Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (40 page)

One of the most influential Islamists of the century was neither an Arab nor a Persian. Abul Ala Mawdudi was born under British colonial rule in India in 1903. Mawdudi chose a religious education, but for family reasons he ended up attending several seminaries rather than completing his studies at a single one, as was the norm. This exposure to a variety of schools, as well as his fluency in English, uniquely predisposed him to a vision of Islam that ignored parochial bounds. A talented publicist as well as a theologian, Mawdudi eventually gained control over a leading journal that he quickly turned into an outlet for his unorthodox views, which went further than just about anyone else’s in depicting Islam as a force for violent social change. “Islam is a revolutionary ideology and a revolutionary practice, which aims at destroying the social order of the world totally and rebuilding it from scratch,” he wrote in 1926, “and
jihad
(holy war) denotes the revolutionary struggle.”
¹²
In this respect, he conceded, Islam bore a certain resemblance to other militant ideologies of the twentieth century, although with a crucial difference. One commentator on Mawdudi glosses his argument this way: “The Nazis and Marxists had enslaved other human beings, whereas Islam sought to free them from subjection to anything other than God.”
¹³
It was, in any case, Mawdudi’s characterization of Islam as a modern revolutionary force that would resonate powerfully among his fellow Muslims in neighboring Afghanistan. Above all else, it was his vision of something he called “the Islamic state”—a form of government that was neither secular nor monarchic and promised a return, via rule by the righteous and the implementation of sharia, to the primal community of the Prophet and his followers—that inflamed the imagination of so many of his readers across the
umma
.

Mawdudi was no mere theorist. He founded a political party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, to further his aims. The Muslim establishment in the Raj did not know what to make of him. Mawdudi did not share the prevailing belief that Indian believers should focus on creating a new Muslim-majority country of their own when independence from Britain was achieved. For him it was not enough to have a state with a Muslim citizenry; what he sought was a state in which undiluted sharia had the full force of law and sovereignty belonged to God. Anything else, he said, was
jahiliyya
, the state of ignorance that had reigned before the Quran was presented to man. Capitalism, Communism, and all non-Islamic belief systems were
taghut
, idolatry. In 1977, when Muhammad Zia ul-Haq seized power in a coup, the general essentially paid tribute to the seductive power of Mawdudi’s ideas by placing himself at the head of the new Islamic sensibility that Mawdudi had spent so many years cultivating. He introduced noninterest banking, banned alcohol, and allowed religious leaders to try miscreants in sharia courts.

But it was, again, an Egyptian who gave the notion of the Islamic Party its most consequential expression. This was another Muslim Brother by the name of Sayyid Qutb. Like Banna, he was a teacher by profession, and in 1948, sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Education, he embarked on a study trip to the United States. He returned from his two-year stay appalled by what he had seen: shallow materialism, frantic pursuit of trivial pleasures, men and women freely mingling in public. His diatribes against American life after his return to Egypt soon cost him his job, and he found himself drawn deeper into his work for the Brotherhood, where he soon had a job running the propaganda department. At the same time, he was embarking on intensive self-study of the Quran, work that would soon bear significant literary fruit.

In 1952 a group of army officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the king and seized power. For a time Nasser flirted with the Brotherhood, and he even tried to recruit Qutb, one of its most prominent ideologists, into his own government. But an attempt to assassinate Nasser in 1954 gave the new president an excuse to crack down on his Islamist rivals, and he threw all of their major leaders, including Qutb, into jail. Qutb endured numerous bouts of torture during his first three years in detention, an experience that seems to have intensified his radicalism. Yet Qutb put the time to good use. He wrote two books, both of which would reverberate with unanticipated force in the Afghans’ bitter struggle against an alien and atheist regime.

One of them was a commentary on the Quran, a reading that subtly articulated Qutb’s vision of Islam as a powerful force for social change. The other,
Milestones
,
inspired a generation of Islamist radicals with its tightly wound harangues about the apostasy of contemporary civilization and the corresponding urgency of the need for a government of God. It is a book that breathes a distinctly totalitarian spirit—and the notion of totality, which Qutb conflates with the Quranic notion of
tawhid
, pervades his argument. Islam, reflecting the all-encompassing oneness of God, is an overarching system that provides the conclusive answer to all spiritual, philosophical, and political concerns. Qutb took Mawdudi’s notion of modern-day
jahiliyya
, or ignorance, and deepened it. Only those states that acknowledged the sovereignty of God and the ascendance of the laws laid down in the Quran could be considered truly Islamic—and by this measure, all of the existing governments in the Muslim world were apostate regimes, regimes that could claim no legitimacy in the name of religion. (Here he was also picking up a line of argument from the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyyah, who had asserted that even governments that claimed to be Islamic could be resisted by force if they failed to follow proper Quranic precepts.)

The only way to restore Islam to its rightful place, Qutb concluded, was by overthrowing these governments. And the best way to do this was by establishing a small cadre of single-minded believers who would devote their lives to this cause. This was a concept that probably owed more to the Leninist notion of a revolutionary avant-garde than to original Quranic theology. But in this respect, too, Qutb was entirely of a piece with his fellow Islamic modernists, who were happy to raid their ideological rivals for any political tools that might come in handy.

No sooner had Qutb emerged from jail than the Egyptian authorities arrested him again. He never returned to freedom. In 1966 he was executed. But his ideas endured. In Iran, a religious student named Ali Khamenei translated Qutb’s books into Persian, and they found wide readership among the younger generation of militant young clerics. One of the Afghans who had studied at al-Azhar in Cairo, a scholar named Burhanuddin Rabbani, translated
Mileposts
into Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian, and distributed it to his students at the Theology Faculty of Kabul University. Later, Qutb’s avid readers included the Palestinian theoretician of jihad Abdullah Azzam as well as one of Azzam’s most avid students, a tall young Saudi named Osama bin Laden.

It was only in the 1970s that radical political Islam finally came into its own. Israel’s devastating defeat of the combined Arab armies in the Six-Day War in 1967 humiliated Nasser and the other secular leaders who had preached the gospel of socialism and Arab unity. This was partly a generational shift, partly a genuine spiritual crisis. Around the Arabic-speaking world,
al-shahbab
—“the youth”—were rejecting the leftist-nationalist slogans of their elders in favor of the statement of
faith: “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.” Islam filled a spiritual void that the secular ideologies apparently could not; nor did it suffer from the burden of alien origins. In Egypt, university students began growing beards and agitating for segregated campus activities.
¹⁴
Young women donned head scarves in a demonstrative display of their contempt for secular utopias. While their elders still preached the virtues of Karl Marx or Michel Aflaq (the architect of Baathism), this younger generation turned to al-Banna or Mawdudi for political answers.

The Islamists found one of their first battlegrounds in Lebanon, where civil war broke out in 1975. Here, too, Cold War rivalries combined to combustive effect in a country where the government was dominated by a Christian minority with close ties to France and other Western powers, while the Muslim majority—including a big Shiite population and a significant number of Palestinian refugees—gravitated toward Moscow as a natural “anti-imperialist” ally. The war enflamed identity politics in Lebanon, and among Muslims it accelerated a shift toward religious activism, especially among the economically marginalized Shiites. A Lebanese Islamist who fought in the war later explained his motivations to the writer Fawaz Gerges:

            
My friends and I felt that since the 1920s our leaders had been experimenting with bankrupt ideologies like Arab nationalism and socialism, which failed to liberate Palestine and restore our dignity as Arabs and Muslims. We thought political Islam was the only means to undo the wrongs. We also believed that those Western ideologies were merely ploys to divert Muslims from their noble goals. Our preachers and clerics often told us that Arabs would regain their glory only if they reclaimed Islam and established
shariah
. Lebanon, we thought, should not be the monopoly of Christians.
¹⁵

The 1970s Islamic revival in the Arab countries came to be known as the
sahwa
, the “Awakening.” One of the places where it hit the hardest was Saudi Arabia, which was somewhat ironic. From the outside the Kingdom of Saud looked like a bastion of conservatism, tightly wrapped in the unassailable orthodoxy of Wahhabism, the sere version of ultrafundamentalism that the first king had officially adopted upon his assumption of power in 1932. For all its appearances, though, the fabulous influx of 1970s oil wealth had shaken the place to its foundations. A rising generation of young religious radicals felt that the visible presence of American oil companies and the growing popularity of Western-style television programs were leading to a dangerous loosening of mores. They began to find allies within the kingdom’s religious establishment, where some clerics worried that the deluge of gold unleashed by the oil bonanza was undermining their own position. Meanwhile, members of
the Muslim Brotherhood fleeing persecution in Egypt were arriving in the kingdom to teach and spread their views.

Qutb’s brother Mohammed, who had also been imprisoned and tortured for his political engagement, emigrated to Saudi Arabia, where he became one of the most ardent propagators of Qutb’s message. He took care, however, to censor his brother’s earlier works, knowing that their revolutionary implications would trigger an allergic reaction from the paranoid Saudi authorities. As it was, Qutb’s contention that all existing governments in the Islamic world were actually apostate regimes did not go down well with the Saudi royal family, whose claim to power was based on their guardianship of the holy places in Mecca and Medina.

But it was this very element that could also be turned into a point of attack, and that was what finally happened in November 1979. Many of the events of 1979 are linked with the mysterious power of anniversaries. The Communist Party in Poland feared the incendiary potential of the nine-hundreth anniversary of the martyrdom of a saint. The thirtieth anniversary of the Communist takeover in China was shrewdly exploited by Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues to reinforce the sense of a new beginning. The forty-day Islamic mourning cycle proved a crucial dynamic for the revolution in Iran—as did the millennial expectations of Khomeini’s followers, whose habit of referring to him as the “imam” fanned a longing for the realm of justice promised by the reappearance of the Hidden Imam. Indeed, the Islamic calendar itself was one of the many issues that fueled the discontent of Iranian believers. The shah’s decision to introduce a new, non-Islamic calendar in the mid-1970s served as yet another bit of evidence to good Shiites that the monarch was an enemy of their religion—and gave Khomeini’s supporters yet another potent argument.

In the Julian calendar of the West, 1979 is not an especially evocative date. But this was not true for Muslims. In the Islamic calendar, which is based on the phases of the moon and takes as its start the Prophet’s exile from Mecca in 622, the Western month of November 1979 coincides with the dawning of the new year of 1400. According to certain traditions, that is the year that the Mahdi, the Islamic messiah, is supposed to reveal himself to the faithful and usher in a new age of eternal justice. For Iranians, this is the moment when historical time and the forces of eternity coincide,
¹⁶
and this apocalyptic expectation fueled the fervor with which Khomeini was greeted as the country’s new savior. Some demonstrators wondered whether he might, indeed, turn out to be the Imam of the Age himself;
¹⁷
some of the faithful even claimed to have seen his face on the moon.

In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a group of provincial zealots came up with a particularly fateful reading of the Mahdi myth. Like the majority of Saudis, they were not Shiite but Sunni, and they hailed from a remote corner of the kingdom
that had largely missed out on the new prosperity. In November 1979, as pilgrims were arriving for the annual hajj, the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca, heavily armed members of the group took over the al-Masjid al-Haram, the Grand Mosque, and took thousands of pilgrims from around the world hostage. They then announced that one of their leaders, a young man named Abdullah Hamid Mohammed al-Qahtani, was the Mahdi, the long-prophesied redeemer of Islam. All Muslims, they said, were religiously obligated to obey his commands. The Saudi authorities declined to do this and immediately set about the task of clearing the mosque. It took them weeks, covertly assisted by a team of commandos lent to the kingdom by the French government, to kill or capture the hostage takers. In the end, according to official Saudi figures, 270 people—hostages, hostage takers, and members of the assault force—lost their lives. Foreign diplomats who managed to get access to local hospitals concluded that the actual death toll was much higher, closer to 1,000.
¹⁸