Dan Snow's History Hit - Saudi Arabia and Iran

Episode Date: July 26, 2020

Kim Ghattas joined me on the podcast to explore how Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran - who were once allies and the twin pillars of US strategy in the area - became mortal enemies after the revolution of 1979. In a war of cultural supremacy, we discussed the nature of various groups using and distorting religion, suppressing cultural expression and encouragning sectarian violence. And how did events like Iran’s fatwa against author Salman Rushdie lay the groundwork for more recent troubles, including the birth of groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the rise of ISIS? Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Down Snow's History here. Think back, think back to the beginning of the year when we were really worried about regional conflict in the Middle East. Shots were fired, shells landed on American troops fired by Iranian forces. It all got a bit scary, then things were subsequently overtaken by the other catastrophic developments of 2020. Anyway, this is talking about the Middle East, we're looking at that great rivalry central to the modern Middle East. Iran versus Saudi Arabia. They're fighting proxy wars. There's an arms race. It's pretty hectic. But it wasn't always like that. It wasn't always like that. Brilliant new book called Black Wave, written by Kim Gattash. She talks about back in the 1970s, they were actually the twin pillars

of the American hegemonic system in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two key allies. Remarkable, despite their religious differences, they're able to work fine. So this is a modern phenomenon, a post-Iranian revolution phenomenon, but it's also a result of some changes of emphasis and some changes in religious practices in Saudi Arabia itself as well. I got to talk to Kim from Lebanon. Fascinating conversation. I hope you enjoy it. You can watch documentaries about the history of the Middle East or listen to back episodes of the podcast, like the brilliant Ali Ansari episodes on the history of Iran. They're all available on History Hit TV. If you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free and then one month for just one pound,

euro or dollar. It's a sweet deal. Go and check it out. In the meantime, here's Kim Gattas. Kim Gattas. Kim, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Dan. You're talking to me from Beirut. We could do a whole history of Beirut, both very recent history, but stretching back into the medium terms as well.

But we're not because we're here to talk about your extraordinary book called Black Wave. In this book, which talks about this competition in the Middle East that we now all know about between Iran and Saudi Arabia, you identify 1979 as a critical. Tell me about the Middle East before. So before 1979, Iran and Saudi Arabia were friendly competitors. They were twin pillars in US policy in the region to fight communism and the influence of the Soviet Union. Of course, Iran was the bigger party in this partnership, as opposed to Saudi Arabia, which was still a very young country. But these two countries were friendly. They were competitive to some extent. They both had their designs in the region. The Iranians often played policemen. The Saudis couldn't do

that. They did use a little bit of religion as their way to expand their influence, their clout. They were spreading a little bit of money around here and there in an ad hoc way, building a mosque or promising to build a mosque in Pakistan, for example. And of course, they were custodians already then of the two holy sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina. So they also exert influence like that as the country that gathers the world's Muslims to come and pray in Mecca and Medina. Before 1979, the region did have wars, did have coups. I don't want to make it sound like everything was perfect before 1979. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. But it did feel like there was still hope, that there was still promise in the future.

There was a lot of diversity, vibrancy, cultural, social, religious. The intolerance that we see today, the sectarian violence that we see today and that we've seen over the last few decades did not exist in this form at the time. So the Middle East before 1979 is very different from the Middle East after 1979. And that's why I think that the reason why that year is so pivotal is not just because it turned two countries into mortal enemies, not just because it was a geopolitical sort of tectonic shift in the region, but because that geopolitical shift had an impact on the culture, society, and religion, or the way people understand their religion in the region. Because Iran and Saudi Arabia turned into mortal enemies,

one Sunni country, one Shia country, perfectly happy to be friends before, enemies after 1979. And they start using religion to exert their influence and, if you will, rally the troops. And that's why 1979, I think, is different from other pivotal years in the region. The revolution in Iran takes Iran out of the US orbit. And we forget we've had podcasts on here with the excellent Ali Ansari talking about Iran, the Anglo-Iranian relationship which stretched back centuries. Iran obviously had a changing relationship with the West, if you like,

but was often quite closely allied or dependent on Western powers and particularly oil interests after the oil revolution. Just try and explain how dramatic that 180 degree volt fast was after the revolution. You know, when we think about it now, it looks like it was very dramatic immediately. But it wasn't that clear at the time. Which is why when the Americans were looking at the events unfolding in Iran and the beginnings of the revolution, which really started picking up speed in 77 and then in 78 and then after October 1978, really started barreling down that road towards the expulsion of the Shah. And he left right in January of 1979.

and he left, right, in January of 1979. At that time, the main concern of the United States was the Soviet Union and communism. And therefore, their main concern was, could the Shah be replaced by a communist friend, a friend of the Soviet Union? That was their key concern. And that's why they were not too keen on all these leftists who were part of the revolution. The revolution really did not start out as an Islamic revolution. It started out as a popular leftist nationalist revolution that included a religious segment, and that includes Khomeini, of course. And so even the CIA looked to Khomeini and thought that he could temper the ardors of the left, that if he exchanged visits and niceties, but they also understood that his time had come when they saw the swell of popular anger on the streets. And they tried to express support for him until the very end, because they too were worried about a communist

takeover in Tehran. And when they saw that the man who was rising above the fray was Khomeini, a man who in essence spoke their language. He was religious, he had a beard, he spoke about the Quran and God. They thought, you know, I mean, too bad for the Shah, he was our friend, but maybe we can do business with this person. I'm not sure that in the US they thought this quite the same, but they weren't instantly alarmed by the rise of Khomeini and the rise of the Islamists who very quickly eliminated and even assassinated the leftists who had carried them this far. It took some time for the U.S. to understand how the tectonic shift was going to change the relationship between Iran and the United States, because there had also been contact between Khomeini and the United States, and there had been assurances that there was no reason to worry. What really changed everything was the hostage-taking in the embassy at the end of 1979. Do we think that there was a sort of popular, spontaneous assault on the US embassy?

Was it with the knowledge and did the authorities tip the wing to those rioters? Or was it a situation they tried to get hold of once it already happened? So initially, Khomeini was not necessarily in support himself. What happened was that the leftists, you know, although they were in a power struggle with the Islamists as to who was going to come on top as the real victor in this revolution against the Shah. There had already been assassinations and eliminations and imprisonments of leftists and, of course, of supporters of the Shah. But the leftists and the labor unions were still quite popular in Iran, even in the second half of the year of 1979. And they could still bring out the street. And Khomeini started, and his supporters started seeing that as a potential threat to their

hold on power. And those groups, being leftists, anti-imperial, were also chanting anti-American slogans. This was not something that had really arisen yet in the Islamist circles. And so to outdo the communists and the leftists who were chanting anti-American slogans, the pro-Khomeini wing of the revolution, if you will, started also adopting that. And that's how the students in support of Khomeini barged into the U.S. embassy and took hostages there. I believe, if I remember correctly, it took a day or two for Khomeini to weigh in and at least not bring an end to it, because he saw that he could use that to his advantage. And then relations predictably go downhill very, very fast after that. What does

Khomeini and Iran, because obviously Iran has in the past at various times has expanded into what we now call the Middle East on numerous occasions. Its current borders are not even today accepted by many Iranians as inevitable and they have ambitions in what we might call southern Iraq today and other parts of the Middle East. What is Khomeini's ambition? Are there territorial ambitions? Is it like leadership in the Middle East in a softer way? Why is there this terrible collision of strategic interests in that region? Back then, Khomeini wanted to be leader of the Muslim world.

He wanted to do this somewhat in an agnostic way, but not quite. He was a Shia, of course, the majority of Muslims are Sunni. And he wanted to appeal to the wider Muslim world. And that's when the Saudis started thinking, maybe this is not great for us. It takes them a while too. It takes them about a year and a half to realize that it's actually going to be difficult to do business with this man or to be friends with this man, because he's agitating against them. He's agitating against their role as custodians of the two holy sites. He thinks that they should be put under some kind of international Islamic tutelage of some sort and not be in the hands of the house of Al Saud, who have got a lot of grief in the Muslim world still. But certainly

when the kingdom was founded in the centuries preceding that, the brand of Islam that they practice is sometimes called or dismissed as Wahhabism, following in the footsteps of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, a man who was very austere, very literalist, ultra-Orthodox, who was considered to be, you know, too radical by his peers in the 18th century. But his thoughts, combined with the founders of the first Saudi dynasty, did take hold in the interior of the Arabian Peninsula and continued because of intermarriage between his family and the Al Sauds until the beginning of the 20th century, when the Al Sauds founded the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But in the eyes of many, they were still seen as usurpers, as people who did not really have the right to claim the mantle of custodians of the two holy sites. And so the Saudis are very prickly about this. They don't like their authority, their leadership to be challenged. And that's precisely where Khomeini would target them. And he would also send people to the pilgrimage, to the Hajj in Mecca and Medina that would agitate.

And we've seen, you know, the clashes, the stampedes, etc. That happened a lot during the 80s. And every time Khomeini would say, you see, the Saudis, they can't handle Mecca and Medina. So the Saudis suddenly feel like they need to deploy religion even more to defend their role as custodians, to defend their role as leaders of the Muslim world. You know that at the time, the king of Saudi Arabia did not really have the title or did not use the title of custodian of the two holy sites. Even in Arabic, they would just say al-malik, the king. It's only later, around 86, when there was another such episode

in Mecca and Medina with clashes with Iranian pilgrims that I think the king thought, you know, I need to make this official. I am the custodian of the two holy sites. And so these two countries, which, as I said, were perfectly happy before under different leadership in Iran to be friends, even though one was Sunni, one was Shia, they become real rivals and they start using religion to drive divisions within the Arab and Muslim world and to rally people to their sides. And therefore, they begin to awaken these historic divisions of Sunni and Shia,

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listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. I guess we need to remember the House of Saud is actually a bit of a newcomer, right? The Hashemites controlled Mecca and most of what is now Saudi Arabia for like a thousand years. And then the House of Saud came and nicked it in the early 1920s. That was an interesting deal that was struck with the British, who wanted, you know, around the time of World War II, wanted to, you know, see the end of World War I,

wanted to see the end of the Ottoman Empire and needed help on the ground to undo and push back against the Ottomans who had ruled over the area for centuries. And the British thought that the Hashemites, who were the sheriffs of Mecca and Medina rather than the custodians, were not strong enough to push back against Ottoman influence and the Ottoman Empire. And so they aligned themselves more with the Al-Sa'ud who had promised that they could deliver and who had already defeated some of the smaller rulers in the Arabian Peninsula. And so that's how that happened. And, you know, the Hashemites got something else. It comes as a great surprise to me.

This is another part of the world with British imperial fingerprints all over a modern crisis. I mean, hey, who'd have thought it, eh? You're sitting in the one enclave in the Middle East, which actually we can genuinely blame the French for. Anglo-French, come on. Anglo-French, yes.

I mean, the Balfour Declaration, the Saxe-Picot Agreement. I do think that those maps that were drawn and territories that were divided up, you know, set the stage for a lot of problems, deep, difficult problems that we do still have to deal with today. But I'm always of the mind of, you know, this is where we are today. So how do we solve our situation now, internally in those countries? So in Lebanon, you know, we have a lot of economic problems and financial problems and a corrupt political class, and we've been through a civil war. It's too easy to say, oh, well, you know, it's leftover from the French. I mean, we are decades later. And what I always find interesting is that although

people rant against the colonial borders, I haven't really heard many people say they want to redraw them. People are quite happy being Syrians, being Lebanese, being Jordanians, being Iraqis. They have trouble within their national borders. But except for the Kurds, and then of course, there's the Palestinians, no one wants to necessarily redraw their borders. The national identity has, I think, taken hold. And so that debate about redrawing borders is mostly one that happens in Washington. Good point. Although this does bring us back to the topic, because there is a concern, isn't there, that Iran has got its eye on Mesopotamia, parts of southern Iraq, with majority Shia populations.

That, I suppose, is just a natural follow-on from what you were saying, which is the Ayatollah is interested in establishing his presence. Of course, Hezbollah, your local militia group there, are Shia and are heavily supported by Iran as well. Is that something that is obviously a hugely exacerbating poor relationship with the US and also with the Saudis? So there are different phases in the Saudi Iran rivalry. And the first phase is 1979, of course, but we must mention what happens in Saudi Arabia in 1979. The attack against the mosque in Mecca by Saudi zealots, so this was not an Iranian thing, it was Saudi zealots, who thought that the House of Saud was not conservative enough, even though it was already quite conservative. And they wanted the Al Sauds to kick out all the infidels,

all the Westerners who were there building up the country because this was a new country, they were exploiting the oil, etc. And in response to that attack, which really again undermines their aura or their prestige as custodians of the two holy sites, the Saudis, who have just seen what's happened to the Shah, who tried to modernize too quickly, the Saudis decide that what they need to do is co-opt that movement. And so although the zealots and the militants with guns are killed or arrested and then hung, etc., they co-opt these ideas and they unleash a quiet, cultural, conservative

revolution across the country, empowering the religious police more than ever before, closing in on whatever small bits of freedom was there, a bit of music, a bit of cinema, women anchors on television, etc. That all gets erased. The black abaya and the black veil become more ubiquitous in areas where women did not really wear them per se every day. And so that is a transformation that then goes beyond the borders of Saudi Arabia as well. And so as this rivalry becomes cultural and religious, it also stays geopolitical. And one way to try to rein in Khomeini, who has these ambitions of leader of the Muslim world, In Khomeini, who has these ambitions of leader of the Muslim world, is to set him off in a war or to encourage the war that starts off between Iraq and Iran, between Saddam Hussein and the Iranian regime at the time. So during the 80s, that's how that rivalry plays out through the war in Iraq and Iran, where Saddam Hussein is a Sunni leader,

but in a country that is majority Shiasa, it was Arab versus Iranian, if you will. And so Iran is not able to really start expanding outside of Iran, except for Lebanon, which it sees as a really propitious terrain for exporting the Islamic Iranian revolution. And that's where you see the birth of Hezbollah in the 80s. Then you have the 90s, where you have a detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran because of a change of leadership in both countries, where they feel that perhaps they can work together, that it's better to share the region, that there are areas where they can cooperate. And it goes quite far. But

then the U.S. invasion of Iraq happens. And more hardline faction in Iran that doesn't see what it benefits from any entente with the Saudis or any conciliation with the U.S. sees an opportunity to reclaim what they feel they have lost during the Iran-Iraq war. And they see the U.S. invasion first as a threat to them because they could be next, but immediately they realize that there's an opportunity for them to use the chaos in Iraq to gain a foothold and use the networks that they have already in Iraq through Shia allies, et cetera, who had been in exile in Iran and then returned, to start really taking hold of that country. You know, there's a great book that came out in the U.S.

written by U.S. Army officers looking at who won the Iraq war. And it wasn't the United States. It was Iran. And that's what you see continuing today. The Iranians are very good at using chaos to gain a foothold. And they've done that very well in Iraq since 2003. And they continue to do that in a different fashion in Lebanon. And of course, they've done that in Syria with their alliance with President Assad since 2011 and the uprising that started there and then turned into a civil war. I'm very struck by the kind of great power rivalries we see in Europe at the end of the 19th, 30th, 20th century. And the thing I always read in history books about like the British position or the French position in Morocco, the German position and this kind of joking.

And it strikes me it's the same thing. Like why are these states, well usually it's the same thing like why are these states well usually statesmen not stateswomen why do they risk catastrophic regional war what do the marines get like physically get out of having a strong position in southern iraq or southern lebanon backing assad i mean what's the advantage i'm being naive are members of the administration making money it's a great question but it's a question i would ask about any leader who goes to war anywhere in the world. What did North Korea gain from any of these wars? What did Milosevic really gain? What was the point? Why does it have to involve war? And I think it's hubris. I think it's hubris. I think it's arrogance. I think it's narcissism. It is about power. It's about a thirst for power. And I think that's what also drives Iran and Saudi Arabia in their rivalry. It's not,

you know, millennia old dispute about, you know, who's the real heir to Prophet Muhammad. I mean, in a way, it is because it's used as a tool in the geopolitical rivalry. But that's not what they're fighting about, particularly because before 1979, as we've been saying, they were perfectly happy to be friendly rivals. They were cooperating in ways that we cannot imagine today, including intelligence and security. So what does Iran want? What does the Saudis want? Power, influence, access to resources. I mean, the Iranians have a foothold, had got a foothold in Lebanon in the 80s and therefore onto the Mediterranean. With their influence in Syria today, they have even more access to the Mediterranean.

It doesn't necessarily bring them much immediately because Syria is devastating to watch, how much of it has been destroyed. And if you look at Iraq, you sort of wonder what are the Iranians gaining? But it really feels like it's about power. It's about standing up to the US because that's also their raison d'etre. And to do that, to continue to do that, they must continue to mine the resources of those countries where they have influence. And that includes Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. You know, Iraqis are very upset with Iran and with Iranian influence and the stranglehold it has on their country. Because they feel that it is sucking the life out of the country, the resources, flooding Iraq with Iranian products, but taking out the water and the electricity, etc.

So it's not a fair exchange, but it usually isn't with countries that have imperial designs. And that doesn't only apply to the Iranians. The Saudis operate very differently. They're not into empire building, but they exert their influence in a much more subtle way, and I would say insidious. and there's a lot written about that that's been very polemical you know the spread of wahhabism and the building of mosques and that is of concern for sure it's also much harder to pin down and it's dangerous to immediately equate it with terrorism which is something that people do instantly and that's not how it works what we should be concerned about is the rise of

intolerance. First, because of these very literal puritanical teachings, and intolerance can lead to violence. But it's a minority. It's the same as the right wing white supremacists in US. Not all of them will carry a gun and shoot someone, but some of them will. Just so interesting. And your book and this conversation is reminding me why it does feel very powerful echoes of big interstate rivalry in Europe over 100 years ago. Thank you so much for joining me, Kim. The book is called Black Wave. So make sure you buy it, everybody. And Kim, good luck with your future projects. Yes, thank you so much, Dan.

I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for the great questions and thank you so much, Dan. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for the great questions and thank you for having me on. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber One child, one teacher, one... yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.