I’ve just written a review of The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam’s Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeda, a riveting retelling of the events of November, 1979, when a group of around 500 Islamic extremists seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca. The author concludes that this action, taken along with other events of that momentous month, led to the Islamic extremism we’re experiencing today. He notes how the Saudi Ulema, in return for their continued support of the state, extorted a high price: the rolling back of many of the modest reforms and modernizations the government had achieved.
I think the book misses the target on some analysis, particularly in drawing conclusions from contested ‘facts’, and he simply gets some of the history wrong. But the book is very much worth reading.
You can read my full review here.
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November:23:2007 - 23:55
As a teenager in D.C. I experienced the other end of this siege: round-the-clock demonstrations at the D.C. Islamic Center as radicals tried to take control from its caretakers, followed by the assassinations and attempted assassinations of some of my Muslim neighbors.
My impression – created by the confidently gung-ho Ahmadinejad look-alike college student demonstrators I met on the bus – was that it was all part of a new movement, that the Iranian Revoution set the tone and was the future, that the West was decrepit and the Soviets were going down, that soon Iran would resume its rightful place using nukes and dominate everybody. These guys had studied Western political philosophy from Hobbes and Locke to Marx and Trotsky and Orwell and the French anti-Communists. They studied despotism not to enlighten their own peoples but with the purpose of enslaving them – they told me their plans before they wiped out their democratic and communist allies.
I believe that the mullahs can still rule Iran with support of less than 20% of the populace is due in no small part to the unbenign influence of these people. But I did not know that the fundamentalist Sunni backlash they inspired produced Al-Qaeda. I’m buying this book.
November:23:2007 - 23:55
I think you might be recalling the Hanafi Muslim Sieges in Washington, in 1977.
That of course adds another strain to the threads of fundamentalist violence.
While I didn’t notice anything on that order of chaos in 1979, I simply could have missed it as I was preoccupied with starting a career.
November:23:2007 - 23:55
I actually thought of mentioning the Hanafi Muslims in my response, but deleted it from my comment. That was over a year and a half earlier. I have no personal insight on that matter, I was too young and not exposed to such things at the time, yet I knew it resulted in increased security at D.C. government and Jewish buildings. The Hanafi Muslims were all Americans, I think. Wanted Muhammed Ali to change his name because they thought it was blasphemous to name someone other than The Prophet Muhammed, as I recall. These guys on the bus in 1979-80 were Iranian, or at least Iranian-inspired.
I suppose you didn’t notice the Islamic Center siege much, because although the media reported it from time to time, it got old quick. The demonstration was continuous and noisy yet orderly after the first failure to take over by force, nor did I witness large numbers of people in the space the police allotted for it.
November:23:2007 - 23:55
Their beef was primarily over Mustapha Akkad’s film “The Messenger”. Not only did it lead to increased security, xenophobia, and a whole new flavor of tensions, but it also gave us Mayor-for-Almost-Life, Marion Barry, who was injured in their takeover of the District Building and became something of a hero.
It was definitely the first act of Islamic-inspired terrorism in the continental USA.
I do have vague recollections of the demonstrations at the Islamic Center. But they were pretty small cheese, particularly when compared to the anti-war demonstrations of the early 70s, the anti-Chilean demos following the Letelier-Moffit assasinations of ‘76.
November:23:2007 - 23:55
I’m very cautious about applying the label “Xenophobia”. Phobias are unreasonable fears, and “Xeno” denotes anything alien. The Hanafis proved that terror was a reasonable fear, yet surely the Hanafi Muslim incidents provoked less “xenophobia” than the attempted assassination of Truman by Puerto Rican “nationalists” thirty years earlier.
Thinking back on it more deeply, the Hanafis were just so far out of the mainstream that us local kids scarcely perceived them as Muslims; we just thought that because they objected to Muhammed Ali’s name they had to be nuts. Indeed, several Muslim and Arab ambassadors became heroes of sorts for taking personal risks to help negotiate an end to the crisis. No one even dreamed of applying the label “Islamic” to the Hanafi’s form of terrorism.
The hostage crisis and the Islamic Center siege were different, however. Islam and terror marched together, plain and simple, and threatened to be the wave of the future – as later events have proved.