanese state had no authority over the Palestinian guerrillas. Villagers, Muslim and Christian alike, resented the Palestinian fighters for attracting Israel’s wrath onto them and ruining their world and livelihood.
One of those was Sadr’s friend Chamran. Training in Lebanon was a rite of passage for revolutionaries of the period, and even before the civil war weapons were readily available.
Inspired by the success of the Cuban, Algerian, and Vietnamese revolutions and insurgencies, Iranian opposition groups of all political stripes, from Marxists to nationalists, religious fundamentalists to Islamist modernists, were exploring the option of an armed insurgency against the king of Iran.
The Persian empire was 2,500 years old, but the Pahlavi dynasty was young. In 1925, with help from the British, Reza Shah, a brigadier general in the Persian Cossack army, had put an end to two centuries of Qajar dynasty.
Khomeini and other clerics denounced what they saw as the Westernization of Iran by a despotic ruler. They were particularly incensed about the greater rights granted to women, including the right to run for elected office and serve as judges.
Khomeini went to Turkey, then Iraq, but Lebanon provided convenient proximity for Iranian dissidents, along with religious and social affinities and even entertainment:
There was Shiism and the community in Lebanon … there was Iran and the shah … and then there was Jerusalem. Those were the issues that brought the three men together and where their interests overlapped.
After the British captured Jerusalem from the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I, a headline in the New York Herald of December 11, 1917, declared that JERUSALEM HAS BEEN RESCUED AFTER 673 YEARS OF MOSLEM RULE. That same year, the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, in a declaration named after him, promised the Jewish people a national homeland in the biblical land of Palestine but stated that it was “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish Communities in Palestine.”
By 1936, there were armed clashes between Jews and Arabs. Both were revolting against the British Mandate, but Arabs were also fighting against continued Jewish immigration into Palestine. The immigrants were not only Jews fleeing persecution but also those responding to a vision for statehood in the biblical land of Israel set out by Theodor Herzl,
Tens of thousands of Jewish survivors from the Nazi death camps were refugees in Europe; their former communities had been destroyed, and third countries had closed the door to Jewish immigration during the Holocaust. 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
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.
Arab countries had rejected the Partition Plan, declaring they would continue to fight for an undivided Palestine.
The Arabs had lost Palestine, it was a catastrophe, a nakba, as it became known.
They took the keys to their houses with them and never gave up on the idea of returning home one day. 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.
Arabs had put their faith in nationalism and in Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Just a few years prior, in 1956, Nasser had emerged victorious from a war for control over Egypt’s Suez Canal,
The man who had risen to lead them was Yasser Arafat, a Palestinian from Gaza, who had become chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969. Armed Palestinian factions that had battled the Israelis alone and alongside the Arabs began to consolidate their grip on the refugee population in Jordan and Lebanon, filling their ranks with more fighters and launching attacks into Israel. The king of Jordan would have none of it—his army crushed the PLO ruthlessly in 1970. More Palestinian fighters, and more refugees, headed to Lebanon.
The Shias felt they had no one: the shah of Iran was an ally of Israel and was mostly concerned with keeping tabs on the Iranian opposition in Lebanon.
Traditionally in Shiism, the perfect Islamic state can come into existence only with the return of the Mahdi, or Hidden Imam, a messiah-like redeemer and the twelfth imam after Ali, who had gone into hiding, or occultation, in the ninth century. Until the return of this infallible man, governance would be in the hands of the secular state. But Khomeini asserted that the Quran had in fact provided all the laws and ordinances necessary for man to establish an Islamic state and that the prophet and Imam Ali had intended for learned men to implement them: with these tools, a wise man, or faqih,
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Sadr seemed to want to pressure the shah just enough to make him soften his grip and engage with the opposition, but not see him toppled.
The Bazaar had always served as a political force in Iran, agitating against Western competition on its turf, and they often made common cause with the clerics who resented Western influence on Iranian society.
Banisadr had also read Khomeini’s book about an Islamic state with disbelief. Most of his colleagues on the left found the writings so outlandish that they assumed it was a forgery by the Iranian regime seeking to discredit Khomeini as a religious fanatic.
