Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 35 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

Given the prominence of Islam in public life across much of the Arab world today, it is easy to forget just how secular the Middle East was in 1981. In all but the most conservative Arab Gulf states, Western fashions were preferred over traditional dress. Many people drank alcohol openly, in disregard of Islamic prohibition. Men and women mixed freely both in public and in the work place, as more and more women were entering higher education and professional life. For some, the freedoms of the modern age marked a high point in Arab progress. Others viewed these developments with unease, fearing that the rapid pace of change was leading the Arab world to abandon its own culture and values. The debates over Islam and modernity have deep roots in the Arab world. Hassan al-Banna had created the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 to fight against Western influences and the erosion of Islamic values in Egypt. Over the decades the Muslim Brothers had faced increasing repression, banned by the Egyptian monarchy in December 1948, and then by Nasser’s regime in 1954. In the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Islamic politics were driven underground across the Arab world, and Islamic values were undermined by secular states that increasingly drew their inspiration from either Soviet socialism or Western free-market democracy. Yet repression only strengthened the will of the Muslim Brothers to fight secularism and promote their own vision of Islamic values. A radical new trend emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s, led by a charismatic Egyptian thinker named Sayyid Qutb. He was to prove one of the most influential Islamic reformers of the century. Born in a village in Upper Egypt in 1906, Qutb moved to Cairo in the 1920s to study in the teacher’s college, Dar al-’Ulum. Upon graduation, he worked for the Ministry of Education as a teacher and an inspector. He was also active in the literary circles of the 1930s and 1940s as both an author and a critic. In 1948 Qutb was sent on a two-year government scholarship to study in the United States. He took his masters in education from the University of Northern Colorado’s Teachers’ College, with periods of study in both Washington, D.C., and Stanford, California. Though he crossed the United States from east to west, Qutb came away with none of the typical exchange student’s affection for the country. In 1951 Qutb published his reflections, “The America I Have Seen,” in an Islamist magazine. Condemning the materialism and dearth of spiritual values he encountered in the United States, Qutb was appalled by what he saw as moral laxity and unbridled competitiveness in American society. He was particularly shocked to find these vices in American churches. “In most churches,” Qutb wrote, “there are clubs that join the two sexes, and every minister attempts to attract to his church as many people as possible, especially since there is a tremendous competition between churches of different denominations.” Qutb found such behavior, of trying to pack in the crowds, more appropriate for a theater manager than a spiritual leader. In his essay Qutb told the story of how one night he had attended a church service followed by a dance. He was appalled to see the lengths to which the pastor went to make the church hall look “more romantic and passionate.” The pastor even chose a sultry record by Ray Charles to set the mood. Qutb’s description of the tune—“a famous American song called ‘But Baby, It’s Cold Outside,’” captures the gulf that separated him from American popular culture. “[The song] is composed of a dialogue between a boy and a girl returning from their evening date. The boy took the girl to his home and kept her from leaving. She entreated him to let her return home, for it was getting late, and her mother was waiting but every time she would make an excuse, he would reply to her with this line: but baby, it’s cold outside!”³ Qutb clearly found the song distasteful, but he was even more shocked that a man of religion would choose such an inappropriate tune for his young parishioners to dance to. Nothing could be further from the social role of mosques, in which the sexes are separated and modesty is the rule in dress and behavior. Qutb returned to Egypt determined to snap his fellow countrymen out of their complacent admiration for the modern values that America embodied. “I fear that a balance may not exist between America’s material greatness and the quality of its people,” he argued. “And I fear that the wheel of life will have turned and the book of time will have closed and America will have added nothing, or next to nothing, to the account of morals that distinguishes man from object, and indeed, mankind from animals.”⁴ Qutb did not want to change America; rather, he wanted to protect Egypt, and the Islamic world generally, from the moral degeneration he had witnessed in America. Shortly after his return from the United States, in 1952 Sayyid Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Because of his background in publishing, he was placed in charge of the society’s press and publications office. The ardent Islamist had gained a wide readership through his provocative essays. Following Egypt’s 1952 revolution, Qutb enjoyed good relations with the Free Officers. Nasser reportedly invited Qutb to draft the constitution of the new official party, the Liberation Rally. Presumably, Nasser did so less out of admiration for the Islamist reformer himself than as a calculated bid to harness Qutb’s support for the new official organ into which all political parties—the Muslim Brotherhood included—were to be dissolved. The new regime’s goodwill toward the Muslim Brotherhood proved short lived. Qutb was arrested in the general clampdown on the organization after a member of the Brotherhood attempted to assassinate Nasser in October 1954. Like many other Muslim Brothers, Qutb claimed he had been subjected to horrific torture and interrogation while under arrest. Convicted on charges of subversive activity, Qutb was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor. From prison, Qutb continued to inspire fellow Islamists. Ill health often confined him to the hospital wing, where he wrote some of the most influential works of the twentieth century on Islam and politics, including a radical commentary on the Qur’an and his clarion call for the promotion of a genuine Islamic society, titled Milestones. Milestones represents the culmination of Qutb’s views on both the bankruptcy of Western materialism and the authoritarianism of secular Arab nationalism. The social and political systems that defined the modern age, he argued, were man-made and had failed for that very reason. Instead of opening a new age of science and knowledge, they had resulted in ignorance of divine guidance, or jahiliyya. The word has particular resonance in Islam, as it refers to the pre-Islamic dark ages. Twentieth-century jahiliyya, Qutb argued, “takes the form of claiming that the right to create values, to legislate rules of collective behaviour, and to choose any way of life rests with men, without regard to what God has prescribed.” By implication, the remarkable advances in science and technology of the twentieth century had not led humanity into a modern age; rather, the abandonment of God’s eternal message had taken society back to the seventh century. This was as true for the non-Islamic West, Qutb believed, as it was for the Arab world. The result, he argued, was tyranny. Arab regimes did not bring their citizens freedom and human rights, but repression and torture?as Qutb knew from painful firsthand experience. Qutb believed that Islam, as the perfect statement of God’s order for mankind, was the only route to human freedom, a true liberation theology. By extension, the only valid and legitimate laws were God’s laws, as enshrined in Islamic sharia. He believed that a Muslim vanguard was needed to restore Islam to “the role of the leader of mankind.” The vanguard would use “preaching and persuasion for reforming ideas and beliefs” and would deploy “physical power and jihad for abolishing the organizations and authorities of the Jahili system which prevents people from reforming their ideas and beliefs but forces them to obey their erroneous ways and make them serve human lords instead of the Almighty Lord.” Qutb wrote his book to guide the vanguard who would lead the revival of Islamic values, through which Muslims would once again achieve personal freedom and world leadership.⁵ The power of Qutb’s message lay in its simplicity and directness. He identified a problem—jahiliyya—and a clear Islamic solution that was grounded in the values that many Arab Muslims held dear. His critique applied equally to imperial powers and to autocratic Arab governments, and his response was a message of hope grounded in the assumption of Muslim superiority:Conditions change, the Muslim loses his physical power and is conquered; yet the consciousness does not depart from him that he is the most superior. If he remains a Believer, he looks upon his conqueror from a superior position. He remains certain that this is a temporary condition which will pass away and that faith will turn the tide from which there is no escape. Even if death is his portion, he will never bow his head. Death comes to all, but for him there is martyrdom. He will proceed to the Garden [i.e., heaven], while his conquerors go to the Fire [i.e., hell].⁶

However much Qutb disapproved of Western imperial powers, his first target was always the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world, and Nasser’s government in particular. In his exegesis of the Qur’anic verses on the “Makers of the Pit,” Qutb draws a thinly veiled allegory of the struggle between the Muslim Brothers and the Free Officers. In the Qur’anic story, a community of Believers was condemned for their faith and burned alive by tyrants who gathered to watch their righteous victims die. “Doomed were the makers of the pit,” the Qur’an relates (85:1–16). In Qutb’s commentary, the persecutors—“arrogant, mischievous, criminal and degraded people”—took sadistic pleasure in witnessing the pain of the martyrs. “And when some young man or woman, some child or old man from among these righteous Believers was thrown in to the fire,? Qutb wrote, ?their diabolical pleasure would reach a new height, and shouts of mad joy would escape their lips at the sight of blood and pieces of flesh??graphic scenes absent from the Qur?anic tale, but perhaps inspired by Qutb?s experiences, and those of his fellow Muslim Brothers, at the hands of their torturers in prison. ?The struggle between the Believers and their enemies,? he concluded, was essentially ?a struggle between beliefs?either unbelief or faith, either Jahiliyya or Islam.? Qutb?s message was clear: the government of Egypt was incompatible with his vision of an Islamic state. One would have to go. Qutb was released from prison in 1964, the year Milestones was published. His standing enhanced by his prison writings, he quickly reestablished contact with comrades from the banned Muslim Brotherhood. Yet Qutb must have known that his every movement would be followed by Nasser’s secret police. The Islamist author had gained such prominence across the Muslim world for his radical new thoughts that he would be a danger to the Egyptian state at home and abroad. Qutb’s followers faced the same surveillance and risks as the reformer himself. One of Qutb’s most influential disciples was Zaynab al-Ghazali (1917–2005), the pioneer of the Islamist women’s movement. When only twenty years old, al-Ghazali founded the Muslim Ladies’ Society. Her activities had brought her to the attention of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who tried to persuade her to join forces with the Muslim Sisterhood he had just launched. Though the two Islamist women’s movements followed their separate courses, al-Ghazali became a loyal follower of Hasan al-Banna. In the 1950s al-Ghazali met the sisters of the imprisoned Sayyid Qutb, who gave her draft chapters of Milestones before the book had been published. Inspired by what she read, al-Ghazali devoted herself to the vanguard role envisaged by Qutb’s manifesto—preparing Egyptian society to embrace Islamic law. Just as the Prophet Muhammad spent thirteen years in Mecca before migrating to Medina to found the first Islamic community, so the followers of Qutb allowed thirteen years to transform Egyptian society as a whole into an ideal Islamic society. “It was decided,” she wrote, “that after thirteen years of Islamic training of our youth, elders, women and children, we would make an exhaustive survey of the state. If this survey revealed that at least 75% of the followers believed that Islam is a complete way of life and are convinced about establishing an Islamic state, then we would call for the establishment of such a state.” If the poll results suggested a lower level of support, al-Ghazali and her colleagues would work for another thirteen years to try to convert Egyptian society.⁷ In the long run, their aim was nothing less than the overthrow of the Free Officers’ regime and its replacement with a true Islamic state. Nasser and his government were determined to eliminate the Islamist threat before it gained ground. The Egyptian authorities released Sayyid Qutb from prison at the end of 1964, after a decade?s imprisonment. Zaynab al-Ghazali and his other supporters celebrated Qutb?s release and met frequently with him, under the watchful gaze of Egyptian police surveillance. Many believed that Qutb had been released only to lead the authorities to like-minded Islamists. In August 1965, after only eight months? liberty, Qutb was rearrested, along with al-Ghazali and all their associates. They were charged with conspiracy to assassinate President Nasser and overthrow the Egyptian government. Although their long-term aim was certainly to replace the Egyptian government with an Islamic system, the defendants insisted they were innocent of any plot against the life of the president. Al-Ghazali spent the next six years in prison and later wrote an account of her ordeal, capturing in graphic horror the tortures to which the Islamists, men and women alike, were subjected by the Nasserist state. She was confronted with the violence from her first day in prison. “Almost unable to believe my eyes and not wanting to accept such inhumanity, I silently watched as members of the Ikhwan [i.e., the Muslim Brothers] were suspended in the air and their naked bodies ferociously flogged. Some were left to the mercy of savage dogs which tore at their bodies. Others, with their face to the wall awaited their turn.”⁸ Al-Ghazali was not spared these atrocities; she faced whipping, beatings, attacks with dogs, isolation, sleep deprivation, and regular death threats, all in a vain attempt to secure a statement implicating Qutb and the other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in the alleged conspiracy. When two newly arrested young women were admitted to share al-Ghazali’s cell, after she had suffered eighteen days of abuse, she could not convey the horrors in her own words but read them the Qur’anic verses on “The Makers of the Pit” instead. Upon hearing these verses, one of the women began crying silently; the other asked, disbelievingly: “Does this really happen to ladies?”⁹ The trial against Sayyid Qutb and his followers opened in April 1966. In all, forty-three Islamists—Qutb and al-Ghazali among them—were formally charged with conspiring against the Egyptian state. The state prosecutors used Qutb’s writings as evidence against Qutb and charged him with promoting the violent overthrow of the Egyptian government. In August 1966, Qutb and two other defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. Zaynab al-Ghazali was given twenty-five years with hard labor. By executing Qutb, the Egyptian authorities not only made him a martyr of the Islamist cause but confirmed to many the truth of Qutb’s writings, which became yet more influential after his death than they had been during his own lifetime. His commentary on the Qur’an, and Milestones, his charter for political action, were reprinted and distributed across the Muslim world. A new generation, coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, was electrified by Qutb’s message of Islamic regeneration and justice. Its members dedicated themselves to achieve his vision?by all possible means, peaceful and violent alike.

The Islamist challenge spread from Egypt to Syria in the 1960s. The influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sayyid Qutb’s radical critique of secular government, combined to create a revolutionary Islamic movement bent on the overthrow of Syria’s praetorian republic. The conflict took Syria to the brink of civil war and claimed tens of thousands of lives before reaching its brutal climax in the Syrian town of Hama. The founder of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mustafa al-Siba‘i (1915–1964), was himself a native of Hama. He studied in Egypt in the 1930s, where he came under the influence of Hasan al-Banna. Upon his return to Syria, Siba’i brought together a network of Muslim youth associations to create the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. Siba’i drew on the Muslim Brotherhood’s network to win a seat in the Syrian parliament in the 1943 elections. From that point onward, the Syrian Muslim Brothers were too strong to be ignored by the political elite, even if they were not powerful enough in their own right to exercise much influence on the increasingly secular and Arab nationalist political discourse in Syria in the 1940s and 1950s. When the Ba‘th party seized power in Syria in 1963, the Muslim Brothers went on the offensive. The politics of the Ba’th were intensely secular, calling for a strict separation of religion and state. This was only natural, given the sectarian diversity of the party. Whereas the population of Syria was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim (about 70 percent of the total), the Ba‘th had also attracted many Christian members as well as secular Sunni Muslims. It had also had substantial support among the Alawites. An offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Alawites were the largest of Syria’s minority groups, representing about 12 percent of the population. After years of marginalization by Syria’s Sunni majority, the Alawites had risen through the military and the Ba’th to new prominence in Syrian politics by the 1960s. As the Ba’th tended toward secular, even atheist views, it provoked growing resistance from the Muslim Brotherhood, which claimed to be Syria’s “moral majority.” The Muslim Brotherhood saw the rise of the Alawites to political prominence as a distinct threat to the Sunni Muslim culture of Syria, and its members were determined to undermine their government through violent means if necessary. In the mid-1960s, the Brotherhood formed an underground resistance movement in Hama and the northern city of Aleppo. The Islamist militants began to stockpile weapons and train young recruits drawn from high schools and universities across Syria. One of Hama’s most charismatic imams (mosque prayer leaders), Shaykh Marwan Hadid, was particularly successful in recruiting students to the Islamic underground movement. For many of the young Islamists, Hadid was an inspiration and a role model for Islamic activism.¹⁰ Confrontation between the Islamist underground and the Syrian government became inevitable when the Ba’thist commander of the Syrian air force, General Hafiz al-Asad, came to power in the coup of November 16, 1970. As a member of the Alawite minority community, al-Asad was Syria’s first non-Sunni Muslim leader. He made efforts to placate Sunni Muslim sensitivities in his early years in office, but to no avail. The introduction of a new constitution in 1973, which for the first time did not stipulate that the president of Syria would be a Muslim, revived questions of religion and state. The constitution sparked violent demonstrations in the Sunni Muslim heartland of Hama. Further Islamist violence followed al-Asad’s decision to intervene in the Lebanese civil war on the side of the Maronite Christians and against the progressive Muslim forces and the Palestinian movement in April 1976. Al-Asad’s intervention in the Lebanon War raised grave concerns among Syria’s Muslim majority. Many disgruntled Sunnis, who had found themselves marginalized by the Alawite-dominated government since al-Asad came to power in 1970, suspected the new regime of promoting a “minority alliance” that bound Syria’s ruling Alawites with the Lebanese Maronites to subjugate the Muslim majority of Syria and Lebanon. With tensions growing between the government and the Sunni community, al-Asad ordered a crackdown on the Syrian Muslim Brothers. In 1976 the authorities arrested Hama’s radical imam, Shaykh Marwan Hadid. The Islamist recruiter immediately went on a hunger strike, and he died in June 1976. The authorities insisted that Hadid had taken his own life by starvation, but the Islamists accused the government of his murder and promised to avenge Marwan Hadid’s death. It took three years for Syria’s Islamists to organize their retaliatory blow against the Asad regime. In June 1979, the Islamist guerrillas attacked a military academy in Aleppo, the majority of whose students—some 260 of the 320 cadets—were from the Alawite community. The terrorists killed 83 cadets, all of them from the Alawite minority. The attack on the military academy was the opening volley in an all-out war between the Muslim Brotherhood and the regime of Hafiz al-Asad that was to rage for the next two and one-half years, dragging Syria into a hellish daily back-and-forth of terrorism and counterterrorism.

The Muslim Brothers in Syria, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, refused to negotiate or compromise with the Asad regime. “We reject all forms of despotism, out of respect for the very principles of Islam, and do not seek the fall of the Pharaoh so that another might take his place,” they announced in a leaflet distributed across the towns and cities of Syria in mid-1979.¹¹ Their language echoed the Islamist militants in Egypt, who were similarly bent on overthrowing the Sadat government by violence, and who gave moral support to their Brothers in Hama in their revolt against Syria’s pharaoh. With no scope for reconciliation, the hard-liners in the Syrian government, headed by the president’s brother, Rifa’at al-Asad, were given a free hand to suppress the Islamic insurgency by force. In March 1980, Syrian commandos descended by helicopter on a rebel village between Aleppo and Latakia and placed the entire village under martial rule. According to official figures, more than two hundred villagers were killed in the operation. Emboldened by its success in the countryside, the Syrian government sent 25,000 troops to invade the city of Aleppo, scene of the cadet massacre one year earlier. Soldiers searched every house in those quarters known to support the Islamist insurgency and arrested more than 8,000 suspects. Rifa’at al-Asad warned the townspeople from the turret of his tank that he was ready to execute 1,000 a day until the city was cleansed of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brothers struck back on June 26, 1980, with an assassination attempt against President al-Asad. Militants threw hand grenades and fired machine guns at the president while he received a visiting African dignitary. Al-Asad was shielded by his bodyguards and narrowly escaped death. The following day, Rifa’at al-Asad sent his commandos to the notorious Tadmur Prison, where Muslim Brother prisoners were detained, to exact a terrible revenge. ’Isa Ibrahim Fayyad, a young Alawite commando, would never forget his first mission, when he was ordered to massacre unarmed prisoners at Tadmur. The Syrian soldiers were flown by helicopter to the prison at 6:30 A.M. There were perhaps seventy commandos in all, divided into seven platoons, each dispatched to a different cell block. Fayyad and his men took up their positions and went to work. “They opened the gates of a cell block for us. Six or seven of us entered and killed all those we found inside, some 60 or 70 people in all. I must have gunned down fifteen myself.” The cells echoed with machine-gun fire and the screams of the dying shouting “Allahu Akbar.” Fayyad had no compassion for his victims. “Altogether some 550 of those Muslim Brother bastards must have been killed,” he reflected grimly. Other participants estimated as many as 700–1,100 Muslim Brothers were gunned down in their cells. The unarmed prisoners made desperate attacks on the commandos, killing one and wounding two others in the melee. When the commandos were finished, they had to wash the blood from their hands and feet.¹² Having exterminated the Muslim Brothers in Tadmur Prison, al-Asad took the initiative to eliminate the Brotherhood from Syrian society. On July 7, 1980, the Syrian government passed a law that made membership in the Muslim Brotherhood an offense publishable by death. Undaunted, the Islamist opposition movement embarked on a series of assassinations against prominent Syrian officials, including some of President al-Asad?s personal friends. The Syrian government responded in April 1981 by sending the army into the Muslim Brothers’ stronghold in Hama. The fourth-largest city in Syria, with a population at the time of about 180,000, Hama had been the center of Islamist opposition since the 1960s. When the troops arrived, the townspeople put up no resistance, assuming this would be a raid like those in the past, in which people were detained for questioning and intimidated by the commandos before being released. They were wrong. The Syrian army decided to make an example of the civilians of Hama, killing children and adults indiscriminately. One eyewitness described the carnage to a Western journalist: “I walked a few steps before coming on a pile of bodies, then another. There must have been 10 or 15. I walked by them, one after the other. I looked at them a long time, without believing my eyes.... In each pile there were 15 bodies, 25, 30 bodies. The faces were totally unrecognizable.... There were bodies of all ages, 14 and up, in pyjamas, gelebiyehs [native robes], in sandals or barefoot.” ¹³ Estimates ranged from 150 to several hundred killed in the attack. The total death toll in two years of hostilities between government forces and Islamists already exceeded 2,500. The Muslim Brothers responded to the army’s Hama atrocity in kind, initiating a terror campaign against innocent civilians in the major towns and cities of Syria. The Islamists shifted the battlefield from the northern towns of Aleppo, Latakia, and Hama to the capital city of Damascus. The Muslim Brothers planted a series of explosive devices that shook the Syrian capital between August and November of that year, culminating in a massive car bomb in the city center on November 29 that killed 200 and wounded up to 500—the largest casualty toll of any single bomb the Arab world had witnessed up to that point. Anwar Sadat’s assassination in October 1981 coincided with President Asad’s fifty-first birthday; Syrian Islamists circulated leaflets threatening him with the same fate. Al-Asad authorized his brother Rifa’at to conduct an extermination campaign against the Muslim Brothers in their stronghold in Hama, to defeat the movement once and for all. The Syrian government went to war against the Muslim Brotherhood in their stronghold of Hama in the early morning hours of February 2, 1982. Helicopter gunships ferried platoons of commandos to the hills outside the city. After the government’s murderous raid in April 1981, the townspeople were on high alert, and the vigilant Islamists were quick to react when they heard the incoming helicopters. Shouting “Allahu akbar,” the Muslim Brothers rose in armed revolt against the Syrian state. The call to jihad, or holy war, was made over the loudspeakers of the city?s mosques, normally used for the daily calls to prayer. The leader of the Muslim Brothers urged the townspeople to drive the ?infidel? Asad regime from power once and for all. By dawn, the first wave of soldiers was in retreat and the Islamist fighters went on the attack, killing government officials and Ba’th members in Hama. Early success gave the insurgents a false hope of victory. For behind the first wave of army commandos lay tens of thousands of soldiers, supported by tanks and aircraft. It was a battle the government could not afford to lose and that the insurgents lacked the means to win. For the first week, the Muslim Brothers managed to fight off the Syrian army onslaught. Yet the government’s superior firepower took its toll, as tanks and artillery leveled whole city blocks, burying their defenders under the rubble. When the town finally fell, government agents exacted a bloody toll of the survivors, arresting, torturing, and arbitrarily killing the townspeople of Hama for the slightest suspicion of support for the Muslim Brothers. New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman, who entered Hama two months after the violence, found a city in which whole quarters had been destroyed and leveled by bulldozers and steamrollers. The human toll was far more terrible. “Virtually the entire Muslim leadership in Hama—from sheiks to teachers to mosque caretakers—who survived the battle for the city were liquidated afterward in one fashion or another; most anti-government union leaders suffered the same fate,” Friedman reported.¹⁴ To this day, no one knows how many people died in Hama in February 1982. Journalists and analysts have estimated a death toll ranging somewhere between 10,000–20,000, but Rifa’at al-Asad boasted of having killed as many as 38,000. The Asad brothers wanted the world to know they had crushed their adversaries and dealt the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria a blow from which it would never recover. The stakes were now higher than ever in the conflict between Islamists and pharaohs. Whereas the Egyptian authorities had resorted to widespread torture and selective execution of its Islamist opponents, the Syrian regime engaged in mass extermination. A higher degree of training, planning, and discipline were required for the Islamists to topple such powerful adversaries. The experiences of Islamists in Syria and Egypt had shown that Arab states were too strong to be toppled by assassination or subversion. Those Islamists who hoped to overturn secularism and establish Islamic states would have to look elsewhere. The conflict in civil war Lebanon provided one opportunity for Islamist parties to promote their ideal vision of an Islamic society. Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion presented a different option. In both cases, Islamist parties took their struggle to the international arena, broadening the scope of their battle to combat regional and global superpowers like Israel, the United States, and the Soviet Union. What had begun as a domestic security struggle for individual states was becoming a global security issue.