1979 and After: Iran's Revolution and the Islamic Revival

Three events of 1979 set the agenda for the next two decades. In Iran a revolution brought to power Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and a doctrine he had set out in 1970: that in the absence of the twelfth imam a qualified jurist should rule. In Mecca, in the first hour of the Islamic year 1400, armed followers of a Saudi preacher seized the Grand Mosque and proclaimed the Mahdi. And at the end of the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, drawing Arab volunteers into a war that a Palestinian scholar, ʿAbdallāh ʿAzzām, declared the duty of every Muslim. Over the following two decades Iran and Saudi Arabia competed to speak for Islam; Saudi money spread a Salafi reading of the faith through schools and mosques far from Arabia; Pakistan’s military ruler wrote Qur’anic punishments into criminal law; an Iranian fatwa against a British novelist turned a literary quarrel into a global crisis; and from the Afghan war came the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Most of this was new. A Shia state ruled by a cleric, a call to kill issued across borders by a head of state, and a jihad declared by a private network against a world power have no real precedent in the earlier chapters of this series. Majority

This chapter tells that story as religious history: what each movement claimed, how far its claims were new, and how other Muslims answered. The intellectual roots of political Islam, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Sayyid Quṭb and Mawdūdī, are in §11; Wahhabism’s origins are in §10; the events of 2001 and after are in §13. It stops at describing religious change: the wars of these years are mentioned only where they changed how Islam was practised or argued.

Timeline

Iran: a state ruled by a jurist

The revolution

The movement that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah in 1978–79 was a coalition: clerics and their followers in the bazaar and the mosques, liberal nationalists, and leftists from the communist Tudeh party to the Islamic-Marxist Mojahedin-e Khalq. Protests began in Qom in January 1978, the Shah left Iran on 16 January 1979, Khomeini returned from exile in France on 1 February, and the old government fell on 11 February.^[3]​^[4] Consensus A referendum produced an Islamic Republic, proclaimed on 1 April 1979. Over the next three years the clerical wing defeated or destroyed its former allies, and Khomeini became the arbiter of the state.^[4]​^[24] Consensus

Historians differ on why the revolution took a religious form: whether because the clergy had the only nationwide organization the Shah had not dismantled, because Shia symbols of martyrdom and injustice gave the opposition a language, or because Khomeini himself outmanoeuvred the others. Most combine all three.^[3]​^[24]​^[4] Majority

Khomeini’s doctrine

Shia law had long given qualified jurists some of the imam’s authority while he is hidden (§6): the care of orphans and endowments, judgment in disputes, the collection of religious taxes. A few jurists argued for more. Aḥmad Narāqī (d. 1829) held that the jurist’s guardianship could extend to political authority, but no one tried to build a state on the idea.^[24] Majority

Between 21 January and 8 February 1970, in exile at Najaf in Iraq, Khomeini gave nineteen lectures that turned the idea into a programme. Islamic law, he argued, already contains everything a government needs; what is missing is the will to apply it; and in the imam’s absence the people best qualified to rule are those who know the law, the jurists. The lectures were published that year as Ḥokūmat-e eslāmī (“Islamic Government”) and circulated among his students; Hamid Algar’s translation appeared in 1981.^[1]​^[2] Consensus

Said Amir Arjomand calls the resulting state a revolution within Shiism as well as in Iran: never before had Shia jurists ruled a state in their own name, and the doctrine broke with the long tradition, associated with the leading jurists of the twentieth century, that clerics should advise and restrain rulers rather than become them.^[24] Majority The constitution approved by referendum on 2–3 December 1979 made the principle law. Its fifth article, as revised in 1989, gives the leadership of the community during the occultation to “the just and pious faqih, who is fully aware of the circumstances of his age”; its fourth requires every law to rest on Islamic criteria.^[9] Consensus

The doctrine did not command the Shia world. Olivier Roy notes that almost all of the dozen or so grand ayatollahs living in the revolution’s early years rejected Khomeini’s version of it; among them, in Najaf, the great teacher Abū l-Qāsim al-Khūʾī dismissed it as a basis for Islamic government.^[25] Majority Shia religious authority remained divided between those who accept the leader in Tehran as their source of guidance and those who follow other senior jurists. Consensus

War as sacred defence

On 22 September 1980 Iraq invaded Iran. The war lasted until 20 August 1988 and killed, on most estimates, between 450,000 and 500,000 people.^[10] Majority on the toll. Each side spoke the language of religion and history. Iran called it the “Sacred Defence”; its volunteer militia, the Basij, drew young men and boys to the front with the imagery of Karbalāʾ and martyrdom (§5). The secular Baʿthist government of Iraq cast itself as heir to the Arab victory over the Persians at al-Qādisiyya in the 630s (§4).^[10] Consensus When Khomeini accepted a ceasefire in July 1988, he compared the decision to drinking poison. Consensus

The war made the revolution’s religious language permanent in Iranian public life: the cult of the martyr, the cemeteries, the murals. It also fixed a Sunni–Shia dimension onto a state rivalry. Iran’s attempt to export its revolution, and the Gulf monarchies’ fear of it, coloured Sunni–Shia relations for the rest of the century. Majority

Mecca, 1400

The seizure

At dawn on 20 November 1979, the first day of the Islamic year 1400, several hundred armed men, on most counts between 300 and 600, took control of the Grand Mosque of Mecca during the morning prayer. Their leader, Juhayman al-ʿUtaybī, a former member of the Saudi National Guard, presented his brother-in-law Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh al-Qaḥṭānī to the crowd as the Mahdi, the redeemer expected at the end of time.^[7]​^[8] Consensus

Juhayman had come out of a pietist movement, al-Jamāʿa al-Salafiyya al-Muḥtasiba, “the Salafi group that commands right and forbids wrong”, founded in the mid-1960s by followers of the Syrian-Albanian hadith scholar Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī. The senior Saudi scholar ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Bāz had at first supported it. Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix, using Juhayman’s own pamphlets and interviews with former members, showed that the group was not a political organization but a millenarian offshoot of Saudi Salafism: it denounced the royal family as corrupt and illegitimate, rejected television, images and the employment of women, and condemned the official scholars for keeping silent.^[8] Majority

The government needed a religious ruling before it could fight inside Islam’s holiest sanctuary, where bloodshed is forbidden. The senior scholars, led by Ibn Bāz, gave it. Saudi troops, advised by officers of the French gendarmerie’s GIGN, retook the mosque on 4 December after two weeks of fighting; al-Qaḥṭānī was killed. By official figures 127 soldiers, 117 insurgents and 26 pilgrims died. Sixty-three of the captured rebels were publicly beheaded on 9 January 1980 in eight Saudi cities.^[7] Consensus on the events; Majority on the figures, which some writers think were understated.

The response

The royal family’s answer was not to weaken the religious establishment but to strengthen it. Through the 1980s the scholars gained authority over education, the media and public morals, and the government, which had begun to allow some social change in the 1970s, reversed it.^[26] Majority Lacroix describes the following decade as the high point of the Ṣaḥwa, the “Awakening”, a movement of preachers and teachers who combined the Wahhabi creed (§10) with the political activism of the Muslim Brotherhood (§11), and who turned against the government after it invited American troops into the kingdom in 1990.^[26] Majority

Afghanistan and the Arab volunteers

Soviet troops entered Afghanistan at the end of December 1979 to support a communist government against a widening rural revolt. The Afghan resistance called itself the mujāhidīn, “those who wage jihad”, and was armed by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Consensus

The man who turned that war into a cause for Arabs was ʿAbdallāh ʿAzzām (1941–1989), a Palestinian scholar trained at al-Azhar who had taught in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In a widely circulated tract, Defence of the Muslim Lands, he argued that when unbelievers occupy Muslim land, jihad becomes an individual obligation (farḍ ʿayn) on every Muslim able to fight, not a collective one that others can fulfil, and that Afghanistan was such a case.^[13] Majority In 1984 he and Osama bin Laden founded the Services Bureau (Maktab al-Khidamāt) in Peshawar to receive and direct volunteers.^[13] Consensus

How many came, and how much they mattered, is disputed. Estimates of the foreign volunteers range from a few thousand to tens of thousands over the decade; Hegghammer stresses that their military role was small beside the Afghan fighters, and that their importance lay in what they took home.^[13] Contested on numbers. The Soviet army withdrew in February 1989. ʿAzzām was killed by a car bomb in Peshawar on 24 November 1989; who killed him has never been established.^[13] Consensus

Hegghammer calls ʿAzzām the founder of a new kind of movement: one that asked Muslims to fight for other Muslims anywhere in the world, regardless of their own state, and that treated the obligation as binding whatever their scholars or governments said.^[13] Majority Classical law had placed the declaration of war in the hands of the ruler. That a private scholar, and then private networks, claimed the right was itself a change. Majority

Pakistan: Islamization from above

General Muḥammad Ziyāʾ al-Ḥaqq (Zia ul-Haq), who seized power in Pakistan in 1977, made the Islamization of law the centrepiece of his rule. In 1979 he issued five ordinances, the Hudood Ordinances, which introduced the fixed punishments (ḥudūd) of classical law into criminal law: for theft, for unlawful sexual relations (zinā), for false accusation of zinā, and for drinking, with a fifth setting out the manner of whipping. A Federal Shariat Court, set up in 1980, could strike down laws it found un-Islamic.^[5]​^[6] Consensus

The zina ordinance had the largest effect. Because it required four witnesses to prove rape, but treated a woman’s own complaint as possible evidence of sex outside marriage, women who reported rape could themselves be prosecuted. The lawyers Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani documented such cases, and the number of women in Pakistani prisons rose sharply during the 1980s.^[27] Majority The law was amended in 2006 to return rape to the ordinary penal code.^[5] Consensus

Vali Nasr argues that Zia’s Islamization was less a religious revival than a strategy of state power: it gave a military regime legitimacy and a constituency, and made religious parties partners of the state.^[6] Majority The same years saw Saudi and Gulf money fund new madrasas in Pakistan’s north-west, many of them Deobandi, which educated Afghan refugees and Pakistani boys alike.^[21] Majority

Saudi Arabia and the spread of Salafism

Money, missions and universities

The Saudi state had built an international religious apparatus before the revolution of 1979: the Islamic University of Medina, founded in 1961 to train students from across the Muslim world, and the Muslim World League, founded in Mecca in 1962 under the patronage of Crown Prince Fayṣal. After the oil price rises of the 1970s, and with new urgency after 1979, it funded mosques, schools, textbooks, scholarships and preachers abroad, much of it through such bodies and through private charities. Consensus

How much was spent is not known. Figures of $75 billion, $87 billion and “upwards of $100 billion” over several decades circulate widely; none comes with published accounts behind it. Peter Mandaville, editing a set of case studies of Saudi religious influence, warns against figures built on “non-specific hearsay” and finds the effects real but uneven, often mediated by local movements with their own agendas.^[28] Contested on the scale; Majority that Saudi funding spread a Salafi reading of Islam. Political on the modern use of the figures.

What Salafism is

The name comes from al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ, “the pious predecessors”, the first three generations of Muslims. Salafis aim to follow their example directly, from the Qur’an and the hadith, and reject practices they regard as later innovations (bidʿa): saint veneration, many Sufi rituals (§7), and, for many, strict adherence to a single school of law (§6). Salafism overlaps with the Wahhabi tradition of Saudi Arabia (§10) and with al-Albānī’s hadith-centred teaching, but it has other modern roots as well (§10, §11). Majority

Quintan Wiktorowicz, in an influential article of 2006, argued that Salafis share a creed but divide over how to act on it. Purists, the majority, concentrate on teaching and correct practice and avoid politics, often counselling obedience to rulers. Politicos engage in politics and criticise governments, as the Saudi Ṣaḥwa did. Jihadis hold that armed struggle is required against rulers or foreign powers they judge to be at war with Islam.^[29] Majority The typology has been refined since, but its central point stands: most Salafis are not jihadis, and the strongest critics of the jihadis have often been other Salafis. Majority

The Rushdie affair

On 26 September 1988 Viking published Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in London. Its dream sequences include a prophet called Mahound, a scene drawing on the early reports about verses praising the goddesses of Mecca (§3), and a brothel in which prostitutes take the names of the Prophet’s wives.^[17] Consensus on the content. Many Muslims, most of whom had not read it, understood it as an insult to the Prophet. India banned its import on 5 October 1988; in Bradford, in northern England, protesters burned a copy on 14 January 1989; on 12 February six protesters were killed in Islamabad during an attack on the American Cultural Center.^[17]​^[30] Consensus

On 14 February 1989 Radio Tehran broadcast a statement by Khomeini calling on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world” to kill the author and all those involved in the book’s publication who knew its contents.^[18]​^[17] Consensus A religious foundation offered a bounty of millions of dollars. The novel’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in July 1991; its Italian translator and its Norwegian publisher were wounded. Consensus

What made the statement new was its reach. A jurist’s fatwā is an opinion, binding on those who follow him; Khomeini was also the head of a state, and he pronounced a sentence of death on a British citizen without trial, to be carried out anywhere.^[30] Majority Muslim reactions were divided. Many who condemned the novel rejected the sentence: a scholar of al-Azhar argued that blood must not be shed except after a trial, and the Iranian ayatollah Mehdi Rohani accused Khomeini of respecting neither international law nor Islamic law.^[17] Majority Others endorsed it. In 1998 Iran’s foreign minister said that his government would take no action to threaten Rushdie’s life, though the ruling was not withdrawn.^[30] Consensus

Kenan Malik argues that the affair’s lasting effect was in Britain and Europe, where it turned immigrants of South Asian origin into a political constituency defined by religion, “Muslims”, rather than by origin or class.^[30] Contested Political on the whole affair, whose lessons are still fought over in arguments about free speech and blasphemy. The novel’s sources, the early reports of the “Satanic verses” and how later Muslim scholarship rejected them, are in §3.

Movements of the 1980s and 1990s

The revolution and the Afghan war were not the only sources of the Islamist movements of these decades. Most had local roots, many in the Muslim Brotherhood (§11), and each became a question of national politics as much as of religion. Four illustrate the range. Political on all four.

• Lebanon: Hezbollah. Founded in 1982 among Lebanese Shia during the Israeli invasion, with training and money from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah published its programme in an open letter on 16 February 1985, pledging loyalty to Iran’s leader as jurist.^[11]​^[12] It is the clearest case of Khomeini’s doctrine adopted outside Iran. Consensus
• Palestine: Hamas. Founded in Gaza in December 1987, at the start of the first intifada, by Shaykh Aḥmad Yāsīn and others from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its charter of August 1988 framed the conflict in religious terms, treating the land of Palestine as an Islamic endowment (waqf); in 2017 its leaders issued a new document and described the charter as historical.^[14]​^[15] Consensus on the documents.
• Algeria: the FIS. The Islamic Salvation Front, founded in 1989, won the first round of parliamentary elections on 26 December 1991 with 188 seats to the ruling party’s 16. On 11 January 1992 the army cancelled the second round; the FIS was dissolved in March. The civil war that followed, fought between the army and armed Islamist groups, of which the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) was the most violent, lasted until about 2002 and killed tens of thousands.^[19] Consensus on events; Contested on the death toll and on responsibility for many massacres.
• Afghanistan: the Taliban. Formed in 1994 around Mullah Muḥammad ʿUmar in Kandahar, from students (ṭālibān) of Deobandi madrasas, many of them in Pakistan, the Taliban took Kabul on 27 September 1996 and declared an Islamic Emirate, recognised only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. They banned girls from school and women from most work, and enforced dress and beard rules through a religious police.^[21] Consensus Ahmed Rashid describes their creed as a mixture of Deobandi teaching and Pashtun village custom, far removed from the scholarly tradition of the Deoband seminary in India.^[21] Majority In March 2001 they dynamited the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan as idols, despite appeals from other Muslim governments, among them a Pakistani delegation sent to plead with Mullah ʿUmar. Consensus

Olivier Roy argued in 1994 that political Islam had already failed: the Islamist movements had not produced, and could not produce, a working Islamic state, and were turning into movements of social and moral conservatism.^[25] Gilles Kepel’s history of the same movements reached a similar conclusion at the end of the decade.^[31] Contested: the movements’ later history has been used to argue both ways.

Al-Qaeda

As the Soviet army left Afghanistan, some of the Arab volunteers looked for a new war. At meetings in Peshawar in August 1988, Osama bin Laden, the son of a Saudi construction magnate, agreed with a group of Egyptian and other veterans to form a base, al-qāʿida, for continuing jihad.^[16] Majority on the date and circumstances. ʿAzzām wanted the volunteers to fight where Muslim land was occupied; the Egyptians around Ayman al-Ẓawāhirī wanted to overthrow governments they regarded as apostate. Bin Laden’s network eventually took a third course: war against the United States, which he saw as the power behind both.^[16]​^[13] Majority

In August 1996, from Afghanistan, bin Laden issued a declaration of war against the Americans “occupying the land of the two holy places”, Saudi Arabia, where US troops had been based since 1990. On 23 February 1998 the London newspaper al-Quds al-ʿArabī published a statement in the name of a “World Islamic Front”, signed by bin Laden, al-Ẓawāhirī and leaders of groups in Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh, declaring that killing Americans and their allies, civilian and military, was an individual duty for every Muslim able to do it.^[22]​^[23] Consensus On 7 August 1998 bombs at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killed 224 people, most of them Africans.^[16] Consensus

The 1998 statement took ʿAzzām’s argument for an individual duty and turned it against civilians in any country. It was issued as a fatwa by men who were not, by any traditional standard, qualified to issue one; bin Laden had no formal religious training.^[23] Majority The great majority of Muslim scholars and religious bodies, Sunni and Shia, rejected the killing of civilians that it called for, before and after 2001 (§13). Majority

A different revival: women reading the texts

The same decades produced a quieter movement with a longer future. In 1987 the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi published Le harem politique (in English, The Veil and the Male Elite, 1991), which re-examined the hadith used to limit women’s public role and the men who had transmitted them, applying the classical science of transmitters (§0) to argue that some were unreliable.^[32] Majority In 1992 the African-American scholar Amina Wadud, then teaching in Malaysia, published Qur’an and Woman in Kuala Lumpur, a reading of the Qur’an’s verses on gender that argued from the text, not from later law, for the moral equality of women and men.^[20] Consensus on what they argued. Wadud was among the founders of Sisters in Islam in Malaysia. Such work became known as “Islamic feminism”, a label some of its writers accepted and others rejected; its later history, and the arguments it provoked, are in §13. Majority

The evidence

Primary sources

What is absent

• A Shia state ruled by jurists before 1979. Jurists had advised and resisted rulers, and the Safavid shahs had patronised them (§9), but none had ruled in their own name. Majority
• Agreement among senior Shia jurists on Khomeini’s doctrine. Most rejected it then; many outside Iran still do. Majority
• Audited figures for Saudi religious spending abroad. The widely quoted totals have no published basis. Consensus
• A single Muslim response to Rushdie. Positions ran from support for the death sentence to rejection of both the book and the sentence. Consensus
• Traditional religious credentials for al-Qaeda’s leaders. Neither bin Laden nor al-Ẓawāhirī was a trained jurist. Majority

Debates

Why did the Iranian revolution become Islamic?

Majority that all three mattered; Contested on their weight.

How much did Saudi money change Islam?

Some writers credit Saudi funding with a global shift towards stricter, more literal religion; others, including Mandaville’s contributors, find its effects uneven and dependent on local actors, and note that the headline figures have no published source.^[28] Contested; Political.

Did political Islam fail?

Roy and Kepel argued in the 1990s that Islamist movements had failed to build Islamic states and were turning into social movements; their critics point to the movements’ continued electoral and military strength after 2001.^[25]​^[31] Contested

Further reading