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Episode 26: How Iran’s regime subverted Shia Islam - with Hussain Abdul-Hussain
00:53:38
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- [00:05]
Aviv
Hi, everybody. Welcome to Ask Aviv. Anything today is going to be a special episode. I say that a lot, but this is true. I am going to manage to do both. An interview with tremendously relevant news content that is also a historical deep dive into something really important that I think we all need to understand about Islam, Shia Islam today, Sunni Islam today, what actually is happening in the Muslim world, where it all comes from, in the Muslim world of the Middle east, near Israel. And we're going to understand some of the ideological depth to the Israel Iran war, not just the 12 days, but the 20 months and the four decades. And we're going to do that with Hussein Abdul Hussein, a research fellow at the foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. And I really am glad he's here. You're going to hear about Shi' ism from Shia Muslim, which is a much better way to learn about Shiism than, from, I guess, named Khaviv. And we are going to also really look at events from that perspective, which I think is very, very valuable. Before we dive into it, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by Bennett and Robin Greenspan of Houston, Texas. Thank you, Bennett and Robin. Really appreciate the help and also appreciate the remarkable dedication. Bennett and Robin are strong supporters of Israel who recognize Israel's centrality and vitality. To the j me to say that they are proud to sponsor this episode because the insights from this podcast make understanding the Middle East a bit easier. Their words, not mine, and really fitting for this episode. In this episode, they chose to dedicate it to the memory of Igal and Amit Vakhs, 53 and 48 years old when they died. Two American Israeli brothers who died defending their home in Netiva Sara in the Gaza envelope on October 7, Igal went out to fight back against the Hamas terrorists. He was armed only with a knife. He was shot in the back. Amit is a retired Shin Bet officer and official member of the town's emergency response team. And he had a gun and he was killed in a gun battle with the Hamas terrorists. He's survived by his wife, Einat, and three children, Daniel, Talia and Dauria. The brothers were also both survived by their father, Alfredo, an immigrant from Argentina, and the younger brothers Nimrod and Gilad. Back to back funerals were held on October 17 and they are buried in Netiva Asara. Thank you very much for that dedication and for this tradition that has formed of dedicating these podcast episodes to people we lost. On October 7th, folks, we tackle questions that are asked in our Patreon community. So that is another kind of community that we have formed around this podcast. Join the Patreon. There's a conversation there that my wife and I are a part of. And also those are the kinds of questions we, we pull out of to really tackle the events of the day. So, Hussein, how are you?
- [03:14]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
I'm good. Thank you very much.
- [03:16]
Aviv
Thank you. Thank you for joining me. Your life story, I want to say very quickly before we dive into the content, because you and I come from very, very different worlds, and I've wanted to tell the story that you tell, and I don't want me to tell it because it shouldn't come from me. You are half Iraqi, half Lebanese, right? Your mother is from Iraq, your father from Lebanon. The other way around. Okay, mother from Lebanon, father from Iraq. You've already told me that. So that's just my brain crossing wires. And. And you are a Shia Muslim and you came to the US Two decades ago. And I will just stop there. Tell us a little bit about that. How, first of all, the Iraqi Shia community, the Lebanesia community, is that common that across those, you know, hundreds and hundreds of kilometers, people meet and marry in the Arab world, in Lebanon, in Iraq? Where did you grow up? In which countries? What brought you to the U.S. 20 something years ago? Tell us a little bit about your story.
- [04:25]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
Well, thanks for having me on, Ion Habib. My story is just like that of many families in the Middle East. People keep on moving between countries, escaping coups and wars and civil wars. In the case of my Iraqi family, they were scared of a communist takeover in Iraq, so they started relocating to Lebanon. And as they did that, the family of my dad met the family of my mom. And since they're both Shia, the friendship eventually led to the marriage of my parents. During early age, I was growing up in Baghdad, in Iraq. These were the early years of the Iraq Iran war. I was in elementary school, but then when my dad found that he had to serve in the military with two kids, he just decided to move to my mom's country, Lebanon, which was not in a better shape. It was in a civil war. But thankfully, we survived the civil war and I lived there most of my late childhood. Teenage I went to college, the American University of Beirut. I worked at Lebanon's the Daily Star daily newspaper at the time. And then when the Iraq war happened, or was about to happen in 2003, I was probably one of the very few voices that supported toppling Saddam. Of course, you know, being a having family and friends in Iraq, having to leave Iraq because of Saddam. And that didn't sit well with most of the people that I knew, friends and intellectuals in Beirut at the time. So I parted ways with them. I moved to Washington in support of spreading liberty and democracy. And I've been doing this for over two decades now. So that's in a nutshell, my story.
- [06:34]
Aviv
Is there a connection between a childhood that is, you know, in that just profoundly a kind of skipping between wars? I mean, avoid. I mean, the Iran Iraq war was at a million dead was. It was catastrophic. And the Lebanese civil war demolished Lebanon for a generation. It was. You're describing you, you lived through these. You grew up in two different disasters. How does that shape, did it shape your sense that maybe, I don't know, even American democracy or any or democracy generally as a concept is an answer to some of the things that afflict the Middle east, to some of the problems in the Middle East?
- [07:18]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
Well, the answer is that unfortunately I remember war ever since I came to this world. So there's always been some war somewhere. And that's, you know, either I was in the war or family and loved ones and friends were in the war or some war was happening somewhere. I'm commentating on a war. So I don't really remember much time without war in that part of the world, especially that I come from two of the most troubled countries in the region. You know, there's something else, it seems to me, or I feel that I grew up in two different Middle East. Now, mind you, in 1979, I was a kid at the time, but that was really a point when things started changing for the Shia and the Shia until that point. The Shia and Arab countries up to that point were mostly pacifist and the Shia of Iran were not really that connected to the Shia of the Arab world, were on the other side of politics and policy. So, you know, we all know that Iran was an ally of Israel under the Shah and they had diplomatic ties and exchanged embassies and whatnot. So the whole. As I grew up and getting Shia shoved into this, the Palestine cause, this happened as I was growing up. So talking to my grandmas on both sides, they never perceived the Palestinian issue as a Shia issue. I was not raised to consider this as our problem. Most of what you see now in terms of the language of Iran, in terms of we should die in martyrdom and free the world, and this was not part of the Shi' ism that I grew up with. You know, it was more, it was much More pacifist. My grandparents on both sides were very well assimilated into their countries. They were part of the system. They pledged allegiance to their respective governments, Iraq and Lebanon. They did not have this cross national. We all pledge allegiance to a guy who sits in Iran. This disagreed with their beliefs. This disagreed with their traditions, social customs over many centuries before I was born. Yeah, so I was born into something and I was growing up until now. It's. It eventually evolved into something else. And that was the point of my article. I was thinking, this is not Shiism. What you see now in Iran is not really the Shiism that I grew up with and that I know.
- [10:07]
Aviv
So this was an article published in the Jewish chronicle of the UK on June 24th. That would have been Wednesday, something like that Tuesday of last week. You make a lot of points and you make them very accessibly and very quickly. And I really urge people to go and read that. And I'm going to try and walk through some of those points and dive deeper into it. One is there is a Shia world of 50 years ago, and then there's a Shia world of 30 years ago. And there are radically different Shia political worlds in the Near East. Iran emphatically leads this change. Khomeini. There's a revolution. It begins in 1978 against the Shah. It is many, many pieces of Iranian society, from liberals and feminists and communists all the way to Khomeini and his clerics. And in the end, this revolution that topples Shah by huge cross sections of Iranian society gets taken over, gets cannibalized by Khomeini himself. We did an episode on this during the war. So everyone who listens to this podcast now knows everything there is to know about it and doesn't have to learn anything else. But that was a joke. That was a dad joke. I apologize. But the point is that as Khomeini takes power, he leads. I have taught on this podcast a great deal about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, about Rashid Rida and his student Hassan Al Banna, who founds the Muslim Brotherhood, and about Rida's teacher Muhammad Abdoukh, and about his teacher Al Afghani, and about this whole lineage of Sunni Muslim theologians saying, why is Islam so weak? How come the British and the French can chop up the Muslim world into their empires? And how do we find our. How do we respond by going back to our forefathers, to our Salafs, and founding this kind of Salafist idea of the original generations of Islam. If we go back to that Piety, we'll retake our place in history again. And these very, very powerful ideas are totally alien to Shi' ism 60 years ago. And then suddenly Khomeini turns them into the vanguard of Shia politics on the global stage. Can you tell us a little bit about how that happens to the point where, and this is something that I think I once read it somewhere, but I didn't realize. Ali Khamenei. Okay, Khomeini, Ruhollah Khomeini leads the revolution from 78 to 79, he takes over. He becomes the supreme leader of Iran, but he's dead by 89. This guy, Ali Khamenei, who is currently the supreme leader of Iran, he's 86 years old. He's been the dictator of Iran since 1989. And this man translated the writings of Said Qutb, one of the students of Hassan Al Ba, one of the heirs of the Muslim Brotherhood line, who is also one of the inspirations for Al Qaeda. He literally translates his writings, including critique of Israel in the west and anti imperialism and anti Zionism and all that, into Farsi, into Persian and injects these deep ideas that are totally alien. And that's, by the way, in the article. So just, you should still read it. There's a lot more in it. Can you tell us that story? How does Khomeini lead the Shia from a place where this is not at all what they're talking about, it's not part of their story, into just adopting a fundamentally Sunni world of ideas into Shiism.
- [13:20]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
So before I dive into this, let me just say this. It is very important to understand the difference between the Shia, the Arab Shia of Iraq and Lebanon and everywhere else, and the Shia of Iran. If the Shia from both sides came to talk to one another, they wouldn't understand, of course, unless the Iranian Shia would switch to Arabic. So the difference in terms of language, the gap is huge. And this also applies to other aspects of religion. But one of the biggest cleavages between these two Shia is that the Arab Shia consider this religion to be theirs. They're the fathers of this religion. So the most important people of this religion, Imam Ali, whose shrine is in Najaf in southern Iraq, and his son, Imam Hussein, it was Franius and Karbala. These guys, these towns are Arab towns. These guys Ali and Hussain and all the 12 imams were Arabic speakers. So this is very important for the paternity of this religion. Who's, you know, who's in charge? Who invented this? Who started this religion? Now when the.
- [14:47]
Aviv
Just to clarify. So in other words, if you're an Arab Shia and you're watching an Iranian Shia led axis with a specific ideology that is the claim of the regime is that it's rooted in Shia religion. You think that this Persian Shiism doesn't get to tell Arab Shia what their religion is, in other words?
- [15:06]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
Absolutely. It should be the other way around. So what my grandpa used to say all the time whenever you know, he saw the Iran building Hezbollah in Baalbek where I was growing up and he'd be unhappy and say, you know, they come here to teach us Shiism. We've been Shia long before they were. The assumption is that Iran started switching to Shiism after 1500 and the Shia Arabs think that they've been Shia since the year 632 or 34, you know, whenever, whatever stocking point. So the idea is that the Shia Arab have been Shia at least a millennium before the Iranian Shia. So we get to set the instructions, we get to set the beliefs, we get to set of how this religion looks like. And you guys were converts from non Islam, Iranian Persian, non Arab who converted to our religion. So we get to say how this religion looks like and how the beliefs of this religion look like.
- [16:13]
Aviv
I know that in Islamic discourse the question of Arabic as a holy language because that's the language of the Quran and of the divine revelation is very significant. It's very dramatic. It's a very big part. You need to learn Arabic in Malaysia if you want to study the Quran itself. And the poetry of the Quran is deemed to be one of the proofs of its divinity because it's considered right, this perfect Arabic. So is that generally felt? Is there resentment of this Iranian argument that we now lead and we're a revolutionary Shiism that's going to take over the and all of that. Is that your view or is that do you think generally shared? In Lebanon and in Iraq and the.
- [16:50]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
Shia communities there has been an issue between the Arab Shia do not like or what they call innovations. They think that when the Iranians came to this religion they brought in their invasions. Now to quickly answer your question, what Shiasm it this is disagreement not over faith within Islam, this is disagreement over political succession. Who was supposed to be to succeed the Prophet after. So the Shia believe the succession went through his, through the line of Muhammad, through his cousin and son in law Ali and then through the descendants of Ali the sons Hassan Hussain and then the son of Hussain Aliyin. Then you count 12 imams after Muhammad Prophet Muhammad and that's why they call 12 Rashia, you know, the 12 imams, the Sunnis believe that, no, this is. It shouldn't go like this, that the companions of the Prophet gathered together and amongst themselves they picked one of them to become the successor, the caliph in Arabic. And then this, you know, they did this for at least four times. So, and the fourth guy was Ali himself, who's the first Shia imam. So this is roughly the split between the two sons. Now, throughout history, the Sunnis were number one. The majority were number one, the establishment. So throughout history, the Shia felt as the minority, as you know, the people who are not running government. The Shia were not the people who were running government. Now, I don't want to go into the details of this because the Fatimids in Northern Africa were sort of Shia. But in general, in the Levant, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Gulf, the Shia were mostly the minority. They were not in charge. And after their 12th Imam went into occultation, that's what the Shia believed. Their community became leaderless. And to make up for this deficiency, the clerics decided, okay, the clerics will run the community, but not in any central way. So each cleric will guide the believers who follow him on ways of belief and only in ways of belief. So this has nothing political to it. And when the cleric dies, you pick another one. And this is the mushtahid. This guy is called in Arabic, the Mushtahid, you know, the very knowledgeable scholar. And this institution is called Taqlit. You know, you emulate one of them. So this is Shiasm for over 1000 years, the Shia are just, you know, assimilating into the Sunni government, whoever is in charge, but they have their own faith. Now, when the huge difference between the Arab Shia and the Iranian Shia is that when Iran started switching to Shias after 1500, in Iran, the Shia are the majority. So they have a different way of handling government and thinking of government. They are in power. They can build an empire, they can wage wars. That's not the way that the Shia, the Arab Shia look. So this is the main difference between the two sides. Now, the, the Iranian Shia, the ones who were building an empire, wanted a rhetoric that, you know, served them, like, you know, yeah, we are the ones. We are the ones who should rule the world. We are the ones. And mind you, the Shia of Iran were locked in a rivalry with the Sunnis of Istanbul, the Turks, the Ottoman Turks. So you have two empires, one of them Sunni, one of them Shia, fighting the Arabs. The Arab Shia were in the Middle, they were living under the Sunni Ottomans but you know, they were co religions with the other guys. But the point for the Shia was that, listen, you know, you want to have your imperial game, good for you. Just leave us out of it. You know, we disagree with what you're saying and we are the authentic Shiism, you know, we are the authentic Shiats.
- [20:59]
Aviv
Yeah, it's just one of the really interesting things about it. When you read a, you know, intro to Islam, right. And you read about the Safavid. Safavid. My Persian pronunciation isn't what it used to be. When you read about it, Right. The dynasty that arises that you're talking about. It never occurred to me what you just said, which I thought was such an interesting. That Shiism had always been peaceful because it was small, because it was a minority, because it had to deal with. Right. For example, when Muslims say something online that somebody doesn't like, it has become a little bit too customary I think, to say taqiyah at them. Taqiyah is this idea that you are allowed to lie and so Muslims are allowed to lie. Actually Taqiyah is a very specific artifact of Muslim Shia experience born out of tragedy because when you are persecuted you can pretend not to be Shia to whatever, be loyal to the regime and that pretending to preserve your safety as a persecuted minority. That's where this concept comes from. It's not random lying. Right. And so so much of the Shia Arab experience is minority is the underdog. And then the Safavids build an empire, take over Persia and forcibly convert the Sunni of Persia and Shiism becomes this triumphant imperial religion. And so everything you just described is actually this immense gap in the fundamental kind of cultural nature, political nature of the religion between the Arab experience and the Persian experience that today is expressed. You just gave me a depth of time that I have to now go read about. Because what the Iranians regime has done with Shi' ism as a revolutionary world conquering idea makes sense if there's this old imperial past. But the Arabs don't have an old imperial past, the Arab Shia and the Persians do. And so it's a radically different sense of what the heck Shi' ism is in history.
- [23:02]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
That's correct. And now just on the issue of Taqiyyah, and this is not only the Shiite, you have the Ismailis and the Druze and the Alawis and these guys who are often classified as Shia, but they're not, they're not at all, even the Shia don't consider them as Being Shia and the Druze don't think of themselves as being actually. Or the Alawites. But long story short is that for the Druze and the Alawats, who are much, much smaller minority than the Shia. Now the Shia are a minority, but they're not a small one like a significant minority. So they were not under threat physically as much as the much smaller guys like the Druze or the Alawites. So for the Druze and the Alawites, you pretend that you are Muslim, you know, so you, you do things that you, for the Shia Taqiyyah, for the Shia is that you only not show your actual belief if your life is threatened, like on the spot. It doesn't mean that you go around and build a parallel structure and call it, you know, my religion for the public. And then you have something that's secret, which is the way that the Druze and the Alawites handle themselves, that's not for the Arab Shia. Plus the Arab Shia always thought of themselves as Muslims, right? I mean, the difference, like I said, is over succession. But the main beliefs of religion are just regular Muslim, unlike the Druze and the Alawites and the Fatimids, the other guys. So this made the Shia live, okay, because, you know, they're Muslim. After all, they disagree over succession. Now they can hide this succession disagreement thing, but the point is they were waiting for something. And the Messiah, the Mahdi, the Messianic figure, Imam Al Mahdi, Hajratullah, Imam Al Mahdi. This is very central as Shia thinking. Otherwise they wouldn't have designed their Marja Taqlid and all these religious institutions this way. So they designed them as waiting for the Mahdi to come. And when he does, they will take over from the Sunnis, everybody else. Now when the Iranians came and they said, no, you know, we're the rulers, this didn't go okay with the Shia Arabs. They were saying, no, you're breaking the main tenets of our belief. We're waiting for the Messianic Mahdi. And now if you're ruling, then, you know, it doesn't accord with the religion itself. So, and this has been going on now to go to Khomeini and to Khamenei. I think what they tried to do is that.
- [25:38]
Aviv
Right, let me just tee it up. Because they revolutionized this whole idea into this Muslim Brotherhood revolutionary kind of concept, right? So what did they add? What was missing before them?
- [25:57]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
So they borrowed from two main sources. They borrowed from the Muslim Brotherhood, from Bana and especially from Qutb and what they borrowed from Qutb was anti imperialism and anti Semitism and having an Islamic government and, and restoring Islam to its glory. So the main division after 1798 when Napoleon showed in Egypt the main division among Muslims was that why are we so behind? And they came up with two possible explanations as you might know. One of them said we have to modernize and the other one said no, we have to go back, revive what we had. The Muslim Brotherhood came from the revived what we had. So we had to go back to 7th century as it was and that'll make us glorious again. So the Shia were not there. The Shia did not think of this. They did not have anything to revive. If anything, the rulers of Iran, like the rulers of Turkey were moving in the modernization direction. Now Khomeini broke pranks with the Iranians at first and he went with the conservative school. So this is where he borrowed from Sayyid Qutb the Islamic government. You know, if we revive an Islamic government then our glory will come back. And this, like I said, this disagrees completely with everything Shia, Shia never had a government, never wanted one. They're waiting for the Mahdi to establish one. And Khomeini and Khani also borrowed heavily from communism the idea of downtrodden of the world coming together and banding against the imperialists and the capitalists. So these are the main two influences that came to Shia. Neither one of those influences defined the history of Arab Shia. You know, I mean all the Shia that I know growing up, my grandfather included either worked for the government. Like you know, my Lebanese grandfather was a judge, a senior judge eventually. And my Iraqi grandfather was a merchant in the market, a capitalist, you know, who made a lot of money. So this communism plus you know, Islamic government both ideas were not part of Shiism. And you will see that my Shia family never assimilated into the Iranian until this point. You know, both my Shia families in terms of religion follow Najaf, follow Sistani, you know, follow the traditional leadership and they do not follow Khamenei who to them is a, is a new thing. So what I'm saying, and this is not only my two families in Iraq and Lebanon there's like millions of Shia families who disagree with the we lite faqih and that, you know, we have to fight and, and win and die and liberate Jerusalem.
- [29:01]
Aviv
Rule of the cleric. So you mentioned this in the article where this ideology of the rule of the cleric Shia clerics came to Khomeini and said to him, what do you mean you're ruling with Shiite religious rule. You're not the Mahdi. What do you think you are? I mean that's what you're trying to say to us. And he says no, God forbid, God forbid, I'm the deputy, I'm the deputy on this earth until such time as he comes. But until then we're going to pave the way by me being the supreme leader and the religious leader at the same time. And that's the ideology of the Iranian regime which is just innovation in Shia Islam. I want to get into where Israel comes into the picture when the Muslim Brotherhood or it begins before the Muslim Brotherhood, it begins in Rida, who's the first serious theologian of this school, of this going back school of Sunni Islam in that period to think seriously about Zionism and what it means. And he came to hate Zionism even though he actually didn't hate it at the beginning. He thought it was a good example Arabs and Muslims should follow about awakening and going back to sources and old cultures and all this and all that. And then he came to hate it because he realized that Zionism wanted self determination. It wanted a state for the Jews. It's the only way Jews would be safe. Modernity was very dangerous for minorities. That was the basic idea of Zionism, the expectation of catastrophe. And therefore it wouldn't settle for for what Herzl originally asked the Sultan in Constantinople for which was autonomy under the Ottoman Empire. That was just because that's all he thought he could get. He actually ultimately wanted self determination and statehood for the Jews. And for Rida, that was a disaster for Islam because the Jews are very weak. And it's one thing to be ruled by the British Empire, it's a whole nother thing for Islam to be pushed back by the Jews. And so there was this sense that the Jews take pride of place in the ideology of the Muslim Brothers and of in general this sort of all these different kinds of Salafist ideas. Because they're weak. Because they're weak. What's important about them is that they are the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. And therefore they are the test of Islam's capacity to return and of the signal of Islam's potential return when Islam overcomes this weakest thing that ever pushed it back. And so the Jews play this seminal role. Now it helps that Al Aqsa, the Temple Mount, the mosque and the shrine on top of that place is in the Sunni tradition the stepping stone that Muhammad used to ascend to heaven. But in Shi'. Ism. It's not in Shi'. Ism. Al Aqsa is not in Jerusalem. And that's not an innovation. That's a heresy for Shi'. Ism. So tell us about that. Jerusalem's position in Shia Islam versus the Sunni ideas. And also how, therefore, does the Palestinian cause, the anti Zionist cause, enter into this Shia ideology of the Iranian regime that doesn't have that pillar of at least Al Aqsa being part of Muhammad's story?
- [32:04]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
Well, yeah, that's true. I mean, look, number one, you have to think of the demographics. If you look at the Levant, take Lebanon out. There are no Shia. Syria doesn't have any Shia. They probably, like, have 50 families as we speak. That's it. Jordan doesn't have any Shia. There's not a single Shia Palestinian. Before, of course, Palestinian Islamic Jihad starts converting a few Palestinians to Shias. There are also a few villages on the border between Lebanon and Israel. These used to have a few Shia. Maybe they're Arab Israeli now. You know, I have no idea what happened to them. But my point here is that the Levant is not a Shia place. Now Iraq is. And Iran, of course, eventually became Shia. But there's, you know, you wouldn't find, if you go to Iraq, at least six or eight shrines, holy spots. Like you. If you go to Najaf and Karbala and Kalvamiya, Calvin next to Baghdad, and Samarra to the north of Baghdad, and then you go to Sardab and Masri, and they're like a dozen of really holy spots for the Shia of Iraq. There are also holy spots for the Shia of Iraq in Mecca, in Medina, you know, so, okay, but there's nothing in the Levant. And I can only think of one spot that belongs to Jafar Tayar in Jordan near Amman. And Jafar Tayar is not really one of the imams. He's like the brother of Imam Ali. So there's no story for the Shia.
- [33:41]
Aviv
Can we just explain what you just listed are the shrines, the belief in the shrines, the centrality of the shrines to the Shia. Just give us two sentences about that for people who, you know, the goal of this podcast is to open a bunch of doors and people could choose to walk through them or not, but just give that sense of the cultural world and the religious world. Why are the shrines really important in Shiism? And. And therefore you're listing shrines and saying, well, this is a source of, you know, if you don't have a single Shia shrine, you're probably not part of the Shia story is what you're saying. But just tell us, why are these shrines so important? Because in Shiism, they're much more important than in, you know, most religions.
- [34:21]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
Well, I mean, in most religions, shrines of, you know, of pious people do count. There are holy spots for many religions. But in Islam, if you take out Mecca, you know, there's no. I mean, why is Medina important? It's the city where Prophet Muhammad spent part of his life living and it's where his tomb is. I mean, he's buried in Medina. Otherwise, Medina has no significance in, you know, in terms of holiness. And mind you, look, there's a difference in terms of how holy the Shia think cities or shrines should be and how the mainstream Sunnis, especially after the Wahhabi Puritan movement came in, so shrines stopped being as important as they used to be. But for the Shia, like many other religions, they have holy spots. Religion is not only literature. It has shrines of the pious, the imams, the prophets. You know, there seem, I mean, the same reason why Jerusalem should be important for the Sunnis, right? I mean, presumably because Prophet Muhammad set foot there. So for the Shia, you have Mecca, of course, you have Medina, of course. And then you have the spots where the imams lived and died. And the biggest majority of these spots would be Iraq. There are a few exceptions for, for example, Imam Ali Ridda in Mashhad in Iran, but that's only like one imam out of. Out of 11. So the history of the Shia does not have the Levant as part of it. And in most of Islam, I mean, in most of Islam, if you take out this, the nightly journey that Prophet Muhammad made, there are really no holy spots for Islam in the divine. Now, the reason I'm saying this is the Shia who live in Lebanon, they're the only bunch of Shia who exist in the Levant. The Levant doesn't have Shia. I mean, the Alawites aside, of course, and the Druze aside. But the 12 are Shia. There are no 12 are Shia. Like I said, Jordan, Syria, Palestinians, nothing. So the story of the Shia unfolds mostly in Iraq. Najaf and Karbala and Kufa, of course. Kufa was the city that Imam Ali made as his. His capital when he was the caliph, the fourth caliph. So he moved it from Medina to, to Kufa. And Kufa has one of the major mosques and shrines. And the Shia believe that when Prophet Muhammad made his nightly journey, he made it to Kufa. And if you look up the mosque of Kufa, you will, you will Find what they call it, Mashad Nabi, the spot where Prophet Muhammad prayed before he ascended to the sky and he came back. So the whole story that Sunnis believe happened in Jerusalem for the Shia, in the Shia tradition, it happened in Kufa and southern Iran. So this is number one, why Jerusalem is not really on the Shia radar. But it even gets worse for the Shia. The person who constructed the Dome of the Rock, the Caliph who constructed the Dome of the Rock was, was the Umayyad Caliph, Abdul Malik bin Marwan. He ruled between 685 and 705 and he constructed this in 691. Now, the Shia hate the Umayyads because number one, the Muawiyah, the founder of the Umayyads, was the one behind the death of Imam Ali. He took this succession from Imam Ali and the son of Muawiyazid is the one who killed Imam Hussain, the son of Ali. So if you grew up as Shia, whenever anyone utters the word the Umayyads, you would say, you know, a curse on them. Like, you know, God take them, God let them rot in hell or something. So the Shia hate the Umayyads. I mean, ask any Shia. This is not something, it's not a secret. Now, the Umayyad is the guys who built the Dome of the Rock. So how do you reconcile revering a building by a guy who, you know, he curse all the time and going for it and liberating it and considering it to be so holy to you?
- [38:36]
Aviv
I'm sorry, how do you do it and how do you do it? Not just that, but the Iranians instituted Quds. They, the Iranians instituted a day that is exactly that Sunni vision of what Jerusalem is, which is, as you say, part of the ideological framing of those regimes. How do you just justify such an obvious, I'm coming in from outside, I'm asking the ignorant question. Hopefully the listeners and viewers are as ignorant as me and this is useful to them. Isn't this absolute abject heresy? Quds they in Iran?
- [39:16]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
So this started with the 1969 fire of that Australian guy. If you're familiar with the story, an Australian guy showed up in Jerusalem and burnt part of al AQSA in 1969. And of course Saudi Arabia made a big deal out of it. And this was the starting point for the creation of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation countries OIC so 1969. And this is the first time that anyone who's Shia, who jumped on board of this, and he denounced this fire and this was Khomeini. And until then, the Shia were not really, you know, if you look up any date before that date, you wouldn't find the Shiite really issuing anything related to whatever happened between Jews and Arabs anywhere around Jerusalem or this part of the land. So this is when Khomeini started internalizing political Islam and he was seeing that Islam was on rise, on the ascendance, not only with Qutra, but also in, in Saudi Arabia and other countries. And he started, he, he wanted to use Islam against the ruling shah at the time. So this is how he got on board with this. And until that point, and at the time, he was not really that prominent anyway. So his statement was not maybe as important to, to the Shia, but this is how he started building it. And eventually he, he called for a Quds. But look, the Shia of Lebanon, the reason they fight with Israel is bilateral. It's because you came and occupied part of our land and we're fighting you. And if we throw our arms, you will come at us again. You meaning Israel. Now, Nasala couldn't have dragged the Shia into this war with Israel if he said Jerusalem. So the reason the Shia fight is that for their own sake, the reason they keep their arms in Lebanon is against the other sects. But if you get the Shia for anything connected to Palestine or the Palestinians, you wouldn't get them on board. The 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel was totally about Lebanon versus Israel. It had, it didn't have a word of Palestine in it. In the year 2000, when Israel pulled out of South Lebanon, Nasala stood on the border in Bentish Bayb and he delivered a speech in which he said, we liberated our land and we encouraged the Palestinians to look at our example and do the same, but there's nothing we can do for them. So Nasala understood that the Shia were not interested in the Palestine cause and Jerusalem. So all of this has been imposed on the Shia as a political platform. Most of the Shia understand that we use this for or not we, like, you know, Hezbollah or Iran, they use this for politics. But there's no Shia who thinks that, you know, this is, this is our thing. On the political level, you might hear the leaders of Hezbollah saying that we will pray in Jerusalem and this is something that they borrowed from Sunni Islam. But if you are just talking to a bunch of Shia among one another, meanwhile, look, if you ask a Shia if I'm going to grant your dream, where would you want to go other than Mecca? Because, you know, Mecca is central to Every Muslim, they would say Najaf. That's, I mean the Vatican for the Shia is Najaf. The most important city that's not Mecca or Medina is Najaf. And after it is Karbala. You know, this is where Imam Ali and Imam Hussain. No one would say Jerusalem. I mean, look throughout the history of Shia pilgrims, you know, the Shia are known for, you know, being pilgrims. They move back and forth from Lebanon to Najaf to Karbala to, you know, Masha. There's not a single trip organized for the Shia pilgrims to go to Jerusalem. And that should tell you a lot about how the Shia view Jerusalem. Until Khomein.
- [43:26]
Aviv
This might be my last question. Thank you so much. Again, there's so much more that I have to ask you and I urge people to read that op ed and also to begin to look up everything we've talked about in these enormous stories that real people live in the Middle east, not cartoons for the purposes of Western political debates. We just had a 12 day war with Iran, which was really a 20 month war with various agents and proxies of Iran and then with Iran itself. And the regime was profoundly humiliated. The number of times they've declared victory now and the number of victory marches they've held tells you just the scale of the humiliation. And it will now struggle to argue that it is the vanguard of Islam and the Shia are going to accomplish what the Sunni failed to and Islam's on its, its path back and all of this kind of Shia version of Muslim Brotherhood ideology. It'll now struggle to pretend like they're really delivering on any of that. And you are of the belief that this is a beautiful, wonderful thing. That is a window first of all, because you don't like dictators and tyrants who hurt people. I kind of got that from things you've written over the years. I've been reading you more than just this op ed, but also you're the belief that the weakening of this particular kind of warping of Shiism opens a window for the return onto the geopolitical stage, the regional stage of the real thing. Can you tell us about that?
- [45:03]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
Yes. So listen, look at Iraq. Iraq has at least 20 million Shia, which is huge compared to Lebanon. Lebanon probably has 1.2 million, which is a small population compared to the Iraqis. Iran had enough money to buy the, or the majority of the Shia in Lebanon and with some, you know, portion, Hezbollah managed to dominate the Shia of Lebanon. Now Iran didn't have enough money to buy the Shia of Iran. And three, four, five years ago, the Shia took to the streets. They burned down the consulate in Najaf itself, you know, the most revered Shia spot in the world. And they tore down, they do this often in Baghdad. They always tear down Khomeini and Hanay's posters. The Shia of Iraq do not think, or the majority of them, or at least half of them do not think of Iran as being their patron or their sponsor. And they, they hate it when, when they're depicted, depicted this way. And to substantiate what I'm claiming, look at elections. You know, the last election in Iraq, four years ago, the pro Iran Shia and Iraq were decimated. So, and, and as I speak, today or yesterday, one of Iran's main allies, foreign Prime Minister Abadi, he said that he's not going to participate in the election now, he said, because there's a lot of intervention and money being spent. But the reason is that he knows that as a pro Iran Shia, he will get beaten. So the point here is that until, as I speak now, the Iraqi Shia are against Iran and even in Lebanon, even during the peak of Hezbollah in Lebanon in the election of 2022, 17% of the Shia went to the ballot boxes and voted against Hezbollah. And Amal, they voted against Iran. And this is during the peak of coercion and money, 2022, Hezbollah is at its best. And now if you look up the municipal election in Lebanon, 40% voted against Hezbollah. And again, mind you, the other side cannot campaign. You know, the anti Hezbollah Shia cannot go to Baalbek and campaign because you'll be killed. You know, there's no money that's supporting the other side. So if you ever level the field, the pro Iran Shia will probably be decimated both in Lebanon and Iraq in the dialect boxes. So what I'm saying here is that all of this comes from coercion and money. And because Hezbollah kills its opponents and its opponents can set foot in these territories. Now what's happened with Israel coming on board is that now the pro Iran Shia and Lebanon are on the run. They are the ones who are on the run. And now this gives a chance to the other guys, the weaker guys, to say, listen, you know, we don't like you, we don't support you anymore. So my point here is that all of These years, since 1979, Khomeini and Khamenei did not really transform the Shia. They just bought them and twisted their arms. And if you take out this sort of pressure, the Shia will not be the guys who want to liberate Jerusalem and want to go with all the crap that Khomeini and Khani or the anti American crap. Now look, I'm not saying that if you take out the Iranian regime, the Shia would be the ones who are waving the American flag all day long. That's not the case. What I'm saying is that the Shia are not as militant as this regime makes them. If this regime ceases to exist, the Shia will be like everybody else. No, they want to raise families. Most of them try their best to move to Dubai and Abu Dhabi where they can make a good living and raise their families. Good education, good life. So that's the Shia. They're just like everybody else. And their tradition is to be pacifist and to pledge allegiance to the government where you live now. Iran came in and they tried to twist this whole idea. I don't think it'll last for long, you know, I don't think it'll outlast the regime. If the regime collapses, I think this whole charade will change. Look, if the Iran regime collapses, I doubt that the Shia will ever hold the Quds Day ever again.
- [49:38]
Aviv
Iraq is a Shia majority country. A Shia liberated from Iranian ideological influence, Iranian money, Revolutionary Guard Corps mixing in the politics and factions of Iraqi Shiism. Could such an Iraq join an Abraham accords that is in the Sunni world? First of all entirely Sunni agreements with the Israelis, all peace between Arabs and Jews have been Sunni. But they're part also of the internal war among the Sunni between these Muslim Brotherhood ideologies and people who want to get away from it and move forward and modernize. And part of modernizing is overcoming the insane obsession with the Jews is how the Saudis actually talk about it publicly. Right. And so part of the internal culture war of Sunni Islam to break away from Muslim Brotherhood ideas has been making peace with Israel not out of love for Israel, but in order to get Israel the hell off the agenda. Is that possible to expect from Shia led Shia majority Iraq going forward?
- [50:46]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
Well, I think the best illustration would be if you look up Qaisir Fazali who is the leader of Asa Ib, one of the most devout supporter of, of the Iranian regime and he always warns against peace with Israel. And his, you know, his warning is because Zionism wants to spread homosexuality in Iran and that's the only idea that he could come up with because he really couldn't find anything for the Iraqis to keep them from signing peace. If you look up this dumb legislation that you know, threatens an Iraqi with the life sentence or even capital punishment if they talk to an Israeli. It's against Zionists and Freemasons. And this should tell you how much the Iraqis understand the difference between Zionism and anything else. If you followed on the debates over the past two years, whenever Iraqis are debating whatever is going on between Israelis and Palestinians, they had no idea which territory is who. You know, where the settlers lived, where Palestinians lived, where Arab Israelis lived, what Israeli meant. They're just a bunch of. They just mixed everyone, lumped everyone together. So the reason I'm telling you this is that it's until this minute there's no clear understanding among the Iraqis of what's going on. They know that Saddam dragged them to it and they hated the Palestine because of Saddam. So in the year 2004, I was there in Baghdad and the first thing that they did, the Iraqis did after the Saddam regime collapsed, they went to the street where the Palestinians lived. There were 5,000 Palestinian refugees who lived in Iraq at the time they went there. They heard rocks at them. They forced them out. And these guys had to move and live in a camp on the border with Jordan, on the Iraqi border with Jordan and turbid and then the UN resettled them somewhere else. This should tell you about the sentiments of the Iraqis, including the Shia Iraqis. They considered Palestine as being a Saddam thing and they didn't really like Saddam that much. If you really focus on the Iraqis, you will see that you can get them to peace. But we have to really focus on them and talk to them and debates and I think they'll be way on the way to IBN of course, Hussein.
- [53:15]
Aviv
Abdul Hussein. This has been absolutely fascinating. I learned a tremendous amount. Thank you for everything you do and write and talk about and would love to have you back sometime.
- [53:25]
Hussein Abdul Hussein
My pleasure. Any time.