The Islamic Republic has infamously made the destruction of the Jewish state its animating principle. The obsession with Israel and Palestine, though, does not come from religious Shia creed but from the world of its religious rival of some 1,400 years: the core literature of the Muslim Brotherhood, a militant Sunni organisation founded in Egypt in the 1920s.
Traditionally, the Shia revere spots and shrines across Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but not an inch in Mandate Palestine. According to Shia tradition, when Prophet Muhammad made his nightly journey to the “furthest mosque,” as narrated in the Quran, this was the Mosque of al-Kufah, in southern Iraq, not Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, as the Sunni tradition has it.
Palestine, whose Muslim population is predominantly Sunni, was thus exclusively a Sunni issue, never a Shia problem, at least until 1979, when Shia firebrand cleric Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in Iran. Khomeini preached a version of militant Shiism that incorporated Muslim Brotherhood doctrines alien to the traditional Shia creed as upheld by Iraq’s Najaf, the Vatican of the Shia world.
In 1928, Hasan al-Banna, a schoolteacher in Egypt, founded the Muslim Brotherhood, whose guiding principle was the revival of the pan-Islamic caliphate with the mission of spreading Islam, by any means necessary, including violence. Banna therefore started arming the Brotherhood and training its members. When the Egyptian government busted him, he found in the “liberation of Palestine” a good excuse to justify his illegal militia.
Government agents assassinated Banna in 1949. He was succeeded by his rival, another schoolteacher, Sayyid Qutb, who proved to be even more radical than his predecessor. Qutb’s books defined the militant Islamist movement – especially its hatred against Jews. The man who translated Qutb’s works from Arabic to Farsi was a young Shia cleric in Iran. His name was Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran today.
Khamenei’s mentor, Khomeini, imported Qutb’s thought into Shiism and came up with his controversial theory about an Islamic government in which the state is guided by one cleric. The singularity of the cleric at the helm of the state broke with a millennium of Shiia religious decentralisation. For over 1,000 years, the Shia agreed that their clerics would guide the believers, but only on spiritual issues, until the return of the Mahdi, Muhammad al-Mahdi, Arabic for “the divinely guided one”. The Mahdi, a messianic figure, was the twelfth imam who in Shiite tradition had gone into occultation and would return at the end of times to restore justice on earth. Until his return, the Shia pledged allegiance on temporal matters to whichever sovereign was in power.
That’s why most senior Shia clerics, in both Iraq and Iran, opposed Khomeini’s idea of clerical rule, arguing that leadership belonged to Imam Mahdi only. Khomeini rebutted that the supreme leader cleric would serve as the imam’s deputy, until his return.
At the outbreak of the revolution, Khomeini feared that the communists would outflank him on the Left, so he instructed his thugs to run over the US embassy, take its diplomats hostage. He then tried to rally the Sunni Muslim world around his Muslim Shia leadership by inviting Yasser Arafat to take over the Israeli embassy in Tehran.
Anti-Americanism and antisemitism thus became the defining doctrine of the Shia Islamist regime of Iran, even though the Shia creed advocates pacifism while waiting for the second coming of the Mahdi.
Khomeini also relied on Shiism to expand his Islamist empire. Iran organised Shia communities in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, and made them into militias that pledged allegiance to Tehran. Tehran then used these militias to wrestle Iraq from America’s hands, besiege Israel with a “ring of fire” and use Arab Shia and, in the case of Gaza, Sunni populations, as a “first line of defence” for non-Arab Shia Iran.
War, conquest, Jerusalem and anti-Imperialism cannot be found in Shia tradition or literature. Khomeini and Khamenei imported them from the founding literature of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is how Palestine became a problem in Iranian Shiism, after it had been for long an exclusively Sunni cause.
As Israel decimated the Iranian militias and bruised Tehran’s Islamist regime, the Shia traditional leadership in Najaf now has the opportunity to lead the Shia world back to pacifism. Shiism, after all, is a religion that requires spiritual guidance, not missiles and nukes.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD)
