by Kim Ghattas
The Arab men who were making their way to Peshawar were a strange assortment: renegades unwanted by their governments, true believers looking for a just cause, thrill seekers on a short jihad vacation, doctors treating wounded mujahedeen. They were a mix of holy war fighters, Peace Corps volunteers, and a Muslim version of the Spanish Civil War’s communist International Brigades. The inspiration for them all, or at least most, was Abdallah Azzam. A charismatic Palestinian from the West Bank with a trademark beard with two white streaks, Azzam was one of the first Arabs to arrive in Pakistan, and he set up the logistical and theological foundations for more to follow.
Devout from a young age, Azzam had some experience fighting in Jordan with the PLO against Israel. A graduate of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, he went on to teach in Jeddah, where his yearning for jihad pulled him closer to the war in Afghanistan, and to Pakistan, where he started teaching Arabic and the Quran in 1981 at the Islamic University in Islamabad. The newly inaugurated King Faisal mosque, as well as the university, were both Saudi-funded. Azzam soon settled in Peshawar and persuaded Bin Laden, whom he had met in Jeddah, to make the trip. The two men wanted to open the spigot of Arab fighters that had started trickling in 1980. Bin Laden provided the money; Azzam took care of the rallying cry. Bin Laden started by raising a fortune for the mujahedeen in Jeddah in 1984, up to $10 million, contributions from relatives and princes. He announced he would offer a ticket, housing, and living expenses for every Arab (and his family) who joined the fight. Then Azzam issued a religious edict that turned modern tradition upside down: his fatwa argued that the jihad in Afghanistan was fard ayn, an individual obligation for every Muslim.
This had not been done before; fard ayn mostly applied to duties like praying or fasting, the pillars of Islam. The fard ayn could apply to a struggle against one’s own leader, as Farag had declared it against Sadat in Egypt. But Azzam was making it an obligation for Muslims to defend Muslim land not their own against the non-Muslims. Greater causes usually fell under a different category, fard kifaya, a duty met by the community as a whole and therefore not binding on the individual. Clerics ridiculed Azzam’s fatwa. Bin Baz fudged his words, calling for financial and moral support. Over time, the lines blurred and the ridicule disappeared when clerics saw that Arab fighters were answering Azzam’s call.
Around 1985, Azzam and Bin Laden set up the Maktab al-Khadamat, the Services Bureau, in Peshawar: half guesthouse, half office, the large, one-story house with a big garden in University Town became the nerve center of the Arab jihad. They used the Bureau to fund-raise and offer money to refugees, recruit and deploy mujahedeen, and distribute weapons. Bin Laden paid $25,000 every month to keep it running. 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.
The bulk of the fighting against the Soviets was done by the Afghans, a quarter of a million full- or part-time fighters throughout the war. Official and covert American support went to them, $3 billion over the course of the eight-year war, with the Saudis matching every dollar. The Arab fighters, or Arab Afghans, as they would become known, were a minority, a few thousand at any one time, an estimated total of thirty-five thousand over the course of the war. Thousands more came as volunteers of all types, including medical, to taste not the thrill of battle but the exhilarating atmosphere of Peshawar and the bonds of this new transnational jihad. No 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 head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal, son of the late king, was a frequent visitor to Peshawar. So was his chief of staff, with bags of cash for the mujahedeen. The lines between what was government and what wasn’t were indistinguishable in an absolute kingdom. Saudi Airlines gave huge discounts on tickets to Peshawar. Azzam’s salary was paid by the World Muslim League. The league also had an office in Peshawar that operated as a front to funnel money and recruit volunteers. In Cairo, the office of the Bin Laden family construction group, which hired local skilled labor for construction in the kingdom, became a pipeline for those seeking to join the battle. Saudi individuals raised and donated money in all shapes and sizes: businessmen wrote fat checks, women donated jewelry. The governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman, the future Saudi king, was in charge of raising private funds for the mujahedeen and funneled millions to the cause. Charities like the Saudi Red Crescent and the International Islamic Relief Organization, all connected to the state, set up offices in Peshawar, working closely with Saudi-backed mujahedeen groups that ran refugee camps. Jamal worried about where the Saudis were spending their money. The funds were going to marginal sectarian groups that were not popular with the wider Afghan population but honed closer to the kingdom’s interpretation of Islam. Bin Baz had reportedly thrown a fit when there had been moves early on to promote a popular Sufi-leaning Afghan rebel to the top leadership of the mujahedeen. Jamal thought that no good could come of the promotion of the more sectarian, puritanical Afghan groups, and he made his views known to Prince Salman.
In 1980, there were already more than a million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, then a country of 80 million. By 1990, the number of registered Afghan refugees reached 3.27 million. In those first years, refugees in Pakistan had to sign up with one of the seven official mujahedeen parties backed by Saudi Arabia, the Peshawar Seven, to qualify for food and supplies. With sustenance came loyalty. The refugee camps became recruiting centers for foot soldiers while the religious seminaries indoctrinated the young with a new worldview.
With Zia’s approval, Saudi charities built hundreds of madrassas, religious seminaries, along the border with Afghanistan, and they favored the exclusionary teachings of fundamentalist schools of thought from the subcontinent that were closest to Saudi puritanism—like the Deobandis and Allama Zaheer’s Ahl-e Hadith. Afghan students filled the classrooms but Pakistani enrollment in religious schools was also on the rise. Across the country, but especially along Pakistan’s western border with Afghanistan and Iran, funds from zakat collection and Saudi money paid for the mushrooming of religious schools. The rise in the number of graduates in the 1980s outpaced the population growth by an estimated 300 percent. The quality of teaching could not keep up, and the character of the schools’ teachings changed: this was no longer about excellence in religious knowledge, but about indoctrination and mobilization, producing either militant activists for the war or Islamic bureaucrats for the continued Islamization of the country. Madrassa, the Arabic word for school of any kind, secular or religious, Christian or Muslim, took on a dark, ominous meaning in this context. Some of the graduates of these religious schools became founders of the Taliban movement, which terrorized Afghanistan in the 1990s. The Saudi sponsorship of the Arab Afghans would lead to the rise of al-Qaeda. The problem with Saudi imperialism, cultural or other, was that they were bad managers. More often than not they lost control over their product—then feigned ignorance or innocence.
As often, the Western media focused on the fanaticism of a few in the religious seminaries but ignored a much bigger problem: even the minds of those who did not espouse violence were closing, being molded into something more doctrinaire, less tolerant than what had shaped their parents’ understanding of the world. Bigotry was being inculcated in regular schools across Pakistan too, where the curriculum was changing. Textbooks on all subjects became laced with religion, and history was distorted to fit the current ideology, defining Pakistani nationalism as exclusively Muslim, and increasingly portraying minorities as subhuman. The Saudis were helping to create an environment in which ideas and actions could be taken to the extreme, and they were blinded to the consequences of their creation because they could not recognize the intolerance of their own ideology.
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Of all the cities that were being transformed by the impact of 1979, plunged into fear or darknes
s, Peshawar suffered the most, and most quickly: a deluge of refugees, of guns, of hatred. The city was being brutalized by Zia’s Islamization, the fervor and the quest for martyrdom of the Afghan mujahedeen who were based there, the arrogance of the Arab fighters who walked around like they owned the city. The Friday sermons grew increasingly angry. “Kill in the name of God,” screamed the preachers. “Jihad in the name of God.” The venom spouted from the mosques’ loudspeakers echoed across the city, coming into people’s homes through open windows or cracks in the doors, impregnating people’s consciousness. Allama Hussaini was still there preaching in his Peshawar mosque where his religious school was popular, full of adepts of Khomeini’s message. Two worlds were clashing, at first only in words. 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 …
Jamal Khashoggi had heard those words before, or variations of them, not just because he’d grown up in Saudi Arabia, but because in December 1981 he had agreed to display an anti-Shia, anti-Iran pamphlet at the Muslim Arab Youth Association book fair he helped organize in Springfield, Illinois. Someone had come to him with copies of a newly released Arabic book titled And Now the Magi’s Turn Has Come, which argued that the Iranian Revolution was nothing but a ploy for Shia domination of the Middle East. The author was signaling that Iranians weren’t really Muslims but Zoroastrians (magi being a term for Zoroastrian priests) who had infiltrated Islam since the days following the death of the prophet. They therefore posed a real danger to the unity of the Muslim nation. The book was full of historical and theological inaccuracies, but none of that mattered to those who were wary of revolutionary Iran. Egyptian students protested against such a divisive book being sold at the fair. Khashoggi thought long and hard but chose to go ahead—there were values, and there were interests. In 1981, the Arab world was a year into the Iran-Iraq War, and awe about Khomeini’s success in bringing a theocracy to power had subsided in the Sunni world. Geopolitics now dictated that everything should be done to undermine Iran. Though it was Saddam who had invaded Iran and started the war, Arabs saw Khomeini as the aggressor.
The author of the anti-Shia pamphlet had first tried to get his book printed at the beginning of 1980, but no publisher in the Arab world would take it, no one wanted to touch such a sectarian polemic. Anti-Shia writings were not new in the Muslim world, but their audience had always been limited, their message—coming from the fringes of fundamentalism—shunned by the majority. The historical, theological Sunni-Shia schism did not preoccupy people in their daily lives. In fact, the author of the Magi book was so fearful of the reaction that he wrote under a pseudonym. But in September 1980, just as the Iran-Iraq War was kicking off, the author had found a publisher and a most excellent patron: Bin Baz. The vice rector of Medina University was now the head of the Saudi Council of Senior Ulama. He asked a committee to review the book and became an instant fan: he ordered three thousand copies and helped promote it. Soon 120,000 copies had been printed, making their way around Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Arab countries. The widespread distribution of the Magi book was a watershed moment, giving permission to a flood of anti-Shia publications in the 1980s. The author of the Magi book would reveal himself two decades later as Mohammad Zayn al-Abidin Surur, a Syrian Muslim Brother in exile, who had lived briefly in Saudi Arabia before settling in Kuwait. His anti-Shia views were driven by his hatred of Assad and Assad’s alliance with Iran. Surur’s writings and influence would ripple for decades, feeding a surge of reactionary militants that would eventually turn against the Saudi state. But initially, Surur’s books served a strategic purpose.
The other anti-Shia author that the Saudis eagerly promoted was Bin Baz’s star student, Pakistan’s own Ehsan Elahi Zaheer, described as the most influential cleric in aggravating Sunni-Shia tensions and violence in South Asia. A student at the newly opened Islamic University of Medina from 1963 to 1968, he graduated with high honors and was encouraged by Bin Baz early on to publish his views. He wrote anti-Shia polemics even before the Iranian Revolution. Zaheer was schooled in the Ahl-e Hadith tradition, which rejected Shiism. His years in Saudi Arabia likely cemented those views, and the revolution added fuel to his fire. Zaheer, who later started the Jamiat Ahl-e Hadith political party, amply fulfilled the hopes of his Saudi patrons and published fourteen anti-Shia books, which drew a wide audience. He wrote many of them in Arabic, only later translating them into Urdu. The heart of his argument was similar to Surur’s but without the politics: Shias were not real Muslims, they were infiltrated by Jews, magis, and others. Just as with Surur’s book, this was new language, not a theological debate, but an attack against Shias as people. Mainstream, moderate Sunni clerics tried to resist the slippery slope toward such an unbending attitude against fellow Muslims, but the radical voices grew louder and louder. Increasing numbers of books were published with titles like The Shias’ Revolt Against the Quran or Shias Rebel Against Islam. The Saudis not only encouraged such vitriol but helped translate the books into multiple languages and distribute them around the Muslim world. Saudi embassies from Islamabad to Washington kept copies available to hand out. This was no longer about persuasion but political condemnation.
Although Zaheer didn’t delve much into politics in his writings, he did his bit to rally the faithful as the Iran-Iraq War dragged into its third year. Iranian propaganda labeled the Iraqi government as an infidel regime, and Saddam sought cover from the Islamic world. As a secular Baathist, he had little experience with the world of Islamic organizations, so he turned to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis sent their favorite man: Maarouf Dawalibi. The Syrian adviser to the Saudi king, who also served as the head of the World Muslim Congress, was instrumental in gathering the who’s who of the Islamic world for the Popular Islamic Conference (PICO) held in April 1983: 280 religious scholars showed up, as well as activists from fifty countries. The Pakistani delegation was the largest. Islamists who had initially hoped Khomeini would back their own Islamic revolution, like Syrian Muslim Brother Sa’id Hawwa; those who were anti-Iran because they saw Khomeini as a threat to the Arab nation; those who were close to the Saudis; those who saw the Iranians as nothing but infidel magi—they all came. It made for a strange sight as they sat in their turbans and cleric’s robes in a conference hall whose front row was occupied by avowedly secular Baathist men in uniform.
Zaheer, who by now had quite the following in the Arab world thanks to his books, gave a speech denouncing the Iranians and calling on the Muslim world to rally behind Saddam: “Those people only understand the language of the sword, these people need to have a sword hanging over their neck, not just the sword of Saddam and not just the sword of his heroes.” Speaking in fluent Arabic, without notes, Zaheer described the Iranians as evil people allied with other evil leaders, the Syrian and Libyan presidents. But the conspiracy would fail, Zaheer insisted, waving his fist and almost screaming by the end of his speech. In the front row, Saddam listened, impassive, before getting up for a long handshake with Zaheer at the end.
After the pamphlets, the books, and the conferences came the fatwas and the militias. In 1985, the Army of the Companions of the Prophets, the Sepah-e Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) militia, was formed in the Punjab, with the tacit approval of Zia and his security services. The SSP’s only purpose was to denounce and attack Shias, the first overtly sectarian militia in the Muslim world, with the chilling rallying cry “Kafir, kafir, Shia kafir”—infidels. In 1986, a series of fatwas began to circulate widely, banning Sunnis from eating food cooked by Shias or attending their funerals. Then came more fatwas explicitly declaring Shias kafir—a true license to kill. Apostatizing non-Sunnis was not a new phenomenon in Pakistan or the Muslim world—it had been done to smaller Muslim minorities—but now it was becoming common currency against Shias, Pakistan’s minority of millions.
What happened next was inevitable. In 1986, the sectarian po
ison that Zia and the Saudis had been injecting into Pakistan collided with the Afghan jihad, on Allama Hussaini’s home turf, in Kurram district on the border with Afghanistan. Hussaini’s Shia tribe, the Turis, were upset with the influx of refugees from Afghanistan and resented their area being used as a launching pad for attacks into Afghanistan, a passage for fighters and weapons across the border. They were on the receiving end of the retaliation from inside Afghanistan. The local tribes mobilized to block fighters and disarm them, amid reports that the government wanted to turn Kurram into a permanent base for the mujahedeen. Zia could not afford to let anyone stand in the way of his jihad, a lucrative business that was keeping his economy afloat and keeping him in power. Sporadic clashes took place throughout 1986, until July 1987, when Zia sent Afghan and Pakistani Sunni militants to attack Shia Turi villages. The fighting lasted for two weeks; the Shias fought back: 52 Shias and 120 Sunnis were killed, and 14 villages were partially or fully destroyed. Here then was the epicenter of modern-day sectarian bloodletting, the first of its kind in modern times. Sectarianism had been weaponized.
Targeted assassinations came next. On the morning of March 23, 1987, Zaheer was giving a lecture to a packed audience of the youth wing of his party in Lahore. He was interrupted midspeech by the explosion of a small bomb planted at his feet. Eight people were killed on the spot and Zaheer was severely injured. Both Saddam and King Fahd offered medical care. The Saudis chartered a special medical plane to fly him, accompanied by his father, to Riyadh for treatment. He died at dawn on March 30 at the King Faisal hospital. He was granted two supreme honors: his funeral prayers, attended by thousands, were led by Sheikh Bin Baz himself, and he was laid to rest in Medina. In Pakistan, protests erupted over his death; thousands took to the streets in Lahore, clashing with the police and burning cars, chanting “Blood for Blood” and “Zia Killer.” Zaheer had had his differences with Zia—he thought the general was using religion as a tool to stay in power. Like many fundamentalists, he felt the dictator had undermined Pakistan’s identity and ideology by caving in to the Shias on the zakat issue. Did Zia dispose of a powerful cleric who was becoming inconvenient? Or did Shias want to silence a man spewing hate against them? Bin Baz personally tried to follow up and push for an investigation. No one would ever be caught for Zaheer’s killing, the first high-profile assassination of a religious scholar in Pakistan. But in the years to come, the narrative would put the blame squarely on Shias, those magi kafir.