Middle East and North Africa – Elizabeth Kendal

Overview

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco,
Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

Christianity was born in the Middle East: in Bethlehem (where Jesus was born), in Nazareth (Jesus’ hometown, where he grew up), throughout the towns and villages of Judea and Samaria (where Jesus ministered for three years), in the Jewish capital, Jerusalem, where Jesus was executed by Roman crucifixion and buried in a borrowed tomb, before God vindicated him as the sinless Saviour by raising him from the dead; and in “Galilee of the nations” where Jesus delivered his

It was in Jerusalem that followers of Jesus first testified about him (Acts 2) and from where the Gospel (or Good News) spread to “all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). It was amongst the Greeks in Antioch, that the followers of Jesus were first called Christians (Acts 11:19-26).

Tradition has it, that in the early decades of the 7th Century there arose in the Arabian Peninsula a religious reformer and self-proclaimed prophet named Muhammad. Inspired by the monotheism of Jews and Christians, Muhammad exhorted the pagan Arabs to reform their polytheistic idolatrous ways and turn to monotheism.

While the Jews and Christians rejected Muhammad as a false prophet, the pagan Arabs rejected Muhammad because of the serious threat he posed to their way of life. Arab idolatry was about more than mere belief; entire commercial industries revolved around it. It was the pre-Islamic, Arab tradition of undertaking an annual pilgrimage to the Kaaba, which housed 360 idols, that kept Mecca economically unviable. [Note: The Apostle Paul hit the same obstacle in Ephesus. There, a silversmith named Demetrius incited craftsmen to riot, warning that if Christianity was to spread, then they – those who make and sell idols – would be out of businesses (Acts 19:23-41).]

Rejected and persecuted, Muhammad fled Mecca with a small band of disciples (Muslims). It was in Medina that Muhammad was established as prophet, ruler, judge and warlord. By Islamising pagan Arab traditions (including Ramadan, the kaaba and the pilgrimage to Mecca) and giving the people two choices – Islam (submission) or death – Muhammad united the Arab tribes of the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of Islam.

After Muhammad’s death in 632 C.E. a series of Arab Caliphs (rulers) led an era of Arab imperial expansion: north through the Levant, east through Mesopotamia and into Persia, and west through Egypt, across North Africa and into Spain. [The Arab Muslim advance into western Europe was halted in October 732 by Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours.]

As with the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula, the indigenous non-Arab peoples were given a choice. While pagans, polytheists and idolators could choose between Islam and death, monotheistic Jews and Christians – also known as the “People of the Book” – were offered a third choice. They could keep their faith so long as they submitted to Muslim rule as mandated by the Quran, in Sura 9:29.

The dhimma pact set out the terms upon which the dhimma (subjugated peoples) would be “protected” (i.e. permitted to live). To secure their right to life, dhimmis had to agree to pay the jizya (tribute/protection money) and remain disarmed and subdued, without legal rights. Should any dhimmi (individual) rebel, or the dhimma (community) resist, then “protection” (right to life) was withdrawn, and jihad (Islamic holy war) would resume.

Recommended books:
The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, by Bat Ye’or, 1996
Islam and Dhimmitude, by Bat Ye’or, 2001
The Third Choice, by Mark Durie, 2010

After the conquest, the Arabs installed proxy rulers to collect taxes and jizya, and to enforce Islamic Sharia Law. Arab colonisation proceeded apace until eventually Arab Muslims became the majority.

In the 11 Century, Seljuk Turks – converts to Islam from the steeps of Central Asia – advanced west through the Caucasus and into Anatolia. There they exploited a local Byzantine (Greek) civil war to seize control of much of modern-day Turkey.

With the Holy Land in Muslim hands and Ottoman armies advancing ever deeper into Byzantium, the Pope in Rome responded to calls from Constantinople (the Byzantine capital) for military aid to save Christendom. The Crusades were simply a failed counter-offence against imperialistic Islam.

Recommended:
The Concise History of the Crusades, by Thomas F. Madden PhD, 1999
“The Crusades Then and Now,” a lecture by Thomas F. Madden PhD, Dec 2011, Augustine Institute.

The goals of Islam are first and foremost political: establish Muslim rule and enact Allah’s law (Islamic Sharia Law). Consequently, apostasy (leaving Islam) is treated as an act of treason against the Islamic community/Ummah or State.

Religious liberty is anathema to Islam which Muslims insist is “the religion of unspoiled nature” [Article 10, Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (OIC, 5 Aug 1990)].

In Islam, religious identity is inherited from the father at birth. Because apostasy is a capital offence, most Muslim converts to Christianity will flee to seek refuge in a country that respects religious freedom. Converts who cannot flee, or who choose to remain in their homeland, are compelled to live as secret Christians. Driven by desperation, some will take the risky path of changing their name and securing false identity papers which enable them to live as Christians. Female converts might do this so they can marry a Christian man (forbidden to Muslim women). Male converts might do this so their children can be Christian. It is an illegal act born of sheer desperation. If discovered, the consequences can be catastrophic. Consequently, converts with means tend to flee.

Apart from expatriate workers, most Christians in the Middle East are indigenous peoples, the remnants of once-great nations: e.g. Copts, Armenians, and Assyrians (also known as Syriacs, Chaldeans and Maronites). For 1400 years these Christians have mostly lived as subjugated, impoverished, persecuted dhimmis – their security and liberty perpetually tenuous.

The mid 20thC provided some respite as secular Arab and Turkish nationalism rose in the wake of Muslim defeats in World War One (in which the Ottomans sided with the German Empire) and World War Two (in which the Arabs sided with the Nazis).

However, the days of respite are over! Traditional, fundamentalist, Quranic Islam is back – meaning jihad is back, Sharia is back, dhimmitude is back . . .

Recommended:
After Saturday Comes Sunday: Understanding the Christian Crisis in the Middle East, by Elizabeth Kendal (Wipf and Stock, Eugene, OR, USA, 2016)

However, traditional Quranic Islam is proving to be incredibly divisive! While many Muslims are being drawn into intolerant and supremacist, fundamentalist Islam, just as many are being driven away from Islam all together. Profoundly disillusioned by what Islam is producing, they are rejecting its violence, rejecting its politics, and rejecting its “prophet”.

Recommended:
Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, edited by Ibn Warraq, 2003.

As Christian missionary and researcher David Garrison PhD has pointed out, “We are in the midst of the greatest turning of Muslims to Christ in 14 centuries of Muslim-Christian interaction. More than 80 percent of all the Muslim movements to Christ in history have occurred in the past two to three decades.”

Note: Garrison defines a “movement” as a turning to Christ that results in at least 1000 baptism, or the establishment of at least 100 worshipping communities over a two-decade period. He notes that the first 1200 years of Muslim-Christian interaction, there were none! However, in the late 19thC there were two: one in Indonesia and one in Ethiopia. Then, during the 20thC there were eleven, one in Albania, Algeria, Bulgaria and West Africa; two in Iran, two in Bangladesh, and three in Central Asia . . . making a grand total of 13 movements in 1,368 years.

Garrison writes: “It is this long history of frustration, a history that has seen tens of millions of Christians absorbed into the Muslim world that makes the current events all the more striking.”

For, in the first 12 years of 21stC Garrison recorded a further 69 movement of Muslims to Christ. What’s more, these movements are not concentrated in some remote corner, “but taking place throughout the House of Islam: in sub-Saharan Africa, in the Persian world, in the Arab world, in Turkistan, in South Asia and in Southeast Asia.”

“Something is happening,” writes Garrison, “something unprecedented. A Wind is blowing through the House of Islam!”

Quote from: A Wind in the House of Islam, by David Garrison, 2012 (p18).

Recommended news sources reporting Christian persecution in the MENA (general):
Christian Solidarity Worldwide https://www.csw.org.uk
Middle East Concern, https://www.meconcern.org/
Morning Star News, https://morningstarnews.org
Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin http://rlprayerbulletin.blogspot.com/

Islamic Revival 1979

After Saturday Comes Sunday: Understanding the Christian Crisis in the Middle East
by Elizabeth Kendal (Wipf and Stock, Eugene, OR, USA June 2016)
see: https://www.elizabethkendal.com/books/

Chapter 4 (minus footnotes)

Islamic Revival, 1979

The eyes of the whole world were fixed on Iran in 1979 as a year of protests and rising revolutionary fervour culminated on January 16 in the fall of the US-backed Shah (king). Two weeks later, on February 1, the world watched in nervous awe as five million Iranians poured out into the streets to welcome Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini into Tehran. After years in exile Khomeini had returned to establish his version of Islamic government: velayat-e faqih, guardianship of [Islamic] jurists. Then on November 4, in a carefully planned and executed assault, revolutionary students seized control of the American Embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-four hostages. It was spectacular drama and the world was gripped.

So gripped was the world in fact that when revolutionary Sunnis in Saudi Arabia laid siege to Mecca’s Grand Mosque on November 20, 1979, the crisis went virtually unnoticed. What’s more, because it was resolved it was quickly forgotten. Yet the consequences of the failed Sunni revolution in Saudi Arabia have been just as significant as the consequences of the successful Shi’ite Revolution in Iran, if not more so. For though the Sunni revolutionaries failed in their objective—the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy—they paved the way for Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist Wahhabi clerics to secure a most strategic win; a victory all the more exploitable precisely because the world was so oblivious to it.

These two events of 1979—the successful Shi’ite Revolution in Iran and the failed Sunni Revolution in Saudi Arabia—energised fundamentalist elements and radicalizing forces within both sects of Islam. Each case saw fundamentalist clerics catapulted from the margins of society to the centre of state power where they could dictate policy and gain access to state funds. In Iran the role of the clerics would be loud and overt as the clerics assumed supreme power. In Saudi Arabia the role of the clerics would be quiet and covert, exercised from behind the benign facade of the aging, ingratiating, profligate US-allied House of Saud.

The events of 1979 sent the process of Islamic Reformation into overdrive, fuelling the acceleration of three critical trends:

widening the gap between Islam’s traditionalists and modernizers (polarisation within Islam—with traditionalists increasingly hostile towards modernizers);
widening the gap between Sunnis and Shi’ites (polarization of the sects—with Sunnis increasingly hostile towards non-Sunnis); and
widening the gap between Islam and non-Islam (polarization of cultures—with Islam increasingly hostile towards non-Islam).

IRAN

The Americans were caught both unawares and unprepared by unrest of 1978 and subsequent Islamic Revolution of 1979. In January 1977, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research predicted that Iran would most likely remain stable under the Shah’s leadership. It predicted that prospects were good and that relatively clear sailing could be expected well into the 1980s. In December 1977, during a stopover in Tehran, US President Jimmy Carter described Iran under the Shah, as “an ‘island of stability’ in one of the world’s more troubled areas.”

Source:
The Twilight War: the secret history of America’s thirty-year conflict with Iran
By David Crist, (New York: Penguin, 2012)

“An island of stability”?

Determined to modernise and secularise Iran, the Shah had embarked on radical reforms. He had ordered the sale of state-owned business while launching aggressive land reforms, forcibly seizing and redistributing land, including the vast holdings of wealthy Shia clerics, which, as author David Crist notes, “struck at the heart of their wealth and power.”

“The shah,” writes Crist, “largely dismissed Islam as a backward force that impeded the formation of a new, modern Iran.” His secularization policies—which included the empowerment of women and the removal of Islamic dogma from schools—earned him the ire of the very same religious establishment which had joined forces with the masses to restore him to power during the troubles of 1953. Indeed; things had changed: the youthful, modest and popular shah had grown into a cruel totalitarian despot who didn’t care who he hurt or alienated as he drove Iran towards modernity.

Powerful religious opposition rose out of Qom, the religious heartland of Shia Islam, where Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (60) was speaking publically against the Shah’s secularization of society. So as to vilify the Shah as the puppet of an enemy US, Khomeini exploited the popular myth that the CIA had engineered the 1953 “coup” through which Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammad Moseddegh was overthrown.

So effective was Khomeini in rousing opposition that the shah had him arrested in 1963 and exiled the following year. Khomeini settled in the Shia holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq, from where he continued to rail against the “corrupt” Pahlavi dynasty.

One of the main by-products of the Shah’s radical and aggressive reforms was serious social instability. Rural unemployment had soared, sending masses of religiously conservative rural poor streaming into the cities in search of work. According to Crist, the population of Tehran multiplied fivefold. The influx of migrants created a need for social services and political representation—something the religious establishment was only too pleased to provide.

In 1975, the Shah cancelled elections and abolished the opposition in favour of a single party state. Opposition swelled, with educated elites and Marxists joining the ranks of the opposition alongside the students, the unemployed and the entire religious establishment. Iran was anything but “an island of stability”.

Significantly, strategic analyst Gregory R. Copley has remarked that when he visited Tehran in the 1970s, “there were no Farsi-speakers in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran; neither in the State Dept. element, nor, apparently, in the CIA component there.”

Regardless, that the US was so oblivious of trends within Iran is actually quite remarkable, for the situation was clearly ripe for unrest.

The Unravelling

“The shah’s power began to unravel in late 1977,” writes Crist. “Khomeini’s eldest son died, likely of a heart attack, but Khomeini accused the shah and his secret police of murdering him. A short time later, on January 7, 1978, an article published in a government newspaper ridiculed the ayatollah, questioning his religious credentials and even his sexual preference. Riots erupted in the religious city of Qom. In the resulting mayhem police shot several protesters.”

It was essentially all downhill from there. On February 18, 1978, riots erupted in every major city across Iran. A pattern emerged: riots would erupt; they would be repressed with deadly force; there would be forty days of mourning; then fresh riots would erupt and the cycle would start over. Each fresh outbreak of rioting was more violent that before and with the US blocking sales of tear gas, the regime had only limited means of crowd control.

Encouraged by the perception that the US was abandoning its ally and no longer backing the Shah’s regime, the opposition escalated its demonstrations, strikes, riots and clashes with police through 1978. Venues viewed as Western or decadent were targeted for attack. A cinema was attacked and set on fire, resulting in the deaths of more than 400 patrons. A rumour was spread accusing the Shah’s regime of starting the fire to discredit the rioting religious opposition. Though false and contrary to all the evidence, the rumour sent hostility skyrocketing. Crist describes this moment as “the beginning of the end of [the Shah’s] quarter-century reign.”

The Shah wasn’t the only one wanting Khomeini silenced. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein (a Sunni) was exceedingly anxious not to see his own restive Shi’ite majority incited. Ordered out of Iraq, Khomeini sought refuge in Kuwait only to be turned away. Ebrahim Yazdi, Khomeini’s close advisor, advised the cleric to seek refuge in a democratic country where he would have religious freedom and be able to use the free press to spread his message. In October 1978, Khomenei (by then in his mid 70s) settled in Paris, France, where he could incite Islamic revolution in Iran free of the constraints he had previously endured under the Baathist regime in Iraq. In Paris, Khomeini assumed leadership of the anti-Shah movement’s Islamic element. Khomeini labelled the Shah’s regime a “Satanic government,” and advocated that it be washed away in “torrents of blood”.

Muharram, the first month of Islamic calendar, is a period of mourning and religious fervour amongst Shi’ites. The tenth day of Muharram—the Day of Ashura—is a very important day of the Mourning of Muharram.

In Muharram (December) 1978, revolutionary elements keen to exploit the heightened religious fervour, distributed audio-cassettes of Khomeini’s sermons amongst the masses. The cassettes, which had been smuggled out of France to incite revolution, fuelled a marked escalation in protests, strikes and street clashes.

Like many in the revolutionary movement, Daniel Shayesteh (a student at the time) was motivated not by fundamentalist Islam—something he says he did not fully understand—but by the difficult and repressive social conditions that ordinary Iranians experienced under the shah.

“I had a problem,” explains Daniel, “with the socio-political system in Iran. Why should a student who is working tirelessly for his future struggle with poverty in a rich, oil-based country be threatened with termination of his studies and be forced to sleep on the streets? I turned my anger over such conditions towards the Shah. The country was rich, but only for rich people. Middle class citizens, villagers, and students suffered. It was not difficult for me to find a motivation to participate in the student’s revolutionary movement against the government of Iran.”

According to Daniel, most of the revolutionary students did not understand how society would be changed under the rule of Islam. “We were told that if we expected to be the best nation in the entire world we must follow the Mullahs [Islamic clerics] and commit ourselves to the Ayatollah Khomeini . . .”

According to Daniel, Khomeini convinced the revolutionaries that his intention was to rescue Iran from economic hardship and dictatorship. He spoke about restoring the equal opportunity, freedom and democracy that the Shah had stolen.

“We were misinformed and brainwashed,” writes Daniel. “Without question or investigation we believed that to follow Islam was to follow our leader blindly. We believed that Islam would fill in all of the inconsistencies of our culture, all the gaps between the rich and the poor, and suddenly we would be a democracy. It was a blindside attack on those of us who wanted equality and peace.”

Recommended:
The House I Left Behind: a journey from Islam to Christ,
By Daniel Shayesteh, (Melbourne, Australia: Deror Books, 2012).

That Problematic Cold War Prism

Author, historian and former marine David Crist—whose father, George Crist (a four-star marine general) was stationed in the Middle East through the 1980s—believes the American government failed to recognise the religious aspect of the Iranian opposition precisely because it viewed everything through a Cold War prism. The CIA, notes Crist, was in Iran to monitor the Soviet Union and track communists; they did not have relations with Shia clerics and were not even aware that the Shah was gravely ill. Some in the US administration even speculated that Khomeini supporters might serve as a natural bulwark against the communists. Many even believed Khomeini represented democracy.

The American Ambassador in Tehran predicted optimistically that the overthrow of the Shah (a US ally) would lead to the creation of a benign pro-Western government where Khomeini would play a “Gandhi-like” role.

The US-administration of President Jimmy Carter decided against supporting any crackdown on protestors; instead it encouraged the Shah to move towards greater democracy. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish-born immigrant, lamented Carter’s policy of appeasement, bewildered by US ignorance that could not see that the various parties contending for power in Iran were “not motivated by a spirit of compromise, but by homicidal hatred.”

By January 1979, Carter had washed his hands of Iran. Without American support, the Shah knew he had no option but to flee.

Revolution!

Daniel Shayesteh writes: “When the Shah left on January 16, 1979, the Air Force joined the revolutionaries, rendering the government incapable of controlling public demonstrations and riots (. . .) After the Shah had vacated his throne, the Ayatollah Khomeini quickly entered the scene (. . .) Khomeini’s arrival on February 1, 1979, also signalled defeat for the general army, which eventually surrendered. The Shah’s government collapsed, the Shah’s prime minister escaped, and the revolutionaries took over. Tears of happiness flowed freely from all who supported the Revolution, making Khomeini’s return a day of celebration. We had overthrown the most powerful government in the Middle East and believed that we had opened the door for all Iranians to take part in the governing of their country. What a heartbreak only months after the Revolution when we learned our zealous allegiance to the Mullahs had been abused and our plans for Iran’s future had been ignored for the sake of establishing a theocratic government—Islam.”

While some in the Carter administration would trivialise the Iranian revolution, failing to grasp its significance—others went so far as to cheer it. The US ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, praised the “vibrant cultural force” of Islam and predicted that Khomeini would be “somewhat of a saint when we get over the panic.”

Meanwhile, shockwaves were reverberating across the Arab world as the Shi’ite Revolution triggered widespread anxiety amongst Sunni Arab regimes that saw the rise of a Shi’ite theocracy in Tehran as a direct threat to their power. Not only did the Iranian revolution revive the historic enmity between the two sects of Islam (the Sunnis and the Shi’ites), it undermined the House of Saud’s claim to leadership of the Muslim world, and threatened its grip on its oil-rich, Shia-dominated Eastern Province on the Persian Gulf.

In exchange for security guarantees from the US, Saudi Arabia increased oil production for US benefit. The US supplied the Saudis with materiel, including sophisticated f-15 fighter jets; hundreds of US soldiers were secretly stationed in the country. While the CIA did offer limited assistance, it did not believe Saudi Arabia faced any real threat. Furthermore, the CIA had great difficulty gathering information in what Yaroslav Trofimov describes as the “tightly knit and pathologically secretive” Saudi kingdom. Despite the US “security umbrella”, which included CIA assistance, no-one in Saudi Arabia—not the Saudis and not the CIA—was aware that a Sunni revolution was brewing.

On November 4, 1979, Iranian revolutionary students stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, seizing sixty-four hostages. Despite the fact that the US Embassy had been targeted in February; despite the fact that intelligence estimates had warned of imminent dangers, the Embassy was totally unprepared. Ayatollah Khomeini endorsed the seizure and opposed any negotiations with “The Great Satan”.

The fall of the US embassy coincided with the hajj of 1979, when some 100,000 Muslims from all over the Muslim world would flood into Saudi Arabia to join the locals in the pilgrimage to the Kaaba in Mecca. It would be a time of immense anxiety for the Saudis, as regional tensions were soaring. Though trouble certainly was brewing, it would not be Iran or any Shi’ite that would cause trouble in Mecca during the hajj of 1979.

SAUDI ARABIA

American explorers first tapped oil in eastern Saudi Arabia in 1938. Subsequently, thousands of US oil experts and construction engineers flooded into the desert kingdom, along with military personnel for security. Needless to say, conservative, fundamentalist Saudis were not impressed. Not only did the influx of foreigners facilitate the emergence of “un-Islamic” recreational activities such as watching television, and social mixing over drinks etc; but it violated the death-bed wish of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. For while in the process of dying, Muhammad had reportedly given these orders: “Expel the pagans from the Arabian Peninsula,” and “Two deens [faiths] shall not co-exist in the land of the Arabs.”

Opposition simmered and as Trofimov notes, “One of the more virulent early protestors against American penetration was an up-and-coming scholar named Abdelaziz Bin Baz” who was highly respected by the Saudi Ikhwan (Muslim Brothers).

Tumultuous times followed World War II. The Sunni Arabs of the Levant had allied with the Nazis and their defeat left the Muslims in their weakest state since Islam’s inception.

Islam might have been in chaos, but the House of Saud was secure in its role as the custodian of Islam’s holy places: Mecca and Medina. To further cement its Islamic credentials, the ruling regime had whole neighbourhoods torn down and swept aside to make room for the massive enlargement of Mecca’s Grand Mosque. The House of Saud further consolidated its role as the guardian and defender of Islam by receiving thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members fleeing persecution in secular, Arab nationalist Egypt and Syria.

In May 1962, the Saudi government sponsored a conference in Mecca aimed countering Arab nationalism and Nasserism [the secular, socialist philosophy espoused by Egyptian president Abdel Nasser] and promoting Islamic Reformation, specifically Wahhabi Islam. The Muslim World League was thus established, with its headquarters in Mecca, under full Saudi control. In the words of Dore Gold, “This new organization, dedicated to fostering pan-Islamic solidarity, would revive Saudi Wahhabism and spread it globally, for it sought not only to convert Christians to Islam but also to convince Muslims to adopt Wahhabism.”

The House of Saud was aided in its task by its new found wealth as oil flowed out and cash flowed in. But while the Saudi royals were growing rich on oil profits, the Bedouin settlements remained mired in grinding poverty. To escape their mud houses, camel herding and date growing many young Bedouin men sought out positions in the Saudi National Guard. Trofimov explains that while the regular military was filled with ambitious young officers from cosmopolitan coastal cities, many of whom were Arab nationalists or socialists, the National Guard absorbed the Ikhwan [Saudi Muslim Brothers] and recruited amongst the religiously conservative tribes.

Following Sunni tradition, the Saudi state is ruled by a strongman whose primary job is to protect Islam. As the ruling power protects Islam, the religious clerics legitimize and protect the ruling power. This mutual pact between the ruling and religious establishments, is a long-standing Sunni tradition.

The relationship between King Faisal and the Wahhabi clerics was therefore of necessity a close and symbiotic one. Faisal knew he had to maintain the relationship to remain in power, while the clerics knew they had to maintain the relationship in order to reap the benefits of that power. While the ministries of foreign affairs, finance and defense would remain the exclusive province of the House of Saud, Faisal gave the clerics control over the Ministry of Pilgrimage and Awqaf (religious endowments), the Ministry of Education (from 1963), and the Ministry of Justice (from 1970).

With the Wahhabi clerics controlling education, it was inevitable that Saudis would be radicalized from early childhood. When the clerics secured control of Higher Education in 1975, they made Wahhabi religious courses mandatory in all universities. The “Wahhabization” of Saudi society had begun.

All the while, modernization and liberalization were continuing apace further widening the divide between the modernizing ruling establishment and the Wahhabi religious conservatives. The clerics had to act.

Leading the anti-modernzation drive was none other than Sheikh Abdelaziz Bin Baz. His dawa (missionary) movement, through which young men were trained in hyper-conservative Salafi ways (i.e. the ways of the prophet and his companions as per seventh century Islam), attracted an ever increasing number of restless, disenchanted Bedouin. Of course the religious teaching they received from the Wahhabi clerics made them even more restless and disenchanted.

Simmering beneath the surface

By 1977 some young Salafi Bedouin, having been fed a diet of Wahhabism in their schools and universities, had grown deeply disenchanted, not only with the House of Saud but with the clerical establishment which tolerated its un-Islamic behaviour, especially its import of American decadence.

One malcontent named Juhayman al-Uteybi, a Bedouin in the Saudi National Guard, had grown so thoroughly disillusioned with the entire religious establishment he had started debating, writing and agitating for change. Juhayman strongly opposed the presence of foreigners in Saudi Arabia, especially Christians, and he detested the cinemas and places of entertainment established for them. Juhayman also protested the regime’s tolerance of Shi’ites, whom he regarded as polytheists on the grounds that they venerated Ali and Husayn. As far as Juhayman was concerned, Shi’ites were heretics who should be forced to choose between Sunni Islam or the sword.

Juhayman attracted a following of disaffected young students, but his views did generate controversy, dividing the clerics and earning him the opposition of Sheik Abdelaziz Bin Baz. Yet even the clerics who opposed Juhayman agreed that his theology was faultless and merely represented the teachings of the Wahhabi clerics. Irrespective of his faultless theology, Juhayman was deemed a threat and issued with a warning.

Juhayman was convinced the religious establishment was betraying Islam by siding with a regime [the House of Saud] that it knew was violating Islamic rules—and all for reasons of political expediency. Knowing full well that the regime would seek to kill him and then legitimize the killing by labelling him a Khawârij [an extremist/takfiri], Juhayman threw down the gauntlet and declared the Saudi regime illegitimate.

Ripe for Revolution

Saudi Arabia’s social and economic conditions made it ripe for revolution. After the 1973 oil-driven economic boom, many young Bedouin had come to Riyadh, drawn by the bright lights and the prospect of work. Many were conservative Muslim idealists determined to live conservatively as Salafis (i.e. as seventh century Muslims). Juhayman found it easy to recruit followers amongst the university students in Medina and Riyadh; after all, they had already been indoctrinated in Wahhabi Islam. Gradually his movement grew and gained momentum.

In early 1978, Juhayman decided to publish a collection of his teachings. Not only did Juhayman want to extend his reach, he also wanted to ensure his teachings were not being distorted. Being strongly anti-regime and subversive, Juhayman’s manuscript could not be presented to any Saudi publisher. Instead, Juhayman had his manuscript smuggled into Kuwait where sympathetic Muslim Brotherhood activists facilitated its publication. With Juhayman’s words in print, the long-suspicious Saudi authorities had incontrovertible proof as to the subversive nature of Juhayman’s activities. Arrest warrants were issued.

Alerted to fact that his name headed a regime hit list, Juhayman fled deep into the desert. Twenty-five of his most senior followers were not so fortunate, and were arrested. Amongst those arrested was a young student of poetry named Mohammed Abdullah (25). Tall with fair-skin, hazel-eyes and black-hair, he was a man of stunning appearance.

Mohammed Abdullah had been arrested once before, some years earlier, while he had been working as an administrator in a Riyadh hospital. The experience had been both traumatizing and disillusioning. Money had gone missing from the hospital safe and Mohammed was accused simply on the grounds that he was poor, and had come from one the poorest regions of Saudi Arabia. Despite having no evidence against him, Saudi police arrested Mohammed and then proceeded to torture a confession out of him. Only later, when the real thief was caught with the cash, was Mohammed released from prison—minus his fingernails.

Juhayman sent an emissary to his former teacher and ideological ally, the Sheik Abdelaziz Bin Baz, now a leading cleric with immense influence. Bin Baz persuaded Prince Nayef to let him question Mohammed Abdullah and the other imprisoned religious dissidents. After doing so, Bin Baz deemed them harmless. He saw them as zealous young promoters of true Islamic morality, defenders of pure Wahhabi Islam, their only fault being immaturity which left them a bit ignorant of how things worked politically. At Bin Baz’s insistence, the dissidents were released. And so Juhayman’s followers emerged from prison, “energised by this support from the ulema [clerics]—and radicalized by the beatings they suffered in Prince Nayef’s jails.”

Not far away, Egypt too was simmering. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had switched his Cold War allegiance from the Soviets to the US, and released from prison thousands of Muslim Brotherhood activists jailed by Nasser. But in Egypt, as in Iran and Saudi Arabia, a movement for Islamic reformation was gaining momentum—one which rejected soft, pragmatic Islam in favor of traditional, puritanical, uncompromising Islam. The Egyptian movement comprised secret cells of religious dissidents. Known as Gamaat Islamiya (Islamic Groups) the Egyptian movement was especially prevalent on the campus of Cairo University. Further to this, a secret offshoot of Gamaat Islamiya known as the Islamic Jihad broke away to plot the assassination of the “infidel” Anwar Sadat, who they deemed a traitor for brokering peace with Israel. Prominent amongst this group was a graduate of Cairo University’s medical school named Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Though vaguely aware of events in Egypt and Iran, Juhayman was not influenced by them. Totally focused on the Saudi situation, Juhayman was determined to find solutions in the Qur’an and Hadiths (the sayings/traditions of Muhammad).

The Mahdi Cometh

One day, while studying the Hadiths, Juhayman stumbled across a reference to the Mahdi. Never mentioned in the Qur’an, the Madhi appears in the Hadiths as the Islamic Messiah who returns amidst chaos and a great falling away of Muslims to usher in the End of Days.

According to Islamic eschatology [doctrine of the End Times], the Mahdi will lead the final jihad in which all the Christian cities of the world will be captured. Jesus too will appear, following the Mahdi and killing all those who said he [Jesus] had been crucified [See Qur’an Sura 4:156-159]. The Hadiths elaborate, saying Jesus will kill all pigs (the food of Christians), destroy all crosses (the symbol of Christians) and abolish the jizya (the Qur’anically-mandated protection money Christians are forced to pay under Sharia to secure their right to life). [Note: no jizya means no protection! As such, all Christians will be killed.] According to the Hadith, Jesus and the Mahdi will rejoice at the elimination of Christians. Not a single infidel will survive the final jihad to end all jihads.

Conveniently, the Hadiths provide a precise description of the Mahdi’s name and appearance. He will bear the same name as the prophet (Muhammad) and will be tall and fair-skinned with a broad forehead and prominent nose—indeed he will look very much like the prophet Muhammad; in fact, very much like Mohammed Abdullah!

Furthermore, the Hadiths provide a precise description about the timing of the Mahdi’s appearance. According to the Hadiths, the Mahdi will appear in Mecca, right after the hajj at the turn of an Islamic century. And as it so happened, the forthcoming hajj of 1979 would be the last hajj of Islam’s fourteenth century!

Convinced the End of Days was upon them Juhayman established a training camp in the Arabian desert and started training his revolutionaries in military tactics. He assured his followers, many of whom were members or former members of the Saudi National Guard, the weapons were only for defensive purposes as he was convinced that the Muslim masses would recognise Mohammed Abdullah as the Madhi when he was revealed to them.

Subsequently, Mohammed Abdullah’s sister reported that she’d had a vivid dream in which she saw her brother standing by the Kaaba inside Mecca’s Grand Mosque receiving adulation as the promised Mahdi. Before long, militants and sympathisers from far and wide were reporting having had the same dream. Eventually the resistant Mohammed Abdullah became the reluctant Mahdi.

Juhayman sent an emissary to inform Bin Baz that they had the Mahdi in their midst and intended to reveal him soon. As the emissary made no mention of Juhayman’s stockpiles of weapons or of his military training camp in the desert, Bin Baz did not perceive the movement to be threatening. While Bin Baz did not accept that Mohammed Abdullah could possibly be the Mahdi, he saw no need to crush Juhayman’s movement. He merely warned Juhayman against doing anything that could stir up fitna (strife, doubt), for that would be unacceptable. Neither did Bin Baz see any need to alert the authorities whose eyes were firmly fixed on events unfolding in Tehran as Ayatollah Khomeini consolidated his power through purges and blood-spilling. The Saudis were convinced that the clerical regime in Tehran had designs on the whole Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich, Shi’ite dominated Eastern Province.

In early November 1979, as the hajj season commenced and many thousands of pilgrims flooded into Mecca, all eyes were fixed on events in Tehran, where revolutionary students had seized the US Embassy and taken 64 hostages. While the international news media was fixated on the hostage crisis, and while Riyadh was in a virtual state of panic over revolutionary Iran’s intentions in the Persian Gulf, Juhayman was setting the stage for his revolution. Weapons were being ferried into the Mecca’s Grand Mosque through the construction entrance—the “Bin Laden Accessway”—courtesy sympathetic insiders. As the religious students had all gone home, the mosque’s vast labyrinth of underground, basement chambers, known as the Qaboo, was quiet and empty.

In the closing hours of November 19, 1979—the last day of the year 1399 on the Islamic calendar—Juhayman and Mohammed Abdullah quietly entered the city of Mecca and took up their positions.

The Siege of Mecca

At dawn the next day—the 1^st of Muharram 1400 on the Islamic calendar (November 20, 1979 on the Western calendar)—Juhayman’s revolutionary forces seized control of Mecca’s Grand Mosque, Islam’s most holy site. With snipers in position, the gates where locked. Juhayman oversaw the military operation while Mohammed Abdullah’s brother, Sayid, delivered an oration. The end of the world was coming, he said, and he exhorted the masses to receive the Mahdi and join with Juhayman in the fight against corruption, immorality and unbelief.

At that point, Mohammed Abdullah was ushered into their presence. As the militants cleared a passage for him, Mohammed Abdullah, “submachine gun in hand,” walked towards the Kaaba where Juhayman was waiting for him. Worshippers gasped in awe. One by one the revolutionaries bowed before him and declared their allegiance; worshippers (now hostages) followed suit.

The mosque’s imam, Sheikh Mohammed Ibn Subeil, shed his religious cloak and scurried through the crowd to his quarters above the Fatah Gate from where he phoned his superiors and alerted the authorities.

It took the police more than an hour to respond; a single officer in a jeep was sent to investigate. Upon arriving at the gate, the jeep was sprayed in bullets courtesy Juhayman’s snipers. The driver fell bleeding out of his vehicle. When the jeep did not return, the Saudi police dispatched a convoy of vehicles. Upon arrival at the mosque they too met with a hail of gun-fire; eight officers were killed instantly and 36 wounded. The killing had only just begun.

The details of the two-week siege and its ultimate resolution have been documented by Yaroslav Trofimov in his book: The Siege of Mecca.

Recommended:
The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam’s Holiest Shrine,
By Yaroslav Trofimov (Achor Books, 2008).

“Saudi officials,” writes Trofimov, “had severely misjudged the extent of resistance that Juhayman’s men could offer in Mecca, and as a result Saudi troops had been mauled in a veritable massacre. The Saudi National Guard no longer wanted to fight in the Grand Mosque. The Americans had tried to help on the ground – and failed. France was the only hope left. It had become the French Republic’s responsibility to rescue a monarchy that guaranteed the Free World’s oil supplies.”

The story of how it all unfolded is truly gripping, but for that you’ll need to purchase Trofimov’s book. It will be enough for our purposes to focus on how the House of Saud managed to get American and then French troops into Mecca in the first place—a city forbidden to infidels—let alone into the Grand Mosque itself.

The Fatwa that Changed Everything

Reluctant to even point their weapons in the direction of the most venerated holy site, let alone kill fellow Muslims, Saudi security personnel were simply being slaughtered. Furthermore, many security personnel were wondering if maybe the Mahdi had indeed arrived.

Unless King Khaled could get a fatwa (a religious ruling) from the kingdom’s most senior clerics—one that would give Saudi security personal permission to fight, and give the regime permission to invite non-Muslim (kafir/infidel) forces into Mecca and into the holy mosque— then the House of Saud would meet the same end as the Shah of Iran.

King Khaled summonsed Shiekh Abdulaziz Bin Baz, along with twenty-nine other senior clerics, to the Royal Palace in Riyadh. Sitting down with the stressed and desperate Saudi king, Bin Baz and the clerics knew they had the House of Saud exactly where they wanted it. The fatwa would not come cheap.

After a lengthy debate about the situation inside in the mosque, the clerics agreed that Mohammed Abdullah could not possibly be the Mahdi. Despite this, the Wahhabi clerics had considerable sympathy with the revolutionaries who they regarded as pious, albeit hot-headed, deeply religious conservatives. Though the Americans were busy blaming Iran for the Mecca uprising, the clerics knew full well that it was a Wahhabi revolt led by those who had been trained by Bin Baz and in schools the Wahhabi clerics had themselves founded.

Fully aware that they held all the cards, the clerics set out their demands and engaged in a bit of quid-pro-quo. They would sign a fatwa recognizing the House of Saud’s legitimacy on the condition that from now on the ruling House of Saud live up to its Islamic responsibilities, beholden to the clerics.

“There should be no more women on TV,” writes Tofimov, “no more licentious movies, no more alcohol. The social liberalization that had begun under King Faisal should be halted and, where possible, rolled back. And billions of Saudi petro-dollars should be put to good use, spreading the rigid Wahhabi Islam around the planet (. . .)

“As some Saudi princes described it later, the ulema [clerics] essentially asked al-Saud to adopt Juhayman’s agenda in exchange for their help in getting rid of Juhayman himself.”

The mostly-young Sunni revolutionaries who perished in the Qaboos underneath the Great Mosque in late November and early December 1979, were, as Dore Gold notes, “the products of mainstream Saudi institutions”. Both Juhayman and Mohammed Adbullah had studied in Saudi Universities, and the former had also studied under Sheikh Bin Baz, who went on to become the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia.

Concerning the fatwa issued by Bin Baz and the ulama, Gold comments that it essentially expanded the ulama’s authority in “supervising the kingdom’s Wahhabi character.”

Gold quotes a Saudi journalist at Harvard University, Sulaiman al-Hattlan, whose analysis echoes that of the Saudi princes: “Though the government killed the extremists, it then essentially adopted their ideology (. . .) to appease the Islamists, perhaps fearing further extremists threats.”

Gold comments that after the siege of Mecca the Saudi leadership gave the ulama much greater authority in the kingdom’s affairs; as such the power of the ulama increased considerably, especially that of Sheik Abdelaziz Bin Baz, whose influence grew phenomenally. And as Gold notes, Bin Baz was tremendously hostile to Christians and Jews, teaching: “According to the Koran, the Sunnah, and the consensus of Muslims it is a requirement of the Muslim to be hostile to the Jews and the Christian”, and, “it is a religious requirement to despise the infidel Jews and Christians (. . .) until they believe in Allah alone.”

Bin Baz advanced the idea that Islam must have a global reach if it is to counter Christian missionary activity. He was a strong advocate of jihad (Islamic holy war) as the means of removing all obstacles to the spread of Islam. He taught that jihad was the means by which the door was opened to da’wa (Islamic missionary activity). Bin Baz also promulgated the idea of financial jihad (jihad bi-l-maal), leading to the rise of Islamic “charities” and other money-raising schemes such as Halal certification, from the early 1980s.

The fatwa ensured that Bin Baz and the Wahhabi ulama would have an unlimited flow of Saudi petro-dollars with which to spread intolerant, pro-Sharia, pro-jihad, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian, Wahhabi Islam right across the globe.

Since the end of 1979, Saudi petro-dollars have been used to build thousands of large, beautiful mosques all around the world—mosques designed not primarily to provide for Muslims, but to attract locals to Wahhabi Islam. Many of these mosques, which routinely offer free (Saudi funded) education, are built in strategic areas where no Muslims exist.

Since 1979, Saudi petro-dollars have been used to grant scholarships to poor African and Asian Muslims so they can be educated in Wahhabi Islam in Islamic Universities across the Middle East before returning home to radicalize the locals.

Since 1979, Saudi petro-dollars have been used to finance international jihad in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Africa, the Caucasus, Asia, the Middle East and now also in Europe and the West—ensuring the jihadis are kept not only busy, but far away from Saudi Arabia.

Since 1979, Saudi petro-dollars have been used to establish departments and fill Chairs in Islamic Studies in Western universities through which the Wahhabis can take control of the narrative and subvert the West with regards to Islam’s political mandate and intentions.

Actually, it is amazing what a band of committed, imperialistic, fundamentalist ideologues can achieve when given access to unlimited funds, guaranteed absolute freedom, and never asked any questions.

Recommended
Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism,
By Dore Gold, (former Ambassador to the United Nations) (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003)

Gaddafi perceived what the West did not.

The late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi might have been a cruel and eccentric megalomaniac, but he was also a committed anti-Islamist, frequently railing against “the bearded ones” as he called them. After the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington, Gaddafi renounced Libya’s weapons of mass destruction, and opened all Libya’s facilities to international inspectors who dismantled all Libya’s chemical and nuclear weapons programs, as well as its longest-range ballistic missiles. Normalization followed and Gaddafi allied with the West in the War on Terror, keeping al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) hemmed in and hamstrung for years.

Why did he do it?

In May 1989, while the West was fixated on events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—where President Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (re-structuring) had paved the way for radical transformation—Gaddafi was more concerned about Muslim radicalization and the rise of militant Wahhabi Islam.

Terrorism analyst Yossef Bodansky explains:

In late May [1989], twenty-one Arab monarchs and other heads of state, as well as dozens of senior officials and staff, gathered in Baghdad for an all-Arab summit (. . .)

“Qadhafi [Gaddafi] delivered an alarming and perceptive speech. Time was running out for the Arab world, he proclaimed. The Arab political system was on the verge of collapse because of the popular groundswell of Islamist radicalism. Furthermore, the new wave of radicalism was all-Islamic and thus undercut the region’s Arab identity. ‘We must all, virtually today,’ Qadhafi warned, ‘establish a joint alliance to stand strong and steadfast against the radical-extremist Islamic groups that are seeking to take over the entire Middle East. They multiply with the speed of lightening. We are likely to wake up one morning to face the masses raising slogans to the effect that “Islam is the solution to all our economic and social woes” and demanding that we, the present rulers, vacate the arena’.”

To Gaddafi’s dismay the Arab leaders were not interested in combating radicalization or the rise of militant Wahhabi Islam. Led by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the Arab leaders firmly believed they could exploit the Wahhabi militants for their own ends. As Bodansky explains, the Arab leaders believed that the militant “networks were indispensible to launching terrorist operations at the heart of the West.”

In response to Gaddafi’s concerns, Saddam Hussein proposed that the Arab leaders promote an all-Arab, as distinct from Islamist, jihad—a jihad the Arab dictators would facilitate rather than one to which they would succumb.

But Gaddafi was right! The enemy of my enemy is NOT necessarily my friend. Play with fire and you will get burned.

Source:
High Cost of Peace: How Washington’s Middle East Policy Left America Vulnerable to Terrorism, By Yossef Bodansky, (New York: Prima, 2002)

1979: A Pivotal Year

The year 1979 will go down in history as being the year in which Islamic reformation came of age and went into overdrive. It was the year that revolutionary, fundamentalist and aggressive factions within both sects of Islam—Shi’ite and Sunni—were massively empowered. It was the year that fundamentalist Islamic clerics were catapulted out of the fringes into the halls of state power from where they would dictate policy and gain access to state funds.

While the consequences and implications of the Islamic (Shi’ite) Revolution in Iran were obvious, the consequences and implication of the siege of Mecca’s Grand Mosque and the failed Islamic (Sunni) Revolution in Saudi Arabia were not. Consequently, Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi clerics have been able to “Wahhabize” Sunni Muslims and fund dawa (missionary work), along with military, intellectual and economic jihad globally—all with impunity, protected from any jihadist blowback by a US security umbrella.

Today, as modernizing Muslim dissidents are intimidated, bashed and murdered; as Sunni versus Shi’ite sectarian conflict escalates and spreads destroying everything in its path; as Islamic intolerance soars to new heights and as Muslim persecution of Christians reaches levels unseen in a century—we in the West need to wake up!

The time has come to end denial and confront reality, realising that we are decades behind the game.

The 'Arab Spring'

After Saturday Comes Sunday: Understanding the Christian Crisis in the Middle East
by Elizabeth Kendal (Wipf and Stock, Eugene, OR, USA June 2016)
see: https://www.elizabethkendal.com/books/

Chapter 6 (minus footnotes)

The “Arab Spring”

According to the Western narrative, the “Arab Spring” was a historic movement in which the Arab masses rose up in popular revolutions in pursuit of liberal, Western-style democracy. Furthermore, in the subsequent struggles—described as being between totalitarian tyrants and the democratic masses—good (i.e. “democracy”) was destined to prevail. Consequently, Western governments determined that in order to be on “the right side of history” they would throw their support behind the masses.

Though it sounds fantastic, this narrative is complete and utter rubbish.

Being anti-government does not necessarily equate to being pro-liberal or pro-Western-style democracy. The forces that rose against the Arab dictators were hugely diverse, comprising human rights advocates and free speech activists, right through to hard-line pro-Sharia, Salafi/Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalists. The only thing uniting the protesters was their desire for change.

Considering how it all turned out, perhaps it is time to put aside the false Western narrative and take a fresh look at what really happened in the so-called Arab Spring.

Only in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring started, was the uprising spontaneous. And the cry of the protesters was not for “democracy” as much as it was for basic human dignity.

While each subsequent uprising was unique in regards to the reasons for the uprising, the make-up of the players involved and the role of the military; they were alike in that dark forces with interests were ready to exploit the unrest for their own personal and political gain.

Indeed, it did not take long for the Arab Spring to morph into a Sunni Intifada with regional geo-political implications.

Yearning for a brighter more equitable, just and secure future—even for a liberal, Western-style democracy—Middle Eastern Christians featured highly in the early protests, particularly in Egypt and Syria where they have long formed a significant minority. But as the Muslim Brotherhood moved in and hijacked the movement, Christian anticipation turned to anxiety, even antipathy. For Middle Eastern Christians knew—courtesy of their long historical memory—that any shift away from secularism back towards an Islamic order would benefit only Muslims at the expense of Christians. What’s more, after a generation of Wahhabi radicalization courtesy of Saudi Arabia, a return to the Islamic order would spell not merely discrimination, subjugation, persecution and dhimmitude, but massacre, exile and probably genocide.

Christian leaders warned the West, but to no avail. Being mostly of the opinion that Islam is inherently benign, even peaceable—a sort of oriental version of Christianity; and that humanity, which is on a path of continuous linear progress, is inherently good—so that all that is required for selfless benevolence to flourish is liberty, Western leaders scoffed at their warnings and turned a deaf ear to their pleas.

Once upon a time in Tunisia

Mohamed Bouazizi was only three years old when his father died. Though his mother remarried, her second husband suffered health problems and was unable to find regular work. The family lived in Sidi Bouzid, an impoverished town, 300 km (190 miles) south of the Tunisian capital, Tunis.

When he was only ten years old, Mohamed started a small business selling fresh fruits and vegetables. Every day he would take his cart to the market and load it up with fresh produce before heading out with his groceries and scales to sell the produce through the streets. When Mohamed was not out working, he was at school. Life was difficult, but his produce business provided his struggling family with income they desperately needed.

Being incredibly poor, Mohamed could not afford the fee to license his cart. Consequently, he was routinely bullied and intimidated by police who, absent any compassion, empathy or respect, looked down on him and saw him simply as a soft target.

After completing his secondary schooling, nineteen-year-old Mohamed opted out of studies, choosing instead to work fulltime. If he could earn more, he reasoned, his five younger siblings would have the chance to stay in school.

In pursuit of better wages, Mohamed applied to join the army, only to be rejected. In fact Mohamed applied for many jobs, but with high unemployment, all he ever managed to get for his efforts was rejection. All the while, he continued to take his wooden cart to the market every morning, load it up with produce and then walk it more than two kilometres back to the local souk [market]. It was hard work; he was saving for a pick-up truck.

As if life were not difficult enough, Mohamed was bullied by police on a near-daily basis. Occasionally they would confiscate his produce and even his scales, or they would fine him for running a produce stall without a permit. In mid-2010, police sent a fine to his house for 400 dinars: the equivalent of two months earnings.

On the morning of December 17, 2010, a police woman named Fedya Hamdi confronted Mohamed (now 26) as he was on his way to the market. She started by confiscating his unlicensed cart, and when he tried to pay the ten dinar fine (a sum equivalent to a good day’s earnings) she refused to accept it. Instead, she slapped him, spat in his face and hurled offensive and humiliating insults at him, slurs intended to hurt the honor of his dead father.

Mohamed could not afford to lose his cart, so he went to the provincial headquarters to make a complaint. They sent him away, refusing to even see him. At 11:30 am, the desperate and despairing young man returned to the elegant white building, poured fuel over himself and set himself on fire.

Massively burned yet still alive, Mohamed was hospitalized in a critical state.

Dhafer Salhi, a local lawyer who witnessed Mohamed’s self-immolation, petitioned the head of police, urging him to meet with the young man’s family, immediately, so as to defuse the anger on the street. Salhi warned the police that if they didn’t address the situation then the whole country would burn. But the chief of police was dismissive, doubtless reasoning, “Who cares if one poor street vendor tries to kill himself?”

News of Mohamad Bouazizi’s self-immolation spread through his home town of Sidi Bouzid. Mohamed’s friends and admirers poured into the streets, shocked, distraught and outraged.

Mohamed was not the first Tunisian to attempt suicide or even to self-immolate on account of despair and humiliation. What made Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate act different was the response of his friends. They knew that Tunisians would identify with Mohamed’s hardship and humiliation. They knew that Tunisians would be outraged by the way the authorities had treated him. Critically, they were determined to ensure Mohamed’s suffering would not be in vain.

Social Media

That afternoon (Dec 17, 2010), Mohamed’s mother, Menobia, led a peaceful protest outside the municipality headquarters while two of Mohamed’s relatives—Rochdi Horchani and Ali Bouazizi—filmed the event, conducted interviews and posted the footage to Facebook.

Tunisia has 3.6 million internet users, 39 percent of the population; with 31 percent on Facebook, one of the highest on the African continent.

The footage was picked up by pro-Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar-based Al Jazeera, which has a media team devoted to trawling the web in search of useful videos from across the Arab world. That evening, the video was aired on Al Jazeera's Mubasher channel, and subsequently on numerous satellite channels. As the Tunisian trend of increasing openness and connectedness converged with the Tunisian trend of escalating frustration and disillusionment, outrage spread and protests erupted. Clearly multitudes of Tunisians cared about the fate of this poor vendor, not the least because so many identified with him.

While the internet and satellite TV channels buzzed with news of a Tunisian uprising, Tunisia’s state censored media ignored the protests. Doubtless the government was expecting the protesters would eventually run out of steam. But the protests rolled on and tensions soared.

On December 29, 2010, Tunisia’s Nessema TV broke the silence to report that Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had visited Mohamed Bouazizi’s bedside at the hospital in Ben Arous. But if Ben Ali thought he could diffuse tensions with a photo opportunity, he was sorely mistaken. For what Tunisians saw was not a compassionate president rising to the occasion. Instead they saw a downtrodden young man, bandaged from head to toe with a single opening around his burned black lips through which a feeding tube was inserted down his scorched throat, fighting for his life in the presence of a leader who could have made a difference but didn’t. Needless to say, the image did not produce the reaction Ben Ali had hope for.

When Mohamed Bouazizi finally succumbed to his injuries on January 4, 2011, the nation erupted. Fed up with high unemployment, inequality and nepotism, tens of thousands of Tunisians poured into the streets of Tunisia’s cities calling for the government’s downfall. Daily they clashed with police as the country descended into a spiral of violence. From his palace, behind the barricades, Ben Ali asked the military to step in and suppress the uprising. They refused, and on January 14, 2011, Ben Ali and his family fled Tunisia for Saudi Arabia. Ben Ali’s twenty-three-year reign was over. Mohamed Ghannouchi assumed control as interim president.

Dignity

According to his mother, Menobia, “Mohamed did what he did for the sake of his dignity.”

As victims of high unemployment and soaring inflation, most protesters were appealing for the same: dignity. “We are here because we want our dignity,” two university educated unemployed protesters told TIME magazine. “We don’t want to have to rely on political favors or bribes to get jobs; we need to clean out the system.”

Dignity! That is what the masses wanted—dignity; to be treated with respect as human beings; to have justice and opportunity, and not to be forced to struggle against corruption and grovel for crumbs. Dignity!

The Tunisian uprising was wide and deep, spreading to all corners of the land and to all levels of society, and Tunisia’s highly respected and forever-neutral military did not intervene. What’s more, the revolution was over so quickly that no-one had time to hijack it. [Attempts to hijack it would come later.]

Those seeking to replicate the “revolution” in other Arab states would find that their circumstances were different. For not only is each state is unique, but more critically, protesters in subsequent uprisings would find that various powers and interested parties—both within (such as the Muslim Brotherhood) and without (foreign powers, both state and non-state actors)—would be prepared for the wave and determined to ride it.

The “Arab Spring” Heats Up

On Saturday January 15, 2011, just one day after the fall of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, Mohsen Bouterfif died in an Algerian hospital from burns he suffered in a self-immolation.

Mohsen Bouterfif lived in Boukhadra, in Tebessa province some 700 km east of Algiers. He had met with the mayor of Boukhadra on the Thursday, in the hope that the mayor might be able to find him housing and a job; but all to no avail. His hopes dashed, Mohsen stood in front of the town hall, doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire. Moshen’s desperate act was one of four self-immolations to occur in Algeria within the space of four days. Only Mohsen’s act was fatal.

After Mohsen died, about 100 young men protested in Boukhadra. To pacify the masses and prevent the protests from taking hold and spreading, the governor of Tebessa province sacked the mayor, while the central government cut the price of sugar and cooking oil.

On Monday January 17, 2011, Abdu Abdel-Monaim Kamal (49), a restaurateur, set himself on fire outside the Egyptian Parliament in Cairo. A policeman who was close by managed to extinguish the flames and Kamal was quickly taken away by ambulance with superficial burns.

In Mauritania, Yacoub Ould Dahoud (40) a father with a graduate degree from France and who belongs to a wealthy family set himself on fire protesting against alleged government mistreatment and political marginalization of his tribe.

The very next day, Mohamed Farouk Hassan (40), a lawyer, set himself on fire in Cairo, protesting rising prices. Mohamed was hospitalised with non-life threatening injuries.

In Egypt, five men self-immolated within the space of a week.

The BBC reported on January 19, 2011, that an Egyptian Facebook group had called for street protests on January 25, which the organizers were calling a “day of revolution against torture, poverty, corruption and unemployment.”

On January 22, 2011, thousands protested in Sana’a, Yemen, after the authorities arrested Tawakul Karman, a political dissident. Meanwhile, protesters were also mobilizing in Oman, Syria and Morocco.

On January 25, 2011, huge mass protests erupted in multiple Egyptian cities. The very next day the Egyptian military commenced its crackdown.

By January 29, 2011, the protests in Sana’a, Yemen, had swelled to the tens of thousands, with protesters calling for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down.

In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak pressed through some political reforms in the hope that reforms would satisfy the protesters. Not a chance!

Long a powerful political player, the Egyptian military then made its move, switching allegiances to side with the protesters.

The Egyptian military

The Mubarak regime was little more than a military dictatorship in civilian garb. While it had democratic elements and was nominally secular, the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) was an authoritarian party controlled ultimately by the military. The military—long regarded as the most modern and progressive element of society—was invested with sweeping powers. Egypt’s presidents—Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak—had all been senior military figures who simply removed their uniforms upon entering politics.

The Egyptian military had long expected that when Mubarak retired he would hand power over to a senior military figure. So when Mubarak began grooming his son, Gamal, with the intention of establishing a Mubarak dynasty, the military was incensed. The popular uprising provided a perfect cover under which the military could make its move to get rid of Mubarak and hold on to power. By switching sides and backing the protesters, the military essentially staged an under-cover coup.

When Hosni Mubarak resigned on February 11, 2011, a military council was named to govern in his place. The crowds in Tahrir Square celebrated what they thought was their victory, a win for people-power, a triumph for democracy. The reality was, however, that had the military stayed loyal to Mubarak, the protesters alone could not have removed him. As Stratfor Global Intelligence stated at the time: “In a genuine revolution, the police and military cannot contain the crowds. In Egypt, the military chose not to confront the demonstrators, not because the military itself was split, but because it agreed with the demonstrators’ core demand: getting rid of Mubarak. And since the military was the essence of the Egyptian regime, it is odd to consider this a revolution.”

On February 13, 2011, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) abolished the constitution and dissolved parliament, promising a new constitution to be ratified by a referendum. SCAF declared that it would rule Egypt for six months or until it determined that Egypt was ready to hold parliamentary and presidential elections. The military had massively increased its power.

The “Arab Spring” Gets Complicated

By February 14, 2011, protests had erupted at Pearl Roundabout in central Manama in Shi’ite majority, Sunni-ruled Bahrain on the Persian Gulf. While the protesters were mostly Shi’ite, they were not primarily protesting along sectarian lines. Like those in Tunisia and Egypt, their hopes were set on dignity and reform. They were not going to get it; Shi’ites would definitely not be permitted to rise.

By February 15, protesters were mobilizing against Gaddafi in Libya, and these protests were totally different yet again. Events in Tunisia and Egypt had inspired Gaddafi’s opponents, giving them grounds for hope and confidence. Maybe, they reasoned, they could ride this wave and exploit this window of opportunity to remove Gaddafi under the cover of the Arab Spring. Gaddafi’s opponents were diverse—tribal, political, religious—united only by their desire to be rid of him.

After seizing power in 1969, Gaddafi—a committed socialist—abandoned the 1951 UN-backed constitution and centralized power in Tripoli. Before then, Libya had functioned as three autonomous regions—Tripolitania (west), Cyrenaica (east), and Fezzan (south)—held in balance under one flag by a constitution prepared by Libyans with assistance from the United Nations. Those who drafted the Libyan democratic constitution of 1951 had been very careful to address and balance Libya’s complex realities—particularly the tribal, regional and religious differences within the country. Strategic analyst Gregory R. Copley elaborates: “The 1951 Constitution put Seyyid Idris al-Senussi into power as King Idris I. That was done specifically because the Senussi family, leaders of the moderate and Westernist Sanusiyyah Muslim movement, were outside the tribal framework of Libya, and therefore gave no advantage to any single tribe.

“The 42 years of Qadhafi [Gaddafi] power in Libya were hallmarked by the removal of this neutral leadership and the imposition of the dominance of the al-Qadhadhfa tribe over the other 140 or so tribes of Libya.”

When protests erupted in oil-rich Benghazi, capital of the Cyrenaica region, on February 18, 2011, the protesters were flying the red, black and green tri-color flag of the 1951 Constitution. These protests were about far more than Gaddafi.

Gaddafi may have identified as a Muslim, he was a committed anti-Islamist, allied with the West in its “War on Terror”. And oil-rich Benghazi had become a hot-bed of radical fundamentalist Islam. Led predominantly by anti-liberty, anti-democracy Islamists—many al-Qaeda affiliated—as well as various mutually hostile tribal factions, the Benghazi protests were essentially about decentralization and greater autonomy for the oil-rich region. They were not going to get it; too many other powers had interests in Libya.

Despite the severe unrest and ubiquitous nature of the Western narrative, Gaddafi remained extremely confident. He was certain the West would not want to do anything to destabilize Libya, for such actions would go against the West’s own security interests. “Should the situation in Libya be unstable,” Gaddafi warned in a March 28, 2011, interview with Russia Today, “al-Qaeda will establish its rule and Libya will get transformed into another Afghanistan. Millions of refugees will flood Europe, which will make the whole Mediterranean region suffer.” Gaddafi was certain the West did not want that.

As February rolled into March, protests escalated in Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco and Oman. Tunisians too returned to the streets, demanding the resignation of interim president Mohamed Ghannouchi.

On March 5, 2011, ahead of a planned “Day of Rage”, Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry issued a statement banning public protest. “The kingdom categorically prohibits all forms of demonstrations, marches, or protests, and calls for them, because that contradicts the principles of the Islamic Sharia, the values and traditions of Saudi society, and results in disturbing public order and harming public and private interests.”

The decree was endorsed by the Council of Senior Religious Scholars, the highest body for interpretation of Islamic law, and supported by the Sunni Wahhabi clerics. “Islam strictly prohibits protests in the kingdom because the ruler here rules by God’s will,” Sheikh Abdel Aziz Alasheikh told worshippers in Riyadh’s central mosque. Meanwhile, King Abdullah defused tensions and pacified the masses by the usual Saudi means: he unveiled an unprecedented financial package, releasing some $37 billion to pay for unemployment benefits, education and housing subsidies.

By March 8, 2011, the situation in Sana’a, Yemen, had come to a head: security forces opened fire on protesters, wounding 100. Subsequently, opposition forces rejected President Saleh’s offer of a new constitution and parliament.

On March 14, 2011, the situation at Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout came to a head: Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa asked Saudi Arabia to send security forces into his country. An estimated one thousand-strong contingent of the Saudi National Guard entered Bahrain ostensibly in response to a “security threat” to supposedly protect strategic sites and infrastructure. Bahrain’s main opposition bloc described the Saudi-led intervention as a “declaration of war” and urged the United Nations to intervene. While the US did call for restraint, it refused to recognize the invasion as an invasion.

Bahraini and Saudi security forces (Sunnis) crushed the protesters (mostly Shi’ites) and even the Pearl Roundabout itself, including the ninety-meter tall monument—all with the tacit approval of the US-led West. Even when Bahraini doctors were dragged before courts, tortured and jailed for sedition because they had treated the wounded, the response of the democratic West was stony silence.

Subsequently, Western media would express its confusion over what it regarded as “mixed responses”. What they failed to appreciate was that who falls was far less important than who rises. The West would only champion “democracy” when it was perceived to advance Western interests; so much for standing on the moral high ground.

Clearly the Arab Spring would not be a Spring for all Arabs. Clearly there would be no Spring for vilified, persecuted, downtrodden minority Arab Shi’ites.

Up until this point the Islamic regime in Tehran had been backing the uprisings, seeing them as an “Islamic Awakening” akin to the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979—afterall, the similarities were profound. As the protesters ousted their US-backed, anti-Islamist dictators, few cheered louder than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

However, as events in Bahrain made clear, this movement was less of an Arab Spring and more of a Western-backed Sunni Intifada.

SYRIA

When Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was banned in 1964, armed MB members responded with assassinations and bombings in which several Baath Party officials were killed and government properties destroyed. In 1979, the Combatant Vanguard split from the Muslim Brotherhood to wage war against the regime. It launched an attack on the military artillery school in Aleppo in which eighty-three Alawite student officers were massacred. Subsequently, in 1980, President Hafez al-Assad issued a law making membership of the Muslim Brotherhood a capital offense. Religion would not be permitted in politics.

The MB insurgency escalated until February 1982, when the Syrian government launched a military intervention to put down an uprising in Hama, killing more than 10,000 mostly Muslim Brotherhood supporters, arresting some 20,000 and blacklisting a further 600,000. After that, the MB withdrew from political life; MB leadership fled overseas while members and supporters went underground.

After Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood began to organize again, but its efforts to have the ban lifted were to no avail: the Muslim Brotherhood would remain a banned organization.

In February 2011, the Assad government moved quickly to crush Arab Spring protests organized on Facebook. By mid-March, opposition was emerging from the flashpoint city of Daraa in Syria’s largely conservative Sunni southwest. From Daraa, the demonstrations spread to the Kurdish northeast, and, most critically, to Aleppo and the suburbs of Damascus. All the while Syria’s Christian leaders were warning that the protests were taking a sinister turn.

At the outset of Syria’s Arab Spring protests, the Muslim Brotherhood cautiously refrained from participating. Its first official statement in support of the uprising was issued only at the end of April 2011, when it openly called for the regime of Bashar al-Assad to be toppled. On 29 April 2011, Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood led the protests for the first time, in what it labeled a “Day of Wrath”.

The Melkite Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, Gregory III Laham, warned that while the protests were not as yet sectarian, being rooted as they were in grievances that were social (repression and inequality) and economic (unemployment plus massive fuel and food price hikes), criminals had become involved and weapons were flooding in. He also warned that fundamentalist Muslims were calling for jihad.

On May 11, 2011, Christian aid group Barnabas Fund reported that as demonstrations against the Syrian government intensified, Christians were coming under increasing pressure to join the uprising, or leave. “In one Christian village outside the southern city of Deraa a home came under fire by a group of masked men on motorbikes, while Muslim residents in the village of Hala have issued an ultimatum to their Christian neighbours either to join the demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime or to leave. Their demands are making life extremely difficult for the Christians, who have closed their shops and are considering what course of action to take. Churches have also received threatening letters.”

In a letter to Western leaders, a senior Syrian church leader made this appeal:

Ask the Heads of State of Arab countries to work for real development (. . .) But don't encourage revolutions.

“The situation has deteriorated into organised crime, robbery, fear, terror being spread, rumours of threats to churches (. . .) Fundamentalist groups are threatening citizens and wanting to create ‘Islamic Emirates’(. . .) Christians especially are very fragile in the face of crises and bloody revolutions! Christians will be the first victims of these revolutions, especially in Syria. A new wave of emigration will follow immediately.

On May 13, 2011, Bloomberg News published a daunting article by diplomatic and UN correspondent Flavia Krause-Jackson entitled, “Syrian Christians Say ‘Arab Spring’ Changes Could Hasten Extinction.” It is a confronting report. “As the Arab Spring protests reach Damascus,” she writes, “Syrian Christians look warily at a future without a time-tested autocrat to protect them from religious intolerance.”

Krause-Jackson quotes Archbishop Cyril Aphrem Karim, leader of a US branch of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch, who observed: “History has proven to us that Christians [in the Middle East] have always had more secure lives, better treatment by people who may be looked on as dictators, like Saddam Hussein. [In Syria], our feeling is, if the regime falls, the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood will seize power and that is bad news for us.”

According to Archbishop Karim, protesters in the streets of Damascus could be heard chanting: “Christians to Beirut, Alawis to the grave.”

As to the plight facing Syria’s Christians, Krause-Jackson ominously warned: “A history that predates Islam won’t guarantee the communities’ survival.”

Archbishop Karim told Krause-Jackson that while he frequently travels to Washington and has had repeated meetings with State Department officials and lawmakers he does hold out much hope that the US will do anything to help Syria’s Christians. “I don’t feel the U.S. is really concerned by Christians in the Middle East,” Karim said. “There is just not much sympathy.”

And all the while, notes Krause-Jackson, “Christian communities are staring at extinction.”

Raising the Stakes

On June 3, 2011, Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and numerous Yemeni government officials were worshipping in the palace mosque when a massive improvised explosive device (IED) exploded in their midst. Seven people were killed and more than 87 injured. President Saleh, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Mujawar and several other senior figures were critically wounded. President Saleh was airlifted to Saudi Arabia suffering multiple shrapnel wounds, broken bones, smoke inhalation, internal bleeding and extensive burns.

Appearing on Yemeni TV on 7 July 2011, Saleh—still at that time in Saudi Arabia receiving treatment including multiple surgeries for his injuries—stressed that dialogue was essential to solving Yemen’s problems. Saleh said he welcomed power-sharing, but stressed that it should be “within the framework of the constitution and in the framework of the law.”

On August 3, 2011, the Arab world was transfixed by images of former Egyptian strongman-president Hosni Mubarak (83) on a stretcher inside a cage in a Cairo courtroom; his co-accused sons by his side. Prosecutors read out the charges against him along with descriptions of the unarmed protesters he was accused of killing.

On Sunday August 21, 2011, Libya’s rebels entered the capital, Tripoli, courtesy NATO air-support. Seventy-two Libyan civilians—including 20 women and 24 children—were killed when this coalition of Western powers bombed the capital city of a country that had not attacked or even threatened the West—an ally, what’s more, in the “War on Terror.”

By August 24, it was over: the regime had fallen. After facilitating the removal of the dictator in Tripoli, the US, UK and France simply installed another dictator in Tripoli. This time the dictator was an Islamist, an “Arab Afghan”—that is, an Arab veteran of the Afghan jihad. His name was Abdel Hakim Belhadj, but he was also known as “the sheikh.” After the Afghan War he returned to Libya and, with other “Arab Afghans”, founded the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), the group that would go on to murder US Ambassador John Christopher Stevens (52) in the September 11, 2011, terror attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.

Gaddafi might have been toppled, but with centralized power restored, Benghazi’s wealth would continue to flow to Tripoli—meaning Libya’s civil war would roll on and on and on.

What’s more, in a catastrophe of monumental proportions, Libya’s numerous weapons caches were raided enabling vast quantities of weapons to move into the hands of arms traders, belligerents such as Tuareg separatists, and terrorists such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Ultimately these weapons would end up in the hands of jihadists in Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Syria and goodness knows where else.

Two months later, on October 20, 2011, the ousted Libyan strongman-dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was found hiding in a drainpipe outside his hometown of Sirte. Dragged from the pipe by a mob of salivating “bearded ones”, Gaddafi was brutalised and sodomised with an army knife by bloodthirsty Islamic jihadists to cries of “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is greater). Eventually the blood-soaked former dictator was summarily lynched as euphoric jihadis captured the images on their mobile phones in much the same way other killers might collect trophies.

Upon hearing the news British Prime Minister David Cameron effused, “People in Libya today have an even greater chance after this news of building themselves a strong and democratic future. I’m proud of the role that Britain has played in helping them to bring that about and I pay tribute to the bravery of the Libyans who’ve helped to liberate their country. We will help them, we will work with them, and that is what I want to say today.”

Likewise, Labour leader Ed Miliband rejoiced that Gaddafi’s brutal death marked the end of a period of “brutality and repression.”

“I pay tribute to the Libyan people for standing up to the former regime and seeking to define their own democratic destiny,” he said. “We should be proud of the support that our armed forces have given to that cause. We should all hope that this day also marks the end of the armed conflict and the start of a period of stability where we see a transition to democratic government.”

“We came, we saw, he died!” declared a jovial US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton upon learning that Gaddafi had been lynched.

But the Benghazi uprising never had anything to do with liberal, Western-style constitutional democracy.

Energized by Gaddafi’s barbaric lynching, tens of thousands of Syrian protesters poured out onto the streets of Damascus the very next day chanting, “Your turn is coming Bashar.”

According to the Associated Press, one of the protest banners read, “Ben Ali fled, Mubarak is in jail, Gadhafi is killed, Assad . . . ?” And of course to that they could have added, “Saleh is burned.”

With that declaration of war, with that threat to his life, Bashar al Assad knew the time had come to put an end to the so-called Arab Spring once and for all.

Syria would be where the Western-backed, Muslim Brotherhood-led Sunni Intifada would finally meet its match.

Algeria

ALGERIA

A highly repressive Presidential Order outlining the conditions and rules for “the exercise of religious worship other than Muslim” came into force on 1 March 2006. It is surely no coincidence that the Order appeared within days of the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation. Approved by the government in February 2006, the Charter paved the way for some 10,000 condemned Islamists to be amnestied and released from prison. Considering this context, Presidential Order 06-03 was doubtless a concession to hard-line Islamists.

See:
Algeria: severe new penalties for ‘proselytising’, analysis by Elizabeth Kendal, 24 March 2006

Targeting Algeria’s growing Protestant Christian Church (community), Presidential Order 06-03 mandates that all non-Muslim places of worship be registered with the government (something no church has ever achieved); and criminalises any religious activity that could be deem “proselytism”.

Presidential Order 06-03 has brought nothing but grief to Algeria’s peaceful Christians – in particular evangelical Protestants – across Algeria. Christians have been imprisoned and numerous churches have been forced shut. The situation is especially severe in Kabyle region, where a revival of Berber culture and identity (which is neither Arab nor Islamic) has opened the door for many Kabyle people to embrace Christianity.

Though constitutional amendments in February 2016 brought hope, repression – in particular church closures – escalated from 2017 through 2019 as the government sought to bolster its Islamic credentials ahead of elections, in the face of massive and enduring anti-regime protests.

See:
Advent in Algeria: Persecution, Protests and Promise
Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin (RLPB) 4 Dec 2019

The primary hope of Algerian Christians is that Presidential Order 06-03 will be repealed and religious freedom will come to respected as a fundamental human right.

Recommended:
Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin / Algeria
Morning Star News / Algeria
Middle East Concern

Egypt

EGYPT

The Copts are the indigenous people of Egypt, the true descendants of the Pharaohs. Tradition has it that St Mark the Evangelist (also known as John Mark, a contemporary of Apostles Paul and Barnabas; Acts 12-15) took the Gospel (or Good News) to Egypt. History shows that the Copts have been Christian since the early centuries of the Common Era.

Arab armies invaded Egypt in the 7th Century. Today, Egypt’s Copts live as a subjugated, persecuted and perpetually imperilled ethnic and religious minority under an increasingly radicalised (Wahhabised) Arab Muslim majority.

On Friday 2 Nov 2018, Islamic militants ambushed two buses transporting Coptic Christians home from a monastery in Minya Province, killing seven pilgrims and wounding 19. The Islamic State in Egypt claimed responsibility. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

Condemned to generational poverty on account of systematic discrimination, the Copts also suffer gross insecurity on account of Islamic terrorism, and violent persecution at the hands of hostile local Muslims.

The most serious persecution includes:

The routine bombing of churches during worship, and massacre of Coptic pilgrims as they travel on desert roads en route to visit ancient monasteries. Such attacks are mostly committed by Islamic jihadists/militants, especially those aligned with Islamic State.
The abduction of Coptic girls for forced marriage to Muslim men. It is well documented that Islamic fundamentalist gangs, operate with the complicity of local police and authorities, to traffic Coptic girls across religious lines. Once married to Muslim men, these Christian girls will produce Muslim babies for the benefit of Islam. Most Coptic families who lose a daughter this way, never see their daughters again.
Charges of blasphemy (a criminal offence) for criticising, mocking or even just discussing Islam.
Islamic pogroms in which Copts are assaulted, humiliated and murdered, while their homes and businesses are vandalised, looted and torched. Such pogroms are routine in Upper Egypt and wherever the Muslim Brotherhood has a foothold. They are usually triggered by mere rumours, including of blasphemy, or of being in a relationship that Islam deems haram (forbidden: e.g. a Christian man with a Muslim woman); or that Christians are praying in a house (thereby supposedly establishing a church).
The February 2017 ethnic-religious cleansing of Copts from the Sinai Peninsula, at the hands of Islamic State (IS-Sinai).

Justice Egyptian Style

Because Islamic Sharia Law does not permit infidels to press charges against Muslims in a court of law, Egypt has (since early 2007) been forcing Coptic victims of Islamic violence into “reconciliation sessions” wherein the Copts must agree not to press charges (of looting, rape, assault, arson etc), in exchange for which the Muslims must agree to end the cycle of violence (no compensation, no justice, no deterrence). To force Coptic victims of Islamic violence to accept such unjust terms, police routinely arrest Coptic youths for use as bargaining chips.

With “justice” like this it is no wonder that persecution with impunity has become the order of the day.

Iran

IRAN

A most strategic nation, rich in history and culture, Iran has been captive to revolutionary Islam, and ruled by a belligerent Shi’ite theocracy, ever since the Islamic Revolution of February 1979.

However, the Islamic Revolution has backfired, resulting in mass disillusionment not merely with Islamic rule but with Islam itself. Mass disillusionment with Islam has also triggered a revival of interest in Persian culture, which pre-dates Islam and is creative and dynamic.

In 2020, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN, a secular non-profit institute in the Netherlands), surveyed 50,000 Iranians (90 percent of whom were inside Iran). GAMAAN found that only 32 percent of all Iranians still consider themselves to be Shia Muslim. While 78 percent of respondents said they still believe in God, around half have rejected their Islamic religion, while six percent have converted to another faith, including 1.5 percent who now identify as Christian.

GAMAAN Survey [pdf in Persian]

Analysis [article in English]

Persecution of religious minorities is severe and escalating. While Armenian and Assyrian Christians are permitted to keep and observe their Christian religion (as dhimmis), they are not permitted to worship in Farsi (Persian language) or to proselytise Muslims. Severe criminal penalties apply. Armenian and Assyrian pastors who have crossed this line have been imprisoned, driven into exile, and even assassinated.

Repeatedly harassed and arrested for membership of a house church, Fatemeh (Mary) Mohammadi (21) protests her groundless suspension from Azad University on the eve of exams (Dec 2019). source: Article 18

Responding to the fact that Christianity is growing at an unprecedented rate among ethnic Persians, the Islamic regime is escalating its persecution of Christians while insisting (to avoid sanctions) that no-one is ever imprisoned on account of their faith. Christians who refuse to succumb to intimidation (including threats, beatings, home raids, loss of job, denial of education, short-term administrative detentions etc), will find themselves before Revolutionary Courts facing charges of threatening national security. The less influence the West has, and the more influence China has, the less Iran will need to bother with such pretence.

On 18 February 2021, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani signed into law two controversial amendments to Iran’s Penal Code. The amendments affect Articles 499 and 500, the articles most commonly used in the prosecution of converts. Previously, Article 500 set a sentence of three months to one year for anyone found guilty of “propaganda against the order of the Islamic Republic of Iran or propaganda for the benefit of groups or institutions against the order”. The amended Article 500 provides for up to five years’ imprisonment for “any deviant educational or proselytising activity” by members of so-called “sects” that “contradicts or interferes with the sacred law of Islam” through “mind-control methods and psychological indoctrination” or “making false claims or lying in religious and Islamic spheres, such as claiming divinity”.

As human rights lawyer Hossein Ahmadiniaz laments, “The law should protect citizens ... But in Iran the law has become a tool to justify the government’s violent treatment of converts and other unrecognised minorities.”

Additional news source specialising in Iran: London-based, Article 18 https://articleeighteen.com/

Iraq

IRAQ

The Assyrians are the indigenous people of Iraq and indeed of all Upper Mesopotamia. Their history as a nation with its historic capital in Nineveh (site of modern-day Mosul), and as a powerful empire, stretches back some five millennia. The Bible records (in the book of Jonah) that the Assyrians embraced Yahweh, the God of Israel, at the preaching of a very reluctant missionary named Jonah. Upon hearing the Good News about Jesus the Christ/Messiah, the Assyrians believed. The Assyrian Church of the East is the first Christian denomination ever established. Once a mighty military empire, as Christians the Assyrians became a mighty missionary empire, taking the Gospel east through Central Asia, and by the 6thC, into China.

Arab armies invaded Mesopotamia in the 8th Century. Since then, the indigenous Assyrians have routinely been subjected to massacres and genocide at the hands of Arab, Kurd, Turks and, more recently, the transnational Islamic jihadists of Islamic State ((IS), previously Islamic State in Iraq and Syria/Sham (ISIS); previously Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), previously Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)).

Numbering around 1.4 million in the 1980s, the Assyrian community went into decline after Gulf War One, in which the US humiliated its former ally, Saddam Hussein. Subsequently, not only did Saddam start playing the Islam card for political gain, he also joined (albeit secretly) with Iran (his former enemy) to support Islamic terrorist organisations which, they believed, they could use against the West.

Thousands of Christians celebrate Palm Sunday in the streets of Qaraqosh, in the historic Assyrian heartland of the Nineveh Plains, Northern Iraq, 10 April 2022 (Credit- Twitter Father Naim Shoshandy).

Today, mere remnant of up to 200,000 Assyrians remains in Iraq. These genocide survivors – virtually all of whom are traumatised, displaced and destitute – are struggling to regain access to their homes and historic lands in the Nineveh Plains. They are caught in the middle of predatory, land grabbing Shi’ite Shabaks (Tehran’s proxies), and Kurdish nationalists eager to colonise and then annex the Nineveh Plains into a future Kurdish state. The situation is dire. It is a Christian Crisis of monumental proportions.

Additional news source specialising in all things Assyrian (news from Iraq, Syria, Turkey and the Diaspora): Assyrian International News Agency http://www.aina.org/

Saudi Arabia

SAUDI ARABIA

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is one of the most repressive, human rights abusing states on the planet. According to its constitution: “The state protects Islam; it implements its Shari’ah [and] protects human rights in accordance with the Islamic Shari’ah” (Articles 23 and 26). Laws and punishments are determined by Islamic Sharia Law (Article 38).

While Saudis citizens are governed according to Islamic Sharia Law, expatriate workers are free to keep their religion, so long it is never displayed, and so long as they abide by Islamic social norms. All proselytism of Muslims is banned; and there is no public worship other than Islamic.

While “underground”/secret Saudi Christians do exist inside the kingdom, most converts with means will flee for their lives. In accordance with Islamic Sharia and Hadith, converts may (unofficially of course) be killed with impunity. Most converts are killed in family honour killings, thus enabling this Sharia state to keep its hands clean.

Syria

SYRIA

Once one of the safest and freest countries for Christians and tourists anywhere in the Middle East, Syria now lies largely in ruins due to a war imposed on it by foreign powers.

It helps to think of Damascus as a valve: Assad had the oil and gas flowing from west to east (from Iran through Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean) while the Sunni powers wanted it to flow from south to north (from Qatar through Saudi Arabia and Syria to Turkey). But that would require regime change to re-establish Sunni hegemony.

And so it was that in early 2011, US-allied Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, pro-Muslim Brotherhood Qatar, and NATO-member neo-Ottoman Turkey moved under the cover of Muslim Brotherhood-led “Arab Spring” protests to pursue regime change in Damascus. In 2011 they pumped in weapons. When that failed, they pumped in transnational jihadists. For Syria’s religious minorities – Alawites, Shi’ites, Christians, Druze (who together comprise around 25 percent of the population) – as well as all Syria’s secular/nominal Sunnis (in other words, for the majority of Syrians), the war had become an existential struggle for survival.

Today, the main threat to Christians is not the Syrian government. Indeed, government-held territory is where Syrian Christians are most safe and free and supported.

While Christians in the now Kurdish-run Hasakah Governorate (contiguous to Iraq’s northern Nineveh Province) might be free, they are however gravely imperilled on account of the presence of Turkish troops and their jihadist proxies, as well as by transnational terrorists.

They are also routinely troubled by aggressive Kurdish nationalism, especially in education. Consequently, many Christians in Syria’s northeast would like to see the Syrian government back in control of Hasakah Governorate.

The greatest threat to the lives of Syrian Christians today comes from US sanctions.

The US administration’s Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act essentially places all government-controlled areas of Syria in a state of economic siege. As with any siege, the Caesar Act is designed to escalate suffering as in a pressure-cooker in pursuit of regime-change. Maronite Archbishop Joseph Tobji (49) of Aleppo has labelled it “a diabolical Act”.

The Caesar Act’s sanctions have halted reconstruction and devastated whole sectors, including small business and agriculture. Syria’s once thriving health sector and pharmaceuticals industry have been totally crippled, leaving Syrians without medicines and treatments.

Recommended:
“How economic sanctions negatively affect the health sector in Syria: a case study of the pharmaceutical industry.” By Ziad Ghisn, London School of Economics, 16 April 2020.

Warning of a “hunger pandemic,” the World Food Program report in December 2020 reported that in the first 6 months of 2020, around 1.4 million Syrians did not know where their next meal would come from, a shocking figure which has now climbed to 9.3 million.

The Caesar Report, which formed the pretext for the Caesar Act, was commissioned by the pro-Muslim Brotherhood (MB) ruling family of Qatar, who are sworn enemies of the Alawite anti-MB President Assad, and integral to the regime-change alliance. The report is fraudulent; indeed Human Rights Watch has debunked its claims. Not only is the Caesar Act based on a fraud, it is entirely political and entirely punitive; and it threatens to devastate Syria’s Christian remnant.

Turkey

TURKEY

Turkey is a NATO member, a US ally, a jihadist patron, a sponsor of international terror, and a genocide denier with grand neo-Ottoman ambitions. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s imperial ambitions span Libya and the eastern Mediterranean (including Cyprus), reach into northern Syria and northern Iraq, and run through the South Caucasus and Turkic Central Asia.

For more on Turkey's expansion into the the South Caucasus (Transcaucasia),
see: Global Persecution: Transcaucasia (on this website)

Surp Giragos Church in Diyarbakir, southern Turkey, 22 Oct 2011.

In February 2016, the Turkey’s ruling AKP government confiscated the newly renovated Armenian Apostolic Cathedral, Surp Giragos (Saint Cyricus) in Diyarbakir. The confiscated church, which was given over to looters, remains shut to this day.

Along with Surp Giragos, the Surp Sarkis Chaldean Church, the Virgin Mary Ancient Assyrian Church, and the city’s Protestant church were also expropriated.

The Surp Giragos complex included priests’ houses, chapels, and a school. The Cathedral, which was renovated with funds raised entirely through the Armenian community, was the largest Armenian Apostolic church in the entire Middle East.

When the renovated Surp Giragos Cathedral reopened in 2011, it awakened many to the reality that Turkey was once home to a sizable Armenian community. Indeed, the renovated cathedral became the centre of a movement: a coming out of “hidden Armenians” (the forcibly Islamised and Turkified descendants of Genocide victims). It also held the deeds of thousands of plots of land confiscated from Armenians by the Turkish nationalist regime during the Armenian Genocide.

Recommended:
Trauma and Resilience: Armenians in Turkey - Hidden, not hidden and no longer hidden.
By Raffi Bedrosyan (Gomidas Institute, 4 December 2018).

Further to this, the ruling AK Party of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has for years been fuelling toxic Armenophobia (as bad as any anti-Semitism you’ve ever seen), both in the media and through the school curriculum. Erdoğan is thus creating an anti-Armenian tinderbox that risks igniting at any moment; it is a Christian Crisis in the making.

Recommended books:
Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918.
By Grigoris Balakian (Alfred A, Knopf, New York, 2009)

A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility.
By Taner Akcam (1999, 2007)

The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and the Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. By Taner Akcam (2012)

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