by Kim Ghattas
On July 31, 1987, just a few days before the official start of the hajj, Iranian pilgrims leaving the mosque after prayers gathered for a march. There were reports of a tacit understanding with the Saudis that they would tolerate a peaceful march with no political slogans. The intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, who oversaw security for the hajj, denied that such an agreement had ever been reached. Either way, the procession clashed with a cordon of Saudi police trying to stop the marchers. At 6:30 p.m., the protesters burned American flags. Just before seven, an altercation occurred. Saudi police used tear gas to push back the protesters. The crowd of sixty thousand retreated, but the exit alleys were blocked. Witnesses said pilgrims attacked the Saudi police with knives. Shots were fired. Prince Turki described pilgrims carrying bats and sword-like machetes, hidden under their white pilgrim ihram, ready to strike the police. The Iranian version has the Saudis resorting to excessive and unwarranted violence. The Saudis always denied firing into the crowd, but witnesses spoke of people with bullet wounds to the chest, arms, and thighs. “Shots could be heard loud and clear,” and “cartridges were found on the main street.” By eight in the evening, it was all over. More than four hundred people had died, 275 of them Iranian, according to Saudi officials. The Iranians put the toll at four hundred Iranians killed and four thousand injured.
Sami was devastated once again by what had happened in what was supposed to be a sanctuary of peace. Politics had no place here—neither Iran’s politics nor anyone else’s. For three days, official Saudi state media said nothing—as usual. Even the pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat, read by thousands around the region, kept up the pretense of a successful, calm hajj, with headlines that ignored the tragedy. By August 2, there was a brief mention of an official warning against all protests, after Iranians had caused minor disturbances, according to the paper. Then the reporting suddenly shifted to highlighting the support the kingdom was getting from around the Arab and Muslim world in the face of the “Iranian mob.” But there was no hiding the bloody debacle that had leaked into global headlines and was being retold in all four corners of the world, by tens of thousands of pilgrims close enough to have witnessed or heard about the carnage. Here was yet another stain on the record of the House of Saud as custodians of the holy sites.
The Iranians were apoplectic. A crowd of more than a million gathered two days later in Tehran, chanting “Revenge” and “Death to the Saudi rulers.” The speaker of the house, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, called on the faithful to avenge the blood of the martyrs, “uproot the Saudi rulers,” and “divest the control of the holy shrines from the contaminated existence of the Wahhabis, those hooligans.” “The true revenge,” he added, “is to remove the colossal and precious wealth belonging to the Islamic world which lies under the soil of the Arabian Peninsula … from the control of criminals” and use it to fight “infidels, paganism, and arrogance.” A mob ransacked the Saudi, Kuwaiti, French, and Iraqi embassies in Tehran. A Saudi diplomat was killed.
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. The Saudis gathered six hundred supporters from 134 countries for a conference organized by the World Muslim League in Mecca. It cost over $400 million. The Iranians held theirs under the title “International Congress on Safeguarding the Sanctity and Security of the Great Mosque,” bringing together three hundred participants from thirty-five countries. The accusations they hurled at the Saudis revealed historical grievances that had mostly lain dormant while Saudi Arabia and Iran had been friendly allies, during the reign of the shah. Rafsanjani called for the “liberation” of Mecca, while another cleric accused the House of Saud of being “a bunch of English agents from Najd who have no respect either for the House of God or for the pilgrims who are the guests of God.” This was a reference to the way that the founder of the Saudi state had relied on British help to edge out his rival Sharif Hussein from Mecca.
When King Abdelaziz ibn Saud had launched his first raids to recover his ancestors’ land in Najd in the early 1900s, he’d also had his eye on the rest of the peninsula, especially Mecca and Medina, holy places that would add Islamic glory to his crown. Those were still under the rule of Sharif Hussein, descendant of the prophet, longtime ally of the British. In 1916, as the Ottoman Empire faltered during World War I, Sharif Hussein proclaimed himself king of Hejaz. The British and French acquiesced. But Abdelaziz had also been courting the British, hoping to convince them he was the better option to rule not only the Hejaz but the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. With his warriors, he was conquering more and more terrain, defeating another rival dynasty, the Al-Rashid, that had ruled over large parts of the peninsula for almost a century. In 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. Sharif Hussein briefly laid claim to the title of caliph but soon lost the support of the British (one of his sons became king of Iraq, the other founded the monarchy that still rules in Jordan). Abdelaziz sent his troops to conquer the Hejaz, starting with a brutal massacre in Taef. When the Al-Sauds reached the holy sites in December 1924, Wahhabi zealots destroyed the cemetery of Jannat al-Baqi in Medina, the resting place of many of the prophet’s relatives and companions, including his daughters and wives. Such destruction and desecration caused consternation across the Muslim world, but Shias were especially incensed. They called on Muslims to rally and expel the Al-Sauds from the Hejaz.
Abdelaziz moved quickly. He invited delegations from Persia to investigate the alleged damage. One of the delegations reported that Mecca was in better shape than it had been under Sharif Hussein. The other group left Medina disheartened by the destruction it had witnessed. Yet another delegation came from India, demanding that control over the holy cities be handed to a committee representing all Muslim countries. Abdelaziz swiftly sent them on their way. Other travelers described terrible damage to a site described as so rich in “the remains of great saints that they have almost lost their individual importance while the relics of just one of the persons mentioned would be sufficient to render celebrated any other Moslim town.”
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. The first wave of destructive zeal had happened in the early 1800s, when the descendants of Muhammad ibn Saud, the original founder of the Al-Saud dynasty, had pushed to conquer more territory outside their emirate of Najd. They conducted bloody raids into the territories of Qatif and Bahrain, which were dependencies of Persia, and into Iraq, which was under Ottoman rule. In 1801, they sacked Karbala, in Iraq, in one of the worst massacres in Islamic history, killing two thousand people (according to the account of one of their own chroniclers). They plundered the city and stripped the shrine of Imam Hussain of its treasures, its cloth embroidered with pearls and gems. In 1803, one of the Al-Sauds was assassinated at the mosque in Dir’iya, their hometown, as revenge. Two centuries later, when Saudis would be asked about the bloody history of their ancestors and their plunder of Karbala, they would immediately point out it had really all started with a dispute about trading routes, in which Iraqis had been the first to attack, “killing 300 Wahhabis.” 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 plunder was used to build the Al-Sauds’ campaign to conquer Mecca and Medina, which they occupied briefly, looting the treasures of the tomb of the prophet and destroying the Jannat al-Baqi cemetery. The Muslim world was horrified. Meccans saw the men as dangerous fanatics, infidels dressed as Muslims. By 1810, the Ottomans had had enough of the Wahhabis and sent their army t
o crush them. Dir’iya was reduced to rubble. Abdallah ibn Saud, descendant of the founding father, was captured and taken to Constantinople to be decapitated. A renowned jurist and scholar in Damascus at the time, Muhammad Amin ibn Abidin, a Sufi and a mufti (Islamic jurist) from the Hanafi school, had nothing but scorn for “those who followed Abdelwahhab.” In his seminal book Radd al-Muhtar ala ad-Dur al-Mukhtar (Guiding the Baffled About the Exquisite Pearl), he wrote about the demise of those who thought that they alone were the true Muslims, killing fellow Muslims and scholars until “God had finally neutralized them and destroyed their country.”
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Ahmad ibn Zayni Dahlan, a mufti in Mecca belonging to the Shafi’i school, wrote at length about the seditious Wahhabis, describing how Egypt had marked the news of Abdallah ibn Saud’s arrest with one thousand cannon shots, decorating towns and celebrating for seven days. Dahlan had little good to say about Ibn Abdelwahhab and his followers, describing them as sly. He devoted two books to repudiating the Wahhabis: one telling the story of their demise and one refuting their thought, titled al-Durar al-Saniyya fil Rad ala al-Wahhabiyya (Resplendent Pearls in the Refutation of Wahhabism). Dahlan was deeply worried that the singularity of opinion and creed preached by someone like Ibn Abdelwahhab would be the undoing of the Muslim nation.
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.
* * *
In 1987, Sofana Dahlan sat in her art class in a Jeddah middle school and traced a thick black line through the neck of the figure she was drawing—in essence, slitting his throat. The ten-year-old didn’t have violent tendencies. She was only doing what she was being told by her primary school teacher. She also had to black out any faces in her books. Creativity was being murdered on a daily basis in Saudi schools. Sofana was a descendant of Mufti Dahlan, whose predictions had come true.
The young girl lived with the double legacy of Ibn Abdelwahhab’s fundamentalist teachings on one side and, on the other, the forgiving, inclusive vision of her ancestor Mufti Dahlan. At school, Sofana learned all about Ibn Abdelwahhab’s unitary version of extreme Salafist, Hanbali Islam. Her parents told her to study it for her school tests and then forget about it—to retain only what she was getting in private tutoring in Shafi’i Islamic teachings. At school, she was taught that you could not be friends with Jews and Christians; at home and on travels, her parents socialized with all kinds of non-Muslims. At school, she was taught that all human representations were a sin, even photographs, which were described as al-shirk al-asghar, the lesser idolatry. But at home, there were family portraits and pictures on the wall. There were too many contradictions for a child to comprehend and reconcile. She was too young to fully grasp this separation of the private from the public, but it produced intense inner turmoil. She would outgrow the confusion and would eventually challenge the system to become one of the first Saudi woman lawyers. But the one teaching that she couldn’t leave behind, that would remain seared in her mind, was the notion that music was haram, forbidden. “Listen to music,” the teacher had told Sofana when she was just six years old, “and you will have melted iron poured into your ears on Judgment Day.” She could never outgrow that frightful image. She would always startle when she heard music, even as an outspoken lawyer who had traveled the world, even as a grown woman in her forties, when a young, powerful crown prince would become the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia and confuse her even more by opening concert halls, bringing John Travolta and the Cirque du Soleil to the kingdom.
* * *
A decade after the sky fell to earth, after revolutions and uprisings, a whole new series of dramatic events were about to unfold, ushering in a new decade and setting the stage for the next phase of the Saudi-Iran rivalry. Wars would end and dictators would die, but the new peace could not undo the deep transformations that had taken root in the psyches of nations and people during the 1980s.
10
CULTURE WARS
PAKISTAN, AFGHANISTAN, IRAN, LEBANON
1988–90
What happens when you win?
When your enemies are at your mercy:
How will you act then?
Compromise is the temptation of the weak;
this is the test for the strong.
—Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
On August 17, 1988, a four-engine C-130 plane carrying Zia ul-Haq crashed. It was 4:30 p.m., just a few minutes after takeoff from Bahawalpur in Pakistan’s Punjab province, close to the border with India. All thirty passengers perished, their mangled bodies scattered over a large, sandy plain just miles from the airport. There was talk of a ball of fire that had engulfed the plane before it crashed. Was it sabotage? A missile attack? An internal malfunction? Sabotage was the most likely answer, but the investigation was never allowed to reach any conclusion. There was one certainty: the dictator was dead.
At home in Karachi, the former television anchor Mehtab Rashdi wasn’t even sure of that. Not at first. Could it be true that Zia, the man who had silenced Pakistan’s women and abused the country, was really gone? The woman still known for having said no had been waiting for years for news like this. She hadn’t known how or when the country would finally be rid of the evil buffoon, but she had been waiting. Now the radio and television channels were playing Quranic recitations. She felt no sadness. But she didn’t dare feel joy yet, either. The streets were quiet, her heart was still. By evening, she could breathe again, maybe for the first time in years. She felt like a boulder had been lifted off her chest, off the whole country. He truly was gone.
Condolences poured in, even from India. The US secretary of state, George P. Shultz, described Zia as “a great fighter for freedom.” Vice President George H. W. Bush called him “a great friend,” his loss a tragedy. But there was no sense of tragedy in the country—foreboding perhaps, but not tragedy. In their homes, many Pakistanis celebrated quietly, some even with bootleg whisky. Along the border with Afghanistan, in the Kurram district, home of the assassinated Shia cleric Arif Hussaini and tragic birthplace of modern-day sectarian killings, Shias celebrated loudly, by firing rockets and bullets into the sky, enraging their Sunni neighbors, who saw Zia as their champion and defender. More sectarian clashes ensued and twelve people died. Shiite shops were burned and looted.
In the eyes of most Pakistanis, the dictator had gotten what he deserved. He was no fighter for freedom. This was God’s wrath, thought Mehtab. A man who was everything had been turned to ashes in an instant.
“I do not regret the death of Zia” was Benazir Bhutto’s first reaction when she heard that the man who had sent her father to the gallows was dead. She had been in Pakistan for just over two years now, since a triumphant return from exile in April 1986. Zia had announced he was finally going to hold elections, and he had allowed her to fly home, not expecting the crowd of hundreds of thousands who thronged the streets to greet her and chant “Zia dog.” The dictator decided to place obstacles in her way. He maintained the ban on political parties, which meant Bhutto and her Pakistan Peoples Party couldn’t be on the ballot, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling they should be allowed to run. He scheduled the general elections for November 16, 1988, when Benazir would be days away from delivering her first child. But now that the dictator was dead, Benazir would run practically unopposed. Fate had interverened and there was justice after all, Mehtab kept thinking.
A few weeks later, the former anchor received a phone call from the Islamabad headquarters of Pakistan television. Would she like to cover the general election? “How would you like me to appear on-screen?” she asked. Her question was met with lighthearted laughter. “Any way you want,” came the response. There would be no dupatta imposed on women anymore. She agreed. This was he
r victory over darkness, over the man who thought he was a better Muslim than she. Her first appearance on television in eight years would signal that change had arrived. Benazir Bhutto’s party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, won enough seats to form a government.
For five days, there was dancing and music on the streets of Pakistan, a public eruption of joy after years of fear, a celebration of life after everything but religion had been banned. Were people celebrating the first democratic elections in over a decade, or was it a belated celebration of Zia’s demise? Probably both, but another, more amorphous dictatorship was taking hold of the country, born from seeds planted there by Zia, with generous help from Saudi Arabia and the United States.
Benazir was now prime minister, the first-ever female Muslim head of government anywhere—and one of the rare women leaders on the world stage, still a small club. But she would never again appear in public—in Pakistan or overseas—without a veil, a loosely wrapped white chiffon scarf that became her trademark. She would try to undo Zia’s Islamization and carry forward her father’s dream of a progressive country where there was no discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or religion. But she would fail, assailed by the now entrenched religious and security establishment bristling at a woman leader and her secular rule. With the encouragement of Saudi clerics, there had even been fatwas against her run for office.
She would be removed from power by August 1990, outdone by the military establishment’s maneuvers against her, and plagued by allegations of corruption. Most Pakistanis had hoped her rise to office would yield a return to normal life, to the pre-Zia era, with no screaming clerics or gangs of armed gunmen—religious or criminal—ruling the streets. They looked forward to a full return of civilian rule. But Pakistan’s army, powerful before, was now so entrenched in politics that they didn’t even need a general in the presidency to rule the country. Bhutto was replaced by a Zia protégé and friend of Saudi Arabia, Nawaz Sharif, a soft-spoken forty-year-old with a round face and a balding head. Sharif appeared bland, a nondescript-looking man, but he was a ruthless, cunning politician who would dominate Pakistani politics for the next three decades, in and out of power, in and out of political exile in Saudi Arabia, yet always pushing to continue Zia’s Islamization and sectarianization of the country.