Seema Sirohi asks Kim Ghattas to describe Beirut—often dubbed the “Paris of the East”—and the recent decades which witnessed the Non-Aligned Movement and progressive politics in the region.
“The era of the Non-Aligned Movement was one of leftist, anti-imperialist politics,” but there had also emerged a pro-American, pro-capitalism, free-market economy line of thinking. Islam didn’t feature yet, says Ghattas, but that changed in the series of events leading up to 1979. As Egyptian politician Gamal Abdal Nasser lost the war against Israel, there was a sense of reckoning in it—people wondered if “God had abandoned Arabs in their battle against Israel.”
In Iran, a war was raging to topple a pro-American despotic Shah and among those revolutionaries were not just leftist nationalists but also Islamists. As the upheaval against the Shah was “hijacked by Islamists,” says Kim Ghattas, it transformed into an Islamic revolution. People witnessed for the first time how Islam could be used as a successful political force to overthrow a despot.
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