A book showing the ambiguous and complex fact about the causes of the conflict in the mediate East, which importantly changes our perception of the past of this region (from the editor's mate).
Czarna Owac Wydawnictwo Thank you for sharing the passage for publication. We encourage you to read the full book.
Introduction
“What happened to us?” This question haunts us throughout the arabian and Muslim world. We repeat them like a mantra. It sounds from Iran to Syria, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, besides in my country, in Lebanon. The past has become a abroad land for us, unspoiled by the horror of bloodshed for spiritual reasons, a place alive, free from gold and their intolerance and seemingly endless amorphous wars.
Although there have besides been tensions and conflicts in the past, they have been limited in time and space, and the future has inactive brought many promises. What happened to us?
Perhaps this question is not raised by those who are besides young to remember another world, those whose parents did not tell about the youth spent in Peshawar to recite poems, in the Beirut bars where discussions about Marxism continued until late in the night, about Baghdad, where you rode your bike on picnics on the banks of the Tiger. The question may besides surprise those Westerners who presume that today’s extremism and bloodshed have always been normal.
This book is simply a journey into the past. I wasn't led by a melancholy longing for a time of glory. But I tried to realize erstwhile and why everything began to fall apart slowly, later with unexpected force – and what was lost. In modern past of the mediate East, there are many turning points to which we can appeal, trying to explain how we came to be in specified a desperate situation.
Some believe that the Muslim planet fell into disarray with the end of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of the last caliphate after planet War I. Others will point to Israel's uprising in 1948 and the defeat of the Arabs in the Six-Day War in 1967 as the first crack in the collective arabian soul. Others will jump straight to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, recognising its effects as the last paroxysm of a conflict dating back a 1000 years: Sunni and Shiite killing each other, Saudi Arabia and Iran compacted in the fight to death. They will insist that both bloodshed and rivalry are inevitable and eternal. In addition to this part of "the inevitable and eternal" no of these explanations is wrong, but no of them in itself gives a full picture.
Looking for answers to the question, "What happened to us?", I reached the pregnant effect of 1979.
Three large events took place at the time almost independently of each other: the revolution in Iran, the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Saudi goldmen and the russian invasion in Afghanistan, which became the first battlefield of modern jihad, supported by the United States. The combination of these 3 events proved to be toxic and since then nothing has always been like before. From this harmful mix was born Saudi-Iranian rivalry, destructive struggles for leadership in the Muslim world, in which both countries carry religion on banners, usage it and distort it in an absolutely ungodly pursuit of power. This state of affairs has persisted since 1979 like a raging creek that washes everything in its path.
Nothing has changed the arabian and Muslim planet as profoundly and as fundamental as the events of 1979. There were another breakthrough moments: the dissolution of alliances, the beginning or end of wars, the birth of fresh political movements. The extremist heritage of 1979 included all of this and more: that year started a process that transformed both society and cultural and spiritual mention points. Forces released in 1979 changed who we were, and took control of our collective memory.
The communicative of 1979 and the 4 decades that followed is the heart of the book.
Saudi-Iranian rivalry went beyond geopolitics, reaching a level of always more powerful competition for legitimacy through Islam, spiritual and cultural dominance, changing societies from within – not only in Saudi Arabia and Iran, but throughout the region.
The revolution in Iran has already been described in many books, but only a fewer of them have looked at the wave of events caused, how the arabian and Sunni planet reacted to and addressed this momentous event. Competition, extending all the way across Pakistan, caused the domino effect, rebuilt dynamic, pluralistic countries, caused the proliferation of sectarian identities and bloodshed, something that had never defined us before. Pakistan is geographically on the Indian subcontinent, but its contemporary past remains closely linked to the trends that appear in the mediate East, and the country itself occupies a prominent place in our story. In this area of the mediate East and Central Asia, militant sentiments grew in parallel and cultural intolerance flourished, and both phenomena frequently fed each other.
Everywhere I went, collecting interviews for this book, from Cairo to Baghdad and from Tehran to Islamabad, erstwhile I asked people about the importance of 1979 in their lives, there was a wave of emotion. I sat in salons and cabinets of others and felt like I was conducting national or regional therapy: each of them had a communicative about how 1979 turned her life upside down, her marriage, her education – even those who were born after that date. This book is not a historical investigation paper or academic study, but it is more than a dry account: I've been digging through archives, looked through over a 1000 newspapers, interviewed dozens of people, and collected a virtual library of the past of these 4 decades. As a result, I propose a fresh explanation of known events, sometimes forgotten, sometimes overlooked, most so far seen independently. Collected and merged, they cover 4 decades of the past of 7 countries, smash into the dust many recognized truths concerning the region and again shed light on how the Saudi-Iran rivalry developed and changed over time, bringing consequences that no 1 could foretell in 1979.
Although geopolitical events are the background and setting of the Black Wave, it is not a book on terrorism, nor about Al-Qaeda or about ISIS, nor does it talk about the division into Sunni and Shiite, nor about the threat of brutal fundamentalism to the West. All of these are themes that appear almost obsessively in the headlines of Western media.
On these pages, on the another hand, I tell the unspoken past of people – and there are many of them – fighting erstwhile and now against intellectual and cultural darkness, slow embracing their countries in the decades that followed the disastrous year 1979.
Intellectuals and intellectuals, poets and poets, lawyers and lawyers, tv presenters and presenters, young clergymen, writers and writers, men and women, Arabs and Arabs, Iranians and Iranians, Pakistanis and Pakistanis, Sunni and Shiites, people mostly believers, sometimes secular, but always progressive, thinkers and thinkers representing a dynamic, pluralistic planet that inactive exists, though it is flooded by a black wave. They are a force of silence. Most of them have suffered immensely from those who proceed to spread intolerance, whether they wield political power or rifles. any of this majority lost their lives, like Saudi writer Jamal Chaszukji (Jamal Khashoggi), murdered in Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Jamal was my friend and friend. I was just writing about his life erstwhile his cruel death turned out to be a gruesome twist in the communicative of Saudi-Iran rivalry.
The stories of life of all the characters placed in the heart of this book overlap over time and over generations. any of my heroes know each other, most don't. They live in different countries, but fight in the same battles. Their stories are included in other, in the past of historical figures, celebrated writers or infamous militants, in this vast story, in these fables from the 1000 and 1 night of modern mediate East politics.
The communicative begins only a fewer years before 1979, on the Mediterranean coast, in Lebanon, with a little-known episode that played a key function in preparing the ground for the muslim revolution in Iran.
PART I
REVOLUCATION
1
ASSET REVOLUTION
Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, France 1977–1979
Peace died in the homeland of peace
Justice Is Done
When Jerusalem fell
Love retreated and war settled in the heart of the world
In the cave a kid cries and Maria, his mother
And I pray.
Fairuz, a fragment of the song Zahrat almada’in ("City Flower"),
crowd. The President
Deep in the core of the revolution, which turned Iran from the Persian kingdom into a Muslim theocracy, a revolution which the lay leftist and Muslim modernists had cheered for and organized, is simply a paradox. The paradox is that Iran's fundamentalist Ayatollahs the last contractions that gave birth to it is due to the cities of sin and freedom: Beirut, the capital of arabian modernity, formerly known as the Paris of the mediate East, and Paris, the birthplace of enlightenment. Had it not been for the permissive freedom of both these cities, Ajatollah Ruhollah Chomejni, a patient man endowed with a skillful mind, would surely have died forgotten in a two-story mullah brick home in a narrow, blind alley of the holy city of An-Najaf in Iraq. The Iranian clergyman conducted an agitation against Iran's chess for over 10 years, and besides spent any time in Tehran prison. And he came to Nadzafu in 1965; for thirteen years he was wasting there, to anyone unknown, popular in the ellipse of his disciples, but treated with distance by most Iraqi Shiite clergymen. In the Nadaf, clergymen kept separate from politics and looked disapprovally at Ayatollah the inciter who felt he had a peculiar relation with God. Outside the cities of theological issues, there were those who saw in Chomejni a useful political tool, individual who could stimulate the crowds to fight oppression. Various people dreaming of different dreams, from Tehran to Jerusalem, from Paris to Beirut, saw in him a man who could prove useful in carrying out their plans—and they did not realize that they were the tools in his hands.
* * Oh, * *
On the Lebanese coast, on the terrace of a home rising above the shining sea, 3 men, revived by the desire for justice, conducted long night talks, rebuilding the planet and their countries. They were an incredible mix: Musa Sadr, charismatic, green-eyed Iranian clergyman in the Turban, known as the imam Sadr, Hussein al-Hussajni (Hussein el Husseini), superb politician from Lebanon, mustaches and suit, and Mostaf Chamran, an Iranian physicist who became a left-wing revolutionist-warrior. Only 1 of them will last the shock their dreams will bring.
It was 1974. Nelson Mandela, a movement activist against apartheid, sat in a South African prison. The Irish Republican Army fought the British, setting bombs in English pubs and telephone centers. In Vietnam, the American firepower turned out to be in vain. The battles between the pro-American South and the Communist North continued, but United States troops returned home. After nineteen years of war, the number of casualties was devastating: 2 million Vietnamese civilians died, 1 and a half million Vietnamese soldiers and sixty 1000 Americans. president Richard Nixon has just resigned to avoid impeachment as part of a separate infamous episode: the Watergate affair. Men wore long hair and wide ties, and Led Zeppelin was the world's most celebrated stone band. In April 1975, Saigon, captured by communists, will fall. In the same month, the war in Lebanon will start – the flames of the Cold War, so far inflaming Southeast Asia, were now to ignite in the mediate East.
However, in the summertime of 1974, 3 men gathered at Hussein's home in the tiny coastal town of Khalde, 10 minutes south of Beirut, looked back at the achievements of the past year. Their dreams crossed borders, their goals varied, but combined their opposition to oppression. The war was inactive only a faintly heard murmur.
That summer, in the east, the powerful voice of Joan Baez, which echoed from inland, from the dry, cold, fertile Bekaa valley, sounded in his delicacy. An American folk vocalist and civilian rights activist, friend of Martin Luther King and erstwhile lover of Bob Dylan, struck the strings of her guitar in front of a crowd of wealthy music and planet admirers who had come from Beirut and from many parts of the arabian planet to the Baalbek global Festival. She sang about freedom and about wind - bearing answers in the ruins of ancient Heliopolis, the largest, best preserved Roman city located in Baalbek, a town inhabited by little than 10 1000 people. “How many years must there be a people before they let them be free?” Baez asked. Ella Fitzgerald, Rudolf Nurieev, fresh York Philharmonic, as well as Lebanese vocalist, the Earth's unearthly Fajruz, and Egypt's largest diva, Umm Kulsum, all performed in Baalbek, in the shadow of the firing columns of the temples of Jupiter and Bachus. During the day, hundreds of people came to the town to perceive and watch the artists while locals sold souvenirs and snacks at the entrance to the festival.
The city of Baalbek itself was a backward hole. any of its inhabitants did not sin in neatness – in any streets open gutters could be seen. There was no advanced school, but the town was surrounded by fields of cannabis, meaning both money and power – and quite a few weapons. A typical past of neglected areas, however, here in Baalbek (as in another parts of Lebanon) there was an additional dividing line: religion. In this country, stunningly diverse for its tiny size, there were 3 main groups: Christians, a number whose retreating colonial decision-makers passed power and which occupied the dominant position, Sunni Muslims, conventional class of merchant bourgeoisie, city dwellers, powering the ranks of bureaucracy, and Shiacite Muslims, forgotten and oppressed, increasing potatoes and hemp in the Bekaa Valley or collecting tomatoes in the south. In the cities, the necks were mostly booties, paper vendors, busboys. The Shiic landowners, for they were besides there, were petty tyrants. There were besides Shiic notables and politicians, like Husseins, who overcame the barriers, becoming the mayor of a tiny town at the age of nineteen. 3 spiritual groups were adjacent in Baalbek, and the Shiites were the most numerous.
It is believed that the past of the Lebanese Shiite community dates back to the very beginnings of Islam, that it is the oldest community outside Medina, where, after the death of the prophet Muhammad, any recognized Ali, the cousin of the prophet and husband of his daughter, Fatima, as his legitimate heir. From then on, they would be known as Ali's party, Shi'at Ali. Others believed that the prophet chose to win and the first caliph of the Muslim community of Abu Bakra, his close companion.
Two visions of succession clashed in the fight: a spiritual one, referring to the descendants of the prophet, called imams (leaders of prayer), and a second, more earthly one, according to which the authority was to be in the hands of the caliphs (literally, "replacers") chosen by consensus of the wise.
The fight for who should regulation Muslims and impose taxes on the community has turned into a civilian war in the first decades of the existence of Islam and then into a theological schism. [...]
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