More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kim Ghattas
Read between
August 11 - August 30, 2020
Peshawar was the supermarket of the Islamists in the 1980s without the drinking: there the discussions were about Islamic law, fatwas, the war of the believers, the unity of the Muslim nation, and the humanitarian needs of Afghan refugees.
“Because these kuffars are giving millions of dollars of goods to the Afghan refugees,” he replied. “Are you?”
In later years, the two men would part ways over Bin Laden’s plans to take the jihad global; Azzam would be assassinated in 1989 in Peshawar, and the Maktab al-Khadamat would turn into the nucleus of al-Qaeda.
state systematically funded or organized the Arab Afghans; they raised money privately and organized themselves. Unofficially, they were a Saudi pet project, a national cause. The
From the loudspeakers of Peshawar’s Sunni mosques came words the locals had not heard before, or if they had, only in whispers: “Shia kafir,” screamed the preachers, “Shia kafir.” Shia infidels …
He asked a committee to review the book and became an instant fan: he ordered three thousand copies and helped promote it.
So truth in history didn’t matter to him. All that mattered was that he was trying to counter the Iranian SHIA threat.
Shia views were driven by his hatred of Assad and Assad’s alliance with Iran.
July 1987, when Zia sent Afghan and Pakistani Sunni militants to attack Shia Turi villages.
The most painful thing for the architect was the continued disregard for historical Islamic sites, even those dating back to the days of the prophet. The royals had no appreciation of history, while the clerical establishment, obsessed with keeping idolatry at bay, cheered the destruction.
“Guide us to the Straight Way, the way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not [the way] of those who have earned Your anger [such as the Jews], nor of those who went astray [such as the Christians].” Contemporary politics was also injected into this version of the Quran, with the addition of the word “Palestine” in a verse about the Holy Land, for example: “O my people! Enter the Holy Land that God has assigned unto you” became “O my people! Enter the Holy Land, Palestine.”
The mataf, the open, circular area where pilgrims circumambulate around the Ka’aba, had been enlarged, again and again, repaved with heat-reflecting white marble. To allow this extension, historical pulpits, ancient gates, everything had been removed, including the building covering the miraculous well of Zamzam, which had quenched the thirst of Hagar, Abraham’s concubine, and their son Ishmael. The water of the well had been diverted underground and the original opening paved over, its location marked with a black circle on the white marble.
They tried secret negotiations, then attempted open ones.
The impact of the Iran Iraq war is felt up until now. Especially with respect to the United States. The competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia forced Iraq into a place of debt , that Saddam could not climb out of. Meaning when he invaded Kuwait in 1991, he was trying to gain ground again. All of this started because he suddenly and deliberately attacked Iran, because of the militaristic Shiism. Although the rhetoric from the ayatollah was not helping.
But Khomeini and his hardliner henchmen wanted nothing less than the immediate departure of Saddam. This was a nonstarter. Even more egregious to the Saudis was an Iranian request for “observer rights” over Mecca and Medina. This kind of language always induced deep panic in the Saudis. They quickly approved another $4 billion loan to Iraq.
The Umayyad Mosque had, not a Ka’aba, but a relic of Saint John the Baptist.
turning a spiritual event into a political protest to undermine the House of Saud.
Ahead of the 1987 hajj, Khomeini exhorted the Iranian pilgrims to turn it into a “battlefield,” to march “with as much ceremony as possible during the hajj” and to “express their hatred toward the enemies of God and mankind.”
The Saudis had just crashed the oil market with overproduction, bringing the price of a barrel from $30 to $13, bleeding the Iranian economy even further. Khomeini needed a boost, something to reenergize the faithful.
Even the pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat,
For months, the Iranians and Saudis worked to rally the world’s Muslim opinion, each to their respective side, blasting their messages through the media and organizing competing conferences.
Information warfare at a state level. With its clear aims to justify state actions.
March 1924, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the secular founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, dissolved the caliphate, sending the last caliph of the Ottoman dynasty, Abdulmejid II, into exile.
The zealot warriors had wanted to make sure that the cemetery and its domes would never be rebuilt—this was the second time that the forces of Wahhabism had tried to obliterate it.
Few historians recorded that event, but Saudi chroniclers of the time mention it, and it frustrates Saudis that this sequence of their ancestors’ rightful quest for justice is ignored. The reality remains that the sack of Karbala was disproportionately atrocious.
The founding of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia must have felt like sweet revenge for the House of Saud and their allies from the Al-ash-Sheikh. Scorned for two centuries, annihilated by the Ottomans, exiled to Kuwait, they were back, with help from the British, and they were flush with money. They could silence everyone.
Saddam had unleashed hell and fury, not to mention chemical weapons, on Iranian cities.
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 was no apology either. Iranian diplomats described the downing of the plane as “a premeditated act of aggression and a premeditated cold-blooded murder.” Iran vowed revenge.
President Mikhail Gorbachev wanted out. No one knew it quite yet, but the Soviet Union’s collapse had just begun.
Two days before the final Soviet withdrawal, the headlines in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat read, IRAN THREATENING THE MUJAHEDEEN AND SIDING WITH THE SHIAS.
Khomeini’s edict to kill Rushdie sent shock waves through the literary and publishing world.
The twenty-nine-page document was read by Ali Khamenei, the president and soon-to-be Supreme Leader.
In exchange, in a quid pro quo that was never explicitly stated, the United States turned a blind eye when Syrian troops invaded the Christian areas that had remained outside their control in Lebanon, on October 13, 1990.
Pax Syriana.
Nasr Abu Zeid
Nasr’s ordeal began around the time of that apology, and just like Galileo he believed in science and reason, insisting he would continue to “struggle in support of Islam, armed with scientific reasoning and solid methodology.”
Nasr was not starting from scratch: he was building on a great inheritance that went back to the eighth century.
The Mu’tazilah applied reason to the study of the holy book and believed in free will.
—the Abbasid era was the golden age of Islam, the time of science and philosophy, of Abu Nuwas’s libertine poetry about love and wine, the thousand and one days and nights of Scheherazade, and the Abbasid caliph Haroun al Rashid.
Sadat’s killing was a religious assassination dressed up as a political act, and now she was a victim of the very trends it had unleashed and the fundamentalism that was sweeping the Egypt of the 1990s.
Foda had identified three Islamic trends in Egypt. The first was the traditional political one of the Muslim Brotherhood, with historical roots in Egypt—it was the weakest but the most pragmatic, according to Foda. Then came revolutionary Islam, inspired by Iran, the kind that wanted to overthrow systems wholesale, the one that Nageh Ibrahim, Abdelsalam Farag, and other young Egyptians had embraced in the 1970s. In Foda’s view, this was the most dangerous but the least widespread because it relied on a specific demographic: young hotheads. And finally there was what he described as the moneyed
...more
Three of the first caliphs, close companions of the prophet, known as the Rightly Guided Caliphs, had been assassinated.
Egypt had seen political violence and assassinations, but this was a first: intellectual terrorism. The country was shaken, the Arab world shocked.
“Why did they kill him? He was a Muslim! How could they declare him an atheist divorced from his religion? Who gave them the right to divide us between Muslims and infidels?”
And therefore the age long debate at who owns the right to life. Who in Religion can decipher between a good and a bad Muslim/Christian/Jew. The answer I believe is God. Therefore, any rhetoric where one religious sect sanctions killing in the name of God for the purpose of interpretational law does not have a leg to stand on. Mostly because Jesus came to suffer and die so that the law would be fulfilled through him. Capital punishment according to religious law is no longer applicable. Because Jesus fulfilled that death requirement for all who accept him.
The Muslim Brotherhood claimed the government was partly responsible, because it had allowed him access to the airwaves, to “stab Islam in the heart … [a] provocation of Muslim sentiments at a time when the whole world is hounding them with war.”
Victim blaming. How does radio stab a religion in the heart.
His argument echoed in part the one made by the head of Al-Azhar in the Rushdie case: it was up to the state to carry out the sentence of death against apostates after a trial, but since the state had failed to curb Foda, the sentence could be carried out by righteous Muslims.
The king had set off a storm: calling on the West for assistance and bringing even more infidels to the birthplace of Islam was both a demonstration of weakness and an affront to the pride of every Muslim.
Bin Laden insisted he had some eighty thousand fighters at his disposal, all battled-tested Afghan war veterans. He also claimed he had all the weapons he needed.
“We will fight him with faith.”
This would make a great short story or novel
Muslim Brothers, the Egyptian Mohammad Qutb, brother of Sayyid, and the Syrian Surur, author of the book about the Shias as magi.
sheikh Ali al-Huthaifi angrily denounced the Shias, using the pejorative word rafidha, derived from the Arabic “to refuse”—those who had refused to recognize the first caliph, Abu Bakr, and had followed Ali instead.
Even after an indictment in June 2001 named several Shia Lebanese and Saudi members of Hezbollah al-Hejaz as having connections to Iran, the Saudis were reluctant to join the chorus of condemnation of Tehran.
