The exodus of some 700,000 Jews from cities across the Arab world sounded the alarm bell for other religious minorities. “After Saturday, Sunday,” Christians told each other across the region.
The Triumph of Sectarian Nationalism
As the gap between the promises and the reality of secular, nationalist regimes widened, religious movements became a refuge for the disenfranchised and disaffected. Faced with the rise of “godless” governments across the region, religious revivalists initially cast aside sectarian differences and made common cause. Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Sunni revivalist movement the Muslim Brotherhood, insisted that Islam had no sectarian divides. Its Shia counterpart, the Islamic Dawa Party, adopted the brotherhood’s ideology and methodology wholesale. Its spiritual mentor, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, hailed Social Justice in Islam, by Muslim Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb, as the greatest interpretation of the Quran. His students took Qutb’s Milestones on the Road as their manual for jihad. Sunni and Shia Islamists even joined each other’s movements. One of the Dawa Party’s two chapters in Basra was Sunni-led, and in the 1950s, the Iraqi chapter of the Brotherhood included Shia members.
Then, near the close of the 1970s, regime change and reformation in Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia gave fresh impetus for a sectarian response to the failures of the first generation of post-independence rule.
To legitimize his army takeover of Pakistan in 1978, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a womanizer and unapologetic consumer of alcohol, set his secular country on the path of sharia rule. Pakistan’s founders had been avowedly secular, bent on removing not only Hindu numerical superiority but the domination of a Sunni religious elite they regarded as a stultifying impediment to modernization. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s first leader, was Ismaili, a splinter group of Shiism. But in his first speech as president, Zia dispensed with such inclusivity and declared that an Islamic system was an essential prerequisite for the country. In 1979 he replaced the Pakistan Penal Code with the Hudood Ordinances. The laws called for the amputation of the right hand as punishment for robbery. Zia established “Islamic benches” in high courts to ensure judgments complied with Islamic law, and integrated members of Jamaat-e-Islami, the Pakistani parallel of the Muslim Brotherhood, into his bureaucracy. Pakistanis applying for ID cards had to declare the country’s Ahmadis to be unbelievers, a requirement that is still in force.
The revolution that toppled the shah of Iran a year later initially fired the imagination of the region’s downtrodden, Sunni and Shia alike, and threatened to trigger regime change across the Arab world. Even the Muslim Brotherhood initially embraced it. In the new spirit of ecumenism, Article 11 of the 1979 constitution appealed to all Muslims to seek political, economic, and cultural unity. But Article 5 exposed a Shia particularism that alienated Sunnis. The leader of the revolutionary state should be a Shia cleric, it declared, thereby demoting Sunni scholars to underlings.
Anxious Arab leaders seized on the revolution’s sectarian turn to highlight their Sunni credentials. Though the founder of the Iraqi branch of the Ba’ath Party was a Shia, it was increasingly dominated by Sunni Arabs, a minority comprising perhaps 20 percent of Iraq’s population. Its leader, Saddam Hussein, stripped hundreds of thousands of Shias of their nationality, on the grounds of their Persian origin, precipitating an exodus of some five million people, including much of the country’s mercantile elite. Celebration of Shia festivals and pilgrimage from Iran to Iraq’s Shia holy sites was sharply curtailed. By the 1980s, religion and nationalism had been conflated not only in Israel, but across the Middle East.
For 12 centuries after the Prophet Muhammad’s tribal wars, the empty quarters of the Arabian Peninsula had remained as peripheral to the course of the region’s history as the Sahara. But the geographical accident of oil, and the money and foreign allies that it won, turned the peninsula into a key catalyst of Islamic political change.
Both in Ottoman times and their aftermath, the fiercely independent tribes of the Arabian Peninsula had resisted efforts to subjugate them. In the eighteenth century, the Al Saud tribe allied with an order of warrior monks founded by a local scholar, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. They called themselves Ahl al-Tawhid (the people of monotheism), though others knew them eponymously as Wahhabis.
From their base in Nejd in central Arabia, they launched tribal raids on Shias in neighboring Iraq and the Eastern Province, and rival Sunni tribes in Kuwait and the Hijaz. In 1926, they wrested control of Islam’s holiest places, Mecca and Medina, and assumed the old Ottoman title of Custodians of the Holy Places. They proclaimed themselves kings, stopping short of assuming the caliphate, on the grounds that they were not of the Quraish, the Prophet Muhammad’s tribe.
In both ideology and tactics, they were the progenitors of contemporary jihadis. They denounced their opponents as kaffirs, or unbelievers, who were thereby subject to the sword. On the basis of largely dormant thirteenth-century texts, they hounded Shias and Sunni traditionalists who venerated the Prophet’s family as practitioners of shirk, or polytheism. In the name of deleting the accretions of tradition and purifying the faith, they flattened shrines and demolished the old cities of Mecca and Medina, including buildings 1,300 years old. They leveled the Prophet’s home in Medina, the seven mosques built by his daughter, Fatimah, and the mosques of the first caliphs in Mecca.
After their initial display of zeal, however, Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Abdulaziz, reined in the zealots, or Ikhwan. Hundreds were slaughtered in 1930, and life on the coast regained much of its old tempo. Cinemas in the port city of Jeddah continued to play to packed houses and newspapers advertised parties in the casinos and clubs on New Year’s Eve. In 1979, the Ikhwan—possibly sparked by the revolution in Iran—struck back. Under the leadership of Juhayman al-Otaybi, they seized control of the Grand Mosque of Mecca on the Islamic New Year of the year 1400. French commandos were finally summoned to flush them out and al-Otaybi was promptly executed, but though he lost the battle he won the war. Like-minded militants were directed with handsome support to fight communists in Afghanistan, and to bolster their internal legitimacy, the Al Sauds gave full rein to the country’s conservatives to police social conduct. Application of sharia was sharply tightened, sectarian polemic intensified, and acts deemed to be an innovation at odds with the Prophet’s conduct were proscribed in accordance with the teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
Their creed enjoining the scraping away of tradition proved a property developer’s dream. They built skyscrapers, like the Abraj al-Bait Towers, on the demolished Ottoman-era Ajyad Fortress, and erected garish Las Vegas-style hotels that loomed over the Kaaba, the black cube of Mecca. The house of Khadija, the Prophet’s first wife, was replaced with public toilets, and the house of the first Sunni caliph, Abu Bakr, became a Hilton hotel.
The impact of the three revivalist movements on the region’s geopolitics was profound. Petrodollars turned Wahhabism into the world’s best-financed Islamic movement. Over the generation that followed, they exported their fighters and preachers to Afghanistan and beyond. Other armed groups seeking support latched onto them, establishing satellites in isolated mountain caves in Algeria and Libya. Islam’s version of the Knights Templar increasingly