Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (54 page)

O
n October 23, 1983, a man drove a truck packed with explosives into a military barracks in Beirut and blew himself up. The explosion killed 241 members of the United States Marine Corps who had been dispatched to the Middle East by US president Ronald Reagan as part of an international intervention in the Lebanese Civil War. It was the greatest loss of life suffered by the Marine Corps in a single day since the Battle of Iwo Jima in the spring of 1945. Another near-simultaneous attack took the lives of 58 French paratroopers—the biggest single-day loss for a French force since the 1950s war in Algeria.

The organization that assumed responsibility for this strange new form of terrorism—based on the attacker’s self-immolation—called itself Islamic Jihad. (The same group had already claimed responsibility for an attack on the US Embassy in Beirut that had killed 60 people earlier in the year.) Although the group’s origins are somewhat mysterious, it was most likely an offshoot of Hezbollah, a militant organization of Lebanon’s Shiites that had been established not long before. In multinational Lebanon, the mostly rural Shiites traditionally occupied the bottom rung of the sectarian and ethnic hierarchy within the country. That began to change in the
1960s and ’70s, when a charismatic Iranian-born cleric named Musa al-Sadr began to organize the Shiites into a movement to campaign for their rights. His mysterious disappearance in Libya in 1978—orchestrated by Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi—temporarily derailed Shiite aspirations. But then came the revolution in Iran.

No sooner had Khomeini made his return to Tehran than the new revolutionary regime began working to spread the message. From the very start, Khomeini believed that the revolution had pan-Islamic implications. He did not believe that it should be confined to his own country. “In general, a Muslim should not just concern himself with only a group of Muslims,” he once observed. “We are all responsible to stand up to the oppression by the superpowers and discredit plans like those of Sadat and [Saudi King] Fahd.” From the outside, Khomeini was often viewed as a defender of Iranian Shiism, but he did not see himself this way. He saw himself as a holy warrior who was out to defend the entire global community of Muslim believers.
¹¹

The revolutionary government lost no time in pursuing this role—despite the economic and political problems at home. Radio Tehran became an aggressive outlet for Iranian propaganda, broadcast around the region—a factor that played a major role after the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia, when Khomeini succeeded in fomenting unrest throughout the Islamic world by accusing the Americans of orchestrating the takeover. But the new government in Tehran did not restrict its pan-Islamic support to words. As early as December 1979, the Lebanese authorities found themselves coping with an influx of Iranian guerrillas eager to help their coreligionists take the fight to Israel.
¹²
Ayatollah Montazeri declared that Iranian militants should have the right to enter other Islamic countries without passports or visas on the grounds that Islam “has no borders.”
¹³

The response to the Islamic Revolution from Muslims around the world seemed—at least at first—to justify such high-flown talk. Islamist groups sang the praises of Islam’s great Iranian from Indonesia to Nigeria. (There are few Shiites in Nigeria, but in some quarters there after 1979, the word
Shia
came to serve as a synonym for those who aimed for the creation of an Islamic state.) The riots that took place from Islamabad to Tripoli in response to Iranian accusations about the Mecca mosque uprising attested to the emotive force of Khomeini’s appeals to Muslims throughout the
umma
. Khomeini’s former students—who were, of course, not only Iranians—helped to carry his message around the world. And the demonstrated ability of Islamic revolutionaries to overthrow a hated monarch also helped to foment a bloody but little-noted rebellion against the royal family in oil-rich Shiite provinces of Saudi Arabia. Shia Muslims constitute the majority of the population
there, but the Sunni House of Saud, tightly wedded to the ultraconservative Wahhabi sect, has always regarded them as virtual heretics and discriminates against them accordingly. The Shia unrest of 1979 marked merely the first in a long series of uprisings against the central government that continue to this day.

Khomeini himself, however, focused above all on two particular areas: Palestine and Lebanon.
¹⁴
His reasons for taking up the Palestinian cause were straightforward. Unlike the Marxist revolutionaries who still dominated the Palestine Liberation Organization, Khomeini saw the Arab-Israeli conflict in primarily religious terms. For him, waging war on Israel meant fulfilling Quranic injunctions against Jewish “hypocrites” inimical to the true faith as well as the ultimate recovery of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which he viewed as one of the holiest places in Islam. It was Khomeini who established the annual al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day in Iran’s revolutionary calendar: every year, to this day, the Tehran regime organizes demonstrations proclaiming the religious imperative for the reconquest of Jerusalem. Starting in 1979, Palestinians (who viewed the shah as an enemy because of his alliance with Israel) actively participated in various stages of the Iranian Revolution, and Iran started providing various Palestinian groups with military training early on. Later in the 1980s, Iran became one of the main sponsors of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist resistance group based in the Gaza Strip.

Still, the Shiite factor in Iran’s revolution was not to be discounted, and few Palestinians were Shiites. But what bound the two sides together was a fondness for radical politics. The Palestinians leaned naturally to revolutionary ideology since it challenged the status quo of the Middle East, and as long as this was true, the religious differences between them and the Iranians played a subordinate role. They shared a common enemy, and that was enough to help them overlook the problems of religion.

That was not true of Lebanon, which boasted its own large, and largely underprivileged, Shiite population. The revolution was still under way in Iran when the first portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini began to appear on the walls of homes throughout the Shiite villages and shantytowns of Lebanon. The Amal militia, the military wing of al-Sadr’s “Movement of the Disinherited,” suddenly found itself facing competition from a new group based on the paramilitary organization that had fought for Khomeini’s agenda during the revolution: Hezbollah, “the Party of God.” Sadr had envisioned his movement as one that would advance the cause of justice for all Lebanese. He made an effort to bring non-Shiites into its leadership and at least attempted to transcend sectarianism. Hezbollah, formed in part by Shiites who rejected Sadr’s more inclusive approach, had no such scruples. The group
in its current form emerged in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when its leaders publicly declared their allegiance to Khomeini’s theory of
velayat-e faqih
and pledged to transform Lebanon into an Islamic republic along Iranian lines. From the very beginning, its primary aims included the destruction of the state of Israel. Hezbollah’s fanaticism and success in the Lebanese Civil War gradually allowed it to supplant the more moderate Amal—even though many Shiite clerics in the country echoed some of their Iranian counterparts by rejecting Khomeini’s theory of the guardianship of the jurist.
¹⁵

The Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Islamic army Khomeini created in parallel to the conventional military, assumed patronage of Hezbollah from the beginning in 1982. Guard instructors trained its fighters and outfitted them with weapons. Money flowed from Tehran to the shantytowns of Beirut. The Iranians also helped the new group build a media operation that has become one of the most effective means of public mobilization in Lebanon today. Over the past three decades—most notably during its 2006 war with Israel—Hezbollah has established itself as one of the most effective political and military organizations in Lebanon, and thus as a potent vehicle for the advancement of Islamist (and Iranian) agendas throughout the Middle East. It has been implicated in numerous terrorist attacks.

Perhaps the most fateful innovation that resulted from Iranian involvement in Lebanese politics was the suicide bombing. Islamic Jihad achieved such devastating success precisely because the Americans and French had not prepared defenses against attackers who were prepared to kill themselves. Oddly enough, the suicide bombing was a terrorist tactic with secular rather than religious origins; it was pioneered by secular nationalists during the Lebanese Civil War, and then used to particularly deadly effect by the People’s Mujahideen (Mujahideen-e Khalq or MEK), the Islamo-Marxist militia. The MEK, which turned against Khomeini in 1980, used suicide attacks as part of its terror campaign against the leaders of the clerical system.

But it was the institutionalized use of “martyrdom” by the Islamic Republic that firmly established suicide attacks as a modus operandi for Islamic fighters. By the time of the 1983 Beirut attacks, the Iran-Iraq War had been under way for three years, and the Iranians had already had ample opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of “martyrdom operations” against Iraqi troops that drew on the messianic fanaticism of believers still alight with revolutionary fervor. Young troops went into battle wrapped in slogans evoking the great traumas and triumphs of Shiite belief. The rhetoric of martyrdom drew on centuries of Shiite ritual adoration for Ali and Hussein, those lodestars of the true faith who were also the victims of cosmic injustice.

Nor did Khomeini view his war with the apostate Saddam Hussein as one whose consequences would be confined merely to their two countries. He saw the fight against Iraq as part of a larger crusade to restore Muslim rule throughout the Middle East. “The road to Jerusalem lies through Baghdad” was a slogan widely used by the Iranian regime during the war. “Our revolution is not tied to Iran,” Khomeini once remarked. “The Iranian people’s revolution was the starting point for the great revolution of the Islamic world.”
¹⁶
All the more bitter for him, then, was the ignominious stalemate with which the war finally ended. Khomeini famously equated the agreement that formally concluded the war with Iraq with a “draught of poison.”

Khomeini’s aspirations to global leadership of the Islamic community had broader aspects as well. One was to establish Islam as a powerful alternative to the ideologies that then dominated global politics. Odd Arne Westad, a leading historian of the Cold War, observes that the Iranian Revolution marked the moment when the United States was jolted by the realization that “communism was no longer the only comprehensive, modern ideology that confronted American power.” Ironically, the events in Iran brought a similarly rude awakening to the Russians. Khomeini’s revolution presented a serious challenge to the Marxist theory of Third World revolutions. In this reading, “clerical reaction” was supposed to be just another way station on the path to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yet this was clearly not what had happened in Iran.
¹⁷

Indeed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the philosophy that inspired it, political Islam remained essentially the only universalist ideology that could pose serious competition to the American and European ideals of liberal democracy in the Middle East.
¹⁸
Khomeini’s fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie, which condemned him to death for allegedly slandering the prophet in his novel
The Satanic Verses
, can be viewed in this same context of Iran’s ideological rivalry with the West. The death sentence pronounced on Rushdie by the ayatollah was a transparent attempt to snatch back the mantle of leadership from various Sunni governments the Iranians depicted as too cowardly (and too craven to the United States) to defend the honor of Islam. Somewhat paradoxically, when the United States launched its post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one effect was to greatly expand Iranian influence in the region by eliminating two of the regional competitors that Tehran despised most of all: the secular regime of Saddam Hussein and the ultraconservative Sunni government of the Taliban. Nonetheless, today the Islamic Republic remains one of the few foreign regimes that American politicians of all ideological stripes can reliably vilify at little cost to themselves.

But Khomeinis revolution had another legacy that was even more consequential. This was its impact on the centuries-old rivalry between the Shiite and Sunni branches of Islam. Before 1979 the intra-Muslim divide figured little in global politics. After 1979 it was impossible to avoid. That the Shiites had succeeded before any other Muslim nation in restoring the sovereignty of God was an extraordinary turn of events that some Sunni believers came to regard as something akin to a calculated affront. Some scholars argue that the motives for the seizure of the Grand Mosque in 1979 included the desire among some Sunni upstarts to show that they, too, could topple an unjust monarch and establish a truly Islamic state.

The implications of the newfound political self-awareness among hitherto downtrodden Shiite minorities rippled across South Asia. Iranian support for the Shiite mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan boosted the power of the Hazara ethnic minority, shocking a largely Sunni population that had long regarded Hazaras as second-class citizens. One of Khomeini’s students was a Pakistani who returned to his homeland to found the first Shiite political organization in that largely Sunni country, contributing to decades of sectarian violence there. Khomeini’s first foreign minister, Ebrahim Yazdi, met with Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad already in September 1979, establishing a close relationship between Tehran and the Assad dynasty that endures to this day—despite the Syrian government’s harsh suppression of its Sunni Muslim majority. (A mere 15 percent of the Syrian population belongs to the Alawi sect, but that group includes the Assads and much of the Syrian ruling elite among its members. Alawi beliefs, regarded as heterodox by most Sunnis, have much in common with Shia Islam.) And the Sunni secularist Saddam Hussein, who was worried about the restiveness of his own Iraqi Shiites even before the revolution in Iran, saw Khomeini’s ascendance as yet another reason to tighten control over the Shiite believers that constituted the majority of his population. It was, perhaps, inevitable that Tehran would become the main protector of the Shiite resistance groups, such as the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, that later played a prominent role in governing the country after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.