The modernises within the Islamic world face an uphill battle. The following quotes from After Saturday Comes Sunday are used with the author's permission. Note: I've reproduced the section headings from which each quote is taken.
Shia historian Vali Nasr explains: “Shi’ism and Sunnism not only understand Islamic history, theology and law differently, but each breathes a distinct ethos of faith and piety that nurtures a particular temperament and a unique approach to the question of what it means to be Muslim.”73
“The Shia-Sunni conflict is at once a struggle for the soul of Islam,” says Nasr,
a great war of competing theologies and conceptions of sacred history . . . Faith and identity converge in this conflict, and their combined power goes a long way towards explaining why, despite periods of coexistence, the struggle has lasted so long and retains such an urgency and significance. It is not just a hoary religious dispute, a fossilized set piece from the early years of Islam’s unfolding, but a contemporary clash of identities. Theological and historical disagreements fuel it, but so do today’s concerns with power, subjugation, freedom, and equality, not to mention regional conflicts and foreign intrigues. It is, paradoxically, a very old, very modern conflict.74
The Shi’ite assertion that only blood descendents of Muhammad can rightly guide the Muslims challenges the legitimacy not only of the Sunni caliphs, but of today’s Sunni dictators and monarchs for whom the stakes are high. Instead of countering this challenge with theological reasoning, Sunni Islam has opted instead to demonize Shi’ism as heresy; vilify Shi’ites as spoilers, dissidents, fanatics, and rwafida (rejectionists); and incite and legitimize their persecution.75
The Arabs were nomads and merchants, as were the Turks, and the nomadic trading culture so prevalent amongst Sunnis saw Sunni Islam taken to distant fields. Consequently, Sunnis now make up around 87 percent76 of all Muslims worldwide.
What is often overlooked by politicians and media—who tend to think of Islam either as a monolithic bloc or simply as Sunni with a Shi’ite minority—is that while Shi’ites comprise only around 10 percent of Muslims worldwide, they comprise roughly 50 percent of Muslims in the greater Middle East, and (critically) around 80 percent of Muslims around the oil-rich Persian Gulf. So while the Sunni Arabs might dominate the deserts and trade routes, and have control over the two holy mosques, the Shi’ites—backed by Iran with its superior Persian culture and vast military resources—are sitting on virtually all the region’s oil and gas, which amounts to 55 percent of the world’s proven reserves.77
Like most political campaigns today, the struggle for the soul of Islam, which is essentially a struggle for leadership of the Muslim ummah (nation), will likely be determined by who has access to the most wealth. There is an awful lot at stake!
The 1979 Islamic (Shi’ite) Revolution in Iran greatly excited the region’s long repressed and persecuted Shi’ites, including the Shi’ite majority in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province—where virtually all Saudi Arabia’s oil fields and refineries are located. While Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini advocated toppling the House of Saud (i.e., the Saudi monarchy ruling Saudi Arabia), more realistic Saudi Shi’ite leaders sought to exploit the tense situation to press for reforms, specifically an end to the religious vilification and systematic discrimination.
On November 25, 1979, some four thousand Saudi Shi’ites defied a government ban and poured out onto the streets of Safwa City, in Eastern Province’s Qatif district, to commemorate Ashura. Saudi security forces responded with force, and as protests spread throughout Qatif, the Saudi National Guard cracked down mercilessly. More than twenty Shi’ites were killed, while dozens were arrested and hundreds were forced into exile. The aspirations of Saudi Shi’ites were dashed; as a demographic minority within the kingdom, they stood no chance of effecting revolution—not without the support of foreign aid.
Despite the crackdown, Saudi Shi’ites pressed ahead with efforts to have their grievances addressed, but to no avail. If anything, their situation deteriorated: persecution escalated as Shi’ites were systematically vilified as infidels and promoters of polytheism (shirk) for their veneration of Ali and Husayn (amongst others). They are also accused of heresy (bid’a)—a sin punishable by death. In Sunni schools, students are taught that the Shi’ites rejected the early caliphs, and that Sunnis should despise this rejection as an act of betrayal and treachery. Consequently, Shi’ites are routinely vilified as rwafida (rejectionists).
Fatwas (religious rulings) issued by Saudi clerics since 1979 denounce Shi’ites as the ultimate scum and the principal enemy. These fatwas are not just for local consumption, but are intended for Sunni Muslims worldwide. As International Crisis Group (ICG) reports:
In 1991, Abdullah bin Abd al-Rahman al-Jibrin, then a member of [Saudi Arabia’s] Higher Council of Ulama, issued a fatwa designating Shiites as apostates and condoning their killing. In January 1994, responding to a question about the rawafid (alternative of rafida or rwafida) praying in Sunni mosques, he issued a fatwa asserting “they are the enemy and may God fight those that lie.” In another fatwa that year in answer to a question about how to deal with Shiites in the workplace, he stated that, “it is necessary to display abhorrence, loathing, and hatred [toward them] . . . and the priority is to strive to restrict/oppress (tadayiq) them.”
Some of the most egregious examples abated after September 11, 2001, when the Saudi government clamped down on radical speech more generally and warned clerics on its payroll to tone down their rhetoric. Still, institutions under less direct oversight continue propagating anti-Shiite sentiment in the most vituperative of terms. In 2002, the powerful Jeddah-based International Islamic Relief Organisation (IIRO), a leading Saudi charity, disseminated a book in al-Hasa [Al-Hasa Governorate, Eastern Province], One Hundred Questions and Answers on Charitable Work, which claimed it: “was necessary for Sunni Muslims to hate (baghida) the people of heresy (ahl al-bid’a), to loath them and to scorn them as rafida, deniers of God, grave [tomb] visitors [an act of heresy according to Wahhabis], and as apostates. It is incumbent on the Muslim according to his ability . . . to get rid of their evil.”78
Clearly the Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia is a takfiri creed, condemning Shi’ites and other “lesser Muslims” as kafir, apostates to be killed. While the persecution and the killing is committed in religious zeal, it serves a political purpose, ensuring Shi’ites and Shi’ism cannot threaten the Sunni elite’s political and economic interests.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 stoked sectarian tensions, fueled Islamic zeal, and widened the Sunni-Shia divide. By 2003, Iraq was a tinderbox waiting for a spark.
As a Sunni Arab ruling over a majority-Shi’ite population on the Sunni-Shi’ite and Arab-Persian frontier, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein knew it was in his interests to keep Iraqi Shi’ites disempowered, repressed, isolated, fearful, and downtrodden. To that end, Saddam Hussein suppressed Ashura for decades. Consequently, April 22, 2003—the first Ashura Day after regime change and the toppling of Saddam—was an event of unprecedented emotion and profound political significance.
According to terrorism analyst Yossef Bodanksy, after the fall of Saddam, “Iran directly sponsored, through local Shiite networks, the organization of roughly two million people marching to Qarbalah [Karbala] to commemorate the Ashura.”79 Carrying Shi’ite flags, chanting Shi’ite slogans, the great throng of bloodied, highly emotional marchers was an awesome sight.
Shia scholar Vali Nasr was in Pakistan at the time on a research trip. He happened to be in Lahore on that very day, visiting the headquarters of the Sunni fundamentalist political group known as the Jamaat-e Islami (Islamic Party). He writes:
The office television set was turned on to CNN, as everyone was following news from Iraq. The coverage turned to scenes of young Shia men standing densely packed in the shadow of the golden dome of the Imam Husayn’s shrine at Karbala. They wore black shirts and had scarves of green (the universal color of Islam) wrapped around their heads. They chanted a threnody [lament] in Arabic for their beloved saint as they raised their empty hands as if in prayer towards heaven and in unison brought them down to thump on their chests in a rhythmic gesture of mourning, solidarity, and mortification. The image was magnetic, at once jubilant and defiant. The Shia were in the streets, and they were holding their faith and their identity high for all to see. We stared at the television screen. My Sunni hosts were aghast at what they were seeing. A pall descended on the room.80
Nasr explains that what Americans saw as Iraqi freedom, his Sunni hosts saw quite differently. “Iraqis were free,” he says, “free to be Shias, free to challenge Sunni power and the Sunni conception of what it means to be a true Muslim . . .”
Eleven years later, on Friday June 6, 2014, hundreds of jihadists belonging to ISIS/ISIL flooded into northern Iraq’s Nineveh province.
ISIS is a takfiri outfit. Like the Khawârij who assassinated Ali (the fourth caliph and leader of the Shi’ites), ISIS militants are Sunni purists—fully fledged Wahhabis, following the official doctrine taught in and disseminated by the clerics of Saudi Arabia. They do not tolerate infidels or apostates, which for Wahhabis includes all Shia Muslims.
Now in possession of US-made weapons, tanks, and Humvees, ISIS advanced south towards Baghdad where it claimed to have “unfinished business.” On Wednesday June 11, 2014, ISIS captured the mostly Sunni city of Tikrit, along with several districts on the outskirts of Samarra—home to the spectacular gold-domed Askari Shrine, one of the most venerated Shi’ite places of worship in Iraq.81
Early on the morning of Thursday June 12, 2014, ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani uploaded an audio message to his fighters on the group’s website: “Continue your march as the battle is not yet raging . . . It will rage in Baghdad and Karbala. So be ready for it.”
The message included a grave warning to Shia prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. ISIS, it said, would settle its scores with him and the Shi’ites, not in Baghdad or in the Iraqi shrine city of Samarra, but “in Karbala, the filth-ridden city, and in Najaf, the city of polytheists.”82
Unable to rely on Iraqi security forces, Iraqi president Nuri al-Maliki offered to arm any citizen who would volunteer to fight the takfiri ISIS. His call was supported by Iraq’s highest-ranking Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Thousands of Shi’ites responded to al-Sistani’s fatwa, which called on his followers to defend the holy sites. Soldiers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp—that is, Persian Shi’ites—crossed over into Iraq to assist the Arab Shi’ites in the defense of Shia holy places.
Many of the Sunni jihadists had come from the Syrian battlefield (via Anbar and Nineveh) determined to take the fight to Baghdad, the seat of government; to Karbala, the site of the Imam Husayn Shrine, the burial place of Imam Husayn who was martyred by Sunni jihadists from Damascus in AD 680; and to Najaf (in the vicinity of Kufa), the site of the Imam Ali Mosque, the burial place of Imam Ali who was assassinated by the Khawârij/takfiris in AD 661.
One couldn’t help but feel a strong sense of déjà vu.
On June 13, 2014, Shi’ite fighters paraded with their rifles in front of television cameras in Baghdad. As they marched, these Shi’ite warriors chanted “Labeiki ya Zaynab, labeiki ya Zaynab”(“we will follow you Zaynab”), indicating their willingness to follow in the footsteps of Lady Zaynab, the daughter of Imam Ali, who stayed faithful to her brother Husayn as he resisted Sunni aggression and died fighting for what he believed.
When asked what the men were chanting, the Australian correspondent describing the scene shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and answered in a slightly bewildered tone: “I don’t know; some sort of Arabic war cry I guess.”
And I thought to myself: “O my goodness; you have no idea!”
Kendal, After Saturday Comes Sunday (pp. 28-34). Kindle Edition.
...Following Sunni tradition, the Saudi state is ruled by a strongman whose primary job is to protect Islam. As the ruling power protects Islam, the religious clerics legitimize and protect the ruling power. This mutual pact between the ruling and religious establishments is a longstanding Sunni tradition.
When Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal came to power in 1964, he knew he had to maintain the symbiotic relationship with the clerics in order to remain in power. Likewise, the clerics knew they had to maintain their relationship with the monarchy in order to reap the benefits of that power. While the ministries of foreign affairs, finance and defense would remain the exclusive province of the House of Saud, Faisal gave the clerics control over the Ministry of Pilgrimage and Awqaf (religious endowments), the Ministry of Education (from 1963), and the Ministry of Justice (from 1970).
With Wahhabi clerics controlling education, it was inevitable that Saudis would be radicalized from early childhood. When the clerics secured control of higher education in 1975, they made Wahhabi religious courses mandatory in all universities. The “Wahhabization” of Saudi society had begun.
All the while, modernization and liberalization were continuing apace, widening the divide between the modernizing ruling establishment and the Wahhabi religious conservatives.
Leading the anti-modernization drive was none other than Sheikh Abdulaziz Bin Baz. His dawa (missionary) movement, through which young men were trained in hyper-conservative Salafi ways (i.e., the ways of the prophet and his companions as practiced in the seventh century), attracted an ever-increasing number of restless, disenchanted Bedouin. Of course, the religious teaching they received from the Wahhabi clerics made them even more restless and disenchanted.
Kendal, After Saturday Comes Sunday (p. 70). Kindle Edition.
…Not far away, Egypt too was simmering. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had switched his Cold War allegiance from the Soviets to the US and released from prison thousands of MB activists jailed by Nasser. But in Egypt, as in Iran and Saudi Arabia, a movement for Islamic reformation was gaining momentum—one which rejected soft, pragmatic Islam in favor of traditional, puritanical, uncompromising Islam. The Egyptian movement comprised secret cells of religious dissidents. Known as Gamaat Islamiya (“Islamic Groups”), the Egyptian movement was especially prevalent on the campus of Cairo University. In addition, a secret offshoot of Gamaat Islamiya known as “Islamic Jihad” broke away to plot the assassination of the “infidel” Anwar Sadat, whom they deemed a traitor for brokering peace with Israel. Prominent amongst this group was a graduate of Cairo University’s medical school named Ayman al-Zawahiri.166
Though vaguely aware of events in Egypt and Iran, Juhayman was not influenced by them. Totally focused on the Saudi situation, Juhayman was determined to find solutions in the Qur’an and hadith.
One day, while studying the hadith, Juhayman stumbled across a reference to the Mahdi. Never mentioned in the Qur’an, the Mahdi appears in the hadith as the Islamic Messiah who returns amidst chaos and a great falling away of Muslims to usher in the End of Days.
According to Islamic eschatology (the doctrine of the end times), the Mahdi will lead the final jihad in which all the Christian cities of the world will be captured. Jesus, too, will appear, following the Mahdi and killing all those who said that he (Jesus) had been crucified (see Q.4:156–159167). The hadith elaborate, saying that Jesus will kill all pigs (the food of Christians), destroy all crosses (the symbol of Christians), and abolish the jizya (which means there is no longer protection available for Christians).168 According to the hadith, Jesus and the Mahdi will rejoice at the elimination of Christians. Not a single infidel will survive the final jihad to end all jihads.169
The hadith provide a precise description of the Mahdi’s name and appearance: he will bear the same name as the prophet (Muhammad) and even look like the Prophet Muhammad: tall and fair-skinned with a broad forehead and prominent nose. Indeed, he would look like Mohammed Abdullah, who also was tall, with fair skin, hazel eyes and black hair—by all accounts a man of stunning appearance.
Furthermore, the hadith provide a precise description about the timing of the Mahdi’s appearance: the Mahdi will appear in Mecca, right after the hajj at the turn of an Islamic century. As it happened, the forthcoming hajj of 1979 would be the last hajj of Islam’s fourteenth century.
Convinced that the End of Days was upon them, Juhayman established a training camp in the Arabian Desert and started training his revolutionaries in military tactics. He assured his followers, many of whom were members or former members of the Saudi National Guard, that the weapons were only for defensive purposes; he was convinced that the Muslim masses would recognize Mohammed Abdullah as the Madhi when he was revealed to them.
Subsequently, Mohammed Abdullah’s sister reported that she’d had a vivid dream in which she saw her brother standing by the Ka’ba inside Mecca’s Grand Mosque receiving adulation as the promised Mahdi. Before long, militants and sympathizers from far and wide reported having had the same dream. Eventually the resistant Mohammed Abdullah became the reluctant Mahdi.
Juhayman sent an emissary to inform Bin Baz that they intended to reveal Mohammed Abdullah as the Mahdi very soon. As the emissary made no mention of Juhayman’s stockpiles of weapons or of his military training camp in the desert, Bin Baz did not perceive the movement to be threatening. While Bin Baz did not accept that Mohammed Abdullah could possibly be the Mahdi, he saw no need to crush Juhayman’s movement. He merely warned Juhayman against doing anything that could stir up fitna (strife, doubt), for that would be unacceptable. Neither did Bin Baz see any need to alert the authorities, whose eyes were firmly fixed on events unfolding in Tehran as Ayatollah Khomeini consolidated his power through purges and bloodspilling. The Saudis were convinced that the clerical regime of Khomeini in Tehran had designs on the whole Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich, Shi’ite-dominated Eastern Province.
In early November 1979, as the hajj season commenced and many thousands of pilgrims flooded into Mecca, all eyes were fixed on events in Tehran, where revolutionary students had seized the US Embassy and taken sixty-four hostages. While the international news media was fixated on the hostage crisis, and while Riyadh was in a virtual state of panic over revolutionary Iran’s intentions in the Persian Gulf, Juhayman was setting the stage for his revolution. Weapons were being ferried into Mecca’s Grand Mosque through the construction entrance—the “Bin Laden accessway”—courtesy of sympathetic insiders. As the religious students had all gone home, the mosque’s vast labyrinth of underground, basement chambers, known as the Qaboo, was quiet and empty.
In the closing hours of November 19, 1979—the last day of the year 1399 on the Islamic calendar—Juhayman and Mohammed Abdullah quietly entered the city of Mecca and took up their positions.
At dawn the next day—the first day of Muharram 1400 on the Islamic calendar (November 20, 1979 on the Western calendar)—Juhayman’s revolutionary forces seized control of Mecca’s Grand Mosque, Islam’s most holy site. With snipers in position, the gates were locked. Juhayman oversaw the military operation while Mohammed Abdullah’s brother, Sayid, delivered an oration. The end of the world was coming, he said, and he exhorted the masses to receive the Mahdi and join with Juhayman in the fight against corruption, immorality, and unbelief.
At that point, Mohammed Abdullah was ushered into their presence. As the militants cleared a passage for him, Mohammed Abdullah, “submachine gun in hand,”170 walked towards the Ka’ba where Juhayman was waiting for him. Worshippers gasped in awe. One by one the revolutionaries bowed before him and declared their allegiance; worshippers (now hostages) followed suit.
The mosque’s imam, Sheikh Mohammed Ibn Subeil, shed his religious cloak and scurried through the crowd to his quarters above the Fatah Gate from where he phoned his superiors and alerted the authorities. It took the police more than an hour to respond; a single officer in a jeep was sent to investigate. Upon arriving at the gate, the jeep was sprayed in bullets courtesy of Juhayman’s snipers, and the driver fell bleeding out of his vehicle. When the jeep did not return, the Saudi police dispatched a convoy of vehicles. Upon arrival at the mosque, they too met with a hail of gunfire; eight officers were killed instantly and thirty-six wounded. The killing had only just begun.
The details of the two-week siege and its ultimate resolution have been documented by Yaroslav Trofimov in his book The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam’s Holiest Shrine.
“Saudi officials,” writes Trofimov, “had severely misjudged the extent of resistance that Juhayman’s men could offer in Mecca, and as a result Saudi troops had been mauled in a veritable massacre. The Saudi National Guard no longer wanted to fight in the Grand Mosque. The Americans had tried to help on the ground—and failed. France was the only hope left. It had become the French Republic’s responsibility to rescue a monarchy that guaranteed the Free World’s oil supplies.”171
The story of how it all unfolded is truly gripping, and for that you’ll need to purchase Trofimov’s book. It will be enough for our purposes to focus on how the House of Saud managed to get American and then French troops into Mecca—a city forbidden to infidels—let alone into the Grand Mosque itself.
Reluctant to even point their weapons in the direction of the most venerated holy site, let alone kill fellow Muslims, Saudi security personnel were being slaughtered. Furthermore, many security personnel were wondering if maybe the Mahdi had indeed arrived.
Unless Saudi Arabia’s King Khaled could get a fatwa (a religious ruling) from the kingdom’s most senior clerics—one that would give Saudi security personal permission to fight and give the regime permission to invite non-Muslim (kafir/infidel) forces into Mecca and into the holy mosque— then the House of Saud would meet the same end as the shah of Iran.
King Khaled summonsed Sheikh Abdulaziz Bin Baz, along with twenty-nine other senior clerics, to the royal palace in Riyadh. Sitting down with the stressed and desperate Saudi king, Bin Baz and the clerics knew they had the House of Saud exactly where they wanted it. The fatwa would not come cheap.
After a lengthy debate about the situation inside in the mosque, the clerics agreed that Mohammed Abdullah could not possibly be the Mahdi. Despite this, the Wahhabi clerics had considerable sympathy with the revolutionaries, whom they regarded as pious, albeit hot-headed, deeply religious conservatives. Though the Americans were busy blaming Iran for the Mecca uprising, the clerics knew full well that it was a Wahhabi revolt led by those who had been trained by Bin Baz and in schools the Wahhabi clerics had themselves founded.
Fully aware that they held all the cards, the clerics set out their demands and engaged in a bit of quid pro quo. They would sign a fatwa recognizing the House of Saud’s legitimacy, on the condition that from now on the ruling House of Saud would live up to its Islamic responsibilities, beholden to the clerics.
“There should be no more women on TV,” writes Tofimov, “no more licentious movies, no more alcohol. The social liberalization that had begun under King Faisal should be halted and, where possible, rolled back. And billions of Saudi petro-dollars should be put to good use, spreading the rigid Wahhabi Islam around the planet . . . As some Saudi princes described it later, the ulema [clerics] essentially asked al-Saud to adopt Juhayman’s agenda in exchange for their help in getting rid of Juhayman himself.”172
The mostly young Sunni revolutionaries who perished in the Qaboo underneath the Great Mosque in late November and early December 1979, were, as Dore Gold notes, “the products of mainstream Saudi institutions.”173 Both Juhayman and Mohammed Adbullah had studied in Saudi universities, and the former had also studied under Sheikh Bin Baz, who went on to become the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia.
Concerning the fatwa issued by Bin Baz and the ulama, Gold comments that it essentially expanded the ulama’s authority in “supervising the kingdom’s Wahhabi character.”174 Gold quotes a Saudi journalist at Harvard University, Sulaiman al-Hattlan, whose analysis echoes that of the Saudi princes: “Though the government killed the extremists, it then essentially adopted their ideology . . . to appease the Islamists, perhaps fearing further extremists threats.”175
Gold describes how, after the siege of Mecca, the Saudi leadership gave the ulama much greater authority in the kingdom’s affairs; the power of the ulama increased considerably, especially that of Sheik Abdulaziz Bin Baz, whose influence grew phenomenally. As Gold notes, Bin Baz was tremendously hostile to Christians and Jews, teaching that “According to the Koran, the Sunnah, and the consensus of Muslims it is a requirement of the Muslim to be hostile to the Jews and the Christian” and “it is a religious requirement to despise the infidel Jews and Christians . . . until they believe in Allah alone.”176
Bin Baz advanced the idea that Islam must have a global reach if it is to counter Christian missionary activity. A strong advocate of jihad as the means of removing all obstacles to the spread of Islam, Bin Baz taught that jihad was the means by which the door was opened to da’wa (Islamic missionary activity). He also promulgated the idea of financial jihad (jihad bi-l-maal), leading to the rise of Islamic “charities” and other money-raising schemes, such as halal certification, from the early 1980s.
The fatwa ensured that Bin Baz and the Wahhabi ulama would have an unlimited flow of Saudi petro-dollars with which to spread intolerant, pro-Sharia, pro-jihad, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian, Wahhabi Islam right across the globe.
Since 1979, Saudi petrodollars have been used to build thousands of large, beautiful mosques all around the world—mosques designed primarily to attract locals to Wahhabi Islam. Many of these mosques, which routinely offer free (Saudi-funded) education, are built in strategic areas where no Muslims exist.
Since 1979, Saudi petrodollars have been used to grant scholarships to poor African and Asian Muslims so that they can be educated in Wahhabi Islam in Islamic universities across the Middle East before returning home to radicalize the locals.
Since 1979, Saudi petrodollars have been used to finance international jihad in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Africa, the Caucasus, Asia, and Mesopotamia—ensuring the jihadists are kept busy far away from Saudi Arabia.
Since 1979, Saudi petrodollars have been used to establish departments and fill chairs in Islamic Studies in Western universities, through which the Wahhabis can take control of the narrative and subvert the West with regards to Islam’s political mandate and intentions.
Kendal, Elizabeth. After Saturday Comes Sunday: Understanding the Christian Crisis in the Middle East (pp. 72-78). Resource Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Chapter Headings
1 “After Saturday Comes Sunday”
2 The Sunni-Shia Divide
3 “Hasten to Success”
4 Islamic Revival, 1979
5 The Shia Crescent
6 The “Arab Spring”
7 Myth Busting the Syrian Crisis
8 The Evolution of a War
9 The Return of the Caliphate
10 “A Message Signed in Blood to the Nation of the Cross”
11 A House Divided
12 “After Saturday Comes Sunday” for the Nation of the Cross
Appendix 1 Christian Solidarity: The Sound of Silence
Appendix 2 God’s Human Instruments: Just Do It!
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AFTER SATURDAY, COMES SUNDAY: A book review by Paul Windsor
Qatar & Al Jazeera's DANGEROUS Influence In Mideast Politics
Most people in the West think that if a group of people are fighting, they must be fighting for the rights of their people. They don’t understand that Muslim terrorists simply fight to advance Islam. That’s why HAMAS use/d the citizens of Gaza as human shields. They don’t really care about the people’s rights. They fight only to advance Islam (see Israelis must listen to the Palestinians! and Mark Durie's book, The Third Choice).
For a very quick overview of Islamic History see Understanding Islam.
The Cairo Declaration of Human Rights