Inciting Muslim Violence at Mecca, the Ayatollah Further Isolates Iran

Last week a cantankerous old Iranian Shia, Ruhollah Khomeini, currently resident in north Tehran, tried for the seventh time to challenge the God of Islam on the matter of the hajj pilgrimage. This time God won, but it was a terrible victory. Nevertheless, the outcome will be a good thing for all Muslims, and for Iraq and all other opponents of Iran, including the United States.

It is laid down in the Koran, which is for Muslims the word of God, that during the pilgrimage the hajjis must not indulge in any violence, nor verbal disputation, nor abuse (Chapter II, verse 197), not even the violence involved in hunting. The hajj is a religious occasion for individual Muslims, through quiet prayer and worship, to seek spiritual renewal and also affirm the unity of the worldwide brotherhood of Muslims. That is the way the hajj has been conducted for 1,300 years. “No contention, no politics” on the hajj is not only good spiritually, it is a necessity when 2.1 million people from more than 120 countries, many of them enemies, are crammed together in a restricted area.

Ayatollah Khomeini, however, has other ideas. Since 1981, he has been using Iranian Shia pilgrims to exploit politically the great hajj gathering. The Iranians have tried to draw the pilgrims into Iran’s quarrels with Iraq, Israel and the United States, among others. Every year before the hajj , King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has appealed to the Iranians, for respect to the sanctity of the event, but to no avail. During earlier pilgrimages, there have been scuffles, especially at Medina, between the politicized Iranians and the religious pilgrims who did not want their devotions disturbed.

Because the Saudis, guardians of the holy places in Mecca and Medina, unwisely and timorously allowed the Iranians to flout the injunctions of the Koran, Khomeini this year arranged a real political extravaganza. For the first time, the Iranians were to demonstrate in Mecca, Islam’s holiest place. More than 155,000 Iranian pilgrims, the largest group ever from that country, were sent, well-provided with propaganda materials. Among the hajjis were high-ranking civil and military officials, politicians and clerics--including the notorious Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, a member of Parliament and former head of the revolutionary courts, where he was known as the “butcher judge.”

Khomeini roused the combativeness of his pilgrims with two messages. The first, on July 28, said that the pilgrims “should not refrain from giving expression to their hatred to the enemies of God and man.” Even more defiant and anti-Koranic was the message of July 31, in which he condemned those who say that “the pilgrimage is a place of worship, not a battlefield”; Khomeini said that the pilgrims should “go from holy hajj to holy war” by bathing themselves in blood and martyrdom. These ideas were imparted to the Iranians minutes before they went to the evening prayer in the Grand Mosque. Khomeini got his wishes in the brawling that followed the prayers: a death toll of more than 400, including 275 Iranians. Khomeini’s first reaction was that the “infidels could not have done better.”

In fact he could not have done worse for his cause, such as it is. Foreign non-Iranian pilgrims will return home as anti-Khomeini witnesses. For the Iranian Shias did their best to spoil a religious event; the hajjis plan and save for years ahead, to observe the high point of their spiritual lives.

The generalized Muslim reaction to this act of heresy and desecration has been a worldwide condemnation of Iran. The sole exceptions to unanimous denunciation were Libya (which, however, did not approve) and militant Shia groups in Lebanon. Yet even there the Sunni Muslims condemned the Iranian action. So too did the highest spiritual authority in the Muslim world, al Azhar University and Mosque in Cairo.

The blood-curdling threats of the Iranian mullahs must be seen for what they are--hollow. The reality is that they are the expression of Iran’s frustration. Iran faces stalemate--that is, failure--in the Gulf War and failure in all its diplomatic initiatives. Indeed, political and diplomatic isolation has now been compounded by self-inflicted isolation.

What is the worst that the Khomeini regime can do to “revenge” the deaths in Mecca? Probably more outside the Middle East area than inside it, for in the West, Shia zealots can always set off bombs. Within the Middle East, Iran, in theory, could launch military attacks on Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, where there is a U.S. naval installation, or Dubai, which will be repairing the supertanker Bridgeton (the Kuwaiti vessel with a new American flag that was struck by a mine in the gulf last week while under U.S. Navy escort).

Such attacks seem extremely unlikely, because for all their aggressive rhetoric, the mullahs are not fools who bite off so much more than they can chew. Increased subversion and acts of violence in these countries is almost certain, with Kuwait being the most vulnerable. Bahrain has its Shia majority well under control; the 200,000 Shias in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, less than 5% of the country’s population, can hardly hope to “uproot” the Saudi ruling family, to quote Khomeini’s melodramatic threat. I see no chance of Iran’s revolution expanding into and taking over any other Middle Eastern country, which is Khomeini’s real objective.

All this is to the benefit of the United States in its ongoing tussle with Iran. Because of Khomeini’s open defiance of the Koran, Muslims everywhere will be less willing to grant credence to Iran’s anti-American diatribes. Even the most anti-American Arabs have already dismissed as sheer nonsense the Iranian claim that the United States instigated the Mecca incident. Muslims will be less unhappy, perhaps even approving, if the United States delivers a heavy military blow against the Iranians.

But one must be realistic. Despite Iran’s bloody folly, it is unlikely that the gulf states, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, will now grant, openly, the military bases or military cooperation that the United States would like to have. The gulf states will, however, grant covert help more readily, and there will certainly be more enthusiasm for cooperation in any real emergency where the United States and the Arabs had to fight together.

These gains may seem partial and oblique but they are gains. As a result of their arrogance and stupidity, it is wholly unlikely that the Iranians will be allowed to repeat their past performance during the hajj . That will be a victory for Islam--but at what a cost.