by Reza Aslan
Religious adherence to the Saudi model became the prerequisite for receiving government subsidies and contracts. The vast sums the Saudis paid to various Muslim charities, the foundations they established, the mosques, universities, and primary schools they built—everything the Saudis did was inextricably linked to Wahhabism. In 1962, their missionary efforts gained momentum with the creation of the Muslim World League, whose primary goal was the spread of Wahhabi ideology to the rest of the world. This was, in effect, the new Islamic expansion, except that these tribal warriors did not need to leave the Arabian Peninsula to conquer their neighbors; their neighbors came to them. As Keepers of the Keys, the Saudis controlled the Hajj pilgrimage, to the chagrin of most Muslims who considered them little more than a crude band of unsophisticated puritans. With billions of dollars spent to modernize and expand the pilgrimage festivities so as to ensure maximum participation, nearly three million Muslims now inundate the bare Meccan valley every year.
Since the creation of the Muslim World League, the simplicity, certainty, and unconditional morality of Wahhabism have infiltrated every corner of the Muslim world. Thanks to Saudi evangelism, Wahhabi doctrine has dramatically affected the religio-political ideologies of the Muslim Brothers, Mawdudi’s Islamic Association, the Palestinian Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, to name only a few groups. The Saudis have become the patrons of a new kind of Pan-Islamism: one based on the austere, uncompromising, and extremist ideology of “Islamic fundamentalism,” which has become a powerful voice in deciding the future of the Islamic state.
Of course, the problem with fundamentalism is that it is by definition a reactionary movement; it cannot remain tied to power. The Saudi kingdom discovered this from the very beginning when, suddenly flush with money, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud began using his newfound wealth to build a life befitting a king. Soon Saudi Arabia was awash in modern technology bought from the West. The elaborate process of extracting oil from the desert required the presence of hundreds of foreign nationals—mostly British and American—who brought to Arabia an unfamiliar yet alluring culture of materialism. So close was Abd al-Aziz to the British Empire that he was even knighted by the Queen. In short, the king had been Westoxified and, as a result, turned his back on the Wahhabi warriors—now dubbed the Ikhwan, or “brothers” (not to be confused with the Muslim Brothers)—who had helped place him in power.
In 1929, the Ikhwan, angered by the greed and corruption of the Saudi court, launched a rebellion in the city of al-Salba. They demanded that the king renounce his materialism and expel the foreign infidels from the holy land. In response, Abd al-Aziz sent an army to al-Salba and massacred the Ikhwan.
However, Saudi Arabia quickly discovered what the rest of the world would soon learn. Fundamentalism, in all religious traditions, is impervious to suppression. The more one tries to squelch it, the stronger it becomes. Counter it with cruelty, and it gains adherents. Kill its leaders, and they become martyrs. Respond with despotism, and it becomes the sole voice of opposition. Try to control it, and it will turn against you. Try to appease it, and it will take control.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudi regime saw an opportunity to rid itself, however temporarily, of the holy warriors it had nurtured for nearly a century. With economic and military support from the United States and tactical training provided by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the Saudis began funneling a steady stream of radical Islamic militants (known as the Mujahadin, or “those who make jihad”) from Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East into Afghanistan, where they could be put to use battling the godless communists. The intention, as President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, famously put it, was to “give the USSR its own Vietnam” by keeping the Soviet army bogged down in an unwinnable war in hostile territory. The United States considered the Mujahadin to be an important ally in the Great Game being played out against the Soviet Union and, in fact, referred to these militants as “freedom fighters.” President Ronald Reagan even compared them to America’s founding fathers.
What no one considered at the time was the possibility that this ragtag band of international fighters would actually manage to defeat the Soviet Union. Not only did the Mujahadin expel the Soviet forces from Afghanistan, by abandoning their nationalist (read, Islamist) aspirations and joining together as a single united body in pursuit of a common cause, they gave birth to a new kind of transnational militant movement in the Islamic world called Jihadism.
Unlike Islamists, who remain committed to constructing an Islamic state either through political participation or through radical revolution, Jihadists envision a future where there would no longer be any states, Islamic or otherwise. The Jihadists want to create a world in which all the borders and boundaries that have fractured the Ummah into separate and distinct nation-states would be permanently erased. Their dream is to tear down the walls of culture, ethnicity, and nationality that divide the world’s Muslims and to reunite the Ummah once again as a single global community, just as the Prophet Muhammad intended.
In some sense, Jihadism is merely a revival of Pan-Islamism, the now defunct notion of achieving religious unity among the world’s Muslim population. Except that the Islam preached by Jihadists is an ultra-conservative blend of Salafist activism and Wahhabi puritanism tinged with a radical reinterpretation of jihad as an offensive weapon with which they aspire to dominate the world. In true Kharijite fashion, Jihadists segregate all Muslims into “the People of Heaven” (themselves) and “the People of Hell” (everyone else). Anyone whose interpretation of scripture and observance of the Shariah does not correspond to the Jihadist model is considered a member of the latter group—apostates and infidels who must be expelled from the holy community of God.
The Jihadists initially burst onto the international scene in 1990, after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In response to the Saudi government’s decision to invite the American military into the kingdom to repel the Iraqi forces, a small group of Jihadists turned against the Saudi royal family, accusing them of being corrupt degenerates who had sold the interests of the Muslim community to foreign powers. This group, headed by a Saudi exile named Osama bin Laden and an Egyptian dissident (and former Muslim Brotherhood member) named Ayman al-Zawahiri, formed an organization dubbed al-Qaeda (“the base” or “the fundamentals”) that, ten years later, would turn its focus away from the corrupt leaders of the Arab and Muslim world—what the Jihadists term the “Near Enemy”—and toward the “Far Enemy,” and the lone remaining superpower, the United States.
The attacks of 9/11 placed Jihadism squarely in America’s crosshairs, launching the so-called war on terror and flooding the countries of the Middle East—from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond—with hundreds of thousands of American military and civilian personnel whose mission is not only to root out and destroy Jihadist cells, but also to transform the entire Middle East into a more modern, more moderate, more democratic region. On the first point, the United States and its allies have had some measure of success. As an international terrorist organization, al-Qaeda has been severely crippled. Its founder has been killed; its leadership is on the run; its rank and file is nearly decimated. It may still maintain some operational control over Jihadist operations across the globe, but by no means does it possess the resources it enjoyed before 9/11. Far from inspiring a global Muslim uprising against the West, al-Qaeda’s bloody actions and indiscriminate murder of women and children have turned overwhelming majorities of Muslims among all classes, ages, sects, and nations against both the organization and its ideology.
On the second objective—the democratization of the Middle East—the record of the United States and its allies has been disastrous. In fact, the ham-handed and hypocritical manner in which democracy has been promoted in the region, not to mention the religiously polarizing, “clash of civilizations” rhetoric that has accompanied America’s democratization mission, has only further fueled the widespread belief among Musli
ms all over the world that the United States has become the new colonial power in the Middle East, that its true intention is neither to democratize nor to civilize but rather to Christianize the Islamic world.
And yet, as great a failure as the promotion of democracy in the Middle East has been thus far, the fact remains that only through genuine democratic reform can the appeal of Jihadism be undermined and the tide of Muslim militancy stemmed. As has been demonstrated by the wave of prodemocracy demonstrations that has swept across the Middle East and North Africa, the hope for peace and prosperity in the region lies in the creation of genuine, homegrown, and indigenous democratic societies. Indeed, the very future of Islam depends on it.
10. Slouching Toward Medina
THE QUEST FOR ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY
“IN THE NAME of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” the IranAir pilot intones as our plane glides to a stop at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. There is a nervous shifting in the seats around me. The women sit upright, adjusting their headscarves, making sure their ankles and wrists are properly covered, while their husbands rub the sleep from their eyes and begin gathering the belongings their children have scattered in the aisle.
I lift my head to look for the two or three faces I have been carefully observing since boarding the plane in London. They are the younger, single passengers on board, men and women who, like me, are in their late twenties or early thirties. They are dressed in ill-fitting clothes that look as though they were purchased in secondhand stores—awkward long-sleeved shirts; dull slacks; unadorned head scarves—all meant to appear as inoffensive as possible. I know this because this is precisely how I am dressed. When I catch their eyes, I can see a glint of the same anxiety that courses through my body. It is a mixture of fear and excitement. For many of us, this will be the first time we have set foot in the country of our birth since the revolution forced us from it as children.
As part of an effort to reach out to the massive Iranian Diaspora who fled to Europe and the United States in the early 1980s, the Iranian government had issued a tentative amnesty to all expatriates, announcing that they could return to Iran for brief visits—once a year and not to exceed three months—without fear of being detained or forced into completing their mandatory military duty. The response was immediate. Thousands of young Iranians began pouring into the country. Some had never known Iran except through the nostalgic tales of their parents. Others like me had been born in Iran but spirited away when we were still too young to make decisions of our own.
We disembark and slip into the steamy early morning. It is still dark, but already the airport is bursting with arrivals from Paris, Milan, Berlin, Los Angeles. A raucous crowd has gathered at passport control in nothing resembling a proper line. Babies scream. An unbearable odor of sweat and cigarette smoke wafts through the air. Elbows jab me from all sides. And suddenly I am flooded with memories of this very same airport many years ago; of linking arms with my family and shoving our way through a frantic mob, trying to leave Iran before the borders closed and the airplanes were grounded. I remember my mother crying out, “Don’t lose your sister!” I can still hear the terrifying breathlessness of her voice, as though she was warning me that if I let go of my little sister’s hand, she would be left behind. I gripped her fingers so tightly she began to cry, and dragged her roughly toward the gate, kicking at the knees around us to make way.
Two decades and four suffocatingly long hours later, I am finally at the passport window. I slip my documents through a slot in the glass to a young, lightly bearded man in broken spectacles. He flips through the pages absentmindedly while I prepare my well-rehearsed replies as to who I am and why I am here.
“What is your point of origin?” the agent asks wearily.
“The United States,” I reply.
He stiffens and looks up at my face. I can tell we are the same age, though his tired eyes and his unshaven jowl make him appear much older. He is a child of the revolution; I am a fugitive—an apostate. He has spent his life surviving a history that I have spent my life studying from afar. All at once I feel overwhelmed. I can barely look at him when he asks, “Where have you been?” as all passport agents are required to do. I cannot help but sense the accusation in his question.
On the day the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran, I took my four-year-old sister by the hand and, despite my mother’s warning not to venture outdoors, led her out of our apartment in downtown Tehran to join the celebrations in the streets. It had been days since we had gone outside. The weeks preceding the Shah’s exile and the Ayatollah’s return had been violent ones. The schools were closed, most television and radio stations shut down, and our quiet neighborhood deserted. So when we looked out our window on that February morning and saw the euphoria in the streets, nothing could have kept us inside.
Filling a plastic pitcher with Tang and stealing two packages of Dixie cups from our mother’s cupboard, my sister and I sneaked out to join the revelry. One by one we filled the cups and passed them out to the crowd. Strangers stopped to lift us up and kiss our cheeks. Handfuls of sweets were thrown from open windows. There was music and dancing everywhere. I wasn’t really sure what we were celebrating, but I didn’t care. I was swept up in the moment and enthralled by the strange words on everyone’s lips—words I had heard before but which were still mystifying and unexplained: Freedom! Liberty! Democracy!
A few months later, the promise of those words seemed about to be fulfilled when Iran’s provisional government drafted a constitution for the newly formed and thrillingly titled Islamic Republic of Iran. Under Khomeini’s guidance, the constitution was a combination of third-world anti-imperialism mixed with the socioeconomic theories of legendary Iranian ideologues like Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati, the religio-political philosophies of Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, and traditional Shi‘ite populism. Its founding articles promised equality of the sexes, religious pluralism, social justice, freedom of speech, and the right to peaceful assembly—all the lofty principles the revolution had fought to attain—while simultaneously affirming the Islamic character of the new republic.
In some ways, Iran’s new constitution did not differ markedly from the one written after the country’s first anti-imperialist revolution in 1905, except that this constitution appeared to envisage two governments. The first, representing the sovereignty of the people, included a popularly elected executive heading a highly centralized state, a parliament charged with creating and debating laws, and an independent judiciary to interpret those laws. The second, representing the sovereignty of God, consisted of just one man: the Ayatollah Khomeini.
This was the Valayat-e Faqih (“the rule of the jurist”) that Khomeini had been writing about furtively during his years of exile in Iraq and France. In theory, the Faqih, or Supreme Leader, is the most learned religious authority in the country, whose primary function is to ensure the Islamic quality of the state. Yet through the machinations of Iran’s powerful clerical establishment, the Faqih was transformed from a symbolic moral authority into the supreme political authority in the state. The constitution provided the Faqih with the power to appoint the head of the judiciary, to be commander in chief of the army, to dismiss the president, and to veto all laws created by the parliament. Originally intended to reconcile popular and divine sovereignty, the Valayat-e Faqih had suddenly paved the way for the institutionalization of absolute clerical control.
Still, Iranians were too elated by their newfound independence, and too blinded by the conspiracy theories floating in the air about another attempt by the CIA and the U.S. embassy in Tehran to reestablish the Shah on his throne (just as they had done in 1953), to recognize the dire implications of the new constitution. Despite warnings from the provisional government and the vociferous arguments of Khomeini’s rival ayatollahs, particularly the Ayatollah Shariatmadari (whom Khomeini eventually stripped of his religious credentials despite centuries of Shi‘ite law forbidding such actions), the draft was approved in a na
tional referendum by over 98 percent of the electorate.
By the time most Iranians realized what they had voted for, Saddam Hussein, encouraged by the United States and furnished with chemical and biological materials by the Centers for Disease Control and the Virginia-based company the American Type Culture Collection, launched an attack on Iranian soil. As happens in times of war, all dissenting voices were silenced in the interest of national security, and the dream that had given rise to revolution a year earlier gave way to the reality of an authoritarian state plagued by the gross ineptitude of a ruling clerical régime wielding unconditional religious and political authority.
The intention of the United States government in supporting Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war was to curb the spread of Iran’s revolution, but it had the more disastrous effect of curbing its evolution. It was not until the end of the war in 1988 and the death of Khomeini a year later that the democratic ideals that had launched the Iranian Revolution a decade earlier were revived by a new generation of Iranians too young to remember the tyranny of the Shah yet old enough to realize that the present system was not what their parents had fought for. It was their discontent that fueled the activities of a handful of academics, politicians, activists, and theologians in Iran who initiated a reform movement, not to “secularize” the country but to refocus it on genuine Islamic values like pluralism, social justice, human rights, and above all, democracy. In the words of the Iranian political philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, “We no longer claim that a genuinely religious government can be democratic, but that it cannot be otherwise.”
The election of the reformist cleric Muhammad Khatami to the office of president in the late 1990s galvanized this movement, giving shape and substance to the premise that an indigenous democratic system could be founded upon a distinctly Islamic moral framework. Buoyed by this vision and emboldened by Khatami’s reform agenda, hundreds of thousands of young Iranians began pouring onto the streets in 1999 to demand greater rights, including the right to peaceful assembly and a free press, in what became known around the world as the Tehran Spring.