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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kim Ghattas
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August 11 - August 30, 2020
For Iran, ideology was a tool of state power and the allies and proxies that Tehran groomed answered to the Supreme Leader. On the Saudi side, the dark forces were the product of Saudi money, both private and from the government, that had made its way to the Afghan mujahedeen, the Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan, even the coffers of Al-Azhar in Egypt and the pockets of hundreds of clerics from around the Muslim world who had trained in Saudi Arabia. From militancy to intellectual terrorism, the forces fed by Saudi Arabia had no return address; they were not state-run, and they could not be
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Silently, many Saudis had come to understand that the repressive culture and closed society they lived in produced men like the hijackers.
The bombers were Saudi members of al-Qaeda and they had killed civilians in the kingdom—including Muslims.
Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who had written excited dispatches from the front lines of the Afghan war, was back in Jeddah, working as the deputy editor of the English-language daily Arab News.
“But the Shia of Iraq are not happy with that role,” Abdulmajid had said. “We are different from them even culturally, not to mention serious differences of religious doctrine.”
But he had ambition and believed that he—not anyone else—deserved to lead the Shias of Iraq after the demise of Saddam.
Over time, the ranks of the Badr Brigades swelled to an estimated ten thousand Shias who defected from the Iraqi army ranks or were taken prisoner by Iran and pressed to join.
“In the following weeks,” the general wrote in his memoirs, “we discovered what the son of a bitch really had in mind: using helicopter gunships to suppress the rebellion in Basra and other cities.”
If he couldn’t stay in power, he would make sure no one else could rule by planting the seeds of chaos.
scribes of Solomon in the Babylonian Talmud to John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra—ranked as one of the best modern English-language novels—and the tale of the merchant’s servant in W. Somerset Maugham’s 1933 play Sheppey.
Zarqawi and his ilk mostly blew people up indiscriminately, hoping to cause maximum death and destruction. Moqtada would send death squads, hunting people down at universities, medical clinics, and in their homes.
Arabia, then rebuilt his country and became known as Mr. Lebanon. Sunni strongmen each in his own way, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Saddam Hussein, and Rafiq Hariri lived very different lives with very different purposes. Their deaths, all occurring within two years (at the hands of very different killers), produced an imperceptible fracture in the collective psyche of the Sunni world—
but an unwritten exception was made for those fighting against the continued Israeli armed presence in southern Lebanon, seen as a legitimate resistance against the occupation. Hezbollah, still a young organization, was quick to take over that loophole, rebranding fully as a resistance movement.
But that day, the Middle East shifted on its axis. The détente was over. Iran had declared war on Saudi Arabia. The dead man was like a son to King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdallah. His killers, an international investigation would find, were Hezbollah operatives. The assassination had been sanctioned by Damascus, and probably Iran.
Their insecurity was fed continuously by Hezbollah, which reminded them constantly that without the guns of the Party of God, the Shias of Lebanon would again be downtrodden.
He was known as the “living martyr’’ for all the frontline battles he had survived in the war with Iraq. He was working ever more closely with Hezbollah operatives and Nasrallah.
Hezbollah had millions it could spend every month, courtesy of Iran and rich Shia supporters from the diaspora.
The Syrian occupation and Hezbollah’s adventures were thwarting his ambitions for Lebanon.
Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese of all faiths and sects descended onto the streets of Beirut, protesting for weeks and demanding that Syrian troops leave the country.
Assad and Hezbollah needed to make sure Lebanon remained theirs, and Hariri was getting in the way. He had to go. Inside
the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was funding and arming militias, evading US sanctions by siphoning off Iraqi oil, and planting their friends in key positions in ministries.
By then, Zarqawi had not only beheaded Western hostages and blown up the UN headquarters and the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, he had also sent suicide bombers into four-star hotels in Amman one December night in 2005, killing sixty people and injuring more than a hundred. Zarqawi was so bloodthirsty that even al-Qaeda had kept its distance from him,
Now, at this key moment in their history, they had failed the test of magnanimity, the very test that Imam Hussein would have passed. They had become the oppressors.
Salman Rushdie,
Farag Foda
No other accusation seemed to get the police moving as swiftly as cries of blasphemy: not kidnappings, not threats of violence, not belonging to an outlawed radical group, not even overly zealous behavior on the part of a police officer, such as Qadri.
Shahbaz Bhatti, traveling with only a driver despite years of threat, died on the spot when gunmen sprayed his car with bullets as he was leaving his mother’s home in Islamabad.
“Pakistan means land of the pure, and the Shias have no right to be here … We will make Pakistan their graveyard—their houses will be destroyed by bombs and suicide bombers.” Most chilling were the recurrent waves of targeted assassinations of middle-class Shia professionals: doctors, intellectuals, lawyers, journalists,
By 2010, the population was almost 85 million and everything was worse.
He saw the way forward very differently: salvation did not have to come from the West. Islam’s transition to modernity would come from within; renewal was possible.
but through the ballot box; a successful example of political Islam could feed calls for elections in Saudi Arabia itself.
The Iranian president interjected, in Arabic: “This is not what we agreed. We agreed [to talk about] unity, brotherhood.”
There were grand statements about how the whole of Al-Azhar had become a Wahhabi institution,
He was one of the first to draw the parallel between Saudi Wahhabism and Daesh, better known in the West as ISIS.
In March 2011, President Obama had agreed to US military participation in an air mission, along with NATO and Gulf allies, to protect Libyan protesters from their dictator. So why not Syria?
Baghdadi was taking Zarqawi’s dream of establishing an Islamic state to another level. His men found a country much like Iraq in the years after the US invasion: outside the large cities, men with guns roamed freely, state institutions were weak, and—most conveniently—Assad had released scores of Islamists from his jails, just as Saddam Hussein had done before the US invasion of 2003. This was a classic move: the dictator appears to show magnanimity at a time of unrest and declares an amnesty for prisoners, but alongside the intellectuals and activists, he releases into the wild those who will
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America did not want to go to war and Assad survived. The message seemed to be that he could kill his people with any weapon he wanted, except chemical weapons.
The reign of terror began with a crucifixion: two people shot and crucified in the city’s public square, left for days for all to see. Another crucifixion followed.
In Syria, ISIS destroyed an ancient Greek settlement that included the world’s oldest known church and synagogue.
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.
As though, since 1979, the Iranian Revolution had been about one thing: a woman’s modesty. For some in Iran, it certainly was beginning to feel that way.
Khatami, a moderate, affable cleric, could steer the country out of its rigidity and transform the system without overthrowing it.
Basij and other paramilitary groups were let loose into the crowds and beat the protesters.
veiled like all Iranian women in public, and exposed a slush fund for legislators.
They responded that it would be an insult not only to Islamic values but to their wives’ right to choose the veil. She had trapped them: What about the wives of foreign leaders who visited Iran? Didn’t they have the right to choose? The politicians fidgeted.
was one of the ideological pillars of the revolution envisioned by Khomeini, part of the scaffolding holding up the structure—but it was also the Islamic Republic’s Achilles’ heel,
And so Masih called on women inside Iran to send her pictures of their moments of stealthy freedom, azadi yavashaki.
My Stealthy Freedom, had more than five hundred thousand fans.
In one video, filmed in the female-only section of a metro car, a woman clad in black challenged the unveiled woman in front of her: “You’re provoking the regime. Our men did not go to war so you could go out naked.” Masih knew that argument, she’d heard it when her own brothers went to battle against Saddam’s Iraq in the 1980s.
Mohsen had so many regrets that they kept him up at night. The revolution had been a huge mistake, and his generation had so much to atone for—could the younger generations ever forgive what had happened in 1979?
