The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis

radicals seized the Great Mosque in Mecca and held it for a time against the Saudi security forces. Their declared aim was to “purify Islam” and liberate the holy land of Arabia from the “royal clique of infidels” and the corrupt religious leaders who supported them. Their leader, in speeches played from loudspeakers, denounced Westerners as the destroyers of fundamental Islamic values and the Saudi government as their accomplices. He called for a return to the old Islamic traditions of “justice and equality.” After some hard fighting, the rebels were suppressed. Their leader was executed on January 9, 1980, along with sixty-two of his followers, among them Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, and citizens of other Arab countries.
    Meanwhile, a demonstration in support of the rebels took place in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. A rumor had circulated—endorsed by Ayatollah Khomeini, who was then in the process of establishing himself as the revolutionary leader in Iran—that American troops had been involved in the clashes in Mecca. The American Embassy was attacked by a crowd of Muslim demonstrators, and two Americans and two Pakistani employees were killed. Why had Khomeini stood by a report that was not only false but wildly improbable?
    These events took place within the context of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. On November 4, the United States Embassy in Tehran was seized, and sixty-two Americans taken hostage. Ten of them, women and African Americans, were promptly released; the remaining hostages were then held for 444 days, until their release on January 20, 1981. The motives for this, baffling to many at the time, have become clearer since, thanks to subsequent statements and revelations from the hostage takers and others. It is now apparent that the hostage crisis occurred not because relations between Iran and the United States were deteriorating but because they were improving. In the fall of 1979, the relatively moderate Iranian prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, had arranged to meet with the American national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, under the aegis of the Algerian government. The two men met on November 1 and were reported to have been photographed shaking hands. There seemed to be a real possibility—in the eyes of the radicals, a real danger—that there might be some accommodation between the two countries. Protesters seized the embassy and took the American diplomats hostage in order to destroy any hope of further dialogue. In this they were, for the time being at least, completely successful.
    For Khomeini, the United States was the main enemy against whom he had to wage his holy war for Islam. Then, as in the past, this world of unbelievers was seen as the only serious force rivaling and preventing the divinely ordained spread and triumph of Islam. In Khomeini’s earlier writing, and notably in his 1970 book
Islamic Government,
the United States is mentioned infrequently, and then principally in the context of imperialism—first as the helper, then as the successor of the more familiar British Empire. By the time of the revolution, and the direct confrontation to which it gave rise, the United States had become, for him, the principal adversary, and the central target for Muslim rage and contempt.
    Khomeini’s special hostility to the United States seems to date from October 1964, when he made a speech in front of his residence in Qum, passionately denouncing the law submitted to the Iranian Assembly giving extraterritorial status to the American military mission, together with their families, staffs, advisers, and servants, and immunity from Iranian jurisdiction. He was apparently not aware that similar immunities had been requested and granted, as a matter of course, to the American forces stationed in Britain during World War II. But the question of the so-called capitulations, extraterritorial immunities accorded in the past to Western merchants and other travelers in Islamic