Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  Student protests became more aggressive as Sadat drew closer to the West and became more autocratic. In 1978 he issued the Law of Shame: any deviation in thought, word, or deed from the establishment was to be punished with loss of civil rights and confiscation of passports and property. Citizens were forbidden to join any group, take part in any broadcast, or publish anything that would threaten “national unity or social peace.” Even a casual remark, made in the privacy of one’s own home, would not go unpunished.30 In response to government oppression, at the University of Mina students started vandalizing Christian churches—associated with Western imperialism—and attacking those who wore Western dress. Sadat closed down the jamaat, but suppression nearly always makes such movements more extreme, and some students joined a clandestine movement dedicated to armed jihad. Khaled Islambouli had studied at the University of Mina and joined one of these cells. Shortly before his assassination, Sadat had rounded up over fifteen hundred opposition figures in September 1981, including cabinet ministers, politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and ulema as well as Islamists; one of the latter was Khaled’s brother Muhammad.31

  The ideology of Sadat’s murderers had been shaped by Abd al-Salam Faraj, spiritual guide of the Jihad Network, who was executed with Khaled in 1982. His treatise, The Neglected Duty, had been circulated privately among members of the organization and was published after the assassination. This plodding, graceless, and ill-informed document also shows how misguided the secularizing reformers had been to deprive the people of adequate religious guidance. Faraj was another freelancer: he had graduated in electrical engineering and had no expertise in Islamic law. But it seems that by the 1980s, the maverick ideas that he was expressing had spread, unchecked by the sidelined ulema, until they were widely accepted in society. The “neglected duty” of the title was aggressive jihad. Muslims, Faraj argued, had been convinced by feeble-minded apologists that fighting was permissible only in self-defense. Hence Muslims were living in subjection and humiliation and could recover their dignity only by resorting to arms. Sadat was no better than an infidel because he ruled by the “laws of unbelief” imposed on the ummah by the colonialists.32 Despite their apparent orthodoxy, Sadat and his government were a pack of apostates who deserved to die. Faraj cited Ibn Taymiyyah’s fatwa against the Mongol rulers, who, just like Sadat, had been Muslims only in name. In the time of al-Shafii, Muslims had feared only an external attack; now infidels were actually ruling the ummah. In order to create a truly Islamic state, therefore, jihad was fard ayn, the duty of every able-bodied Muslim.

  Faraj reveals the “idolatry” that is every bit as present in some forms of political Islamism as in secularist discourse, for he made the ummah a supreme value. “It is obligatory for every Muslim to seriously strive for the return of the Caliphate,” Faraj argued; anyone who fails to do so “does not die as a Muslim.”33 In the past Islam had been a religion validated by its success. Until the modern period, the powerful position of the ummah had seemed to confirm the Quran’s teaching: that a rightly guided community would prosper because it was in tune with the way things ought to be. The ummah’s sudden demotion has been as theologically shattering for some Muslims as Darwin’s evolutionary theory has been for some Christians. The sense of shame and humiliation has been acute and is exacerbated by a sense of past greatness. Much of modern Islamism represents a desperate struggle to put history back on track. But this dream of a gloriously restored ummah has become an absolute, an end in itself, and as such justifies the means of an aggressive jihad—in this case, a criminal assassination. In Islamic terms, this constitutes the prime sin of shirk, an idolatry that places a political ideal on the same level as Allah. As one commentator observed, far from condoning lawless violence, the ideal of jihad originally expressed the important insight that “the final truth for man lies not in some remote and untarnished utopia but in the tension and struggle of applying its ideals to the recalcitrant and obstructive stuff of worldly sorrow.”34

  Faraj’s primitive theology is apparent when he explains why it was more important to fight Sadat than the Israelis: if a truly Islamic state were established in Egypt, he believed, Jerusalem would automatically revert to Muslim rule. In the Quran, God promised Muslims that he would bring disgrace on their enemies and come to the Muslims’ aid. In a nihilistic abandonment not only of his modern scientific training but also of the Quranic insistence that Muslims use their natural intelligence, Faraj reverted to a particularly naive form of the perennial philosophy that amounted to little more than magical thinking: if Muslims took the initiative, God would “intervene [and change] the laws of nature.” Could the militants expect a miracle? Faraj answered yes. Observers were puzzled that there was no planned uprising after the assassination. Faraj believed that God would step in and do the rest.35 He did not. Hosni Mubarak became president with a minimum of fuss, and his secular dictatorship remained in power for thirty years.

  Terrorism has often cropped up in the Muslim world when the nation’s boundaries do not accord with those set up by the colonial powers for the state.36 Lebanon had been put together particularly ineptly by the colonialists. It had also inherited a pattern of economic disparity and had its own unique and tragic problems. Its Shii population inhabited the infertile country between Tyre and Sidon, which until 1920 had been part of Greater Syria and so had no historic ties with the Sunni Muslims and Maronite Christians of the north; and they had not participated in the modernization process, whereby a prosperous bourgeoisie had made Beirut the intellectual capital of the Middle East. Southern Lebanon remained undeveloped, because the constitution made each confessional community responsible for its own welfare and social institutions. Shii poverty meant that most of their three hundred villages had neither hospitals nor irrigation, and because Shii tended to be uneducated, they were inadequately represented in the national government. During the 1950s, unable to make a living on the land, thousands migrated to Beirut, where they lived in the shantytowns of Maslakh and Karantina, known locally as the “misery belt.” They never assimilated and were regarded with disdain by the more sophisticated population.

  In 1959, however, Musa al-Sadr, a brilliant, cosmopolitan Iranian cleric, arrived from Najaf, where a circle of ulema had created a revisionist form of Shiism. Using Shii ideas to help the people reflect on their political and social position, Sadr began to transform this backward community into one of the leading factions in Lebanon. Part of the problem, Sadr believed, was that the traditional quietism of the Shiah had contributed to Shii marginalization. The Sixth Imam had adopted this policy of sacred secularism in order to protect Shiis from Abbasid violence. But the conditions of the modern world required Shiis to go back to the spirit of Imam Husain and take their destiny into their own hands. In Husain they should find a model of courage and political choice.37 Sadr criticized the ulema and feudal landlords for failing to provide their community with adequate guidance. Together with Ayatollah Muhammad Fadl Allah, another member of the Najaf circle, he provided the community with badly needed social services and began to build a culture of Shii self-reliance and resistance to the systemic injustice of Lebanon.38

  All the elements of the structural violence that typically contributes to the development of an Islamist movement were therefore present in Lebanon. A gulf separated a Westernized, privileged elite from the unmodernized masses; urbanization had been too rapid; there was an inequitable social system, and also physical and social dislocation. The situation of Lebanon was further complicated by the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict. After the Cairo Agreement of 1969, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was allowed to establish bases in southern Lebanon from which to attack Israel, and once the PLO had been expelled from Jordan in 1970, Lebanon became its main base. In southern Lebanon, therefore, the Shii suffered heavy casualties in Israel’s retaliatory bombardment. The demography of the country had also changed. The Shii birthrate had increased dramatically, with the population rising from 100,000 in
1921 to 750,000 in 1975. Because the Sunni and Maronite birthrates had declined, by the mid-1970s the Shii formed 30 percent of the population and had become the largest confessional community in Lebanon.39 When both Sunni and Shii Muslims requested a restructuring of political institutions to reflect this change, a catastrophic civil war broke out (1975–78). Lebanon became a dangerously violent place, where fighting was no longer a choice but essential to personal survival.

  Shii Islam became militant as a result of ubiquitous warfare and the systemic oppression of Lebanese society. Sadr had already established training camps to teach Shii youth self-defense and after the outbreak of the civil war founded AMAL (“Battalions for Lebanese Resistance”), which brought the poorer classes together with the “new men”—Shii businessmen and professionals who had managed to climb the economic ladder. They fought Maronite supremacy alongside the Druze, a small, esoteric Shii sect. The Shii probably suffered more than any other group during the civil war. Their shantytowns were destroyed by the Christian militias, thousands were left homeless, and thousands more had to flee the south of the country during the ongoing struggle between Israel and the PLO. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 to oust the PLO, Shii homes were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands were forced to seek refuge in Beirut.

  At this crucial moment, Musa al-Sadr made a visit to Libya and disappeared, perhaps murdered by Qaddafi, thus becoming the Lebanese “Hidden Imam.” This loss split AMAL: some followed the secularist, American-educated Nabih Berri, who advocated peaceful action, but the more literate “new men” followed Fadl Allah, a scholar whose views would come to be very controversial in the community of learned authorities. His Islam and the Use of Force (1976), written in a society torn apart by violent conflict, had argued that Muslims must be ready to fight and, if necessary, die like Husain in the struggle for justice and equity. Martyrdom was not just a pious deed but a revolutionary political act, a refusal to submit to oppression and cruelty. Rightly used, force enabled a person to take charge of his life and was the only way to survive with dignity in a violent world:

  Force means that the world gives you resources and wealth; conversely in conditions of weakness, a man’s life degenerates, his energies are wasted, he becomes subject to something that resembles suffocation and paralysis. History, the history of war and peace, of science and wealth, is the history of the strong.40

  Muslims should not shy away from economic success and modern technology but use them to resist injustice and marginalization. They would not be aping the West, because instead of making the nation-state an instrument of the market economy, Shii would build a humane state based on the values of community and self-respect. The ends were Islamic, but the means were new.

  In 1979, inspired by the Iranian Revolution and with funding and training from Tehran, Fadl Allah founded Hizbollah, the “Party of God.” Western people were puzzled that the revolution had failed to spread to Shii communities closer to Iran in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia but had taken root immediately in faraway Lebanon.41 In fact, Iran and Lebanon had a long relationship. In the sixteenth century, when the Safavids had founded their Shii Empire in Iran, then a largely Sunni country, they had asked the Shii scholars of Lebanon to instruct and guide them; so it was natural for Lebanese Shii to join the Iranian revolutionary network. Hizbollah first came to the world’s attention during the Israeli invasion (1982) and the subsequent U.S. military intervention (1983–84), when on October 25, 1983, Hizbollah suicide bombers killed 241 American and 58 French peacekeeping troops in their military compound near Beirut airport; this martyrdom operation was followed by further attacks on the U.S. embassy and the U.S. barracks.

  To explain its violent actions, Hizbollah communiqúes cited the United States’ opposition to Khomeini and its support for Saddam Hussein, Israel, and the Christian Maronites. Fadl Allah spoke of the “arrogant silence” of Western powers in the face of Third World suffering.42 These operations were not simply inspired by religious zeal but had a clear political objective: to compel foreign occupiers to leave Lebanon. This was “revolutionary suicide.” As to methods, Fadl Allah pointed out that the Shii were engaged in an asymmetrical struggle:

  The oppressed nations do not have the technology and destructive weapons that America and Europe have. They must fight with special means of their own.… We … do not regard what oppressed Muslims of the world do with primitive and unconventional means to confront aggressive powers as terrorism. We view this as lawful warfare against the world’s imperial powers.43

  These were not random, bigoted, and irrational acts but “legal obligations governed by rules” that Muslims must not transgress.44 One of these rules forbade the deliberate targeting of civilians, which is prohibited under Islamic law—though Hizbollah did take American, British, French, and German civilians as hostages to secure the release of Shii prisoners held elsewhere. In the West the suicide attack immediately recalled the Assassins, who symbolized the fanaticism that Westerners had long attributed to Islam. But while Hizbollah had indeed pioneered this controversial method in the Middle East, most suicide bombing in Lebanon during the 1980s would be carried out by secularists. According to one survey, Hizbollah was responsible for seven suicide operations; the secular Syrian Nationalist Party for twenty-two, and the socialist Baath party for ten.45

  By 1986, however, the resistance leaders had decided that Hizbollah must change direction, since its operations were too often irresponsible and counterproductive; it was suffering heavy casualties and dividing the Shii community. There was tension between Hizbollah and AMAL, and the villages resisted Hizbollah’s attempts to impose Islamic rules.46 By this time Fadl Allah had concluded that violence, after all, did not bring results: What had the PLO achieved with the terrorism that had shocked the world? Lebanese Shii must take a new path, he argued, working “from within the objective and actual circumstances” in which they found themselves.47 Fadl Allah knew that it was impossible to establish an Islamic state in Lebanon and in 1989 even suggested that it was time for the Iranians to begin “the normalization of relations with the rest of the world,” since like any political movement, revolutions go through many stages and change with a changing world:

  Like all revolutions, including the French Revolution, the Islamic Revolution didn’t have a realistic line at first. At that time it served to create a state, it proclaimed a mobilization, a new religious way of thinking and living, with the aim of winning Muslim autonomy and independence from the superpowers.48

  Hizbollah, therefore, renounced terrorism and became a political party answerable to the electorate, focusing on social activism and a grassroots transformation.

  It had already begun to disentangle itself from the melee of Shii militias by developing an underground cell structure and devised a spiritual process designed to replace what Khomeini had called the “colonized brain” with one that could think outside the parameters imposed by the West. All Hizbollah leaders still attend philosophy classes to develop their capacity to think critically and independently. As the American civil rights activists did, they work with small groups in the villages to discover how each individual can best contribute to the community: they may set someone up in business or train him for an elite militia. Their goal, reminiscent of the Confucian ideal, is to develop a Shii community in which everybody receives and gives a measure of respect and feels valued and needed. Since the 2006 war with Israel, Hizbollah has concentrated especially on anger management: “We want to turn this anger from a destructive course into something politically useful—building resistance, perhaps—or into some socially constructive activity.”49

  During that war, Hizbollah modeled an alternative solution to the problem of asymmetrical warfare.50 In preparation for such a contingency, it had constructed deep underground tunnels and bunkers, some forty feet below the surface, where its militias could sit out Israeli air strikes, before emerging to mount a prolonged rocket and missile attack. Hizbollah knew that these could not seriously dama
ge the powerful Israeli war machine, but the long duration and unremitting nature of these missile barrages did affect Israeli morale. Hizbollah’s goal was to force Israel to launch a ground invasion, whereupon the well-trained Hizbollah guerrilla forces, with intimate knowledge of the terrain, could effectively assault Israel’s armored tanks with their shoulder-launched missiles. They had also achieved such a mastery of intelligence and public relations that many Israeli journalists frankly admitted that they preferred Hizbollah’s dispatches to the IDF’s. Their victory in compelling the Israelis to withdraw demonstrated that terrorism need not be the only way to repel a militarily superior enemy.

  As an inspiration for terrorism, however, nationalism has been far more productive than religion. Terrorism experts agree that the denial of a people’s right to national self-determination and the occupation of its homeland by foreign forces has historically been the most powerful recruiting agent of terrorist organizations, whether their ideology is religious (the Lebanese Shii) or secular (the PLO).51 In Israel, however, we have seen a different dynamic of secular nationalism pushing a religious tradition into a more militant direction: its tendency to make the nation-state a supreme value so that its preservation and integrity permit any form of action, however extreme. In May 1980, after the murder of six yeshiva students in Hebron, Gush settlers Menachem Livni and Yehuda Etzion planted bombs in the cars of five Arab mayors, intending not to kill but to mutilate them so that they became living reminders of the consequences of any opposition to Israel.52 But this operation was only a sideline. In April 1984 the Israeli government revealed the existence of a Jewish underground movement that had plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock in order to bring the Camp David talks to an end.