A Bizzare Episode in Recent History

Alvin_255 · 2022-06-11T07:57:42+00:00

A Bizarre Episode in Recent History On Nov 21, 1979, thousands of people surrounded the American Embassy in Islamabad and eventually destroyed the entire compound, killing a number of civilians and contractors in the process. The story of this riot is, like all episodes in history, full of benefit, and teaches us many lessons. The day before this episode, Nov 20 1979, corresponded to the 1st of Muḥarram 1400 AH. It was the infamous day that the puritanical ultra-fundamentalist Juhaymān stormed the Ka’ba with hundreds of religious zealots and madrasa students, and held tens of thousand of pilgrims hostage, and claimed the Royal Family had abandoned Islam. By holding the Ka’ba itself hostage, his goal was to demand a more hard-line interpretation of Islam to be implemented in the land of the Ḥaramayn. Of his demands was that music not be played on radios and women not be shown on TV. I have given many lectures on Juhaymān and his movement and you will find them online. In the first hours of this hostile takeover, there was mass confusion as to what had happened. The Arabs immediately accused Iran of being behind this move (remember this was a pre-Internet era and news was extremely difficult to verify). The Iranian people had just overthrown their brutal Shah, and installed the radical Shi’ite cleric Khomeini as their spiritual head. Hence, Iran was an easy target to blame. In response to these accusations, Khoemeini gave a fiery address, live over Iranian radio, in which he accused the ‘Great Satan’, meaning America, of being behind this dastardly deed. At the time, the world really hadn’t seen the type of fundamentalism like al-Qaeda and ISIS that has come out of certain strands of Sunnism, and it is factually correct to point out that Juhaymān was a precursor to that type of fanaticism (which is still around to this day, and remnants of that same exact ideology are still active on social media as all are aware). Hence, no one could fathom that the people behind the takeover of the Ḥaram were actually Sunnīs of a certain persuasion, and Khomeini, already have a long list of grievances against America, could easily believe that America itself had attacked the Ka’ba. Completely coincidently, hours before this attack, President Jimmy Carter announced that America would be sending a Navy frigate to the Persian Gulf in order to deal with the Iranian hostage crisis, which was in full swing at the time. Back in Islamabad, a local radio station translated the speech of Khomeini and summarized its contents, and then innocuously moved on to the next news item of the American Navy frigate in the Persian Gulf. A group of local students of QUA University in Islamabad put one plus one together, and believed that the news channel was claiming that the attack on the Ka’ba was instigated by America, and that America was also launching a full scale offensive against Muslims. This ‘news’ spread like wildfire , and within hours thousands of students began clamoring outside of the Embassy. Thus it was that, barely a day after Juhaymān has snipers on the roof of the Ka’ba, thousands of QUA students had also surrounded the American Embassy in Islamabad as a response to Juhaymān’s siege. As with all mobs, and as is always the case when fanatics and anger is allowed to reign unchecked, eventually the crowd whipped itself into a frenzy, and weapons and guns were brought out. A student fired at the gates of the compound; the bullet ricocheted back into the crowd and severely injured another student. But the interpretation was that this bullet emanated from the compound guards (and not from one of their own protestors), and so the accusation was made that the Americans are firing on the protestors! This caused the crowd , already stirred to a level of fanaticism, to raise the bar even higher, and surge towards the gates, eventually scaling the walls of the compound and ransacking the entire Embassy. The 300 staff inside barely managed to lock themselves in a safe vault, and over the course of the next few hours, waited for help from the Pakistan government. The Embassy officials were completely clueless as to why this was happening, and since the attack came out of the blue, were totally unprepared. As well, until this point in time, Pakistan had not seen the type of radical mobs that are now (unfortunately) common, and so the Embassy was completely unequipped to deal with this type of onslaught. There is no doubt that there would have been a total massacre had there not been a large vault in the basement in which hundreds of people crammed (and almost suffocated to death!). As it was, four Pakistanis and two Americans lost their lives in this skirmish; many dozens were severely injured. Eventually the Pakistani army did manage to quell the crowd and save the rest of the staff. However, the entire area was completely devastated, and of course diplomatic ties were affected. Of the lessons we benefit from this incident are: the dangers of emotional fanaticism (both on Juhaymān’s side and from the easily instigated mobs); the evils of acting on unverified information; and the fact that large, riled up mobs are typically not going to act in manners that are predictable. No doubt, there is much to be angry about American foreign policy; however, the takeover of the Ka’ba, and the aftereffects of the rampage of the Embassy in Islamabad, are purely internal mistakes, and based on overzealous misinterpretations of our own texts, and acting on unverified rumors, and an ignorance of political events and realities. Let the wise pay heed and learn from the mistakes of others, so that they do not make the same types of mistakes!

Thread starter Alvin_255
Start date Jun 11, 2022

Alvin_255

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A Bizzare Episode in Recent History

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