Black Wave

by Kim Ghattas

  Just over a year later, after dawn prayers on August 5, 1988, several gunmen barged into Hussaini’s madrassa in Lahore and shot him. He died on the spot. His bodyguard apparently tried to kill himself for having failed to protect him. In death, Hussaini was also granted two honors: the Iranians sent a delegation, and a representative of Khomeini delivered a eulogy at the funeral. Iran later issued a postage stamp in his honor. Zia came to the funeral and was also met with chants of “Zia killer, Zia Killer.” This time, the killers had in fact been hired by the governor of the province, General Fazle Haq, a key figure of the Zia era, who was working with a member of Zia’s security team on the assassination plot. Several members of the plot landed in prison. Haq would later be assassinated. The president’s direct involvement was never proved.

  Zaheer and Hussain had nothing and everything in common: their violent deaths, their efforts to radicalize their respective communities, and the role they each fulfilled in the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Pakistan had now been a witness to the first two major sectarian-motivated assassinations in modern history.

  * * *

  Zia was trying to play a dangerous game of sectarian politics without igniting a civil war in his own country. He was also walking a tightrope between Iran, his neighbor, and Saudi Arabia, his generous patron. In the early 1980s, when it became clear the Iran-Iraq War was not going to be a quick affair, Pakistan sent a contingent of around eleven thousand soldiers to Saudi Arabia, including a highly mobile elite tank unit and fighter jet pilots, to help with the internal security of the kingdom and the royal family. The Saudis had no experience fighting conventional wars with modern armaments, but they had money, and the Pakistanis were good soldiers. In 1987, the Saudis became wary of Shia soldiers in the Pakistani contingent, questioning their loyalty. They asked Zia to send only Sunnis. No Saudi official ever confirmed this publicly, and no Pakistani official or officer would ever answer a question about this matter in a straightforward way—all they would say was that if Zia had received such a request, he would have known that operating the Pakistani army on a sectarian basis was a recipe for civil war. The official story was that the contract had come to an end. The Pakistani troops went home.

  Two key things had happened in the preceding twelve months that had spooked the Saudis: the Iran-Iraq War was reaching an unprecedented paroxysm of violence, with Iran launching a large-scale offensive, massing six hundred thousand troops on the border with Iraq in the summer of 1986 and warning of attacks against other countries. But even more worrying for the Saudis was the carnage in their own territory, in Mecca on July 31, 1987. Iranian pilgrims had clashed with Saudi police forces, resulting in the death of four hundred people. The Saudis feared there had been an Iranian plot to take over the Holy Mosque. Khomeini was now calling on Muslims to wage war against the House of Saud, and the Saudi embassy in Tehran had been ransacked.

  The Saudis wanted to ramp up protection of their throne and their Islamic leadership. To do so, they needed to close Arab and Muslim ranks. In November 1987, during an Arab League summit in Jordan, Saudi Arabia pushed for a strident communiqué against Iran. Newspapers remarked that such a tone was usually reserved for Israel. The Saudis even used the occasion to resume ties with Egypt, ostracized since the March 1979 Arab League summit in Baghdad.

  But violence in the birthplace of Islam, and in the house of God, was always a harbinger of turbulent change. At least that’s what the Saudi architect Sami Angawi believed with all his heart. The head of the Hajj Research Center, who had witnessed the unfolding siege on the Holy Mosque in Mecca in November 1979, was once again in the holy city when hundreds of pilgrims died on what would become known as Bloody Friday.

  9

  MECCA IS MINE

  SAUDI ARABIA

  1987

  O pilgrims of the hajj, where have you gone, where?

  The beloved is here, come, come,

  Your beloved is the next-door neighbor;

  Why are you wandering the desert searching?

  If you see the faceless face of the beloved

  You are then transformed as the Lord of the House and become Ka’aba.

  —Rumi, Divan, 648

  Mecca had already changed. Not just the city, but the Holy Mosque itself. The most sacred place for all Muslims, God’s throne on earth, was no longer that of Sami Angawi’s childhood and certainly not of his father’s days as a mutawwif, guiding the pilgrims. The Al-Sauds saw the Holy Mosque as the source of their power and leadership of the Muslim world. Their goal was to attract as many pilgrims as possible to the hajj. To do so, they needed more roads, more hotels, more space in the mosque itself. Sami thought that the whole city of Mecca should have been a sanctuary, but the Al-Sauds were planning a veritable metropolis around the Ka’aba.

  With his Hejazi turban, Sami still stood out just as much as he had in 1979 in the country with an unofficial dress code. On this day, July 31, 1987, he hovered over Mecca in a helicopter doing aerial photography, documenting the changes in the city. His time-lapse photography was tracking the flow of pilgrims to determine how to expand access to the mosque and improve the religious rituals within and without the inner sanctum. From up high in the sky, he could see a crush of people, a crowd massing just a mile from the mosque. In the years since evil and violence had disrupted the sanctity of the Holy Mosque in November 1979, Sami lived in fear that violence could erupt again. Was this what he saw unfolding down below? He could tell there was serious trouble. Maybe even blood. His heart tightened in his chest. More than a million pilgrims were converging on Mecca. The hajj would officially start in a few days.

  Sami was nostalgic for the old Mecca, for the simpler times when the mizan, the balance, between modernity and tradition was easier to attain and maintain. His eternal quest for spiritual harmony was constantly disrupted by construction cranes, bulldozers, generators, and loudspeakers. Sami believed in an evolution that respected the continuity, but Mecca’s connections with the past were being physically severed. The future of the sanctuary of Islam was in danger. The aim of his research center was to make further expansions to the mosque and its surroundings more in tune with history, more respectful of tradition. It was a Sisyphean battle.

  Every king had tried to put his imprint on the city and the mosque; some were worse than others. King Faisal had been a parsimonious man and the expansion works reflected as much—measured and reasonable, nothing too ostentatious. The current ruler, King Fahd, was a spender who disliked all that was old. He loved glitz and gold. More ancient neighborhoods were being torn down, and Mecca’s classical Islamic architecture was vanishing rapidly. Ugly modern buildings were rising, and more chain hotels were being built to accommodate yet more pilgrims. Sami wasn’t against modernizing the city, but did it have to mean the destruction of its history? The most painful thing for the architect was the continued disregard for historical Islamic sites, even those dating back to the days of the prophet. The royals had no appreciation of history, while the clerical establishment, obsessed with keeping idolatry at bay, cheered the destruction. Sami’s latest heartbreak was his failure to stop the destruction of the house of Abu Bakr, the prophet’s companion and father-in-law, and the first caliph. In its place rose a Hilton Hotel. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” goes the William Faulkner line in his Requiem for a Nun. But in the kingdom of the House of Saud and for the heirs of Muhammad ibn Abdelwahhab, the past did not exist; history was dead, its relics buried.

  There were more and more pilgrims coming to the sacred mosque for the yearly hajj and the minor pilgrimage, the umra, which can be performed at any time of the year. In 1987, 1.8 million pilgrims participated in the hajj, up from 232,971 in 1954. That was an eightfold increase, though the world’s population had increased by only two and a half times during that period. The kingdom kept expanding the Holy Mosque and enlarging the highways so more pilgrims would come to Mecca, where they would be presented with a unified version of Islam, stripped
of all embellishments, all accretions, all diversity of thought. The Saudis even had the Quran to go with it: in late October 1984, King Fahd launched the King Fahd Holy Quran Printing Complex. One of the largest printing plants in the world, it had a capacity to print eight million copies of the Quran and produce thirty thousand audio and video cassettes of Quran recitations, every year. The complex was built by Rafiq Hariri, a Lebanese contractor who would make a fortune in the kingdom during the 1980s, become a friend of the House of Saud, and return to his country to become prime minister after the end of the civil war. A committee of scholars had worked for months to produce a supposedly “perfect,” error-free Quran in its annotations and commentary. All other copies were confiscated, and the “perfect” version was distributed instead. Another committee was working on an English translation. Millions of copies were given to pilgrims and distributed abroad through various channels, including through the embassies’ Islamic affairs sections, which had replaced the cultural affairs sections in Saudi diplomatic missions in several major cities.

  The Saudi-endorsed translations came with egregious modifications or footnotes, turning those editions into polemics against Jews and Christians. The most widely distributed Quran published in 1985 relied heavily on the explanations of medieval thinkers, including students of Ibn Taymiyya, inserting their commentary into the actual verses. A verse in the “Fatiha,” the opening of the Quran, had the words “Jews” and “Christians” inserted in parenthesis, making them the target of hate in an otherwise general call to the faithful to stay on the right path: “Guide us to the Straight Way, the way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not [the way] of those who have earned Your anger [such as the Jews], nor of those who went astray [such as the Christians].” Contemporary politics was also injected into this version of the Quran, with the addition of the word “Palestine” in a verse about the Holy Land, for example: “O my people! Enter the Holy Land that God has assigned unto you” became “O my people! Enter the Holy Land, Palestine.” The Saudi-endorsed versions remain the most widespread, offering non-Arabic speakers a very specific, one-sided reading of Islam, which is hard to question without Arabic knowledge. These strict, polemical, medieval explanations of verses of the Quran were also the basis of religious studies in Arabic and were favored by the likes of Bin Baz as the best readings of the Quran. There was much to learn from these readings if presented with a variety of others for comparative study, but brandishing them as the only acceptable version was problematic.

  Sami despaired at the closing of minds around him. Minds could always be retrained, hearts could be retuned, he tried to convince himself. But the history destroyed in the inner sanctum of the Holy Mosque could not be rebuilt. The arched gateway, known as Bab al-Salam, Gate of Peace, through which the prophet had walked to pray by the Ka’aba, had long since been removed. Even the frame of black marble that had been inlaid in the stone floor to mark the gate’s historical location was gone. The mataf, the open, circular area where pilgrims circumambulate around the Ka’aba, had been enlarged, again and again, repaved with heat-reflecting white marble. To allow this extension, historical pulpits, ancient gates, everything had been removed, including the building covering the miraculous well of Zamzam, which had quenched the thirst of Hagar, Abraham’s concubine, and their son Ishmael. The water of the well had been diverted underground and the original opening paved over, its location marked with a black circle on the white marble. The buildings around the mosque were growing taller, the view from the Ka’aba to the hills surrounding the holy city was slowly being obstructed. Sami kept thinking of a hadith that seemed to warn about this: “If you see buildings surpass the [Mecca] mountains, then beware that the hour has cast its shadow.” There were a few variations to the wording in various hadiths, but they all pointed to the nearing of Judgment Day.

  Every gouge in the bedrock, every move by a bulldozer was a stab to Sami’s heart, as though his body were being ripped apart. “This is not God’s will,” he thought. “This is part of his testing.”

  * * *

  Now the House of Saud was being tested again. What Sami had seen from the helicopter flying above the city was not another Juhayman episode; it was the embodiment of the Saudi-Iran competition for global leadership of the Muslim world, playing out at the holiest site of Islam. The Iran-Iraq War was in its seventh year, and the Saudis were still paying Saddam generously for his efforts, with billions of dollars in civilian and military supplies: $10 billion up to December 1981, then (along with Kuwait) another $20–$27 billion by the end of 1982. Saudi Arabia itself was being drawn into the conflict. Iran wanted to prevent tankers transporting Iraqi oil from passing through the Strait of Hormuz. It had targeted a Saudi tanker; Iranian and Saudi jets had faced off in the skies.

  Despite all the resources they’d received, the Iraqis were unable to win the war. Although mostly friendless and stuck in the trenches, the Iranians dug in their heels, refusing to accept a cease-fire. Whenever the Iranians sounded more belligerent or looked as though they were gaining a slight upper hand on the battlefield, the Saudis scurried to push for a cease-fire. They once offered the Iranians $25 billion in war reparations. They tried secret negotiations, then attempted open ones. In 1985, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, even traveled to Tehran. His Iranian counterpart, Ali Akbar Velayati, visited Riyadh. In February 1986, when the Iranians seized the key Iraqi oil port of Al-Faw, the Saudis tried again, frantically, to reach a cease-fire through backroom deals, desperate to avoid an outright Iranian victory. But Khomeini and his hardliner henchmen wanted nothing less than the immediate departure of Saddam. This was a nonstarter. Even more egregious to the Saudis was an Iranian request for “observer rights” over Mecca and Medina. This kind of language always induced deep panic in the Saudis. They quickly approved another $4 billion loan to Iraq.

  Ever since Khomeini had triumphed over the shah in February 1979, he’d had his eyes on Islam’s holy sites—he saw the Al-Sauds as usurpers, unworthy custodians, the “camel grazers” he had written about decades ago. Mecca, God’s throne on earth, the gateway to paradise for Muslims, was layered with religious but also political and financial importance. For centuries, the city had been at the heart of Islam but on the periphery of power. No caliph had reigned from either Mecca or Medina since the founder of the Umayyad caliphate, Mu’awiya bin Abi Sufyan, had chosen Damascus as his capital in the second half of the sixth century and made plans to convert an ancient church into a stunning mosque to rival the one in Mecca. The Umayyad Mosque had, not a Ka’aba, but a relic of Saint John the Baptist. The wider Hejaz slowly developed more autonomy, as its own emirate, under a noble overlord, a sharif, who was always either a Meccan or a descendant of the prophet’s family through his other grandson, Hassan, brother of Hussein. Removed from the politics, the scheming of caliphs, and the internecine conflicts, Mecca developed its aura of a mystical, celestial city. For centuries, the sharif of Mecca had been a servant of the caliphs, who derived legitimacy from the holy sites while receiving financial gains from levying taxes on the pilgrims.

  Khomeini recognized the hajj as a unique opportunity to reach millions of Muslims and spread his revolution. He had been methodically chipping away for years. In 1981, there were violent clashes between the Saudi police and Iranian pilgrims who were distributing pictures of Khomeini and chanting “Allahu Akbar va Khomeini rahbar” (God is great, Khomeini is the leader). Khomeini wanted to change the nature of the hajj itself, turning a spiritual event into a political protest to undermine the House of Saud. By 1984, Khomeini had set up the Organization for Hajj Endowments and Charity, which operated under his direct supervision. The leaders assigned to guide the caravans of Iranian pilgrims underwent extensive ideological training and were in charge of disseminating the Supreme Leader’s message via booklets (printed in various languages) and by holding meetings with non-Iranian pilgrims and foreign officials. The goal was not only spreading the revolution’s message, but actively
proselytizing and converting pilgrims to Shiism. Within two years the Iranians, or at least the more radical faction of the leadership, felt emboldened in their designs on Mecca. In 1986, 113 Iranian and Libyan pilgrims were arrested in Jeddah upon arrival, accused of carrying huge quantities of explosives. The Iranians among them were accused of being Revolutionary Guards. The Saudis believed they had planned to take over the Holy Mosque.

  King Fahd had had enough of the constant challenge to the House of Saud’s legitimacy as the guardian of the two holy sites. In October 1986, in front of an assembly of royals and clerics, sitting on a baroque-style, gold-painted armchair, King Fahd announced he was officially replacing the title of His Majesty the King with that of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. First introduced by Saladin during the Crusades, the title had never been officially used, until King Fahd, who—with his reputation as a gambler and playboy—needed its shine more than any of his predecessors. But no title could fend off Khomeini’s messengers. Ahead of the 1987 hajj, Khomeini exhorted the Iranian pilgrims to turn it into a “battlefield,” to march “with as much ceremony as possible during the hajj” and to “express their hatred toward the enemies of God and mankind.” Iran had reached the limits of its military capabilities and was sinking in the battlefield. The Saudis had just crashed the oil market with overproduction, bringing the price of a barrel from $30 to $13, bleeding the Iranian economy even further. Khomeini needed a boost, something to reenergize the faithful.