How one year changed the Islamic world
Events of 1979 destroyed the world’s view of Islam. Today it is seen as a religion driven by intolerance, a militancy at its barbaric worst.
1979 began with the bloody emergence of the Ayatullah’s regime in Iran. Next came Saudi dissidents occupying Islam’s Masjid al Haram in Mecca. Devastating bombardment by Saudi guns and tanks resulted in a bloodbath. This was followed by the burning of American embassies in Pakistan and Libya and the hostage drama following the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran. Before the year was out Russian tanks rolled into Afghanistan, with far-reaching consequences for the entire region. Pakistan was not far behind, where the zealous dictator Ziaul Haq hanged Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and began the odious task of thrusting his warped view of Islam forcefully down the throats of his helpless subjects.
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan – the world and its perception of Islam would never be the same again.
Shah Raza Pahlavi, America’s staunchest ally in the oil-rich Gulf, who had ruled Iran for 38 years since his father was deposed in 1941, fled his kingdom on 17th of January, 1979. Into the void arrived, on 1st February, the charismatic 70-year old Ayatullah Ruhulla Khomeini to a tumultuous welcome by millions of his followers. On 11th February the monarchy was abolished. What followed was a ruthless Shia theocracy. Tens of thousands were killed as the new regime cleansed Iran of those opposed to the rule of the Ayatullahs.
The lonely and forlorn Shah wandered around the world searching desperately for a home. When in September 1979, America eventually agreed to let him in, outraged students stormed their embassy in Tehran and took 52 hostages, whom they held prisoner for 444 days. The world community was rightly shocked at this blatant defiance of international diplomatic norms. Shockwaves of these tectonic events reverberated across the world, nowhere more dramatically than in the Wahabi ruling family of Saudi Arabia, who were themselves faring not much better.
Juhaiman ibn Mohammed ibn Saif al Otaibi, himself a former Guardsman was rallying dissidents from the Saudi National Guard, commanded by Prince (now King) Abdullah, to overthrow the Saudi Royals. During the month of Zilhaj, he smuggled hundreds of his supporters and tons of arms and ammunition into the labyrinth of rooms beneath the Kaaba, with help from Osama bin Ladin’s brother Mahrous and his construction company, whose workers were renovating the Kaaba.
On 20th November 1979, corresponding to the 1st of Muharram, 1400 Hijri, Juhaiman and his men occupied the Kaaba, took hundreds of pilgrims hostage, locked all its doors and placed heavily armed gunmen on minarets and vantage points. Juhaiman declared that the Mahdi had arrived whose name Mohammad bin Abdullah al Qahtani was, remarkably, the same as that of the Holy Prophet (pbuh). He demanded the replacement of the decadent Saudi Royals by a truly Islamic government.
The Saudi government was in a dillema. The holy grounds of the Kaaba could not be attacked. So they resorted to seeking a fatwa from the Ulema led by the venerated blind cleric, Shaikh Abdul Aziz al Baaz. The old man was fully aware of economic developments over the last few years. The Arab-Israel War of 1974 had led to closing of the Suez Canal. Oil prices had skyrocketed. Saudi oil revenues before 1974 were about $4 billion a year, while by 1979 they were touching $100 billion. In negotiations with Prince Abdullah, and his brothers Defence Minister (later Crown Prince) Sultan and Interior Minister (who succeeded Sultan as Crown Prince) Nayef, the Ulema struck a tough bargain. Besides getting their own religious police and considerable control over education and legal matters, they extracted substantially enhanced funding for their World Islamic League, whose mission was to spread Wahabism throughout the world, very much like the Soviet COMINTERN of the Cold War era. This was to have a decisive impact on subsequent developments. In exchange they issued a fatwa authorizing an attack on the Kaaba.
The Saudis threw in troops, tanks and guns into the battle, destroying minarets and other structures in the Kaaba. They took heavy casualties but were unable to defeat the rebels, till French advisors arrived and helped dislodge the rebels. There was a total news blackout. The Saudis themselves acknowledged that several hundred troops, pilgrims and rebels, including the self-proclaimed Mahdi, were killed. Others claimed the casualties were in the thousands. Juhaiman and 60 others were captured, tried and executed.
In a strange development, enraged Pakistanis blamed the Americans, attacked their embassy, burnt it to the ground and killed a staffer. A week or so later the embassy in Libya was also burnt down. The Americans had nothing to do with the attack on the Kaaba, leading to worldwide condemnation of Libyan and Pakistani zealots, who were apparently coming to the defence of Islam in their own warped way.
1979 was not over. The worst was yet to come. On 27th December, Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan, opening a new Pandora’s Box of problems. Saudi ulema invoked a religious edict that when a Muslim state is attacked by a non-Muslim state, every Muslim must come to its help. With reams of money from the oil bonanza on the one hand and a religious cause to help the Afghans on the other, Saudi Ulema poured in money for training religious fighters in madrasas on the Afghan-Pakistan border. They had a willing ally in Ziaul Haq. Tens of thousands of young Muslim fighters from across the globe were trained to fight in Afghanistan. Thus were born the Taliban, Al Qaeda and a host of other less well-known but equally ruthless militant groups. Ten years later a tired and defeated Russian army withdrew from Afghanistan. Soon thereafter Taliban formed a Sunni theocratic state in Afghanistan. Their Wahabi agenda led to extremist acts ranging from the total subjugation of women to the destruction of historic giant Buddhist statues at Bamyan.
Thousands of foreign fighters returned to their homelands to wage new armed struggles for the spread of Wahabism, the Saudis continuing to fund them to this day. Their tactics grew more vicious, their targets more dispersed – from the bombing of American Embassies in Africa, to the attack on the USS COLE to the dramatic events of 9/11 when 15 Saudis and 4 other Arabs, caused havoc in the US. Muslims have unfairly earned the disgust and wrath of the whole world, because of the continued violence of these zealots, invariably trained in Wahabi funded madrasas in Pakistan. The worst effected is the Pakistani nation itself, where products of these madrasas include suicide bombers and killers who descend to pathetic and cowardly acts such as like the vicious attack on Malala Yusufzai. The depth of depravity to which these monsters have descended has repulsed the world, bringing shame to the entire Muslim ummah; and quite rightly so, as the silence of the Muslim world is deafening. Until Muslims themselves stand up and confront these terrorists and cut them off from their funding sources in the Arabian homeland of Wahabism, the world will look down with contempt at Muslims and carry a very poor image of Islam and its followers. This is the legacy of 1979, the year the Muslim world stirred from centuries of slumber, only to take the wrong path of violence, intolerance, terrorism and suicide bombings, not of “Sirat-ul-Mustaqeem” – the straight path, which every Muslim yearns for and which hundreds of millions pray for five times a day, every day of their lives.
The writer, a retired mariner, is an Islamabad-based Research Fellow at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
