Nov 16, 2025
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My Half Century With Islam, Part 4
by Doniphan Blair
A founder of Islamic modernism, Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-'97), was probably a Persian Shi'a but preferred to be known as a Sunni Afghan, hence his name. illo: unknown
Continued from My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
Return to My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
Return to My Half Century With Islam, Part 1
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.
ALL CIVILIZATIONS ARE MONOTHEISMS
insomuch they’re rules-based, share the social construct of increased ethics and cooperation, and are universalist. Despite their stupendous suffering and occasional cynicism, often expressed in humor, most Jews assumed the other monotheists would eventually recognize this obvious fact. They were mistaken. Many Muslims and Christians rejected the inherent equality and tolerance of monotheism, even after it helped inspire the American Constitution and the elimination of slavery, a pattern of prejudice continued among communists and fascists. Sadly, monotheism has long been gamed by charlatans, cult leaders and false messiahs as well as authoritarians, who role play Islamic, Christian or Jewish values but lust for the idolatry of personal or tribal benefits, despite the fact that “[a] civilization that builds on the basis of blood is a tribe, a tribe that builds on the basis of ideas is a civilization,” as I noted in my “The Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto”.
Salafists Try to Make Islam Great Again
The Wahhabis were resisted from their mid-18th century beginning by liberal Muslims, first the preachers in Wahhab’s own family, then those in Mecca. Indeed, Islam’s most sacred city was famous for tolerance and creativity pre-Islam and that tradition continued, especially when it welcomes millions of visitors during the Hajj. Making the pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the “Five Pillars of Islam” (but only if a devotee can afford it), and Muslims from all over the world came to pray, talk, trade and sometimes marry, since women often attended unveiled, or be entertained and enlightened by Sufi storytellers and theologians. During Wahhab's Hajj, with his devotees, “the qadi [head judge] of Mecca pronounced them to be unbelievers, in view of the well-known principle, based on ‘Hadith’, that whoever without good reason denounces a fellow Muslim as an unbeliever himself enters that category,” (Hamid Algars, “Wahhabism”, 2002).
The Wahhabis were so unpopular, in fact, they were driven from Mecca in 1811, eight years after conquering it, by Egypt’s new ruler, Muhammad Ali Pasha, a military genius backed by hardened Albanian troops. Ali Pasha was also a liberal Muslim, probably a Bektashi Sufi (a tariqa which allows alcohol), who opened Egypt to the West, by reviving the multicultural, scholarly center and port of Alexandria. The Ottomans followed suit in 1839 with top-down reforms, called “Tanzimat,” which introduced elections and later full citizenship for Greeks, Armenians and even Jews, including the right to serve in the army (important for men to prove their capacity and status, unfortunately, just in time for WWI).
Meanwhile, "The Nahda," the Arab Enlightenment, bubbled up from Arab street, driven by writers and diplomats, ranging from progressive modernists to conservatives or clandestine Wahhabis. One of the best-known was the activist and scholar Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897), who travelled throughout Europe as well as the Middle East, Persia and India teaching, publishing and sometimes plotting, including assassinations. His most famous disciple, Muḥammad Abduh (1849-1905), became Egypt’s Grand Mufti (religious head) and famously liberal. Indeed, he allowed figurative art (after visiting European museums), often quoted “The Quran”’s “No compulsion” line, amplified women’s rights, and inspired Egypt’s 1919 Revolution. In fact, many Middle Easterners adopted western ideas, tools and goods, which radically altered lives and life spans, but their democracy was in its infancy, their institutions were archaic, and their leaders were often corrupt. Thus the poor and disenfranchised were forced toward Salafism, as Wahhabism came to be known, after incorporating Islamist innovations from India and elsewhere.
Farida Mazar Spyropoulos, a Syrian dancer married to a Greek restauranteur, introduced belly dancing, Middle Eastern romance and the 'Hoochee-Coochee' dance to America at the Egyptian pavilion of the 1893 Chicago world's fair, where the line to see her went around the block. photo: unknownUnlike the Protestants, who evolved from Puritans to mostly tolerant democrats in three centuries, the Salafists believed modernity could be stopped by increased fidelity to Shari’ah Law, even though they reinterpreted “The Quran” and added sections. The Muslim Brotherhood was started by an Egyptian schoolteacher in 1928, to restore a caliphate after the Ottoman one was abolished in 1924. Although it adopted a few theories from Abduh, it borrowed mostly from European Fascists, already in control of Italy, and the Nazis, using brown uniforms, mass rallies and extreme antisemitism to became Salafism’s preeminent sect. Indeed, Hamas is an offshoot; Qatar is a Brotherhood state; Erdogan’s Turkey is Brotherhood-inspired; and the original Egyptian group tried to co-opt the Arab Spring in 2011 but then destroyed it. As the Brotherhood was beginning, the Wahhabis finished their conquest of most of the Arabian peninsula, established Saudi Arabia (1932), and began building immense wealth in partnership with infidels, the Americans who discovered oil there in 1938, even though that, too, is forbidden by Shari’ah Law.
The Salafists also excoriated and ended, to various degrees, depending on region, the traditional Arab culture of belly dancing, music, wine and hash, which flourished in the Middle East's world-class cafes for centuries. The Arabs always made wine, which many Muslims partook privately, but then they developed “al-kuḥl” (an Arabic word), which some young men use to this day as a rite of passage or mystical psychedelic experience, by getting blotto drunk. Although coffee was discovered in nearby Ethiopia in the 10th century, it was adopted by Yemeni Sufis, to help with late-night prayers, and popularized around the 15th century. Hashish arrived around the 12th century, with commercial cultivation starting in Egypt and the more high-end in Lebanon, but international commerce continued, since hash was a compact and popular trade good from Afghanistan, again with Sufis involved. Although Baba Ku was the hash-smoking folk hero from the cultural center of Balkh, the real pioneer was another Afghan Sufi, Qutb ad-Dīn Haydar, the dour leader of a small Malamati (self-blaming) Sufi tariqa in the 13th century. He preached abstinence and fakirism (in his case, pushing an iron rod through a scabbed-up hole in his arm) until, one day, “Walking in the country side in the midday heat, he discovered the divine properties of a plant that… almighty God has bestowed… which will dispatch the shadows that cloud your soul and will brighten your spirit,” (Gabriel Nahas, Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, 1982).
The mullahs outlawed tobacco after it was imported from the New World in the 16th century, up to under punishment by death but, after about fifty years, the sultans convinced them it was not an intoxicant like alcohol. From Turkey to North Africa, the “hookah” (water pipe) was borrowed from hash smokers‚ while smoking cigarettes in public proliferated by the 17th century. In this way, globalization gifted the Middle East three pleasant, only modestly toxic and widely popular drugs, a cocktail not available in Europe until the 19th century. Indeed, many Middle Eastern men delighted in their coffee, tobacco and hash in their reserved space of the cafe (women ruled the home) until the arrival of the Salafists, who really got going in the 20th century. From Morocco to India, they challenged the corruption of regular folk as well as authorities and started funding desperately needed charities, schools and hospitals. Not so welcomed, however, was how, to varying degrees, they forced women to cover and punished of, artists, gays and minorities, although they did inspire some Shi'a and Sufi preachers to adopt aspects of their doctrine in an attempt to restore Islam. This two-century struggle was considered an internal Islamic reform movement and largely unknown in the West until Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979.
The Shi'a Ayatollahs became notorious for holding 53 Americans hostage for 15 months, replete with mass demonstrations featuring the chant “Death to America,” but they also proved much more brutal than the Shah, who was culturally liberal and not quite as repressive. In fact, the Ayatollahs installed harsh religious as well as regular police and hanging judges, who executed many of their opponents but also supposed allies. Some Western leftists, like French philosopher Michel Foucault (who visited Iran twice in 1978), supported Iran’s revolution, which reversed the CIA-assisted coup of 1953, even though it proved disastrous for Iranian women, artists, Sufis and minorities as well as leftists. A vibrant intelligentsia endures, especially among Iranian filmmakers, but the authoritarianism remains, which sparks months-long protests every few years and is repressed with mass incarceration and murder. There were protests in 2019 and even larger ones in September 2022, after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, was killed for not properly covering her hair. In the summer of 2024, mainstream media reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guard agents were assassinating dissidents in Turkey.
World travelers, show here camping (probably near the Bamiyan Buddhas) was a common in Iran, and enjoyed by many Iranians, as I experienced, until the country was closed in 1979 by Shi'a Ayatollahs. photo: unknownThe Ayatollahs also adopted extreme antisemitism, despite Persia’s traditional friendship with the Jews, starting in antiquity with a mythical Persian Jewess, who became queen and saved her people (recounted in “The Bible”’s “Book of Ester”), and the actual King Cyrus the Great. A brilliant lawgiver and liberal as well as general, Cyrus defeated Nebuchadnezzar and freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity. He even helped them rebuild their temple in Jerusalem (making him the only gentile given the honorific “messiah”), and brought Jews to Persia. They lived there comparatively well for 2,500 years, in fact, sometimes serving as advisors and doctors, and reaching a population of 100,000 in 1948, when Israel became a state. Iran was one of the few Muslim countries, along with Turkey and Morocco, not to expel their Jews, and they flourished under Shah Pahlavi.
Despite such long fraternity, mutual benefit and occasional intermarriage, however, the Ayatollahs kicked the Jews out in 1979 (the few who remain endorse the country’s vehement anti-Zionism, which some Jews profess, in adherence to the ancient belief that Israel's emergence must await the messiah). Moreover, the Ayatollahs decided that supporting the Palestinians and oppressed Shi’a of Lebanon, and attacking Israel was the perfect trick to unifying a chaotic Islam and attracting Muslims of any sect who felt humiliated or angry with the West. After the once-impoverished, third-class Jews living across Islam enjoyed suspicious battlefield and economic success in Israel, with some help from the West, they could serve as the perfect symbol of evil and scapegoat. Israel may be tiny and far from Iran, but if the Ayatollahs could destroy it, that would prove the superiority of Shi’a theology and ethics, help them defeat the seven-times larger Sunnis, and make them God’s chosen people—absurd as that may sound to an Iranian liberal, artist or Sufi as well as rational observer.
The Muslim Brotherhood was not the only group to import fascist and Nazi ideologies and tactics to the Middle East. Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1938, was supposed to minister to the spiritual needs of Islam’s third sacred city, but was actually an aristocrat and a brutal warlord. Indeed, he ordered the murder of dozens of liberal Muslims as well as hundreds of Jews, in massacres, which started in Hebron in 1929, with the slaughter of 68 Jews (and a hundred more elsewhere) in an orgy of violence that prefigured Hamas’s invasion of October 7th. Although liberal Arabs saved hundreds of Hebron’s Jews and, after they fled, Hebron’s merchants wrote an open letter asking for their return, the Arab’s fascist aristocracy was intimidating, held sway, and fomented more revolts and then wars. Indeed, al-Husseini took over the Arab Revolt in 1936 and, six years later, moved to Berlin, where he spent the remainer of World War Two encouraging Bosnian Muslims to fight for Germany and lobbying Nazis to bring the Holocaust to the Holy Land.
Anti-colonial British sentiment in Iraq inspired the “Golden Square” coup of 1941, which was supported by Italy’s Fascists as well as the Nazis. The rebelling officers controlled the country only briefly, but enough time to butcher 250 Jews in Baghdad, which was half Jewish for over two millennia, replete with pillaging, raping and defilement as well as foreshadowing. In 1948, a similar “farhud” and the public hanging of a dozen of Iraq’s Jewish elite forced the entire population of 90,000 to flee, penniless, to Israel. Although the Ba’ath Party founded after the war was socialist, it produced the fascism of Sunni Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (1979-2003), and that of the Shi’a Assad family in Syria (1970-12/8/2024). Full-blown Islamo-fascism, however, which was not so much nationalist as Islam- and world-wide, only arrived in 1979, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Within three years, Egypt’s liberal president, Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian soldiers affiliated with Islamic Jihad (another Muslim Brotherhood offshoot). His crime: making peace with Israel. Then came Hezbollah, “The Party of God,” an aggressive mosque-state combo of sect, political party and military (bigger than the Lebanese Army until 2024), as well as an Iranian colony in the Middle East, a bit like the ten castles the Hashashin seized in Syria, eight centuries earlier. The Iranians sympathized with the Lebanon’s Shi’a underclass in Lebanon, exacerbated by the country’s civil war, 1975-’90, which killed 150,000, and Israel’s inevitable involvement, due the invasion by Syria and attacks, mostly by Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. After the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan, for trying to overthrow King Hussein (of the liberal Hashemites, a Meccan dynasty installed by the British), they dominated Lebanon until the Israelis forced them to flee to Tunis, Tunisia, including 8,000 fighters who remained at loose ends until mixers were organized and marriages ensued. But, Hezbollah remained and began earning leftist as well as radical Islamist street cred with two massive suicide truck bombings: one of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983, the other of a Jewish community center in Argentina, in 1994, murdering 241 and 85, respectively.
The Palestinian spiritual leader and war lord, Amin al-Husseini (lft), lived in Germany at the end of WWII, made Nazi propaganda and lobbied Hitler for death camps in Palestine. photo: unknown Seven years later, those numbers were eclipsed ten-fold by al-Qaeda’s Hashashin-style attacks of 9/11, which killed 3,000 and shot Salafism to the top of the news, foreign policy and negative public opinion world-wide. Although some Muslims celebrated, others took to the streets of Tehran, Cairo and elsewhere to show solidarity with America and opposition to radical Islamism, which went quiet for a decade. Indeed, in 2011, pro-democracy protestors rose up across the Arab world after a Tunisian fruit vendor, Tarek Bouazizi, set himself afire to draw attention to the endemic corruption. The Arab Spring quickly toppled Egypt’s corrupt dictator, Hosni Mubarak, who died in prison in 2020, and Libya’s colorful, capricious one, Muammar Gaddafi, who was raped and killed by rebels in 2012, after three and four decades of abuse, respectively, as well as leaders in Tunisia and Yemen. Alas, the Arab Spring failed to attract overwhelming support, was outflanked by seasoned Salafist operatives and triggered civil wars in Libya, Yemen and Syria, with only the latter finally resolved. After Israel destroyed Hezbollah, Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad's biggest local supporter, a miraculous 12-day campaign, mostly by ex-al-Qaeda fighters, cost only 200 casualties and forced Assad to flee to Moscow on December 8, 2024. This dealt a significant blow to both Iran, the main backer of the al-Assad regime (composed of Alawites, yet another esoteric Shi’a sect), and Russia, which installed military bases there in the Cold War, began bombing rebels in 2017 and lost its only Mediterranean naval base, in Tartus. The conquering faction, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (meaning “life and freedom for the Levant"), seems more tolerant and democratic then the average Salafist group, evidently chastened by the horror of civil war, which killed up to 600,000 (80% civilian) of Syria's multicultural society, including Shi’a, Sunni, Druze, Kurds and agnostic modernists.
Civil wars generally favor fundamentalists, as per the saying from the 14th century Middle East, “Better a century of tyranny than one day of chaos.” The Arab Spring did produce Egypt's first-ever free election in 2012, but voters elected a Muslim Brotherhood member president, Muhammad Morsi, whom the army soon had to oust for abrogating democracy (he died in prison, 2019).
Nevertheless, Sunni fundamentalists are still powerful in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, where the Taliban is more repressive than ever, Mali and elsewhere, especially after the birth of Salafism’s newest iteration, the Islamic State during the chaotic fighting in Syria in 2014. IS (also called ISIS, to insult the goddess, and DAESH, its initials in Arabic) conquered a third of the country and a similar slice of Iraq. Armed men would race across the desert, a la Wahhab cavalry, but in Toyota pickup trucks, and do orgiastic attacks. They proclaimed a caliphate, the first since the end of the Ottomans, which attracted radical Islamists, freebooters and sadists from across the West. In keeping with Salafism’s double-down strategy, IS adopted every possible western weapon, communication system and luxury good but a more repressive Islam than even 18th century Wahhabism. They mandated gloves, eye mesh and anklets, to more completely cover women, and forbid images or music for entertainment, education or enlightenment purposes, but not propaganda. Indeed, their slick marketing and social media used extensive beheadings and torture imagery, not to mention porn was readily available on their devices.
We don’t have to find a modern al-Ghazali to divine that IS’s claim to abide the letter of Shari’ah Law contradicts the spirit of the peace-professing and mystical Muhammad and Sufis, who were once popular across the Middle East. IS’s fiendish fundamentalism frightened so many Muslims, in fact, many Middle Eastern countries—including Iran—assisted the American and Iraqi armies defeat them, culminating in the Battle of Mosul (2016-’17), and the killing about 10,000 IS fighters and 8,000 civilians. Other than the Taliban’s second seizure of Kabul, in 2021 (the first was 1996), that was Salafism’s last major battle before October 7th, 2023.
Me hanging out with Ukrainian soldiers and refugees (the guy giving a gang sign is from the destroyed city of Mariupol) as well as Anne, a pianist who said she'll never play Russian composers again, the Golden Rose Synagogue, Lviv, Ukraine, 2022. photo: D. Blair Authoritarians Invariably Attack Liberals
On October 7th, 2023, I was in Lviv, Ukraine, a lovely cafe and university town, hanging out with some of its many educated, artistic and worldly teens and 20-somethings—hippies, in other words…
Conclusion
This concludes the first half of “My Half Century with Islam, Its Loving Sufis, Four Secrets and Monotheist Wars”. The second half will include the rest of this chapter, which covers from Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution of 2013 through the second Russian invasion (2/24/2022) to Ukraine today, especially how it helps democracies worldwide (it supplied the Syrian rebels drones and intelligence). It will also have 11 more chapters:
14. My Dark Night of the Soul: Realizing a Second Holocaust Is Possible
15. Why Israel Has the Right to Exist
16. The Fourth Middle East Secret: Many Arabs Welcomed Zionists
17. Today’s Arab Liberals: Arab Springers, Honest Monotheists and Ex-Muslims
18. Can Sufis Save Islam a Fifth Time?
19. The War of Symbols in The Middle East and Across the World
20. Everything is in the Mind: From Ancient Hindu Maya to Modern Deconstruction
21. Is Fanatical Islamism More Powerful then Cultural Marxism?
22. The Meaning of 10/7: Forming a Just, Equitable and Radical Multiculturalism
23. Why We All Love Liberal Democracy Even Though Some Won't Admit It
24. Surviving the Chaos of Multi-Front Global War
Some of my articles to be linked in the second half of "My 50 Years with Islam":
Why Arab Liberals Support Israel
Did Arabs and Jews Like Each Other in 1948?
‘The Green Prince’ of Peace Documentary
Theo Who Lived: When Hippie Meets Al-Qaeda
Feras Fayyad: Fighting the Syrian Regime Thru Film
Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed
Darwin and Love: What I Learned Making a Holocaust Movie
Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs
Posted on Feb 07, 2025 - 02:11 PM
by Doniphan Blair
A founder of Islamic modernism, Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-'97), was probably a Persian Shi'a but preferred to be known as a Sunni Afghan, hence his name. illo: unknownContinued from My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
Return to My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
Return to My Half Century With Islam, Part 1
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.
ALL CIVILIZATIONS ARE MONOTHEISMS
insomuch they’re rules-based, share the social construct of increased ethics and cooperation, and are universalist. Despite their stupendous suffering and occasional cynicism, often expressed in humor, most Jews assumed the other monotheists would eventually recognize this obvious fact. They were mistaken. Many Muslims and Christians rejected the inherent equality and tolerance of monotheism, even after it helped inspire the American Constitution and the elimination of slavery, a pattern of prejudice continued among communists and fascists. Sadly, monotheism has long been gamed by charlatans, cult leaders and false messiahs as well as authoritarians, who role play Islamic, Christian or Jewish values but lust for the idolatry of personal or tribal benefits, despite the fact that “[a] civilization that builds on the basis of blood is a tribe, a tribe that builds on the basis of ideas is a civilization,” as I noted in my “The Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto”.
Salafists Try to Make Islam Great Again
The Wahhabis were resisted from their mid-18th century beginning by liberal Muslims, first the preachers in Wahhab’s own family, then those in Mecca. Indeed, Islam’s most sacred city was famous for tolerance and creativity pre-Islam and that tradition continued, especially when it welcomes millions of visitors during the Hajj. Making the pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the “Five Pillars of Islam” (but only if a devotee can afford it), and Muslims from all over the world came to pray, talk, trade and sometimes marry, since women often attended unveiled, or be entertained and enlightened by Sufi storytellers and theologians. During Wahhab's Hajj, with his devotees, “the qadi [head judge] of Mecca pronounced them to be unbelievers, in view of the well-known principle, based on ‘Hadith’, that whoever without good reason denounces a fellow Muslim as an unbeliever himself enters that category,” (Hamid Algars, “Wahhabism”, 2002).
The Wahhabis were so unpopular, in fact, they were driven from Mecca in 1811, eight years after conquering it, by Egypt’s new ruler, Muhammad Ali Pasha, a military genius backed by hardened Albanian troops. Ali Pasha was also a liberal Muslim, probably a Bektashi Sufi (a tariqa which allows alcohol), who opened Egypt to the West, by reviving the multicultural, scholarly center and port of Alexandria. The Ottomans followed suit in 1839 with top-down reforms, called “Tanzimat,” which introduced elections and later full citizenship for Greeks, Armenians and even Jews, including the right to serve in the army (important for men to prove their capacity and status, unfortunately, just in time for WWI).
Meanwhile, "The Nahda," the Arab Enlightenment, bubbled up from Arab street, driven by writers and diplomats, ranging from progressive modernists to conservatives or clandestine Wahhabis. One of the best-known was the activist and scholar Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897), who travelled throughout Europe as well as the Middle East, Persia and India teaching, publishing and sometimes plotting, including assassinations. His most famous disciple, Muḥammad Abduh (1849-1905), became Egypt’s Grand Mufti (religious head) and famously liberal. Indeed, he allowed figurative art (after visiting European museums), often quoted “The Quran”’s “No compulsion” line, amplified women’s rights, and inspired Egypt’s 1919 Revolution. In fact, many Middle Easterners adopted western ideas, tools and goods, which radically altered lives and life spans, but their democracy was in its infancy, their institutions were archaic, and their leaders were often corrupt. Thus the poor and disenfranchised were forced toward Salafism, as Wahhabism came to be known, after incorporating Islamist innovations from India and elsewhere.
Farida Mazar Spyropoulos, a Syrian dancer married to a Greek restauranteur, introduced belly dancing, Middle Eastern romance and the 'Hoochee-Coochee' dance to America at the Egyptian pavilion of the 1893 Chicago world's fair, where the line to see her went around the block. photo: unknownThe Salafists also excoriated and ended, to various degrees, depending on region, the traditional Arab culture of belly dancing, music, wine and hash, which flourished in the Middle East's world-class cafes for centuries. The Arabs always made wine, which many Muslims partook privately, but then they developed “al-kuḥl” (an Arabic word), which some young men use to this day as a rite of passage or mystical psychedelic experience, by getting blotto drunk. Although coffee was discovered in nearby Ethiopia in the 10th century, it was adopted by Yemeni Sufis, to help with late-night prayers, and popularized around the 15th century. Hashish arrived around the 12th century, with commercial cultivation starting in Egypt and the more high-end in Lebanon, but international commerce continued, since hash was a compact and popular trade good from Afghanistan, again with Sufis involved. Although Baba Ku was the hash-smoking folk hero from the cultural center of Balkh, the real pioneer was another Afghan Sufi, Qutb ad-Dīn Haydar, the dour leader of a small Malamati (self-blaming) Sufi tariqa in the 13th century. He preached abstinence and fakirism (in his case, pushing an iron rod through a scabbed-up hole in his arm) until, one day, “Walking in the country side in the midday heat, he discovered the divine properties of a plant that… almighty God has bestowed… which will dispatch the shadows that cloud your soul and will brighten your spirit,” (Gabriel Nahas, Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, 1982).
The mullahs outlawed tobacco after it was imported from the New World in the 16th century, up to under punishment by death but, after about fifty years, the sultans convinced them it was not an intoxicant like alcohol. From Turkey to North Africa, the “hookah” (water pipe) was borrowed from hash smokers‚ while smoking cigarettes in public proliferated by the 17th century. In this way, globalization gifted the Middle East three pleasant, only modestly toxic and widely popular drugs, a cocktail not available in Europe until the 19th century. Indeed, many Middle Eastern men delighted in their coffee, tobacco and hash in their reserved space of the cafe (women ruled the home) until the arrival of the Salafists, who really got going in the 20th century. From Morocco to India, they challenged the corruption of regular folk as well as authorities and started funding desperately needed charities, schools and hospitals. Not so welcomed, however, was how, to varying degrees, they forced women to cover and punished of, artists, gays and minorities, although they did inspire some Shi'a and Sufi preachers to adopt aspects of their doctrine in an attempt to restore Islam. This two-century struggle was considered an internal Islamic reform movement and largely unknown in the West until Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979.
The Shi'a Ayatollahs became notorious for holding 53 Americans hostage for 15 months, replete with mass demonstrations featuring the chant “Death to America,” but they also proved much more brutal than the Shah, who was culturally liberal and not quite as repressive. In fact, the Ayatollahs installed harsh religious as well as regular police and hanging judges, who executed many of their opponents but also supposed allies. Some Western leftists, like French philosopher Michel Foucault (who visited Iran twice in 1978), supported Iran’s revolution, which reversed the CIA-assisted coup of 1953, even though it proved disastrous for Iranian women, artists, Sufis and minorities as well as leftists. A vibrant intelligentsia endures, especially among Iranian filmmakers, but the authoritarianism remains, which sparks months-long protests every few years and is repressed with mass incarceration and murder. There were protests in 2019 and even larger ones in September 2022, after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, was killed for not properly covering her hair. In the summer of 2024, mainstream media reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guard agents were assassinating dissidents in Turkey.
World travelers, show here camping (probably near the Bamiyan Buddhas) was a common in Iran, and enjoyed by many Iranians, as I experienced, until the country was closed in 1979 by Shi'a Ayatollahs. photo: unknownDespite such long fraternity, mutual benefit and occasional intermarriage, however, the Ayatollahs kicked the Jews out in 1979 (the few who remain endorse the country’s vehement anti-Zionism, which some Jews profess, in adherence to the ancient belief that Israel's emergence must await the messiah). Moreover, the Ayatollahs decided that supporting the Palestinians and oppressed Shi’a of Lebanon, and attacking Israel was the perfect trick to unifying a chaotic Islam and attracting Muslims of any sect who felt humiliated or angry with the West. After the once-impoverished, third-class Jews living across Islam enjoyed suspicious battlefield and economic success in Israel, with some help from the West, they could serve as the perfect symbol of evil and scapegoat. Israel may be tiny and far from Iran, but if the Ayatollahs could destroy it, that would prove the superiority of Shi’a theology and ethics, help them defeat the seven-times larger Sunnis, and make them God’s chosen people—absurd as that may sound to an Iranian liberal, artist or Sufi as well as rational observer.
The Muslim Brotherhood was not the only group to import fascist and Nazi ideologies and tactics to the Middle East. Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1938, was supposed to minister to the spiritual needs of Islam’s third sacred city, but was actually an aristocrat and a brutal warlord. Indeed, he ordered the murder of dozens of liberal Muslims as well as hundreds of Jews, in massacres, which started in Hebron in 1929, with the slaughter of 68 Jews (and a hundred more elsewhere) in an orgy of violence that prefigured Hamas’s invasion of October 7th. Although liberal Arabs saved hundreds of Hebron’s Jews and, after they fled, Hebron’s merchants wrote an open letter asking for their return, the Arab’s fascist aristocracy was intimidating, held sway, and fomented more revolts and then wars. Indeed, al-Husseini took over the Arab Revolt in 1936 and, six years later, moved to Berlin, where he spent the remainer of World War Two encouraging Bosnian Muslims to fight for Germany and lobbying Nazis to bring the Holocaust to the Holy Land.
Anti-colonial British sentiment in Iraq inspired the “Golden Square” coup of 1941, which was supported by Italy’s Fascists as well as the Nazis. The rebelling officers controlled the country only briefly, but enough time to butcher 250 Jews in Baghdad, which was half Jewish for over two millennia, replete with pillaging, raping and defilement as well as foreshadowing. In 1948, a similar “farhud” and the public hanging of a dozen of Iraq’s Jewish elite forced the entire population of 90,000 to flee, penniless, to Israel. Although the Ba’ath Party founded after the war was socialist, it produced the fascism of Sunni Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (1979-2003), and that of the Shi’a Assad family in Syria (1970-12/8/2024). Full-blown Islamo-fascism, however, which was not so much nationalist as Islam- and world-wide, only arrived in 1979, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Within three years, Egypt’s liberal president, Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian soldiers affiliated with Islamic Jihad (another Muslim Brotherhood offshoot). His crime: making peace with Israel. Then came Hezbollah, “The Party of God,” an aggressive mosque-state combo of sect, political party and military (bigger than the Lebanese Army until 2024), as well as an Iranian colony in the Middle East, a bit like the ten castles the Hashashin seized in Syria, eight centuries earlier. The Iranians sympathized with the Lebanon’s Shi’a underclass in Lebanon, exacerbated by the country’s civil war, 1975-’90, which killed 150,000, and Israel’s inevitable involvement, due the invasion by Syria and attacks, mostly by Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. After the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan, for trying to overthrow King Hussein (of the liberal Hashemites, a Meccan dynasty installed by the British), they dominated Lebanon until the Israelis forced them to flee to Tunis, Tunisia, including 8,000 fighters who remained at loose ends until mixers were organized and marriages ensued. But, Hezbollah remained and began earning leftist as well as radical Islamist street cred with two massive suicide truck bombings: one of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983, the other of a Jewish community center in Argentina, in 1994, murdering 241 and 85, respectively.
The Palestinian spiritual leader and war lord, Amin al-Husseini (lft), lived in Germany at the end of WWII, made Nazi propaganda and lobbied Hitler for death camps in Palestine. photo: unknown Civil wars generally favor fundamentalists, as per the saying from the 14th century Middle East, “Better a century of tyranny than one day of chaos.” The Arab Spring did produce Egypt's first-ever free election in 2012, but voters elected a Muslim Brotherhood member president, Muhammad Morsi, whom the army soon had to oust for abrogating democracy (he died in prison, 2019).
Nevertheless, Sunni fundamentalists are still powerful in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, where the Taliban is more repressive than ever, Mali and elsewhere, especially after the birth of Salafism’s newest iteration, the Islamic State during the chaotic fighting in Syria in 2014. IS (also called ISIS, to insult the goddess, and DAESH, its initials in Arabic) conquered a third of the country and a similar slice of Iraq. Armed men would race across the desert, a la Wahhab cavalry, but in Toyota pickup trucks, and do orgiastic attacks. They proclaimed a caliphate, the first since the end of the Ottomans, which attracted radical Islamists, freebooters and sadists from across the West. In keeping with Salafism’s double-down strategy, IS adopted every possible western weapon, communication system and luxury good but a more repressive Islam than even 18th century Wahhabism. They mandated gloves, eye mesh and anklets, to more completely cover women, and forbid images or music for entertainment, education or enlightenment purposes, but not propaganda. Indeed, their slick marketing and social media used extensive beheadings and torture imagery, not to mention porn was readily available on their devices.
We don’t have to find a modern al-Ghazali to divine that IS’s claim to abide the letter of Shari’ah Law contradicts the spirit of the peace-professing and mystical Muhammad and Sufis, who were once popular across the Middle East. IS’s fiendish fundamentalism frightened so many Muslims, in fact, many Middle Eastern countries—including Iran—assisted the American and Iraqi armies defeat them, culminating in the Battle of Mosul (2016-’17), and the killing about 10,000 IS fighters and 8,000 civilians. Other than the Taliban’s second seizure of Kabul, in 2021 (the first was 1996), that was Salafism’s last major battle before October 7th, 2023.
Me hanging out with Ukrainian soldiers and refugees (the guy giving a gang sign is from the destroyed city of Mariupol) as well as Anne, a pianist who said she'll never play Russian composers again, the Golden Rose Synagogue, Lviv, Ukraine, 2022. photo: D. BlairOn October 7th, 2023, I was in Lviv, Ukraine, a lovely cafe and university town, hanging out with some of its many educated, artistic and worldly teens and 20-somethings—hippies, in other words…
Conclusion
This concludes the first half of “My Half Century with Islam, Its Loving Sufis, Four Secrets and Monotheist Wars”. The second half will include the rest of this chapter, which covers from Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution of 2013 through the second Russian invasion (2/24/2022) to Ukraine today, especially how it helps democracies worldwide (it supplied the Syrian rebels drones and intelligence). It will also have 11 more chapters:
14. My Dark Night of the Soul: Realizing a Second Holocaust Is Possible
15. Why Israel Has the Right to Exist
16. The Fourth Middle East Secret: Many Arabs Welcomed Zionists
17. Today’s Arab Liberals: Arab Springers, Honest Monotheists and Ex-Muslims
18. Can Sufis Save Islam a Fifth Time?
19. The War of Symbols in The Middle East and Across the World
20. Everything is in the Mind: From Ancient Hindu Maya to Modern Deconstruction
21. Is Fanatical Islamism More Powerful then Cultural Marxism?
22. The Meaning of 10/7: Forming a Just, Equitable and Radical Multiculturalism
23. Why We All Love Liberal Democracy Even Though Some Won't Admit It
24. Surviving the Chaos of Multi-Front Global War
Some of my articles to be linked in the second half of "My 50 Years with Islam":
Why Arab Liberals Support Israel
Did Arabs and Jews Like Each Other in 1948?
‘The Green Prince’ of Peace Documentary
Theo Who Lived: When Hippie Meets Al-Qaeda
Feras Fayyad: Fighting the Syrian Regime Thru Film
Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed
Darwin and Love: What I Learned Making a Holocaust Movie
Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs
Posted on Feb 07, 2025 - 02:11 PM
