Black Wave

by Kim Ghattas

  * * *

  When Zia ul-Haq died in the summer of 1988, the war between Iraq and Iran had just ended. The summer had devastated Iran’s armed forces. Saddam had unleashed hell and fury, not to mention chemical weapons, on Iranian cities. Missiles had rained on Tehran the previous winter, emptying the city of a quarter of its inhabitants. On the morning of Sunday, July 3, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air flight 655 over the Strait of Hormuz as the plane made its way to nearby Dubai. There were 290 civilians on the plane, including sixty-six infants and children. No one survived. Their lifeless bodies floated in the sea amid the wreckage of the plane.

  A US Navy spokesman said the Vincennes had mistaken the Airbus A300 for an Iranian F-14. An hour earlier, one of the Vincennes’s helicopters, flying over the strait, had come under fire from an Iranian boat. The Americans returned fire and sank two Iranian boats. US president Ronald Reagan said no one could minimize the horror of what had happened and described it as a “great tragedy” but an “understandable accident.” At the UN, Iran sought condemnation. There was none. There was no apology either. Iranian diplomats described the downing of the plane as “a premeditated act of aggression and a premeditated cold-blooded murder.” Iran vowed revenge. Some anti-American demonstrations in the country followed, but overall the reaction was muted. Iranians were too exhausted to even protest, but mostly they were devastated by the lack of international sympathy for the tragedy, as though this was just part of the cost of being at war, the cost of being Iranian. The country could take no more. The plane shooting was a notable turning point for the Iranian leadership, including Khomeini. For months, those closest to him, including his son, had argued it was time to accept a cease-fire. They argued that the war against Saddam could not be won without years more of blood and treasure. Now came proof that the outside world cared little how many more Iranians died, in a war or a plane crash. Survival of the regime and the revolution itself was on the line.

  In a radio address on July 20, Khomeini endorsed a cease-fire with Iraq. “Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom. Happy are those who have lost their lives in this convoy of light. Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice.” The deadly debacle in Mecca and Khomeini’s repeated failure to rally the Muslim world to internationalize Islam’s holy cities were still weighing on him. The ayatollah needed another tool to revive revolutionary fervor.

  * * *

  Another war was drawing to an end, in Afghanistan. The Soviets were tired by a conflict they too couldn’t seem to win or lose. They were pinned to the wall, outmatched by the money and weapons that the Americans, Pakistanis, and Saudis were pouring into the conflict. Stinger missiles that could bring down a plane were the latest addition to the arsenal of the mujahedeen, altering the balance of power. With fifteen thousand troops killed, several hundred thousand wounded, and tens of thousands dead from disease, President Mikhail Gorbachev wanted out. No one knew it quite yet, but the Soviet Union’s collapse had just begun.

  Before he blew up in the sky, Zia had signed on to the Geneva Accords of April 15, 1988, which ended the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and provided for the withdrawal of 150,000 Soviet troops by February 1989. On February 15, 1989, after weeks of slowly drawing down their forces, the last Soviet troops crossed the Termez Bridge over the Amu Darya River in the opposite direction than the one they’d driven in December 1979—out of Afghanistan and back into the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan.

  The CIA’s post in Islamabad sent a cable to the agency’s headquarters: “We WON.” At headquarters, they popped the champagne. At the US embassy in Pakistan they celebrated. The Saudis also felt they had won. Their money had paid for what they saw as the victory of Islam. There were no champagne celebrations, just a quiet sense of accomplishment. Khomeini wouldn’t have it. He wanted a say in the future of Afghanistan. Two days before the final Soviet withdrawal, the headlines in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat read, IRAN THREATENING THE MUJAHEDEEN AND SIDING WITH THE SHIAS. Shias represented only 15 percent of the total population of Afghanistan, but Iran pushed for a bigger representation during negotiations taking place in Peshawar for the formation of the government in exile and the shura, the consultative council. Iran had backed mujahedeen groups as well, mostly Hazara Shias, though they hadn’t done much fighting. This was a Saudi show and the kingdom’s work over the years, pouring money and arms into the pockets of loyal Afghan mujahedeen, was paying off. The radical Sunni Islamist groups had the upper hand. The Tehran-backed groups walked out of the talks and Iran was left empty-handed. Still Khomeini wouldn’t give up. The day before the Soviets crossed the bridge out of Afghanistan, the very day before Saudi Arabia’s quiet victory, Khomeini started a cultural war that would deeply transform the Muslim world for decades to come.

  * * *

  On Valentine’s Day 1989, right before the 2:00 p.m. news, the newscaster on Tehran Radio read out a statement Khomeini had dictated: “I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, which is against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all Muslims to execute them where they find them.” Any Muslim who might die in the process, Khomeini added, would be considered a martyr.

  We may never know whether Khomeini timed his move with cunning precision to overshadow the headlines of the Soviet withdrawal on February 15 and the Saudi victory, or whether he seized the opportunity when he saw it. The biggest irony is that he was finishing off what the Saudis and their friends had in fact started.

  The author of The Satanic Verses, the British Indian writer Salman Rushdie, was already the acclaimed winner of the 1981 Booker Prize. The Satanic Verses was his fourth book, published in September 1988, about two Indian Muslim immigrants to Britain who die on a hijacked plane that explodes over the English Channel. They fall to earth and are magically transformed into living symbols of good and evil. Their stories are intertwined with that of a prophet called Mahound, in a place called jahiliyya. Rushdie described the book as a work about “migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London, and Bombay.” Muslims saw references to their prophet Muhammad and his wives, whose names were given to prostitutes in the book. Khomeini’s edict to kill Rushdie sent shock waves through the literary and publishing world. That same night, Rushdie got police protection and went into hiding. Khomeini had become the spokesperson of Muslims who felt aggrieved and slighted, even those who had not read The Satanic Verses. Six hundred pages and a quarter of a million words long, the book may have been a masterpiece, but it was a maze. Yet someone had gone through it very diligently in India, Rushdie’s native country. And within a month of publication of The Satanic Verses, in the fall of 1988, he had called a friend in Leicester, telling him there was a campaign to ban the book in India, urging him to do God’s work in the UK.

  In Leicester, Faiyazuddin Ahmad, a jovial-looking man, got to work, photocopying extracts of the book and sending them around to Muslim organizations and to the embassies of forty-five Muslim countries in the UK. A recent arrival in the country, Ahmad had previously worked in East Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as a managing editor of newspapers, and was now at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, a local chapter of the Pakistani Jamaat-e Islami, which received funding from Saudi Arabia. Ahmad, who also had ties with the Saudi-funded World Assembly of Muslim Youth, traveled to Jeddah in October to brief members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. At the Saudi embassy in London, the head of the Islamic affairs section, Mughram al-Ghamdi, helped set up the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs to campaign against the book and get it banned. Only a few Muslim countries answered the call. But by December, British Muslims were protesting, burning a copy as they marched through the small town of Bolton. The subcontinental rivalry between Deobandis and Barelvis was mirrored in the Muslim community in Britain, fueling a competition for bigger and bigger protests. A month later, in January
1989, a larger one took place in Bradford, just an hour away from Bolton. The anger rippled back to the subcontinent. Not to be outdone, the Jamaat organized its own demonstration in Islamabad on February 12, bringing a massive crowd to protest outside the US cultural center in Islamabad. More than eighty were injured, five were shot dead. The story goes that Khomeini was watching the news that evening and was moved enough by the deaths of the Pakistani youths that he issued his fatwa. The book had been translated into Persian and had been on sale in Tehran—no one seemed exercised about it until Khomeini spoke out.

  The Saudis couldn’t let this pass. They went the legal way. Sheikh Bin Baz declared that Rushdie should be tried in absentia to determine whether his book was blasphemous. Sheikh Gad al-Haq, the head of Egypt’s highest religious authority, Al-Azhar, came out against Khomeini’s fatwa. But they were not standing up for freedom of speech and writing, no—Al-Azhar’s view was simply that no one could be put to death before there was a fair trial to determine whether blasphemy had indeed been committed. Any verdict in such a case would have to be handed out by a head of government.

  Rushdie did not stand trial, and he survived the death threats. But the Japanese and Turkish translators of his book, and the publisher of the Norwegian one, were all assassinated for their association with Rushdie. Others with no connection to Rushdie would soon be felled or have their lives wrecked by accusations of blasphemy, from Egypt to Pakistan. Death by blasphemy had now been introduced to the Muslim world by a strange twist in the competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia to position themselves as the standard-bearer of global Islam. But Saudi Arabia’s role in this dynamic would be forgotten, and the fatwa against Rushdie would become solely an Iranian story.

  On June 3, 1989, Khomeini, eighty-six years old and ailing, died of heart failure. In his will, he left a parting shot against the Saudis. The twenty-nine-page document was read by Ali Khamenei, the president and soon-to-be Supreme Leader. “Muslims should curse the tyrants, including the Saudi royal family, these traitors to God’s great shrine, may God’s curse and that of his prophets and angels be upon them … King Fahd spends a large part of the people’s wealth every year on the anti-Qorani totally baseless superstitious faith of Wahhabism. He abuses Islam and the dear Qoran.”

  Khomeini’s death would in fact allow a détente to begin between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The president, Ali Khamenei, became Supreme Leader; the speaker of the house, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, was elected president. Despite the vitriol Rafsanjani had spouted at the Saudis during the 1987 hajj crisis, he was a pragmatist, eager to rebuild the country’s economy after the war with Iraq. In August 1990, Iran’s enemy Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait; his troops were on Saudi Arabia’s border. The Iranians and the Saudis were suddenly united in fear of the same madman. By September, the foreign ministers of both countries were talking in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

  The invasion of Kuwait ushered in another geopolitical change in the Middle East. As President George H. W. Bush put together the largest possible military coalition, he was eager to involve as many Arab participants as possible, including Syria. Hafez al-Assad agreed to participate. In exchange, in a quid pro quo that was never explicitly stated, the United States turned a blind eye when Syrian troops invaded the Christian areas that had remained outside their control in Lebanon, on October 13, 1990.

  The Syrian tanks silenced everyone’s guns and imposed the Pax Syriana. Alliances and proxies had shifted over the course of the war in Lebanon. Syria had invaded several times and was in control of dominantly Muslim areas of the country and West Beirut. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was gone; the Palestinian refugees were still there. Christians had slaughtered one another. Israel still occupied large parts of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah’s rise had continued, and its ruthless campaign to eliminate intellectual opponents within the community had reached Beirut, claiming the lives of well-known writers and journalists. One of the most prominent, Hussein Mrouweh, was shot dead at home on his sickbed. The power of ideas was simply too much for Hezbollah to bear. And still the critics were not silenced. They never would be. Just as in Pakistan, where Zia had to repeatedly, continuously subjugate critics with violence to stay on top, so Hezbollah would have to repeatedly beat down opponents. In July 1990, just months before the official end of the war in Lebanon, thousands demonstrated in Tyre. “We want to speak the truth!” they chanted. “We don’t want to see any Iranians!” Lebanese Shia clerics called for the end of the “Iranian invasion” and the departure of the Revolutionary Guards who had come to the Beqaa Valley after the 1982 Israeli invasion and still maintained a presence. But the Guards could in fact leave; Hezbollah, their local affiliate, was in place. And by allowing Assad to send troops into Lebanon, America had unwittingly provided a way for his ally Iran to maintain its foothold on the Mediterranean. The black wave from Iran would not recede. The other one, from Saudi Arabia, was rushing along the Nile.

  11

  BLACK WAVE

  EGYPT

  1992–95

  These fools, by dint of ignorance most crass,

  Think they in wisdom all mankind surpass;

  And glibly do they damn as infidel,

  Whoever is not like them, an ass.

  —Omar Khayyam, Quatrains, 156

  Nasr Abu Zeid never wanted to be Egypt’s Salman Rushdie. He had never wanted to give the impression that he “was against Islam. Far from it.” Among his worst fears was that Westerners would look at him and see a critic of Islam. That’s not what he was. The progressive professor of Islamic studies and Arabic at Cairo University was born a Muslim, raised a Muslim, and, as he liked to repeat, inshallah, he would die a Muslim. He only wanted to make his religion more accessible in today’s world, gentler, less doctrinaire.

  When Nasr was accused of apostasy in Egypt, just a few years after the Rushdie fatwa, the comparison to the British Indian novelist came easily to Western media reporting on a foreign country. But Nasr’s supporters in Egypt preferred to compare him to the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo. Some 350 years earlier, the Catholic Church had persecuted Galileo as a heretic during the Roman Inquisition for asserting that the earth moved around the sun. He had to recant his discoveries, which caused him much anguish until his death. Over time, the Church walked back its condemnation, and in October 1992 the pope closed a decade-long investigation into the condemnation and published a formal acknowledgment of the Church’s error. Nasr’s ordeal began around the time of that apology, and just like Galileo he believed in science and reason, insisting he would continue to “struggle in support of Islam, armed with scientific reasoning and solid methodology.”

  Nasr’s critics dismissed him as a rotund, quiet man, as a “little” secular writer, an infidel. His supporters scoffed: Nasr was their Galileo, the only difference was that the Vatican had apologized to the Italian savant, whereas “some in our universities still believe the earth does not move.” That was the fear of progressive thinkers in Egypt, that the darkness spreading outside, “terrorism dressed in the garb of religion,” was now scaling the walls of universities to turn them into courts of inquisition. Reason and faith, science and dogma—all locked in battle in Cairo. For a while, Egypt’s intellectuals were defiant, buoyed and invigorated by the challenge. “Liberalism till victory or martyrdom” declared Mohammad Said al-Ashmawy, a senior, progressive judge on the court of appeals.

  There would be many deaths.

  For Nasr, it all began in 1992, with a straightforward request for a promotion to the position of full professor in the Arabic department of Cairo University. The tenure committee submitted his file, including all his publications, to three professors for evaluation. One of them, Dr. Abdel Sabour Shaheen, was a fundamentalist preacher at Cairo’s seventh-century Amr ibn al-As mosque, the first mosque built in Egypt. Shaheen did not like what he read.

  Exegesis, the critical interpretation of scripture, is not an Islamic tradition, and for Ort
hodox Muslims like Shaheen, the Quran is the uncreated, eternal, inviolate word of God. Nasr, meanwhile, was the author of books titled Critique of Islamic Discourse and Rationalism in Exegesis: A Study of the Problem of Metaphor in the Writing of the Mu’tazilah.

  The socially timid, bespectacled scholar was a freethinker who challenged the orthodox tradition in Islam and argued that the Quran had to be understood both metaphorically and in its historical context. He was a man of his time, eager to help his fellow Muslims apply the teachings of the Quran to the modern world. To do that, he believed that “the human dimension of the Quran needs to be reconsidered.” So although the Quran was indeed the word of God, Nasr’s argument was that it had been revealed to the prophet Muhammad through the use of a language, a local dialect even, rooted in a specific context: the Arabic language of the Arabian Peninsula of the seventh century. If the word of God had not been embodied in human language, how could anyone understand it?