Black Wave

by Kim Ghattas

  After the attacks of September 11, Saudis were forced by the United States to exercise more control over where their money for charity and proselytizing was going—a lot of it was outside state control. There were some three hundred private Saudi charities sending $6 billion a year to Islamic causes around the world. Every day, wealthy Saudi individuals donated an estimated $1.6 million to charity, and some of it ended up in the wrong hands. According to one estimate, almost $60 million donated to legitimate Saudi-based charities went astray, with $2 million per year going into the coffers of al-Qaeda. The Saudis set up a government commission to oversee charity money going abroad, dissolved some charities, and shut down the Islamic affairs section in the five main embassies in the West. Reluctantly, the Saudis also promised to review the school curriculum, but they never did much—either because, at their core, the royals espoused some of the same beliefs as the clerical establishment, or because they didn’t dare challenge the clerics.

  Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who had written excited dispatches from the front lines of the Afghan war, was back in Jeddah, working as the deputy editor of the English-language daily Arab News. He still believed in political Islam, but he had never espoused violence and he especially opposed Muslims killing other Muslims. This was what divided the world of Islam: those who believed in letting others live and those who didn’t. Osama bin Laden had been Jamal’s friend; they had spent time together in Peshawar and in Afghanistan. Jamal had been one of the first to interview the tall, lanky, rich Saudi. In 1995, Khashoggi, acting as a kind of unofficial intermediary for Bin Laden’s family back in Saudi Arabia, had tried to persuade Bin Laden to publicly renounce his campaign against the Saudi establishment and denounce violence inside the kingdom. The violent sahwa was just beginning. Bin Laden, who was living in Sudan by then, running a training camp for militants, refused. Jamal left, exasperated. After 9/11, Jamal described Bin Laden as living in a fantasyland of terror. He wrote a mea culpa on his personal website, saying the kingdom wasn’t even trying to understand what had led fifteen Saudis to become hijackers.

  A week after the May 2003 bombings, Khaled al-Ghannami, an ex-jihadi—like his friend Mansour—published an opinion piece in the progressive Al-Watan paper, calling into question the legacy of Ibn Taymiyyah, the spiritual father of Wahhabism. He identified the fundamentalist medieval cleric as the source of much of Saudi Arabia’s troubles. Ibn Taymiyya’s words, wrote Ghannami, were a true disaster, leading people to take it upon themselves to impose virtue on others. For Salafists and Wahhabis, Ibn Taymiyya’s words and edicts were unassailable. Khashoggi had just been appointed as editor in chief of the newspaper two weeks prior. He was promptly fired.

  Of all those who tried, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, to wake their compatriots to the dangers of exclusionary thinking and the intolerance that the Saudi system fostered, Sami Angawi, the architect from Jeddah, had the most daring and visually provocative approach. Now in his fifties, he was still speaking out against the destruction of the Islamic heritage in Mecca and Medina—of some three hundred sites, only ten remained. He had resigned in 1988 from the Hajj Center he founded, perhaps forced out by his own integrity, his unwillingness to accept that money was the new God in Mecca. If there was any trauma in his life that most pained him it was the fact that he had never managed to stop the bulldozers. Every stone that was dug up, every building that was torn down felt like a stab in his heart. For Sami, there was a connection between the destruction of buildings and of Islamic heritage and the terror that had been wrought in New York: a monopoly on religion by those who dictated that only their way was right, erasing everything else. The religious authorities endorsed such destruction by stating that it was not permitted to glorify buildings. Sami put together a private lecture for small groups in his Jeddah home, itself an ode to ancient Meccan architecture that he had built himself, with inner courtyards and hanging gardens. The slide projection showed three images: the Saudis dynamiting a minaret in a holy shrine in Medina in 2002; the Taliban blowing up the colossal sixth-century Buddhas carved into a mountain in Afghanistan in March 2001; and finally the World Trade Center engulfed in flames on 9/11. Saudi officials dismissed his lecture as an extreme extrapolation.

  * * *

  During the 1990s, the Middle East had witnessed a decade of relative calm, in part thanks to the détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia but also as a result of Pax Americana—post–Cold War, the United States was the unchallenged hegemon. The Saudi-Iran rapprochement had yielded more than anyone expected, including a security agreement. When Saudi Arabia’s defense minister visited Tehran in May 1999, his Iranian counterpart declared: “The sky’s the limit for Iranian–Saudi Arabian relations and co-operation as the whole of Islamic Iran’s military might is in the service of our Saudi Muslim brothers.” President Bill Clinton was basking in the glory of a unipolar world and America was prospering as the indispensable nation. Throughout his presidency and until his very last months in power, Clinton was working on peace between Arabs and Israelis—succeeding only with the Jordanians. Even though people like Nasr in Egypt had their lives upended, Iraq was under UN embargo, and bombs had gone off in the Saudi kingdom, the decade carried some promise. It all came to an end on 9/11. President George W. Bush went to war against the Taliban, who were sheltering Osama bin Laden. After liberating Afghanistan, America declared a global war on terror, a frenzy of liberation. Bush decided to finish what his father had begun—he went after Saddam.

  PART III

  REVENGE

  13

  CAIN AND ABEL

  IRAQ

  2003–2006

  I am not alone: many children of my homeland

  Escaped to Iran along with their suffering too.

  In their exile, they are my family, in our loss we are all brothers

  I am the son of Baghdad, whenever you meet me,

  I am the son of Baghdad, wherever you see me.

  —Ibrahim Ovadia, “A Guest in Tehran,” Baghdad: A City in Verse (1951)

  There was no time to rejoice. There was freedom, reunion, and then murder, a dizzying succession of events, intense emotions, and nauseating savagery. In exile in Iran, Sayyed Jawad al-Khoei heard the news from family back home in Iraq, gruesome details slowly trickling from his hometown of Najaf, the horror too big to grasp. Sitting in Qom, he listened to commentators on the evening news describe the murder of his uncle in the holy city as the well-deserved end of a traitor. Hacked to pieces, left bleeding on the street. Then shot. Not even the black turban and clerical robe had protected the forty-year-old man who’d met such a cruel end in the shadow of the holiest Shia site of all, Imam Ali’s shrine.

  On April 9, 2003, invading American troops had reached Baghdad. Saddam was on the run. His statue on Firdous Square was toppled by an ecstatic crowd, drunk on the sudden rush of oxygen, as though a block of concrete had lifted from their chest, breathing in the possibilities and imagining new horizons after more than three decades of dictatorship. On April 10, Jawad’s uncle, Sayyed Abdulmajid al-Khoei, was killed by fellow Shias. But he was no traitor. How could freedom be so inexplicably deadly, so full of contradictions? How could his uncle have survived the treachery of Saddam, the pain of exile, only to return and be killed in a free Iraq?

  From a distance, Jawad was reliving years of trauma. He was only twenty-three, but his dark brown eyes were those of an old man. Tall and heavyset, he wore his beard neatly trimmed and short. His father, Sayyed Mohammad Taqi al-Khoei, had sent him out of Iraq at the age of just thirteen, soon after the 1991 uprising of Kurds and Shias, to save him from Saddam’s claws. Jawad wanted to stay. He cried for days before his departure and throughout the twelve-hour drive through the desert to Amman. He would never see his father again. In exile, Jawad became an orphan. In 1994, Sayyed Mohammad Taqi was on his way back from prayers in Karbala on a Friday evening when his car crashed into a truck that appeared out of nowhere. It was no accident. He and two others in the car survived
the initial impact but were left bleeding by the side of the road. Government officers at a nearby roadblock forbade anyone to offer help.

  At the time, Jawad was training as a seminarian in Qom, the next-best place after Najaf. Jawad loved the city; he felt safe there and was an eager student. But it was not home. He was always made to feel that he was an Arab, a stranger, a lesser Shia even. He resented the potent combination of Iranian nationalism and fierce Shia sectarianism—exclusionary and imperial. He studied with graduates of Najaf’s hawza and Iraqi clerics in exile who taught religion in Arabic and in the Najaf tradition. There were many differences between the hawza in Najaf and the one in Qom, in their teachings and school of thought. The biggest divide had been Khomeini’s doing.

  Jawad’s grandfather Grand Ayatollah Abulqasim al-Khoei had been one of the most popular and revered Shia spiritual leaders in recent times since his accession to the position of grand ayatollah in 1970, until he died under house arrest in Najaf in 1992. If Najaf was the Shia equivalent of the Vatican, then the grand ayatollah was something of a pope. Al-Khoei had a huge worldwide following as a marja’a taqlid, an object of emulation. A marja’a is a reference point for Shias everywhere, across borders and oceans, for all their questions about religion in daily life, but also about social and political issues. Whole families can follow the same marja’a, individuals can choose to follow someone different, but being a marja’a is a huge source of soft power and financial income, the kind that Khomeini had tried to divert by declaring himself Supreme Leader in a wilayat al-faqih, requiring fealty and emulation from Shias everywhere. Neither Khomeini nor Khamenei ever attained the level of popular following as a marja’a that Khoei had enjoyed. His student and successor Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani inherited most of al-Khoei’s following and his popularity. Sistani had survived life under Saddam; in a free Iraq, he would have to weather Iran’s efforts to swallow Najaf into the Supreme Leader’s orbit. Although Sistani was Iranian, he was loyal to Najaf’s centuries-long tradition of independence from politics.

  When Khomeini first arrived in Najaf in 1964, al-Khoei had done his duty as a grand ayatollah and hosted him for a week. But beyond the initial hospitality, the Iranian political agitator had found a frosty welcome in Najaf. Al-Khoei and the senior clergy in Najaf did not believe that the original concept of wilayat al-faqih could extend beyond guardianship of widows and orphans. Crucially, al-Khoei believed that in the absence of the Mahdi, the wilayat could not be held by only one faqih, for no one was that wise—assuming so was a recipe for religious dictatorship. Like Imam Musa Sadr in Lebanon, he instantly recognized the dangers of Khomeini’s politics. In the fall of 1978, as Iran was boiling and Khomeini was already in Paris, the empress of Iran had visited Najaf alongside Saddam hoping to enlist Khoei’s support for her husband, the shah. Khoei had given her a ring inscribed with the words “God’s power is superior to theirs.” He thought the Iranians were crazy to try to get rid of the shah. Iraq’s Shias had sometimes appealed to the Iranian monarch for help in appeasing Saddam’s oppressive ardors, and they worried about life without this recourse. Khomeini never forgave al-Khoei, neither for that moment nor for his theological criticism that undermined the foundation of the Islamic state that Khomeini wanted to build in Iran and beyond. And he never forgave Najaf for having spurned him. Decades later, an American invasion was clearing the way for revenge.

  In 1991, Sayyed Abdulmajid, son of the grand ayatollah and uncle of Jawad, fled Iraq with his family to London. There were two imperatives in those turbulent days: the thousand-year-old hawza needed to be preserved and protected, so some had to stay, including the aging grand ayatollah and his older sons. But the continuity of the al-Khoei name also had to be ensured, so other family members had to take shelter abroad. The youngest of the ayatollah’s sons had disappeared during the uprising and its aftermath, most likely killed by the regime, along with some two hundred Shia clergymen. Mohammad Taqi, another son and Jawad’s father, would die next. Saddam continued to eliminate Shia clergymen for years. In London, Abdulmajid, a smiling, shy cleric with deep green eyes, ran his father’s charity foundation. He tried, with his interfaith outreach, to soften the image of Shiism in the West, after a decade that had been marked by the hostage taking in Tehran, the rise of Hezbollah, and plane hijackings. He also had conversations with Western officials about returning one day to an Iraq free of Saddam.

  During the 1991 uprising, instructed by his father, Abdulmajid had traveled south to meet the Americans entering Iraq from Kuwait to ask what help they would provide to the Iraqis after they had encouraged them to rise up against the dictator. But the meeting was called off at the last minute. The Americans retreated. Abdulmajid understood instantly the uprising was doomed. He couldn’t return home and crossed into Saudi Arabia and then brought his family out. The Shias had been left to fend for themselves—and die by the thousands, bodies lying on the street, eaten by dogs. The Shias of Iraq felt betrayed. More than a decade later, Abdulmajid was convinced things would be different and that this president Bush, the son, would go all the way to Baghdad. He felt it was important for him to be there early on, for many reasons. He believed the 1991 uprising had failed because there was no coordination among different towns, groups, and rival clerics. With the gravitas of the Khoei name, he was hoping he could help coordinate efforts from Najaf for another uprising against Saddam in parallel with the US military campaign.

  Abdulmajid also wanted to be there because he worried about the anger and resentment that had built up in the Shia community, not just against Saddam and the Baath Party but against the oppression that had become synonymous with Sunnis as a whole. He worried too that the Shias, betrayed by America before, might reject a US occupation outright and find themselves excluded from a post-Saddam government. He wanted everyone to talk to everyone; he wanted Shias to work with Sunnis and allow them to open religious schools even in Najaf. He wanted Sunnis to feel proud to vote freely for a president whether Sunni or Shia. Iraq’s Sunnis had suffered under Saddam, too; his jails did not discriminate. But if Shias had come to see the state as nothing but a sectarian institution used by Saddam to oppress them, Sunnis still believed in the legitimacy of the state itself, regardless of their feelings about the dictator—and they felt the ground shake under their feet when the Americans invaded. A hairline fracture appeared in their inner being. Jarred by endless American missteps, the fracture would soon widen, splitting the country open, birthing new demons.

  Whatever Washington’s misguided reasons for going to war, Iran saw an opportunity to change the score in the Iran-Iraq conflict to its advantage. Abdulmajid was wary about Iran’s ambitions in his country, specifically in Najaf. Saddam had worked hard to constrain the power of the Najaf hawza, and in 1991 it had become mostly inaccessible to Shia students from outside the country. Meanwhile, Qom was rising as the center of religious learning for Shias. Abdulmajid and other Najaf clerics like him hoped that in a free Iraq, the holy city could reclaim its leading role as a center of learning and impose itself as a voice that counterbalanced the state-run Shiism of Qom. Beyond its designs on Najaf, Tehran was betting on networks of exiled Iraqis in Iran, Islamists who espoused Iran’s politics, some of whom still saw themselves as the vanguard of a new phase of the Iranian Revolution. “But the Shia of Iraq are not happy with that role,” Abdulmajid had said. “We are different from them even culturally, not to mention serious differences of religious doctrine.” He believed strongly that clerics had no business running a country. The dangers would be many in the post-Saddam vacuum, but Abdulmajid told his family: “I must go because the risks of not going are even greater.” On April 1, 2003, Abdulmajid flew with American troops to the southern town of Nassiriyah, near Basra.

  There was one danger he had not foreseen or had certainly underestimated: internal Shia rivalries and the folly of those who thought they were more righteous than others.

  By around April 4, he had arrived near his hometown, camping on the outskirt
s of Najaf in an abandoned factory with a group of American Special Forces, who accompanied him in and out of the city. People everywhere recognized him instantly, leaving their cars in the middle of the street to greet him, rushing in disbelief to touch his cloak. He wore a bulletproof vest under his clerical robe, because he was, after all, in the middle of a war, but he declared: “I have never felt so safe as I do here.” When he finally made it to the Imam Ali shrine, he walked into the courtyard through one of its monumental doors and looked up to the large golden dome scintillating in the spring sun, a minaret on each side, built of thousands of gold-painted bricks. He was mobbed by well-wishers; as he walked into the inner sanctum, they followed him as he prayed and kissed the silver lattice enclosure of Imam Ali’s tomb.

  A crowd had gathered as Abdulmajid walked to the back of the courtyard, up some steps, into a large room bedecked and bejeweled on the inside: the al-Khoei family vault where his father, the great ayatollah, was buried, along with his brother Mohammad Taqi. He could finally pray for their souls in their presence. After thirteen years away, he couldn’t get enough of the spiritual sanctity of this holiest of sites for Shias, a space imbued with so much pain, ancient and more recent, and yet so deeply moving in its quietude and breathtaking beauty that he returned to pray by Imam’s Ali shrine a few days later, on April 10, just before nine in the morning.

  He had gone into the shrine, leaving behind the Americans who had been protecting him on the streets. Soon after noon prayers, as he sat in the office of the keeper of the shrine, an angry crowd formed outside chanting: “Long live Sadr! Long live Sadr!” They were not calling out for the vanished Imam Sadr but for a distant Iraqi cousin of much inferior caliber. Moqtada al-Sadr was a young hothead thrust into a leadership position in 1999 at barely twenty-five, when his father, a popular ayatollah, was assassinated by Saddam. Ayatollah al-Sadr had been an activist cleric who gave fiery speeches and rallied huge crowds at Friday prayers in the slums of Baghdad. The regime allowed it because he railed against America and Israel, Saddam’s favorite enemies. A nationalist, he also emphasized the Arab identity of Iraq’s Shias, as opposed to Persian Shias. But when he became too popular, Saddam had him killed, along with his two eldest sons.