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261: THE SIEGE OF MECCA: A MISSING LINK IN THE CHAIN OF TERROR. The Forgotten or the-we-hope-you-have-forgotten Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine and Saudi Arabia’s secrecy over a seminal event in the evolution of radical Islam
07 May, 2008

THE SIEGE OF MECCA: A MISSING LINK IN THE CHAIN OF TERROR. The Forgotten or the-we-hope-you-have-forgotten Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine and Saudi Arabia’s secrecy over a seminal event in the evolution of radical Islam

THE SIEGE OF MECCA: by Yaroslav Trofimov, is the story about the Forgotten or Hopefully Forgotten Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeida

A Review by Thomas W. Lippman, a former Middle East correspondent for The Washington Post, who is the author of INSIDE THE MIRAGE: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia, and my comments added, inserted, or included.

The 1979 takeover of the Great Mosque in Mecca by heavily armed fanatics has been referred to as “the forgotten uprising.” Forgotten perhaps elsewhere, but not in the Moslem Middle-East where it had been a seminal event of the region’s most traumatic year in modern times.

That year began with the Iranian revolution and ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In between, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, radicalizing the Palestinians. Saddam Hussein took over in Iraq. And the former prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was hanged by the general who overthrew him, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the leader who would turn the struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan into a religious war that inspired zealots such as Osama Bin Ladin.

The struggle over or battle for the Great Mosque in Mecca, birthplace of the Prophet Mohammed and of Islam itself, is the least known event in that sequence because most of the radicals who seized the shrine were executed, and just about everyone else involved, including senior officials of the Saudi Arabian Government, long refused to talk about it.

The seizure of the Great Mosque humiliated the Saudi regime, which bases its legitimacy on its role as upholder of Islam and keeper of the faith’s holy places; the kingdom’s rulers and leaders at first refused to acknowledge that it had happened and later tried to minimize its importance.

Now, in a remarkable feat of reporting, a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, has pierced that veil of secrecy. He found and interviewed Saudis who wished to remain anonymous, persuaded French adventurers to talk, and used the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose U.S. documents, including the diary of the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time. It is clear throughout Trofimov's brisk narrative that he got a lot of help from Prince Turki al-Faisal, the longtime chief of Saudi Arabia’s Intelligence and the former Saudi Ambassador in Washington.

Trofimov tells the story in straightforward language that caters to readers with short attention spans; there are 31 chapters and an epilogue in 255 pages of text. Anyone can read THE SIEGE OF MECCA, and everyone should. Non-specialists may struggle with the first few chapters, which trace the history of Islam and of Saudi Arabia and the origins of contemporary Moslem extremism, but Trofimov kept this section brief, and the material provides useful context in order for readers to understand the significance of the Mosque takeover.

Trofimov unearths a lot of new details about the uprising, including the reasons the Saudis spurned offers of help from neighbouring Jordan and turned instead to France, as well as the exact role played by French commandos in ending the siege and capturing the rebels -- but the book’s value goes well beyond these findings. It establishes two points that are essential in order to understand the terror and turbulence in today’s Middle-East and the birth and rise of al-Qaeida:

First, the Islamic extremists who seized the Great Mosque on 20th November 1979, and their leader, Juhayman al Uteybi, represented a crucial link in an unbroken chain of radical Islamic violence that ran from the fundamentalist warriors who helped Abdul-Aziz Iben Saud take over the Arabian peninsula and create Saudi Arabia early in the 20th century, through the rise of the Moslem Brotherhood, to the group that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat after he had made peace with Israel, to the Taliban in Afghanistan and finally to al-Qaeida and today's terrorists. None was an isolated phenomenon; all are part of the same movement. Their tactics differ, but their aspirations are the same: a return or reversion to what they imagined as a pure, pre-modern Moslem Society, as (and as they thought and still think) the Prophet Mohammed would have run it, untainted by Western ideas and Western materialism, whereas the truth is: the Prophet Mohammed would have seen and recognized the winds of change and adapted and adjusted to them accordingly and appropriately. He was a wise, clever, shrewd, and cunning Leader (he had to be because He was facing similar foes or enemies) who would never have swum against powerful currents, but who would have swum with the currents and maneuvered his boat (ISLAM) and ITS passengers (Moslems) gently and skillfully away from the shoals, the rocks and the rapids to a safe and compromising bank between the river with its powerful currents of change, and the land of change: progress and modernity. He would never have permitted or advocated such violence against what He knew was an indomitable foe.

Second, Uteybi and his surviving companions, who were publicly beheaded after French commandos had helped the Saudi authorities retake the Mosque, may have lost the battle, but they won their war. Saudi rulers, terrified by what Uteybi represented, essentially gave in to his demands that the country’s drift toward liberalization be reversed. Women were taken off television, off the streets, and out of most work-places; theaters were closed and huge amounts of cash were disbursed to the country's most xenophobic, reactionary preachers and teachers. Therein lay the roots of the terror and terrorism that arose from Saudi Arabia two decades later and brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

At the time, the embrace of Wahhabi Orthodoxy seemed like a wise survival policy for the ruling House of Saud. It was only after decades of this indoctrination had produced a new generation of al-Qaeida radicals that some senior princes realised the extent of their folly.

As for the errors committed by the USA, Trofimov was equally blunt. Policymakers in Washington completely misunderstood what Juhayman al Uteybi represented; he was a home-grown Sunni Moslem, but they thought he was a Shiite agent of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, and drew the wrong conclusions; he was especially critical of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, who envisioned the rise of violence-prone Moslem zealotry as a tool that could be useful in combating Soviet communism rather than as a threat to the West. Like I said, Jimmy Carter was the second worst president the USA ever had, next to Bill the-unpaid-bill Clinton! Jimmy is a has-been who never was.

In a relatively brief narrative that can be read over a weekend, Trofimov manages to explain who The Radicals were, what they wanted, how they smuggled their weapons into the mosque, why the takeover traumatized the Saudi Royal Family and why the story still matters.

The Radicals did not want a pure, pre-modern Moslem Society; they wanted what went on and what took place, and what Osama Bin Ladin and his Taliban became, and what they did, in Afghanistan, until the USA and Britain did what the Arabs or the Moslem Arab World, as represented by The Arab League, should have done and which they did not do.

Posted by akill 08:33 | General | Comment(0) | Permalink

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