The regime in Warsaw was, of course, deeply entrenched. It had enjoyed thirty-five years of unchallenged rule. It was Stalin himself, backed by the full force of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police, who had installed the Polish Communists in power in 1944. (A Soviet citizen and Red Army general, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, even served as the Polish minister of defense for a few years.) The Kremlin’s careful engineering of the new administration in Poland was part of a broader, carefully conceived strategy for the Soviet domination of East Central Europe that had been tacitly endorsed by the Western Allies at Yalta. So the Sovietization of the countries in the region followed a clear and uniform plan; there was very little that was spontaneous or ad hoc about the process. Because the Polish Communists and their colleagues elsewhere took direct orders from their bosses in Moscow, all of them followed the same clearly articulated policy line; Stalin did not tolerate factional disputes among his proxies.
The contrast between this story of Communist rule in Poland and its Afghan equivalent could not have been starker. The Afghan Communists rose to power in their slapdash coup of April 1978 thanks to the improvisational initiative of Hafizullah Amin, who wasn’t even the head of his own party. President Mohammed Daoud’s arrest of other Communist leaders had prompted Amin to activate his far-flung network of contacts in the militia and the security services in a reactive strike against Daoud’s government. As a result, the coup’s success owed far more to Daoud’s own weaknesses than to any careful preparation by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Nor did the newly victorious Afghan Communists have a clearly thought-out strategy for the path ahead. For the PDPA leader, Nur Mohammed Taraki, his sudden release from prison and his ascent to the position of head of state were equally unexpected.
The same off-the-cuff style applied to the PDPA’s headlong implementation of its radical reform program. The Communists tried to push through rapid land reform in a country where there were virtually no formalized deeds or cadastral surveys, virtually ensuring chaos.1 They abolished mortgages and other traditional debt relationships without providing a new system of financing to replace them. And they vowed to open up their new institutions to women, an innovation that struck many ordinary Afghans as an affront to Islamic values. (The new PDPA rulers reinforced this sense that they had little respect for religion by replacing the old flag, with its prominent green stripe symbolizing the centrality of Islam, with a new revolutionary flag in Bolshevik red that had no space for religious imagery.) These ill-considered measures predictably sparked widespread resistance within conservative Afghan society.
The April 1978 coup was neither planned nor desired by the men in Moscow; they learned about it from news reports. They had little choice but to acquiesce. As the new regime in Kabul settled into place, its Soviet sponsors watched in consternation as the Afghan leaders recklessly pushed their agenda on a reluctant populace. For all of President Daoud’s faults, no one in Moscow had seen any reason to depose him, precisely because the Soviet party leaders were aware of the instability that might result. One reason for their anxiety was the deep, crippling split within the PDPA. They knew only too well how the radical faction, the Khalq (or “Masses”) group led by Taraki and Amin, despised the moderate members of Parcham (the “Banner”), exemplified by Babrak Karmal. Karmal was a Soviet favorite because he expounded a gradualist reform approach, which seemed less likely to tip the country over into chaos. Unfortunately, Karmal had taken a negligible role in the April 1978 coup, and he and his associates were soon marginalized by the country’s new leaders. But the men in the Kremlin could hardly afford to write off Taraki and Amin. They had already invested far too much in the place.
Events soon tested that commitment. Taraki and Amin desperately tried to stanch the growing signs of rebellion. They received and wooed delegations of tribal leaders, assuring them of the government’s good intentions. At every possible opportunity, they stressed their respect for Islam. But revolts continued to flare up around the country.2
Then, in March 1979, came the biggest explosion to date. So far the uprisings around the country had been confined to rural areas. Then, suddenly, a series of small revolts in neighboring villages tipped off a full-scale rebellion in the western city of Herat, the country’s third largest. On March 15, a mob launched an attack on government offices and security forces. Rioters also stormed the main military base, forcing the inexperienced young garrison commander to pull out his forces. For nearly a week, communications with the central government were completely cut, and anarchy reigned in the streets. This was the first time that the communists in Kabul had lost control of one of the country’s biggest cities.3
Many of the rebels were, like other Afghans, angry at the various manifestations of the “godlessness” of the new regime. But there were also deeper forces at work. Herat lies just over the border from Iran, and many of the Afghans in the city and around it were Persian speakers with a long history of cultural, economic, and social ties to their western neighbor. Tens of thousands of Heratis had worked in Iran during the days of the shah’s economic boom, and many of them had stayed on after the beginning of the Islamic Revolution. In the wake of the shah’s downfall in January 1979, many of them returned home, bearing a message of religious militancy that galvanized their compatriots.4 Some members of the Jamiat-e Islami, the Islamist organization headed by the Kabul University theologian Burhanuddin Rabbani, had sought refuge in Iran, and now they returned to Herat, where they made contact with sympathizers in the Afghan army—including a hard-bitten officer named Ismail Khan who defected to the rebel side during the uprising and later went on to become one of the most famous mujahideen commanders.5 But there was no real operational coordination between him and his sympathizers across the border. The revolt caught everyone by surprise. It was a genuinely spontaneous uprising.
The Soviet advisers in the city, many of them oblivious to the culture that surrounded them, were completely wrong-footed. One minute they were strolling through the picturesque streets of the ancient city. The next they were being chased down and attacked by angry crowds screaming for the blood of the farangi, the foreigners. Three Russians managed to escape in their cars. A few miles away from the city, the drivers of the first two cars noticed that the third was missing. They turned around to look for him and soon found his vehicle parked next to a mud-walled village. The driver was sitting behind the wheel of his vehicle, but he was dead. The attackers had disemboweled him and filled his mouth with sand.6 Within Herat itself, the corpses of other Soviets were paraded through the city on pikes.
Security forces, including members of the new Communist secret police, fired on the rioters, killing hundreds. But when Kabul ordered regular army troops to shoot at the mob, the soldiers turned their guns instead on the local office of the party, killing PDPA officials as well as Soviet advisers. The entire Seventeenth Division of the Afghan Army mutinied, and its officers and men joined the mujahideen. (Among its commanders was Ismail Khan, mentioned above.) The rebels helped themselves to weapons from army depots and took over government buildings. They held out for a week until the resistance was broken by air strikes and a large-scale operation by the Afghan Army to retake the city. Herat would never be the same. Many of the city’s glorious ancient monuments were damaged beyond repair. Estimates of the dead range from five to twenty-five thousand; years later mass graves outside the city were still yielding the bodies of victims.
Herat was a harbinger of the war to come. The inflammatory impact of the Iranian Revolution and the involvement of homegrown Islamists like the Jamiat-e Islami signaled that Afghans were no longer looking to traditional elites for leadership; moderates were already being sidelined. The ferocity of the uprising and the extent of the force needed to quell it made it clear that this went far beyond the usual local tribal rebellion. Vladimir Bogdanov, the KGB station chief in Kabul, subsequently saw it as the ignition point of a true Afghan civil war, the start of a chain of events that would end in the Soviet intervention nine months later.
Most important of all, however, Herat marked the moment when the Russians began to be drawn directly into military involvement in Afghanistan’s internal conflicts. The Afghan military proved incapable of suppressing an uprising on this scale by itself, so the Soviets had to step in. Soviet pilots ended up flying many of the sorties against the rebels in Herat. Soviet advisers—at this point numbering about three thousand in the entire country—participated in the ground attack to retake the city. The leaders in Kabul were spooked. Taraki called Moscow and asked for the dispatch of troops from the USSR to shore up his regime. He told Soviet prime minister Aleksey Kosygin that backing for his government had evaporated:
“Do you have any support among the workers, city dwellers, the petty bourgeoisie, and the white-collar workers in Herat?” Kosygin asked. “Is there still anyone on your side?”
“There’s no active support on the part of the population,” Taraki replied. It’s almost wholly under the influence of Shiite slogans—follow not the heathens, but follow us. That’s what underpins the propaganda.”7
Taraki was right that Heratis had rejected the PDPA. But he was wrong about the degree of their organization. They were not under anyone’s command—at least not enough for it to matter. Neither the Iranians nor the leaders of the anti-Soviet resistance had ordered the uprising, and it had been suppressed before they could do anything to support it. But that was about to change for good.
It was inevitable, perhaps, that Pakistan would become involved. Since their abortive attempt to topple Daoud in 1975, most of the Islamist leaders had fled there, setting up headquarters in Peshawar, the most important city in Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal belt. The local people in Peshawar spoke Pashtu, a language shared by many Afghans, so many of the exiles found the place congenial. The political climate in Pakistan also worked in their favor. The Pakistani president, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq (in power since July 1977), was eager to burnish his Islamic credentials by helping the mujahideen. Needless to say, his support for the holy warriors was hardly motivated by religious altruism. He saw the rebels above all as a tool for exercising influence over the situation in Afghanistan. Like many members of the Pakistani elite, he recalled only too well Daoud’s attempts to stir up Pashtun nationalist sentiment on Islamabad’s side of the border. He wanted to keep the Afghan resistance divided and weak.
Other countries were also keeping an eye on events. The Chinese, eager to seize any opportunity to counter Soviet influence close to their borders, funneled money and weapons to their own proxies, the small but fanatical movement of Maoist guerrillas. Saudi Arabia, flush with oil cash and eager to further its reputation as the great patron of all Islamic causes, began to consider how it might bring its influence to bear. And in Washington, officials in the Carter White House and the Central Intelligence Agency began to see the growing conflict in Afghanistan as an opportunity to make life difficult for the Soviet Union. In July, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order authorizing the CIA to supply covert assistance to the rebels. America’s assistance to the mujahideen began months before the Russians invaded.
Unbeknownst to the Americans, who had few sources of intelligence inside the country, the nature of the Afghan rebellion was already starting to evolve in significant ways. One illustration of the new dynamic came from the province of Nuristan, where by May 1979 the uprising had been going on for a full year. Many other parts of the country had experienced rebellions of their own in the meantime (Herat being merely the most spectacular), but only the denizens of the Pech Valley had succeeded in expelling government forces and holding territory under their own control for so long. The valley dwellers had achieved this under the command of their tribal leaders, the influential clan chiefs whose word was law. But already war and ideology were starting to warp the conventional ways of doing things.
In the summer of 1979, a minor Islamic cleric named Maulavi Hussain arrived in the valley. He was of little importance himself; it was what he represented that mattered. And what he represented was the novel but increasingly influential notion of Islam as a modern, revolutionary force. Once, many years earlier, Hussain had run for a seat in parliament, but his campaign had been fatally undermined by the widely shared conviction among voters that politics was not a proper role for religious leaders. In the early 1970s he had joined the country’s first real Islamic activist group, the Muslim Youth Organization; later in the decade he had joined Hezb-e Islami, the “Party of Islam,” the most radical of the new religious groups.
Hezbis (as they were called) were not defenders of the old order, like so many of the traditional Islamic leaders. Hezbis were not only opposed to Daoud and the Communists, but also objected to a restoration of the monarchy, since, like Khomeini, they had concluded that kings were against Quranic teaching. Unlike Khomeini, though, the Hezbis and most of the other Islamic revolutionaries in Afghanistan were Sunnis, and they had no analogue of the powerful and well-organized Shiite religious establishment to guide them. That was probably just as well. Since so many Islamic clerics in Afghanistan were pillars of the old order, the Hezbis rejected them. As the religious revolutionaries saw it, the new Islamic state would be led by righteous Muslims like themselves, beneficiaries of modern education, and not by the corrupt and ignorant members of the old clerical establishment.
To be sure, some clerics, like Hussain, cast their lot with the Islamists and were happy to use their religious authority to serve the radical cause. As soon as he had settled in with the Pech Valley rebels, Hussain informed them (according to American anthropologist David Edwards) that their uprising “could not be considered a lawful jihad because it had not been authorized and commanded by a legitimate Muslim leader operating according to religious principles. Consequently, all those who had died to this point could not be called martyrs (shahidan), and the religious reward promised to martyrs in Islam was not guaranteed to them.”8 Hussain and his fellow Hezbis canvassed the locals, handing out party identity cards and telling locals how to be proper Muslims. If men wanted to play leading roles in the jihad, for example, they had to wear beards and clean white clothing, he told them.
The villagers were not sure what to think. They still hewed to their own tribal leaders and their traditional style of combat,9 but as the tribal militias came up against government troops armed with all the modern paraphernalia of warfare—assault rifles, armored personnel carriers, helicopter gunships—the drawbacks of the received way of doing things were becoming all too apparent. Tribal democracy was fantastically unwieldy; making any decision required hearing the opinions of representatives from every community that had dispatched fighters or contributed resources. Meetings of tribal councils typically drew hundreds of attendees and could drag on for days, noted American anthropologist David Edwards, who interviewed some of the rebellion’s leading personalities. Relatives tended to fight as a group within each militia and to obey only those who stemmed from the same one.10
These were all serious handicaps in a struggle against an opponent whose forces obeyed an efficient operational hierarchy and followed a clear, universalistic ideology.11 This was, perhaps, one reason the new Islamist parties, which followed a very similar principle of organization, gradually asserted themselves over more traditional habits of thought. But there was a second reason, too, and it was much more concrete. By the summer of 1979, weapons were already running short. It turned out that the tribal councils inside Afghanistan had been far too generous in handing out the few arms they had obtained from the enemy, and they soon ran out. The Islamist groups, by contrast, had carefully hoarded their guns. And because their leaders had been in Pakistan for years, they had already built up fruitful working relationships with the Pakistani military intelligence service (the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI) and the army. This was the key to receiving money, training, and weapons. As a result, tribal fighters increasingly found that the best way to a proper gun was to sign up with one of the new parties. Whoever received a party identity card also had good chances of acquiring a modern rifle.
And now, by the summer of 1979, another process was contributing to the ascendancy of modern political Islam over the old ways. The Communist government in Kabul meted out a harsh response to any area that fought back against its rule. Wherever the army or the secret police made their way back into a rebel zone, reprisals were sure to follow. Not all of the Nuristanis, for example, had been able to hold out against the combined forces of the government, and many had already been forced to make the humiliating trek through the mountains to the refugee camps in Pakistan. There, too, it was the Islamic political parties that offered food, housing, schooling for the children—but only to those who pledged their allegiance. This, too, undermined the traditional leaders, who, once they were in exile, found they had nothing to offer their own people.
Afghanistan may have been geographically remote, but that did not mean that it was completely isolated from events elsewhere in the Islamic world in the twentieth century. The rise of political Islam on the streets of Herat and in the gorges of Nuristan represented the culmination of decades of intellectual ferment that spanned the umma, the global community of believers.
The main issue that concerned Islamic thinkers during the twentieth century was how to respond to Western hegemony. For centuries after its founding, the Islamic world could rightfully claim the mantle of an advanced civilization, boasting achievements in science and culture that rivaled anything in the West. But by the end of the nineteenth century, those days had receded into the mythical past. The initiative had gone over to the Europeans, who, thanks to their superior technology and organization, had divided up much of Asia and Africa among themselves. Many Muslim intellectuals concluded that the only hope for their societies lay in adopting Western ways, accepting the imperative of modernization. Some of them embraced Western ideologies, such as Communism or radical secular nationalism.
But there were also those who soundly rejected the notion that religion was the problem. They declared that Islam held all the answers and that what ailed Muslims was precisely their own lack of faith. What was needed, these thinkers argued, was a revival and renewal of Quranic teaching, not its abolition or dilution. At the end of the nineteenth century, an uprooted Persian who called himself Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani had wandered from country to country, spreading a political philosophy that amounted to an eclectic mix of traditional Islam and anti-imperialist modernism. He portrayed the Muslim world as crippled by political and moral corruption and argued that the umma could respond to the threat from West only by rediscovering the primal vitality of Islamic teaching and seeking to unify itself into a single political entity. Afghani had a profound influence on Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Shahabadi, the scholar who initiated the young Ruhollah Khomeini into the mysteries of erfan.
In Egypt a vigorous young thinker named Muhammad Abduh followed al-Afghani’s cue. He strove, somewhat more systematically than al-Afghani, to refashion Islam into the basis for a modern ideology that could challenge the West on its own ground. He opposed certain traditions, like polygamy, as outmoded and un-Quranic, and he preached tolerance for other religions (specifically the Christian Copts of his homeland). This was a form of Islamism that did not yet suffer from the violent perversions of thought that were yet to come.
What Abduh did not provide his followers was a precise organizational recipe for achieving these ends. That job fell instead to another Egyptian, a young former schoolteacher by the name of Hassan al-Banna. Intensely opposed to the effects of British colonialism on traditional Egyptian society, Banna began to imagine a modern Muslim political party that would organize believers into an all-encompassing revivalist movement that contained a pronounced element of social activism. In 1928 he decided to give this idea concrete form by establishing an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, perhaps the first modern Islamist group, became the most influential Islamic political vehicle of the twentieth century, and its slogan—“Islam is the solution”—laid out the contours of a project that continues today. Egypt is the largest and most culturally influential country in the Arab world, and the Brotherhood eventually spawned affiliates in all the major countries of the Middle East. For centuries, scholars from all over the Muslim world have come to Cairo to study at al-Azhar University, the Islamic world’s leading academic institution. Among them were many Afghans, figures of considerable learning and stature who transmitted the new ideas of the Muslim Brothers back to their home country.
One of the most influential Islamists of the century was neither an Arab nor a Persian. Abul Ala Mawdudi was born under British colonial rule in India in 1903. Mawdudi chose a religious education, but for family reasons he ended up attending several seminaries rather than completing his studies at a single one, as was the norm. This exposure to a variety of schools, as well as his fluency in English, uniquely predisposed him to a vision of Islam that ignored parochial bounds. A talented publicist as well as a theologian, Mawdudi eventually gained control over a leading journal that he quickly turned into an outlet for his unorthodox views, which went further than just about anyone else’s in depicting Islam as a force for violent social change. “Islam is a revolutionary ideology and a revolutionary practice, which aims at destroying the social order of the world totally and rebuilding it from scratch,” he wrote in 1926, “and jihad (holy war) denotes the revolutionary struggle.”12 In this respect, he conceded, Islam bore a certain resemblance to other militant ideologies of the twentieth century, although with a crucial difference. One commentator on Mawdudi glosses his argument this way: “The Nazis and Marxists had enslaved other human beings, whereas Islam sought to free them from subjection to anything other than God.”13 It was, in any case, Mawdudi’s characterization of Islam as a modern revolutionary force that would resonate powerfully among his fellow Muslims in neighboring Afghanistan. Above all else, it was his vision of something he called “the Islamic state”—a form of government that was neither secular nor monarchic and promised a return, via rule by the righteous and the implementation of sharia, to the primal community of the Prophet and his followers—that inflamed the imagination of so many of his readers across the umma.
Mawdudi was no mere theorist. He founded a political party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, to further his aims. The Muslim establishment in the Raj did not know what to make of him. Mawdudi did not share the prevailing belief that Indian believers should focus on creating a new Muslim-majority country of their own when independence from Britain was achieved. For him it was not enough to have a state with a Muslim citizenry; what he sought was a state in which undiluted sharia had the full force of law and sovereignty belonged to God. Anything else, he said, was jahiliyya, the state of ignorance that had reigned before the Quran was presented to man. Capitalism, Communism, and all non-Islamic belief systems were taghut, idolatry. In 1977, when Muhammad Zia ul-Haq seized power in a coup, the general essentially paid tribute to the seductive power of Mawdudi’s ideas by placing himself at the head of the new Islamic sensibility that Mawdudi had spent so many years cultivating. He introduced noninterest banking, banned alcohol, and allowed religious leaders to try miscreants in sharia courts.
But it was, again, an Egyptian who gave the notion of the Islamic Party its most consequential expression. This was another Muslim Brother by the name of Sayyid Qutb. Like Banna, he was a teacher by profession, and in 1948, sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Education, he embarked on a study trip to the United States. He returned from his two-year stay appalled by what he had seen: shallow materialism, frantic pursuit of trivial pleasures, men and women freely mingling in public. His diatribes against American life after his return to Egypt soon cost him his job, and he found himself drawn deeper into his work for the Brotherhood, where he soon had a job running the propaganda department. At the same time, he was embarking on intensive self-study of the Quran, work that would soon bear significant literary fruit.
In 1952 a group of army officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the king and seized power. For a time Nasser flirted with the Brotherhood, and he even tried to recruit Qutb, one of its most prominent ideologists, into his own government. But an attempt to assassinate Nasser in 1954 gave the new president an excuse to crack down on his Islamist rivals, and he threw all of their major leaders, including Qutb, into jail. Qutb endured numerous bouts of torture during his first three years in detention, an experience that seems to have intensified his radicalism. Yet Qutb put the time to good use. He wrote two books, both of which would reverberate with unanticipated force in the Afghans’ bitter struggle against an alien and atheist regime.
One of them was a commentary on the Quran, a reading that subtly articulated Qutb’s vision of Islam as a powerful force for social change. The other, Milestones, inspired a generation of Islamist radicals with its tightly wound harangues about the apostasy of contemporary civilization and the corresponding urgency of the need for a government of God. It is a book that breathes a distinctly totalitarian spirit—and the notion of totality, which Qutb conflates with the Quranic notion of tawhid, pervades his argument. Islam, reflecting the all-encompassing oneness of God, is an overarching system that provides the conclusive answer to all spiritual, philosophical, and political concerns. Qutb took Mawdudi’s notion of modern-day jahiliyya, or ignorance, and deepened it. Only those states that acknowledged the sovereignty of God and the ascendance of the laws laid down in the Quran could be considered truly Islamic—and by this measure, all of the existing governments in the Muslim world were apostate regimes, regimes that could claim no legitimacy in the name of religion. (Here he was also picking up a line of argument from the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyyah, who had asserted that even governments that claimed to be Islamic could be resisted by force if they failed to follow proper Quranic precepts.)
The only way to restore Islam to its rightful place, Qutb concluded, was by overthrowing these governments. And the best way to do this was by establishing a small cadre of single-minded believers who would devote their lives to this cause. This was a concept that probably owed more to the Leninist notion of a revolutionary avant-garde than to original Quranic theology. But in this respect, too, Qutb was entirely of a piece with his fellow Islamic modernists, who were happy to raid their ideological rivals for any political tools that might come in handy.
No sooner had Qutb emerged from jail than the Egyptian authorities arrested him again. He never returned to freedom. In 1966 he was executed. But his ideas endured. In Iran, a religious student named Ali Khamenei translated Qutb’s books into Persian, and they found wide readership among the younger generation of militant young clerics. One of the Afghans who had studied at al-Azhar in Cairo, a scholar named Burhanuddin Rabbani, translated Mileposts into Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian, and distributed it to his students at the Theology Faculty of Kabul University. Later, Qutb’s avid readers included the Palestinian theoretician of jihad Abdullah Azzam as well as one of Azzam’s most avid students, a tall young Saudi named Osama bin Laden.
It was only in the 1970s that radical political Islam finally came into its own. Israel’s devastating defeat of the combined Arab armies in the Six-Day War in 1967 humiliated Nasser and the other secular leaders who had preached the gospel of socialism and Arab unity. This was partly a generational shift, partly a genuine spiritual crisis. Around the Arabic-speaking world, al-shahbab—“the youth”—were rejecting the leftist-nationalist slogans of their elders in favor of the statement of faith: “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.” Islam filled a spiritual void that the secular ideologies apparently could not; nor did it suffer from the burden of alien origins. In Egypt, university students began growing beards and agitating for segregated campus activities.14 Young women donned head scarves in a demonstrative display of their contempt for secular utopias. While their elders still preached the virtues of Karl Marx or Michel Aflaq (the architect of Baathism), this younger generation turned to al-Banna or Mawdudi for political answers.
The Islamists found one of their first battlegrounds in Lebanon, where civil war broke out in 1975. Here, too, Cold War rivalries combined to combustive effect in a country where the government was dominated by a Christian minority with close ties to France and other Western powers, while the Muslim majority—including a big Shiite population and a significant number of Palestinian refugees—gravitated toward Moscow as a natural “anti-imperialist” ally. The war enflamed identity politics in Lebanon, and among Muslims it accelerated a shift toward religious activism, especially among the economically marginalized Shiites. A Lebanese Islamist who fought in the war later explained his motivations to the writer Fawaz Gerges:
My friends and I felt that since the 1920s our leaders had been experimenting with bankrupt ideologies like Arab nationalism and socialism, which failed to liberate Palestine and restore our dignity as Arabs and Muslims. We thought political Islam was the only means to undo the wrongs. We also believed that those Western ideologies were merely ploys to divert Muslims from their noble goals. Our preachers and clerics often told us that Arabs would regain their glory only if they reclaimed Islam and established shariah. Lebanon, we thought, should not be the monopoly of Christians.15
The 1970s Islamic revival in the Arab countries came to be known as the sahwa, the “Awakening.” One of the places where it hit the hardest was Saudi Arabia, which was somewhat ironic. From the outside the Kingdom of Saud looked like a bastion of conservatism, tightly wrapped in the unassailable orthodoxy of Wahhabism, the sere version of ultrafundamentalism that the first king had officially adopted upon his assumption of power in 1932. For all its appearances, though, the fabulous influx of 1970s oil wealth had shaken the place to its foundations. A rising generation of young religious radicals felt that the visible presence of American oil companies and the growing popularity of Western-style television programs were leading to a dangerous loosening of mores. They began to find allies within the kingdom’s religious establishment, where some clerics worried that the deluge of gold unleashed by the oil bonanza was undermining their own position. Meanwhile, members of the Muslim Brotherhood fleeing persecution in Egypt were arriving in the kingdom to teach and spread their views.
Qutb’s brother Mohammed, who had also been imprisoned and tortured for his political engagement, emigrated to Saudi Arabia, where he became one of the most ardent propagators of Qutb’s message. He took care, however, to censor his brother’s earlier works, knowing that their revolutionary implications would trigger an allergic reaction from the paranoid Saudi authorities. As it was, Qutb’s contention that all existing governments in the Islamic world were actually apostate regimes did not go down well with the Saudi royal family, whose claim to power was based on their guardianship of the holy places in Mecca and Medina.
But it was this very element that could also be turned into a point of attack, and that was what finally happened in November 1979. Many of the events of 1979 are linked with the mysterious power of anniversaries. The Communist Party in Poland feared the incendiary potential of the nine-hundreth anniversary of the martyrdom of a saint. The thirtieth anniversary of the Communist takeover in China was shrewdly exploited by Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues to reinforce the sense of a new beginning. The forty-day Islamic mourning cycle proved a crucial dynamic for the revolution in Iran—as did the millennial expectations of Khomeini’s followers, whose habit of referring to him as the “imam” fanned a longing for the realm of justice promised by the reappearance of the Hidden Imam. Indeed, the Islamic calendar itself was one of the many issues that fueled the discontent of Iranian believers. The shah’s decision to introduce a new, non-Islamic calendar in the mid-1970s served as yet another bit of evidence to good Shiites that the monarch was an enemy of their religion—and gave Khomeini’s supporters yet another potent argument.
In the Julian calendar of the West, 1979 is not an especially evocative date. But this was not true for Muslims. In the Islamic calendar, which is based on the phases of the moon and takes as its start the Prophet’s exile from Mecca in 622, the Western month of November 1979 coincides with the dawning of the new year of 1400. According to certain traditions, that is the year that the Mahdi, the Islamic messiah, is supposed to reveal himself to the faithful and usher in a new age of eternal justice. For Iranians, this is the moment when historical time and the forces of eternity coincide,16 and this apocalyptic expectation fueled the fervor with which Khomeini was greeted as the country’s new savior. Some demonstrators wondered whether he might, indeed, turn out to be the Imam of the Age himself;17 some of the faithful even claimed to have seen his face on the moon.
In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a group of provincial zealots came up with a particularly fateful reading of the Mahdi myth. Like the majority of Saudis, they were not Shiite but Sunni, and they hailed from a remote corner of the kingdom that had largely missed out on the new prosperity. In November 1979, as pilgrims were arriving for the annual hajj, the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca, heavily armed members of the group took over the al-Masjid al-Haram, the Grand Mosque, and took thousands of pilgrims from around the world hostage. They then announced that one of their leaders, a young man named Abdullah Hamid Mohammed al-Qahtani, was the Mahdi, the long-prophesied redeemer of Islam. All Muslims, they said, were religiously obligated to obey his commands. The Saudi authorities declined to do this and immediately set about the task of clearing the mosque. It took them weeks, covertly assisted by a team of commandos lent to the kingdom by the French government, to kill or capture the hostage takers. In the end, according to official Saudi figures, 270 people—hostages, hostage takers, and members of the assault force—lost their lives. Foreign diplomats who managed to get access to local hospitals concluded that the actual death toll was much higher, closer to 1,000.18
The leader of the group, Juhayman al-Otaibi, was captured and executed a few weeks after the end of the siege. But his ideas would prove prophetic. He had categorically denounced the corruption of the Saudi regime and rejected the presence of infidel foreigners in a country that was supposed to be the undefiled home to Mecca and Medina, two of the three most holy places in Islam. (The third is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.) A subsequent generation of Saudi radicals—Osama bin Laden among them—would not forget.19
The seizure of the Grand Mosque had another important consequence. It forced the Saudi royal family to confront the reality of the sense of discontent that permeated society. Their response was two-pronged. First, domestically, the government reverted to a policy of unbending conservatism in all matters even remotely associated with religion; the idea was to restore its credentials among the ultraconservative religious establishment, which had proved conspicuously unwilling to offer its support during the mosque crisis, as well as to undermine those who accused the government of slackening in its observance of Islamic mores. Second, the Saudis decided to use foreign policy as a safety valve. The regime ramped up its efforts to spread the Wahhabi creed and to further Islamic causes more generally outside the borders of the kingdom. This, they hoped, would bolster their image as defenders of the true faith and also offer opportunities for shunting off malcontents. It would be years until the full implications of this effort became clear, and nowhere would the consequences be more dramatic than in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, of course, was not an Arab country. In many ways, given its underdevelopment and its poverty, it was peripheral to the rest of the Muslim world. It had contributed no fresh ideas, no original thought, to the great Islamic revivalist movement. Yet, thanks to the quirks of geopolitics, it was fated to become the most prominent arena for the ideas of Sunni Islamism.
Afghan political Islam did not trace its lineage to a holy city or a famous seminary. It started, instead, at Kabul University. The university, founded in the 1930s by a reformist king, had expanded steadily over the years, as the nation’s leaders tried desperately to push Afghanistan forward into the modern era. Still, even by the early 1970s, when it was still the only institution of higher education in the country, it boasted a student population of merely twenty-five hundred. The foreign aid that had poured into Afghanistan in the 1950s and 1960s had given the university a host of new buildings, most of them in the stripped-down concrete modernist style typical of the period. The faculty included quite a few foreigners—not all from the East bloc—and they brought with them exposure to the great political debates in the world at large.
The university was the one place, aside from the army, where Afghans came together from all over the country. As such it was a unique melting pot, one that brought together young men and women of radically different origins. Yet the student body was also riven by deep social differences. Some of the students made it in because they came from prominent families; others managed to get through the application process by dint of sheer hard work and talent. The privileged students, knowing that their instructors would not stand up to them, took liberties with university rules and sometimes engaged in lax ethical behavior—drinking, gambling, patronizing prostitutes—that irritated the students of a more religious bent. For many students, especially those from provincial backgrounds, the confrontation with the loose ways of the modern university was a deeply alienating experience.20
Add to this, then, the fundamental ideological conflicts that were already beginning to tear the country apart. Many of the students were active in Communist politics, and they regarded their more religious classmates as misguided rubes. As one student at the time would later recall, Khalqis kicked soccer balls at Muslim students as they prayed, defecated in the bowls used for ritual ablutions, and ostentatiously smoked or ate near those who were observing the fast. Under Daoud, the more secular-minded students could act in the knowledge that their views enjoyed the tacit approval of the state.
In the late 1960s the Muslim students began to fight back. One of their most passionate leaders was a star student by the name of Abdur Rahim Niazi. Niazi belonged to the new generation of students who believed that Islam, far from representing a backward culture, actually offered a complete range of solutions to contemporary problems. This new cohort of activists, many of them centered on the university’s Faculty of Sharia, attended lectures by professors who had attended al-Azhar University in Cairo. These men had imbibed the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, and propagated its ideas among their charges when they returned to Afghanistan. It was one of these professors, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who had translated Qutb’s works into Dari.
In 1969, Niazi formed a group called the Muslim Youth Organization, which aimed to work toward the establishment of a true Islamic government. Taking their cue from the Egyptians, the Muslim Youth leaders organized their members into conspiratorial cells; these activists would serve as the avant-garde of the revolution that would capture the state for Islam. Afghanistan’s young Islamists represented a completely new breed. Just like their Iranian counterparts, these new religious militants understood that they were engaged in a struggle for survival not only against their own dictator but also against the forces of the Left more generally, and they set out to redefine their faith in terms of a modern-day political creed. Islam, the radicals argued, was more “progressive” than Communism. Niazi wrote: “Fourteen centuries back, Islam taught a very revolutionary and logical lesson for achieving revolution. God said to do jihad in the path of God with honesty. The establishment of an Islamic government requires that kind of jihad. . . . Today truth has been replaced by tyranny, and the only way that has been left has been to invite the people to truth and untiring militancy in this path.”21
What was particularly striking about the Muslim Youth was its comparative lack of traditional religious leaders. In Shiite Iran, the clergy had a long tradition of playing an independent political role, and it was the clerics—or at least some of them—who had adapted to the changing mental environment of the late twentieth century. In Afghanistan, the state had tended to co-opt the mullahs by offering them emoluments, and this had undermined their status in the eyes of many ordinary Afghans—along with the petty corruption that plagued religious notables. For all of these reasons, many Afghans tended to look with suspicion upon members of the ulama who tried to play a political role. Niazi and his generation also reproached the religious establishment for its failure to stand up to the increasingly assertive Communists.
Niazi, a smart and charismatic man who had a galvanizing influence on the nascent Islamist movement, died of cancer in 1970; it is interesting to speculate what his role might have been had he lived longer. In his place a number of other young firebrands came to the fore. One of them was the engineering student Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He was a member of the Ghilzai tribal confederacy that had often opposed the rival Durranis, the clan that provided Afghanistan with many of its leaders right up until the death of Mohammed Daoud. He came to the university after a brief stint at the military academy. In 1972 he was jailed for killing a student Maoist during one of the perennial feuds between young Islamists and leftist radicals. For the other Islamists, this was merely tangible proof of Hekmatyar’s radical credentials, and they rewarded him with a leading role in the Muslim Youth.22
To this day, there are those in Afghanistan who insist that Hekmatyar came to the Islamic cause only after an initial flirtation with the Communists. Hekmatyar and his colleagues deny this. What is certain, however, is that Hekmatyar envisioned Hezb-e Islami, the “Party of Islam” he founded in 1977, as just the kind of organization that Qutb had mapped out in Milestones: an Islamic revolutionary avant-garde based on Leninist conspiratorial principles. After Niazi’s death, Rabbani had transformed the Muslim Youth Organization into a party called the Jamiat-e Islami, the “Islamic Society” (a name that mimicked the party founded by Mawdudi in Pakistan). When the group failed in its attempt to foment a coup against Daoud in 1975, Hekmatyar broke away, seizing the opportunity to create an organization that would be entirely beholden to him. Strictly hierarchical, Hezb-i Islami was supposed to represent the small, elite spear point of the violent struggle that would one day transform Afghanistan into an Islamic state.
Just as Lenin directed his choicest invective at social democrats and other moderate socialists, Hekmatyar reviled the representatives of traditional religion. His Hezbis assailed village mullahs as blockheaded traditionalists who still supported the long-deposed king and were willing to keep the secular state as long as they continued to receive their accustomed perks. The traditionalists were also accused of rejecting modern science and technology, of purveying superstition, and of clinging to local Sufi traditions of saint worship—all of which was depicted by the modernizing Islamists as a rejection of the pure, “rationalist” monotheism of the Prophet’s original message.23 Hezb-i Islami shared some of these ideas with Rabbani’s Jamiat; where the two parties differed strongly was in their ethnic makeup. The Jamiat was somewhat more diverse, though Tajiks (including Rabbani and Massoud) were overrepresented among its members. Hekmatyar’s organization, by contrast, consisted almost entirely of Pashtuns. As the years went by, Hezb-i Islami also gained a reputation as a much more radical group, while Jamiat tended to take a more pragmatic and inclusive line. As several Afghanistan scholars have pointed out, the social and ethnic divide between the two groups strikingly paralleled that between Khalq and Parcham, the two factions whose mutual animosity had such a crippling effect on the Afghan Communists.
Ahmed Shah Massoud, by now a hardened veteran of Islamist infighting, opted to maintain his distance from these battles. His own readings of Qutb and Mawdudi had strengthened his belief in the need for an Islamic state, and he remained a member of Jamiat, technically subordinate to Rabbani. But he had long since decided to fight his own war against the Communists, and to do it entirely on his own terms. His experience among the Nuristanis had given him valuable insights into the nature of this new war. In July 1979, at the age of twenty-five, he once again returned to his home turf in the Panjshir Valley, the place where he had launched the doomed rebellion in 1975.24 Now, thanks to the mishaps of the Khalqi regime, the Panjshiris were much more receptive to his arguments about the anti-Islamic character of the government. But this did not necessarily make up for inadequate resources. Later Massoud told an interviewer that he began his new uprising with thirty followers, seventeen rifles of various makes, and the equivalent of $130 in cash.25
Massoud, however, did have several important assets that he could draw upon. One of them was the Panjshir itself. For anyone intent on fighting a guerrilla war against vastly superior forces, terrain like this is the great equalizer. About sixty miles long, the Panjshir plunges from the high passes of the Hindu Kush down to the open plains just north of the Afghan capital of Kabul. A bewildering labyrinth of canyons and gorges feed into the valley, whose steep walls make life hard for would-be invaders. Most of the valley is just wide enough to allow for a single road that winds steeply up along terrifying defiles. Here and there ledges and plateaus allow for terraces where farmers grow apricots, almonds, and wheat.
The people who live in this place inhabit a relatively self-contained world, and their spirit of fierce independence was a major resource for Massoud to draw on. In 1979, however, it was still not quite enough. Massoud and his tiny army attacked government posts where they could find them, but the Khalqis and their Soviet advisers fought back ferociously, bolstered by their jet fighters, tanks, and helicopters. Massoud and his fighters held out for forty days. By August they had had enough. Battered by government air strikes, he and his band of core followers withdrew from the valley and set off for their safe haven in Pakistan. It was a brutal journey, over the high passes and down through the mountains to Peshawar on the other side. Massoud had been wounded in the leg, and one can only imagine how he managed to make the trip. It was a small beginning, to be sure. But it was a beginning that put Massoud in a good position to exploit the situation that was soon to come.