by John McHugo
But what was possibly most threatening for the Saudi regime was an attempt by some Shi‘is to link their own protests to the seizure of the mosque complex of the Ka‘ba in Mecca by a Sunni militant called Juhayman bin Muhammad bin Sayf al-Otaybi (see below). The demonstrations in Qatif had begun only five days after the seizure of the mosque, while some other demonstrations started on the day of the seizure. The possibility of joint action by both Sunni and Shi‘i dissidents, combining along Islamic lines against the corruption and oppression of the regime, was as much a nightmare for the Saudi authorities as it was in Iraq.8 Once again, we see how the Iranian Revolution was sparking a new assertiveness among Shi‘is outside Iran while also providing an inspiration to Sunni revolutionaries.
IV
Palestine was an interesting case. The Shah had been a close friend of Israel, seeing it as a valuable strategic ally as he tried to establish Iranian hegemony in the Gulf. Khomeini, by contrast, had been known as an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights well before the Islamic revolution. As Shi‘is were a tiny minority among Palestinian Muslims, it was inevitable that Palestinian Islamist movements would be Sunni. Yet for some Palestinian Sunni Islamists the Iranian Revolution was an inspiration. Fathi Shiqaqi was the leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a movement set up in 1980 with a programme of immediate armed struggle against Israel. In those early days, Islamist movements among Palestinians were sometimes encouraged by Israel, which saw them as a useful antidote to Arab nationalism. Shiqaqi contrasted the boldness and willingness to innovate shown by Khomeini, with the tepid and indecisive attitude of Sunni Islamists, who were all too frequently preoccupied with the minutiae of religious observance.
For Shiqaqi, Khomeini was ‘the man of the century’. He had turned Islam into a faith for those prepared to fight and sacrifice their lives for justice. He had also correctly identified the Palestinian call for justice as the point around which the struggle between Islam and the West revolved, whereas so many of the Sunni Islamists were more concerned with domestic political struggles in their own countries. The result was that, for Shiqaqi, Tehran had acquired the right to political leadership of the Muslim world in a way that transcended geographic, ethnic and sectarian boundaries. Shiqaqi saw Khomeini as a disciple of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and argued that he had ensured that there would be no purely sectarian identity in the Iranian Revolution. On the contrary, the Iranian Revolution had been formulated on the basis of the Qur’an. Sunnis, as well as Shi‘is, could line up behind it.9 After Hamas (a Sunni organisation) emerged from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987, it, too, would receive generous support from Iran. This would continue across the decades.
In Egypt, where the number of Shi‘is was extremely small, the Iranian Revolution actually hindered Sunni-Shi‘i relations, for reasons that are not hard to fathom. In 1947 some Sunni-Shi‘i dialogue began, when the Association for the Rapprochement of the Islamic Doctrinal Law Schools was established by an Iranian scholar, Muhammad Taqi al-Qummi. With government encouragement during the Nasser era, attempts were made to reach out to Iranian Shi‘is. Possibly as a result of this, in 1959 the rector of the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, Sheikh Mahmud Shaltut, issued a fatwa that Twelver Shi‘is should be seen as a fifth doctrinal law school alongside the Malikis, Hanafis, Shafi‘is and Hanbalis of Sunni Islam. This, of course, echoed earlier attempts at ecumenism such as those at the time of the powerful Iranian ruler Nadir Shah. Shaltut stated that in his view conversion from Twelver Shi‘ism to one of the four traditional Sunni doctrinal law schools or vice-versa was permissible. Subsequently, however, after Egypt broke off diplomatic relations with Iran in 1960, anti-Shi‘i religious polemic reappeared. This intensified after the Iranian Revolution, when the Egyptian government saw the new Iran and the export of its revolution as a major threat.
From the 1980s onwards, a few Egyptians have publicly announced their conversion to Shi‘ism. This has caused outrage and led to passionate calls for an end to all Shi‘i missionary activities and the banning of Shi‘i publications. The desire for taqrib, or ‘rapprochement’, and the restoration of the unity of Islam has been countered by the fear of fitna, civil strife and subversion. It is not hard to see political subtexts behind official attitudes to Shi‘ism in Egypt, including behind those expressed by the Al-Azhar Mosque. On the one hand there is genuine fear of subversion spreading from Iran. This is coupled with a kind of guilt that, since the time of President Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Egypt has been complicit in fostering policies of Western governments in the region. Those policies are widely perceived as benefiting the interests of those governments, and not those of the people of the region, with the consequence that Egypt has failed in its duty to stand up for the oppressed. On the other hand, the steady Wahhabisation of Egyptian Islam at a popular level, which has followed on from the rise of Saudi Arabia as the wealthiest oil-producing state, has made rapprochement between Sunnis and Shi‘is harder in Egypt, as it has elsewhere. In this respect, a revealing suggestion was put forward in 2007 by Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, a former rector of the Al-Azhar Mosque: that reverence for those of the Prophet’s Companions who are rejected by Shi‘is should be considered an essential part of a Muslim’s faith.10 It will have made rapprochement with Shi‘is much harder, but would have been well received in Saudi Arabia, which is a major donor of aid to Egypt.
In Syria, the Iranian Revolution had paradoxical consequences. In June 1979, a disaffected Sunni Ba‘athist let militants into the artillery academy in Aleppo, where they shot and killed at least thirty-two officer cadets who were chiefly Alawis. The artillery school massacre was a major escalation in the low-intensity guerrilla war already waged against the Syrian regime by Islamist militants inspired by the ideas of Sayyid Qutb. These militants were the Fighting Vanguard, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood founded by followers of Marwan Hadid, a Muslim Brother from Hama. Hadid, unusually for a Syrian Muslim Brother, had been advocating the violent overthrow of the Ba‘athists for a decade, before he died in regime custody in 1976. After the artillery school massacre, violence grew worse. In June 1980 an assassination attempt on President Hafez al-Assad nearly succeeded, and a mass execution of Islamist detainees in the notorious prison of Palmyra took place in retaliation. There were also attempts on the lives of other prominent Alawis and some leading Sunni religious scholars who supported Assad’s regime. Some of these were successful.
The culmination of the unrest was the uprising in Hama in February 1982 when the Fighting Vanguard and local members of the Muslim Brotherhood seized control and slaughtered dozens of local Ba‘athist officials. Their hope was to spark similar uprisings across Syria, but these did not occur. The regime’s response was brutal and comprehensive. Thousands of ordinary men, women and children died in the indiscriminate shelling by the regime’s tanks before it retook control. The lowest estimate for those who died in the regime’s recapture of Hama is 5,000, while figures of 10,000–20,000 (or even higher – up to 40,000) are frequently cited.
The Hama uprising and the violent campaign that preceded it was an attack on the kind of secularist regime against which Sayyid Qutb had advocated violence. At the same time, many of the members of the Fighting Vanguard who fought it had also been inspired by the Iranian Revolution. Specifically Sunni and Shi‘i revolutionary currents had thus come together against the secularist Ba‘ath of Hafez al-Assad. There was also another paradox. While the centre of Hama was being consumed by fire, the Iran-Iraq War was in progress and the Iranians were now on the offensive. The Syrian regime was revolutionary Iran’s major Arab ally throughout that conflict. Only a couple of months after the uprising had been crushed, Syria would help Iran by closing the pipeline for Iraqi oil exports that crossed its territory.
V
In terms of exporting the Iranian Revolution, the greatest success was in Lebanon. It is not an exaggeration to say that this small state, once part of Ottoman Greater Syria but now wedged uncomfortably betw
een Syria and Israel, would be permanently changed as a result.
At the time of the creation of Israel in 1947–49, Lebanon paid lip service to the general Arab view that the partition of Palestine was morally wrong and unjust; but the Lebanese army played only a nominal role in the fighting. The creation of Israel as a Jewish state necessitated the expulsion of a large number of Palestinian Arabs. Many were pushed over the border into Lebanon where they were forced to become long-term refugees. They were predominantly Sunni Muslim, with a fair number of Christians. Some managed to make their way in Lebanon but, for the most part, they were forced by the Lebanese government to remain in refugee camps and prevented from integrating into Lebanese society.
During the Six Day War in 1967, Israel seized the West Bank as well as the Egyptian Sinai peninsula and Syrian Golan Heights. This led to increasingly well-organised armed retaliation from Palestinian groups. Many of these had established a presence among the displaced Palestinians of Lebanon. For a while, the southern tip of the country became known as ‘Fatahland’, after the Palestinian guerrilla movement Fatah, which used the area to launch attacks on Israel. By the early 1970s these attacks were becoming more numerous and more professional. Israel retaliated on many occasions, often deliberately striking at nonmilitary targets (as did Fatah in its attacks on Israel). One of its aims was to alienate the Palestinian guerrillas from the host population. In southern Lebanon this population was, for the most part, Twelver Shi‘i.
The Shi‘is were the poorest of Lebanon’s many confessional groups (‘confessionalism’ is the political system in Lebanon whereby government posts are distributed between the country’s sects according to a set formula). Predominantly rural, they lived in the south (the old Jebel Amil) and the Biqa valley, although many were also drifting to the cities, especially the southern suburbs of Beirut. They tended to have the highest birth rates among Lebanese and to be the least educated. They were at the bottom of the Lebanese social ladder (just as the Alawis had once been in Syria, and the Twelver Shi‘is still were in Iraq). Although many Shi‘i fighters joined the Palestinians, the community had also come to resent the Palestinian militias, which lorded it over them. When they also suffered from Israeli shelling and bombing as retaliation for Palestinian attacks on Israel, that anti-Palestinian resentment deepened.
In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon. It had two sets of objectives. The first was to destroy the Palestinian militias and drive the Palestinian leadership out of the country. The Israelis hoped that this would deal a mortal blow to Palestinian nationalism. The second was to intervene in the civil war which by then had already raged intermittently in Lebanon for some seven years, a conflict between broadly Christian groups on one side, and on the other, leftist groups that were predominantly made up of Muslims. From 1979 onwards, Iran began to spread its revolutionary message among Lebanon’s Shi‘is, who were increasing in numbers and as a proportion of the Lebanese population. Today the Shi‘is are generally assumed to be Lebanon’s largest sect. Shi‘i politics were originally dominated by village leaders, but from the 1950s onwards left-wing secular parties had a strong appeal. Although Ba‘athist secularism attracted increasing numbers of Lebanese Shi‘is,11 many others had the same reservations about secular Arab nationalism that occurred among their Iraqi co-religionists: fear that it would lead to domination by the Sunnis, who were a large majority across the Arab world as a whole.12
Sectarian politics spread to the Lebanese Shi‘is from 1969 onwards, when a Shi‘i Supreme Islamic Council was established. It was chaired by Musa al-Sadr, a religious scholar who was born in Iran of Lebanese ancestry and was a cousin of the Iraqi Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr. He worked with other left-leaning groups against Maronite Christian domination, and founded the Amal movement (amal means ‘hope’ in Arabic), which had its own militia. He disappeared in 1978 while on a flight to Libya, and is thought to have been murdered on the orders of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. When the Lebanese civil war and the concomitant Israeli invasions began, Amal grew steadily in importance, both as a militia and a political party. However, as its power increased it suffered the fate of some other left-wing political parties in Arab countries, such as the Ba‘ath parties of Syria and Iraq and the Palestinian movement Fatah: it became a part of the patronage-dispensing political establishment.
Iranian Revolutionary fervour was already spreading among some Lebanese Shi‘is, but the process was accelerated by the Israeli invasion of 1982. As the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak put it with admirable frankness in a Newsweek interview in 2006, ‘When we entered Lebanon ... there was no Hezbollah. We were accepted with perfumed rice and flowers by the Shia in the south. It was our presence there that created Hezbollah.’13 Only six days after the start of Israel’s invasion in June 1982, a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards and regular troops – some of them battle-hardened from urban fighting in the war with Iraq – flew into Lebanon. Some would remain and train a core of fighters for what would become Hezbollah.14
The movement gained momentum during Muharram in 1983 when several trucks full of Israeli soldiers blundered into an Ashura procession, apparently as the result of a map-reading error. There could have been no more apt targets to represent the tyrant Yazid, since Israel was understandably often cast in this role during Ashura events throughout the years of occupation. When the soldiers were stoned, they responded with bullets. Several people were killed. The incident is seen as something of a formative moment in the development of Lebanese resistance to the Israeli occupation and Hezbollah.15
There is a radical side to Hezbollah which the movement has never repudiated. This is set out in an open letter written in 1985 to ‘The Downtrodden of Lebanon and the World’. It sees Islam as the only answer to the world’s problems and is addressed to ‘the Arab and Islamic peoples’. The letter is a black-and-white, simplistic document placing all blame for whatever is wrong on imperialism, colonialism and Westernisation. Where fractiousness has existed among Muslims, it has thus been a product of imperialism. Islam is the banner under which to fight back, especially against America, Israel and France. The Islam in question is that of Ayatollah Khomeini:
Each of us is a combat soldier when the call of jihad demands it and each of us undertakes his task in the battle in accordance with his lawful assignment within the framework of action under the leadership of the guardian jurisprudent [i.e. Khomeini].
The reference to Khomeini is a sign that Hezbollah had subscribed to his theory of velayat-e faqih. Yet, despite this, the open letter calls, at least implicitly, on Sunni religious scholars, as well as those of their Shi‘i counterparts who do not support Hezbollah, to educate the Muslim masses to practise their faith and fight oppression. It is therefore not a purely sectarian document.16
By the time of the open letter, Hezbollah had already proved itself to be highly effective on the battlefield and in achieving its political goals. It had played an important part in securing the withdrawal of American, French and other international forces that had come to Lebanon in 1983, even if the suicide bombings that had played a large part in achieving this had shocked the world. It had also been instrumental in frustrating Israel’s attempt to impose a victor’s peace treaty on Lebanon, and in persuading Israel to withdraw from its costly occupation of much of Lebanon. (Israel would eventually draw back unilaterally to the international border in May 2000.)
In 1992, Hezbollah contested parliamentary elections for the first time. It meant an obvious step away from the brittleness and intransigence of the ‘open letter’ in favour of pragmatism and compromise. Ever since, Hezbollah has been represented in the Lebanese parliament. Its electoral programmes do not stress religious issues but focus on economic exploitation and underdevelopment as well as security. During this period, Lebanese of all faiths came to see Hezbollah as vital for their security. As well as militantly Shi‘i, the movement can justifiably be described as Arab nationalist. This was brought home in the run-up to the US-led in
vasion of Iraq in March 2003. A week before the invasion began, the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, warned the Americans what would await them if they went ahead:
We tell the United States, don’t expect that the people of this region will welcome you with roses and jasmine. The people of this region will welcome you with rifles, blood and martyrdom operations. We are not afraid of the American invaders and will keep saying ‘death to America’.17
The Americans had given numerous reasons for their proposed invasion of Iraq, and these were often tailored for different audiences. When addressing people concerned by issues such as justice and human rights, they often argued they were going to Iraq to liberate the Shi‘i majority and the Kurds from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. They found no shortage of eloquent Iraqi Shi‘is to put forward this case. What this statement by Hassan Nasralluh shows is that Hezbollah might be a Shi‘i movement that had been inspired and aided by the Iranian revolution, but it was capable of putting solidarity between Muslims of all denominations, as well as between all Arabs, before solidarity with other Twelver Shi‘is.
VI
The Iranian Revolution provided an inspiration for revolutionary Sunni Islamists as well as for Shi‘is. But Iran’s resources to be spent on revolutionary propaganda abroad were small compared to those that Saudi Arabia was now devoting to spreading its Wahhabi message. Consequently that message reached Muslim communities everywhere. Its thrust was inherently anti-revolutionary as well as ultra-conservative, since Wahhabism teaches that a ruler who enforces the Wahhabi brand of Islam in his domains must always be loyally supported by his subjects. It followed from this that, in the Saudi view, all Muslims everywhere should be expected to look up to Saudi Arabia as a beacon of Islam and good Sharia practice.