murky “arms for hostages” Iran-Contra affair.
Such heavy-handed intervention helped create the
intense anti-Westernism that today underlies both Sunni
and Shia radicalism. The fear and resentment of
manipulation by the West were expressed in best-selling
fashion by Iranian cultural critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad,
whose 1962 book Gharbzadegi—“Occidentosis,” or
“Westoxiɹcation”—saw Western cultural and ɹnancial
dominance as a fatal disease that had to be rooted out of
the Iranian body politic and by extension out of Islam as
a whole. Ahmad’s call was taken up across the Shia-
Sunni divide by Egyptian radical ideologue Sayyid Qutb,
who helped lay the groundwork for modern Islamism. In
his 1964 book Milestones, Qutb wrote that “setting up the
kingdom of God on earth and eliminating the kingdom
of man means taking power from the hands of the
human usurpers and restoring it to God alone”—a
deliberate echo of “Judgment belongs to God alone,” the
seventh-century rallying cry of the khariji Rejectionists
who assassinated Ali.
Sunni and Shia radicals alike called on a potent blend
of the seventh century and the twentieth: on the Karbala
story and on anti-Westernism. By the 1980s such calls
were a clear danger signal to the pro-American Saudis,
who were highly aware that radical Sunni energies
could come home to roost in an Arabian equivalent of
the Iranian Revolution. Their answer, in eʃect, was to
deal with radical Islamism by ɹnancing it abroad, thus