Empire: World History - 122. Iran & Saudi Arabia: The Rivalry that Split the Islamic World

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

1979 was the year that set the Islamic world on the path to today. In Iran, the revolution established the nation as a theocracy that sought to defend Shi'ism across the world. In Saudi Arabia, the siege of the Holy Mosque led to the nation embracing a more radical Sunni Islam that it began to export around the world. Almost immediately they began to clash, with great impact across the globe. Listen to William and Anita as they speak with Kim Ghattas about the birth of this rivalry. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg. And today we're joined by somebody I'm going to fan girl over because it's Kim Gattas. We're both going to fan girl. I know.

I know, but you know you from your BBC work and also now your wonderful writing, author of Black Wave, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the rivalry that unraveled the Middle East. You are exactly our ideal guest for here and now because we've been talking about the history of Iran. And you know that question that often you will get at dinner parties after all, why are the Iranians like this? Why are they doing this? It's sort of bafflement that out of sort of nowhere you could have a country that's described by the United States as, you know, the great Satan and that seems to be right front and center of geopolitics at the moment. We're talking to you. You're in Beirut at the moment. That's home, is it? Yes, it is home, and it's great to speak to you both. Thank you for having me. I am in Beirut, which is where I was born, where I grew up, where I went to school, living through.

the Lebanese Civil War in the late 70s and 80s. Brought up in West Beirut, in Christian West Beirut. I was living with my family really right smack in the middle on the dividing line between east and west. Our neighborhood was known as sniper central. I know well, yeah. I spent a lot of nights in the shelter, a lot of days cowering in a small, guest bathroom that was the most shielded room in the house, in the apartment. Our neighborhood

was quite deserted. We were some of the only people still living there. And when you think back now, the question that comes to our mind is why on earth did we stay? But in the moment, there didn't seem to be many other choices. And there's always the sense that, oh, it will end soon. It's not going to get worth, we'll just wait it out, and before you know it, it's 15 years have gone by. And so, we lived on the dividing line, but if you will, our kind of our front door opened onto the eastern side, and we had to cross back into the western side of Beirut to go to school. And we did that, and it was just the craziest thing. People did crazy things during the Civil War to just go on with their life. And at some point, we couldn't drive,

anymore all the way to school. So my father would drop us off at the crossing point by the National Museum. And with my two sisters, we would walk about a mile or two to the other side where a school bus would pick us up and take us to school. And we'd do the same thing coming back. And, you know, this was a time before phones, mobile phones, you were stuck in the middle between east and west, shelling would start and you weren't sure whether to run towards the school bus. if it had come or whether to run back towards your dad, but maybe he wasn't there anymore. So those were formative years, I would say, and it's why I decided to become a journalist. I mean, I was so lucky to be in Beirut, which is a city that I absolutely adore.

Wonderful, wonderful city. One of the happiest times. I went with Margaret McMillan, the historian, and one of the locals there took us to that dividing line, the green line, and said, you know, the green line actually turned green over the years because nobody could go there. they couldn't, you know, tend it. And so basically nature took over. And there were, you know, sort of leaves and, you know, trees and vines growing. So the green line was green. And I, I think that the landscape of Beirut still tells its history so eloquently. I mean, it's pockmarked. So you can almost read it like Braille, what has just been recent history here. It is pockmarked. And there have been obviously more layers of destruction even since the end of the Civil War in 1990. Most of the damage from

the Civil War has been repaired, but you'll still see some buildings that are, you know, abandoned by their owners. Nobody's laid claim to them, so they stand there derelict. And then, of course, you know, we've had wars with Israel between Hezbollah and Israel in 96, in 2006, large parts of the southern suburbs were completely flattened and have also been completely rebuilt. So layers of trauma and destruction and reconstruction. When I first visited Beirut in 94, I drove in from Damascus. And Damascus at that point was completely intact. And Beirut was a wreck.

And coming down that highway, down the hills from Damascus, you passed through this complete wreckage of buildings, some of which were potmarked with shell holes, whole facades and disappeared. And people were living in apartments where the outer wall had gone. The open-fronted apartments. Like an advent calendar or something. peer inside their homes. Yeah, our apartment looked like that every now and then as well. But we again rebuilt, rebuilt, rebuilt.

Eventually, we left the neighborhood about a year before the Civil War ended. We finally thought, okay, this is taking too long. So my parents had moved us to the eastern hills just outside Beirut. And then, you know, as luck had it or our bad luck, the front line moved there. But anyway, you know, we survived intact, which is more than many people. can say in Lebanon. And what's incredible is our neighborhood was so dangerous that war reporters would come there to do TV reports about the snipers, et cetera.

And they'd come across my family, particularly over across two years before I was born. And so we have three repartages in French television and Belgian television about my, you know, sisters playing hopscotch downstairs with a bunch of militiamen with guns standing behind them or visiting my family inside their apartment. My mother was pregnant with me and filming all the puck marks on the walls and the chandelier sort of dangling dangerously above our head. And the pock marks were covered by my sister's school drawings. I mean, that's heartbreaking. It is, I mean, such a visceral picture you're painting, but your own personal history, so closely with the history of so many people in the Middle East. You know, there's this idea of

life goes on despite, you know, enormous trauma, enormous destruction and being sort of in the crosshairs of two sides that seem to be shooting above you and regardless of you. I'm really interested in, because we talked about the Iranian Revolution of 79, you believe that this was seismic for Iran, sure, and we know how it changed the fortune. of Iran, but also the psyche of geopolitics as well. Now, just tell me, first of all, we'll get into the nitty gritty of this, but why do you think this is almost year zero for what we have now here all over the Middle East? There are several reasons, and I think 1979 really stands out because there are many sort of watershed years in geopolitics and in history, watershed events,

whether it's the 1967 war with Israel, whether it's the fall of the Ottoman Empire, whether it's the creation of Israel. But what I found was particularly striking about 1979 is that it was an incredible year from this viewpoint of events. You had the Iranian Revolution. You had the siege of the Holy Mosque of Mecca. You had the rise of Ziyal Haq in Pakistan. You had the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

All the same year, yes. All the same year. It took me a while also to realize this had never been put in one book. And I sort of kept testing my thesis and I kept thinking, surely somebody must have put all of this together. But in fact, you have books about the Iranian Revolution. You have books about the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca or about Afghanistan. but no one had yet put this all together and studied how they interact and how these seemingly separate events end up joining together and creating something totally different, which changes

not just the geopolitical dynamics of the region, but also the culture. This is such an exciting idea, Kim. I know all these different boxes, but I've never seen them together. Yeah, and the collective memory, which is why my book starts with the question, what happened to us, which is the question that so many people ask themselves in the Middle East, and you don't get that question, you know, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire necessarily. Politics continued, people's identity, culture, etc., things, you know, increased. I mean, you have some of them, the end of cosmopolitan towns and, you know, Alexandria, Izmir, Smyrna, et cetera, you have these pockets of life that have changed. But this is really across the region

from Pakistan to Egypt. And the question that, you know, you ask in your book and also that you've just posed now, you know, what happened to us is the question that is being asked in all of these areas that, you know, are now such geopolitical hotspots. But the other side of that is a question I find that goes up sometimes in the most clever. So, that you move in in the West, which is, well, it's always been like this. Shears and Sunnis have hated each other for thousands, hundreds of years, this is what they're like, this is what it has been. Your contention is very simply, no, it wasn't. There was a year zero to this and 1979 was it. Absolutely. Before I delve into this, I want to add one more element to what changed with 79.

So all these geopolitical events, a flood of social, cultural, religious transformations, and a new different dynamic, a deadly dynamic in America's interaction and relationship with the Middle East, where it suddenly becomes really antagonistic because of the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the hostages at the embassy. and then later in Beirut, the Marine barracks bombing, hostages, etc. And we are still living with this as well. The black wave, I think, has receded a little bit in terms of our awareness about the darkness that the region was in. Just to clarify, by black wave you mean. So as I was saying, and I don't want to move away from your question, Anita Al-A, but it does actually answer it as well.

The black wave of how we changed in the region because of the increased religiosity, political Islam, and conservative values that washed over the region as Iran and Saudi Arabia became rivals in 1979. So that's the first thing where we can say, well, they weren't always rivaled. It wasn't always thus. became rivals that year, and we can delve into that. And in their rivalry and in their efforts to try to outdo each other as the more religious, the better leader of the Muslim world, they, you know, fed the masses on both sides, Sunni and Shia, with not just religious education and proselytizing, but increasingly with extremism because that's how you whip up sentiments on both sides. And that's how you keep people

in line. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that black wave changed our movie industry, our literature, are how we dressed. You know, just yesterday I was having a drink with a friend in Beirut. She's from the northern city of Tripoli in Lebanon. She is Sunni. Her mother is veiled. She's Sunni, but a great supporter of Hassan Nasrallah, the Shia leader of Hezbollah. I'm sure we'll talk about him some more in our chat. And my friend suddenly showed me a picture of her mother back in the 70s with her father and their uncles and cousins and not veiled with a whiskey bottle on the table smoking Shisha. And she said, Kim, this is your book. This is a is what happened to us.

Yeah, I mean, the map of women's bodies as a, you know, sort of a litmus test of politics, austerity and tyranny is long established. But I want to make also clear that it's not just the women who suffered. The women suffered more, maybe, but the men also suffered. I think it's important to acknowledge that as well, because the suffering of the women also comes from the suffering of the men. And just going back to your question, I need to. It wasn't always thus, which is why it doesn't always need to be thus. I think it is way too facile.

And we've heard this from many, you know, politicians, the president of the United States, Barack Obama at the time, you know, this has been going on for millennia. You know, I could sit here and say, well, you know, Catholics and Protestants, you know, Northern Ireland. I mean, this has been going on for, you know, centuries as well. But we don't really do that in this dismissive way about Ireland. And I think that we have been so taken in by the darkness of the last four decades, really, that we've forgotten what it was like before 1979. And that's what I try to enlighten people about.

And we're here for this. We are very much here for this. And any note of optimism from any quarter at the moment is, you know, my goodness, it's like rain after years of being in the desert. So, Kim, tell us what's happening in Iran. How does the hostage crisis end and what's the result of it? The hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy into Iran is really a seminal event in the unfolding of what becomes a very confrontational relationship between the U.S. and Iran. Throughout 1979, it's not really clear yet that Iran is about to become America's enemy number one. Khomeini's antagonism vis-à-vis the U.S. is there, but it's not obvious. What happens in November 1979 is that anti-Americanism is starting to appear in the revolutionary fervor of Iran, particularly amongst students and particularly

on the left with the communists. And that slogan is gaining traction with people. And Khomeini is not happy about being outdone in his sort of, you know, leadership and his conservative values and his revolutionary fervor by the communists and the left and the unions who can still gather thousands, if not hundreds of thousands on the streets of Tehran for protests of various, with various demands. So Khomeini is trying to establish his control. And in November of 1979, a group of students who follow Khomeini storm the U.S. embassy, take hostages.

And at first, it looks like it could be over quickly because this is not something necessarily that Khomeini had planned or that he wanted. The students aren't necessarily planning for a four-hot. day-long hostage crisis, but Khomeini very quickly, as he often does, seize the opportunity in this to establish himself as the man who not only is leading the revival of Islam in the region, but is now seizing and taking that anti-imperial slogan and making it the anti-American slogan and taking it as his own and making it his own. And this becomes, in essence, Iran's policy for the next 40 years. And it starts in that moment. But even then, I don't think

the Americans quite realize that this is the beginning of a 40-year confrontation. Another thing that happens, Kim, I think at this point, is that the constitutionists who've attached themselves to Khomeini resign from the government saying they can't be part of a government that's taking hostages of foreign diplomats and so on. And this leaves the field open to Khomeini's most radical followers to seize complete control and make the revolution far more hardline and far more Islamist and specifically Islamic than it's a previous... The revolution devours its children. You know, what happened is that, as I was just saying, you know, Khomeini is just very good

at seizing moments of chaos or jeopardy and turning them into moments of opportunity. And the Islamic Republic of Iran has managed to turn this into an art in its foreign policy over the course of the last four decades, taking moments of jeopardy and turning them into moments of opportunity as they're doing now with the war in Gaza and we'll get to that. But the various strands of this Iranian revolution,

which eventually brings Khomeini to power, was a revolution that was very diverse. And the secular constitutionalists, liberals, leftists, et cetera, I thought they were using Khomeini to push the revolution forward, bring the masses into the street, remove the Shah, and then they would rise to the top. And he, the elderly, ancient, frankly, turbaned leader would go to come and sit under an apple tree, as some of them thought at the time. And instead, he eliminated all of them and took over. and it becomes an Islamic revolution and in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Tell me this. You mentioned Saudi Arabia and that, you know, you cannot have this cataclysm

and this terrible suffering without these two sides clashing. So we've talked about Iran, but we haven't talked about Saudi Arabia in 1979. And you mentioned the siege of the Holy Mosque. And we should really talk about what was life like at the same time in Saudi Arabia and what was going on to form the kind of synapses that now flash when it comes to Iran and Saudi Arabia clashing, as they do in Yemen, for example, or in other parts of the Middle East? So I do want to make clear that, you know, Saudi Arabia was not some kind of, you know, cosmopolitan enlightened, secular country before 1979. Let's, you know, let's be clear about that. It was deeply conservative, particularly in the interior desert areas. custodian of the two holy mosques in Islam, they took that role very seriously.

The tradition of Wahhabism, a word they don't like. Wahhabism is a very puritanical, dogmatic form of Sunni Islam. If you want to know more about it, you can go back to our episode on the foundation of Saudi Arabia. Muhammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince, denies that anything called Wahhabism exists, but it does exist. I'm intrigued by that, because I thought Ibn Wahab was the, was the, was the, the model of the kingdom. Absolutely, but not anymore. And so they would like to put some space now between themselves and that period.

Soge Arabia, conservative, but modernizing, opening to the West because of oil, because of construction, you know, for American engineers coming to Soge Arabia, planning these cities that look like Houston. And you had bits of openness. You had, you know, particularly in the hijazz, in southern, south. west Saudi Arabia, the Hajaz province on the Red Sea, where you have, which is home to Jeddah, which is the... Jada is a completely different feel, isn't it?

A completely different feel to Riyadh or other parts of the interior. Much more liberal than looking in a sense towards India more. Towards India, but also the entryway for pilgrims going to Mecca and Medina over centuries, some of whom end up settling in the city and adding living. of culture, etc. You had some cinemas there. You had a little bit of music on Saudi television as they were starting to allow television. You had music on the radio.

I think he even had a Mecca Jazz station, which is quite extraordinary. Really? But it was conservative. These were little exceptions, little pockets of culture that were allowed. But in parallel, you had these very conservative clerics and very conservative extreme thinkers and young shababs, you know, young men who were incredibly devout and wanted to impose religion and wanted to impose their conservative moors. And they would go into shops and break mannequins and break pictures, etc. So you had these two trends, the country modernizing and opening up to the West really very slowly and a more conservative trend. And those two, clashed with the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca in November 79. And this siege, I mean, I don't think anyone really does this justice here or knows just what it was like.

Will you just, I mean, just remind us. Yeah, absolutely. It's a crucial two-week moment when these radicals seize control of the mosque, they barricade themselves inside. There is a storming, the battle goes on underground in tunnels, and the attackers are killed. in the whole process. It's very humiliating for the Saudi royal family who meant to be guardians of the holy mosques and they're seen to have lost control. What's happening in Iran at the same time? The Shah has already gone. Yeah, at the same time as the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. And at first, people thought these two events were connected, but they were not because the Saudis suddenly realized they had their own, you know, zealots who were unhappy. with the Saudi kingdom's efforts to open up slowly, really, to the West,

modernize, allow foreigners to come to into Saudi Arabia, not to Mecca and Medina, but still. And so Jahiman al-Aaibi, the leader of the group, who had been groomed by the clerical establishment of the kingdom, including Sheikh bin Baz, not groomed particularly to do these kinds of actions to carry out these kinds of actions, but just groomed as their sort of, you know, students and there was this feeling of kinship with this young group of zealots. They suddenly went off and laid siege to the holy mosque of Mecca, bringing violence really to the inside of this holy site in Islam. And it was an embarrassment to the royals. They were supposed to be

the protectors, the custodians of Mecca, and they failed. And they lost control. They lost control of their zealots, and they had to call in the infidels, the foreigners, the French and others to help them put an end to that siege. And you would expect them then to go after every single bit of zealotry in the kingdom to make sure this doesn't happen again. But instead, what they did is they made a deal with the clerical establishment. We'll listen more to you, will give you more leeway to impose more conservative values, police people, unleash the religious police, women who aren't properly veiled.

But you protect our rule and our role as leaders of the country. When I talk to friends in Pakistan, they always say that this is the moment that Saudi begins to export its radicals. Yes. That the deal partly is that we will pay you to take your radical message somewhere else, not in our backyard. And so you have these people turning up for the first time in Peshawar, in Islamabad, financing the madrasas, Zatak. Because what else is happening? The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Right.

Same time. 979, yeah. Yeah. So the Saudis see this internal threat to them, to their rule. Their role as custodians of the holy sites is being questioned, including by Khomeini, and they don't like that. So is Khomeini actually saying directly, actually Iran should be at the gates? Or what is his ask here?

Ayatollah Khomeini often said that there should be international custodianship of the two holy sites. of Islam, meaning it shouldn't be the Saudis. And that really goes to the heart of the insecurity that the Saudis have always had about their role as custodians of the Two Holy Sites, because the House of Saud is not actually descendant of the Prophet. They expelled and replaced the descendants of the Prophet. Yes, the Shadif Hussein of Hajas. And so the Saudis feel deeply wounded. They're very much. very worried about their legitimacy, and they're very worried about their own zealids that have proliferated within their own country. So they allow this unfurling of a silent cultural

revolution within their own country, shutting down the whatever few cinemas that were around, unleashing the religious police, tightening, you know, restrictions on everybody. And people in Saudi Arabia will really talk to you about how it felt like darkness was descending. At the same time, in Iran, there's a much more visible cultural revolution that is smashing liquor bottles that were in hotels and bringing down paintings and shutting down music halls because they were very advanced in their cultural life. I mean, just as mentioned before that in circles, both in New York, Washington and London, indeed, I've heard, you know, for the argument, oh, they've always been like this as thousands of years old. Likewise, in other

circles and largely sort of in Pakistan orbits of the Middle East, I've heard people say, you know the reason that these two sides hate each other is because of America? So just tell me, in this jigsaw puzzle, and we're going to take a break shortly and continue this discussion. But just before we get to the break, I mean, I'm imagining that these events are just happening because they're happening. Is the State Department involved or just watching with horror as things are growing at pace or moving at pace? I wanted to write a book about how players in the region have agency as well, and they drive some of the, or many of the events as well, because it's a favorite, you know, fallback

explanation for what's going wrong, whether in the Middle East or other parts of the world, oh, it's all America's fault. And America plays a role, and it is, of course, in the book. And it is also the focus of my first book, the secretary, which is focus. on American foreign policy and how it, you know, works or doesn't work very often. America in that year is, you know, watching with some horror what is happening in Iran because of the hostage crisis by then in November. It is, of course, deeply concerned about what is happening in Saudi Arabia with the siege of Mecca wondering about the stability of the Saudi royals

and the House of the House of Saud. But no one in that moment, neither the Saudis nor the Americans quite understand how the Iranian revolution is going to change everything for everyone. Because the Saudis actually welcome Ayatollah Khomeini at first. You have a headline in the Kuwaiti newspaper on February 19th, about a week after Khomeini comes back to Iran on the 11th of February, victorious declaring victory for the revolution, which I'm sure you've tackled in your episode, did not start out as an Islamic revolution. It was a revolution with lots of different strands of thinking, leftist, secular, nationalist,

Islamist, liberal Islamist, etc. to remove the Shah, the face of imperialism and oppression. It becomes an Islamic revolution later on. But so a week after, Khomeini's return to Iran, the Kuwaiti newspaper, Arra al-Aam, has a headline. Surd Arabia praises the Iranian revolution. Because the Saudis are looking at this man who is coming to replace their friend, the Shah, with whom they were very friendly. They were, you know, competitive. They didn't always like his role in the region, you know,

pretending to be the policemen of the region. They had some difference of opinions around the Shah's support for, for Israel, that had been a sore point between them. But overall, it was very civil. They visited each other. They called each other with honorific titles, et cetera. So up until early January or mid-January, they were still declaring their support for the Shah.

And then he was gone and replaced by this man with a beard. And they thought, well, okay, we, you know, I think we can do business with him. And Prince Abdullah, who later becomes king, said, you know, he was very relieved that the new Iran was making Islam the organizer of cooperation and wasn't it a great thing that both countries had the Quran as their constitution?

What they had missed was Khomeini's hatred of the Saudis and the Wahhabis which he had written about already in the 50s. Well, look, this is a good point to take a break. So, you know, I mean, it's fascinating. It is also not what you hear very often that you have, you know, sort of the Saudis who have, who have established themselves as the guardians of these two pillars of Islam,

who are saying, okay, a man with a beard and dark black robes, we can overlook the other thing. But I'm only saying, not on my watch. Join us after the break when we talk and explore further what this means to the rest of the world. Welcome back. So Kim Gattah is still with us and has just been so interesting on the lead-up to what we have today, is really why we're here. And just this is the roots to everything that's happening in the Middle East today. We're finally beginning to draw all these things together and understand how they work.

That's a huge compliment, William. Thank you very much coming from you. I'm so pleased. Just before the break, you were telling us that this was not just an inevitable, you know, Iran will hate Saudi, Saudi will hate Iran. It was a decisive thought process going on in the head of Ayatollah Khomeini that I am going to be the prime leader when it comes to Islam in the world. and I'm going to use every possible opportunity I can to show the rest of the world that we can tweak the nose of colonialists whenever we care to. And the Saudis then I guess are sort of taken off guard with this. And the rivalry definitely is there very soon after 79

and the hostage taking the 444 days of siege at the American Embassy. We're now in a situation, and you touched on this also, that you've got exporting of these ideas to different places. And one of the first places, I suppose, that this makes a difference. Exports from both Saudi and from Iran, I guess, as well, is Pakistan. Now, tell us why Pakistan becomes sort of the playground or battlefield or whatever awful way we can describe what happens to Pakistan. Why there?

Ayatollah Khomeini wants to export the Iranian revolution. and he wants to be not just a Shia leader, but a Muslim leader. So he's also making inroads with Sunnis. And, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptians and Sunni Egyptians are also looking to the revolution as an example to follow, which, again, goes against the whole idea that Sunnis and Shias have always killed each other. They actually are trying to emulate Iran and they're admirative of what the Iranians have achieved. But when it comes to Pakistan, you know, Pakistan's Shias are the largest minority in the country, 10 to 15 percent. But they're also the second largest Shia population outside of Iran.

And importantly, Jinnah was himself, a Khadjad, wasn't it? He was of Shia origin. Yes, the founder of Pakistan was a Shia, which is something that the Pakistanis try to sort of paper over and don't advertise very much, but he was. And they were different in terms of their status in the country than, for example, Shias in Lebanon, who have always been the more oppressed minority. But in Pakistan, as I was saying, their large minority, they have reached, you know, the higher echelons of power, their landlords and landowners. But you have a new dictator in town, Zia al-Haq, who is himself, you know, a rabid, Zalit who wants to Islamize the country and gets help from who, from the Saudis. And actually, that happens before 1979.

In 1978, a Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, former Prime Minister of Syria, who's exiled into Saudi Arabia and becomes an advisor to the king, Ma'aruf Dawalibi, is sent to Pakistan to see how he can help Zia al-Haq Islamize the constitution. and those efforts pick up pace after the Iranian Revolution. And one of the greatest flashpoints is this idea of Zakar that Zia brings in. Now, the Zakharth, for those who don't know, is an Islamic principle of giving away 2.5% I think it is of your wealth to charity. It's not really practiced very widely.

The Saudis do do it. It's kind of enshrined in law. And Zia wanted to do just that. He also does other things, doesn't he brings in Sharia law? Adulterers are stoned, drinkers are flogged, thieves have their hands cut off. You have those famous videos of people being very brutally whipped. But whipping is common to both sides. I mean, honest, to be very frank, whipping is common to both sides of sort of a brutal implementation of Islam.

It wasn't part of what Pakistan had been about. Not at all, but also Zakhad, because of the whiffs of Saudi in it, that means that there's a foothold being gained in Pakistan. And is that what provokes Khomeini to say, right, okay, actually not on my watch as well? Does he stir up the Shia population or what happens? Zia al-Hak is himself antagonizing the Shia population because Sunni and Shia Islamic law differ when it comes to Zakat. And for Shia's only a voluntary individual act. And now suddenly Zia is making it mandatory. And so the Shias get organized and they take to the streets.

several hundred thousand, and suddenly Zial Haq is faced with Shia power on the street, and he actually backs down. What month is this February 79? Yeah, February 1979, and then by June 1980, he has to relent. An extraordinary period. Everything's happening in this one year. Everything's happening at the same time. It's this maelstrom of events.

And what I find very interesting about Pakistan is that Zial Haq gets asked, about whether he is emulating Khomeini at some point. And his response is no, because we did all of this first. And he actually precedes Khomeini by a few days in declaring, you know, the Islamization of the constitution. So there's this competition for religious fervor, for outdoing each other when it comes to upholding religious values. But at the end of the day, the Iranians don't make huge inroads in Pakistan. What this episode does do when Zia relents and says, okay, you know, Zaka does not have to be mandatory, he creates a fissure in society. You have the Sunnis who pays zakat and you have the Shias who don't.

The Shias, the other, the other Muslims. And Shias become targets of. violence for the decades that follow. Okay. Can I just ask you to look a little bit over the craggy mountains into Afghanistan? Because again, 79 is such an important year there too. And just how that also becomes an extension of this flexing between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Well, you know, December in 1979, the Soviets invade Afghanistan. And within a few months, the Saudis realized they have an opportunity. They have their Zalachy,

that have just threatened the legitimacy of the House of Saud. They need to, on the one hand, co-op the clerical establishment. On the other hand, they must sort of impose more conservative regimen on their territory. But they'd like to send these young zealots away and where better to do that than to send them to fight the infidel unbelievers communists in Afghanistan. And that becomes, you know, a funnel for sending young men away. And of course, that's, you know, where the Saudis and the Americans start cooperating for what was then known as the good war against the Soviets in the middle of the Cold War. And Peshawar in particular, close to the border with Afghanistan, becomes this petri dish for political Islam crossing with militant Islam. and fighting on the battlefield inside Afghanistan and then coming back to Pakistan and then

going home to countries like Egypt or Algeria, having felt the power of Islam combined with the power of the gun. So what's so extraordinary and bizarre to us looking back at it is that the people who are paying for 50% of this are the American CIA, who are in there straightaway with huge bags full of money, filling bags full of rupees, putting it on donkey backs and passing it over to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Because the Soviets were the bad guys at the time. It was, you know, it was the Cold War. Just as a very quick aside, I'll keep it short. I think that looking back, now we think, oh, this was a terrible mistake. And we can have an argument about strategy and whether the Soviets were really the bad guys or not and what the Cold War meant and so on. But I think the real mistake

was not funding the Mujahideen. The real mistake that America made was walking away from Afghanistan when it was over and not having a strategy for how you deal with the aftermath. I think that was the real problem. The other thing we should say very important at this point is that the Saudis realize

that the way that they can influence events and change the nature of Pakistan is by building Wahhabi Madrasas. And I've got the figures here. In 1947, there were only 245 madrasas in Pakistan. By 2001, that had grown to 6,870, and measured of them were being financed out of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis had, from the very beginning, been paying for Islamic things in the 1960s. King Faisal donated $120 million for a national mosque, which is sitting there like a great spider at the center of Islam. But this focus on madrasas is like this sort of factories producing radicals that begin to churn out ever and average, larger numbers, like forges, producing this whole new armies of Islamists. The Saudis were spending money proselytizing softly. They were sort of seen as benign benefactors, building mosques here or there in the 50s and 60s and 70s. After 1979, the spigot opened and it was a much more focused methodical approach. I just want to remind people at the point that you made earlier.

You said, you know, Peshawar becomes this magnet for, you know, those who want to show that religion and the gun can have a profound difference and two names that we are now very, very familiar with, who are attracted to Bishaw around this time, Bin Laden and Aem-Elahiri. And how are these people moving through Bishawar at this time? Are they on anyone's radar or are they just sort of milling around doing their own thing? They're congregating in Peshawar and they rent houses and they have big cars and they speak Arabic and start little shops where everything is written in Arabic. And they start to grate at, you know, the local population is a little bit aggravated by these non-Pakistaniis who are showing up. with their big SUVs, etc.

And they start injecting their worldview into this city that had never been a city where, you know, hatred was spewed from the mosques in the Friday's sermons. And soon you start to hear the call Shia kaffir, which means Shia's infidels. And that's something that, you know, Peshawaris had never really heard before. And over time, it seeps into their psyche and their collective consciousness and it becomes normal. Other place you see this is just outside Peshawar, the main Sufi shrine of that town, which is the shrine of Raman Baba. I used to go there a lot on Thursday nights when I was covering stuff around there in the 80s. And you used to see confrontations between the madrasa kids and their Saudi mentors who would go up to the locals.

who would be there with their Saz and their tabla and their musical instruments singing the local songs of the local saint, Raman Baba. And the Saudis and the Saudi-trained madrasikis would try and break the instruments and smash up. And eventually they put a bomb in the shrine, which was the main Borelvi shrine. And so you see the nature of Islam in Peshawar and around Pakistan changing very radically at this time as it moves against the kind of old tomb worship of the Borelvi, Sufi, Sufi, liberal. Raman Baba is always speaking about reaching out to Hindus and to Sikhs. Do not spread thorns, he said, spread flowers, because then the aroma will be among you. If you spread

thorns, you will prick your feet. But that whole world is totally anathema to these new madrasa kids. What is most important to note about Pakistan and how, you know, all of this that we've been discussing, changes not only the nature of Pakistan. And I do want to make a quick point here, which is that as the al-Hak is trying to turn Pakistan into a conservative theocracy in a way, it's the women who are out in force on the streets constantly trying to fight back, burning their veils, etc. So that's one very important point. We always must give credit to the women who fight back and fight back they do.

But the other thing that happens in Pakistan during that time at the end of the 1980s is that you have the first massacre, sectarian massacre, state sanctioned, as Zial Haq sends Sunni militias to kill Shias in a town on the border with Afghanistan because the Shias are angry about how their area is being used as a transit point into Afghanistan and they're being shelled by the Soviets in their areas. And so they're trying to interdict the flow of fighters into Afghanistan to protect themselves. And of course, Zial Haq has found himself into this fantastic position where he is key to U.S. policy in the region and he's getting money, et cetera, et cetera. He doesn't want this to happen.

So he sends these Sunni militias to kill Shia villagers. The Shia villagers arm themselves as well and respond. And this is ground zero for the first sectarian killings, not armies, not Iran-Iraq fighting, but really local people killing each other. And so going back to the point, Anita, that you were making, it hasn't always been like this. Sunnis and Shias have not always been at each other's throat. But this is where it started. Well, you know what?

I'm going to go back to something that you said, which I'm going to clear to every episode. And do join us again. Kim will be our guest for our next episode of Empire 2. But it hasn't always been like this. It doesn't always have to be like this. Kim, thank you so much. For now, this is goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Drupal.