Fascinating look into the birth of Al Qaeda

Concord Monitor ^ | November 25. 2007 | Thomas Lippman

[nuconvert]

Thomas Lippman

Washington Post

November 25. 2007

The subtitle of Yaroslav Trofimov's fascinating and important book about the 1979 takeover of the Great Mosque in Mecca by heavily armed fanatics refers to that event as "the forgotten uprising." Perhaps it has been forgotten here but not in the Muslim Middle East, where it was a seminal event of the region's most traumatic year in modern times.

That year began with the Iranian revolution and ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In between, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, radicalizing the Palestinians. Saddam Hussein took power in Iraq. And the former prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was hanged by the general who overthrew him, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq - the leader who would turn the struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan into a religious war that inspired zealots such as Osama bin Laden.

As Trofimov notes, the struggle over the mosque in Mecca, birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and of Islam itself, is the least known event in that sequence because most of the radicals who seized the shrine were executed and just about everyone else involved, including senior officials of the Saudi Arabian government, long refused to talk about it.

The mosque's seizure humiliated the Saudi regime, which bases its legitimacy on its role as upholder of Islam and keeper of the faith's holy places; the kingdom's leaders at first refused to acknowledge that it had happened and later tried to minimize its importance.

Now, in a remarkable feat of reporting, Trofimov, a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, has pierced that veil of secrecy with The Siege Of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeda. He found and interviewed Saudis who wished to stay unknown,

[what's up]

1979...the fateful year.

I believe the Peanut Farmer was in charge then...

[SolidWood]

In your other thread a I was talking about the disastrous year of 1979. Nice coincidence. Thanks for the article.

[Puddleglum]

bump to remember to read this book

[nuconvert]

This significant event was overlooked here, because it occurred about 2 weeks after the hostages were taken in Tehran.

Interesting timing

[woofie]

As for the errors of the United States, Trofimov is equally blunt. Policymakers in Washington completely misunderstood what Uteybi represented - he was a home-grown Sunni Muslim, but they thought he was a Shiite agent of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini - and drew the wrong conclusions. Trofimov is especially critical of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, who envisioned the rise of violence-prone Muslim zealotry as a tool that could be useful in combatting Soviet communism rather than as a threat to the West.

[Casaubon]

nice read

yup jimmah was the man at the time.

“as a tool to fight Communism” I died laughing.

[Pontiac]

"At the time," Trofimov explains, "such an embrace of the Wahhabi orthodoxy seemed like a wise survival policy for the House of Saud.

Appeasement never works.

I also question the wisdom of quickly executing the rebels. It is much wiser to slowly extract every last bit of intelligence from them. Who are their allies? Who are their Imams?

Only after you know every thing there is to know about who these men are how they came to do this deed and you have their allies in your hands can you kill them.

[proxy_user]

They were probably afraid if they didn’t execute them quickly, there would be either new attacks to free them, or political pressure not to execute them.

[G Larry]

For a more complete look at the history of A.Q. read “The Looming Tower” by Lawrence Wright.

[antinomian]

This book was featured on BookTV and you can watch it here.

[nuconvert]

Thank you

[GOPJ]

bump for later