I spent my childhood in Saudi Arabia in the mid-80s, my first immigration due to the Lebanese civil war, and studied in their school system up to grade eight. We had to learn Quran, Hadiths, fiqh and other religious doctrine, five sessions a week as part of the curriculum. This was not passive exposure. We memorized Hadiths, had to explain their meaning, and learned the major schools of jurisprudence and the scholars associated with them. Shafai, Hanbali, Hanafi, Maliki: these were names and traditions we were expected to know. Jaafari was also identified as a distinct school, and tied to my own Shia upbringing, I learned more about that mainly from my grandmother on summer visits. But Ibn Taymia? Not once do I remember him being presented as a scholar worthy of particular note. During the 1980s and before the Gulf War, the Saudi religious establishment and mainstream Wahhabism did not heavily focus on Ibn Taymiyyah’s most radical or political works. If I were to speculate, I think the moment this dynamic visibly shattered was the 1990 Gulf War. When King Fahd invited the US military into Saudi Arabia to protect the Kingdom from Saddam Hussein, the Sahwa movement challenged both the monarchy and the state clerics who sanctioned the decision. To justify their dissent against the King, dissident scholars revived and foregrounded Ibn Taymiyyah’s radical political fatwas concerning rulers, foreign alliances, and the legitimacy of Muslim rulers who allied with non-Muslim powers. This internal crisis in the 1990s helped drag the political Ibn Taymiyyah out of specialist discourse and into a much wider political confrontation. There is also a wider geopolitical architecture here that is difficult to ignore. The amplification of increasingly political and sectarian religious currents arguably served the old logic of divide and rule, especially during the Cold War, when political Islam was useful as a counterweight to Arab nationalism, socialism and Soviet influence. What is not speculative is the Afghan precedent. The United States, working through Pakistan and alongside Saudi Arabia, funded and armed the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union. That intervention helped build the military, financial and ideological ecosystem from which later jihadist movements emerged. The Taliban arose from the post-Soviet Afghan civil war, while al-Qaeda grew out of the transnational jihadist networks formed around the Afghan conflict. So when political readings of Ibn Taymiyyah surged in the same broader period, I do not see them as developing in an intellectual vacuum. They were being revived inside a regional system already being reshaped by Cold War patronage, proxy warfare and the deliberate mobilization of religious identity for political ends.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐫𝐮𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐟 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝: 𝐈𝐑𝐀𝐍’𝐬 𝐄𝐌𝐏𝐈𝐑𝐄 💚🕊️❤️ Before Rome ruled the world, IRAN was already a superpower. From Cyrus the Great's empire to breathtaking architecture, advanced roads, and one of history's first human rights charters, ancient IRAN changed the world in ways most people never learn about.

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إسرائيل استخدمت نحو 1,100 طن من المتفجرات لتدمير مرتفعات علي الطاهر في جنوب لبنان. وكم أتمنى لو أن جبهات المحور الأخرى تشبه جبهة اليمن في سرعة المبادرة وفرض الخطوط الحمراء. التردد في الرد، والخوف من توسيع المواجهة، وانتظار اللحظة المثالية، هي السياسات التي أوصلت لبنان إلى ما وصل إليه: احتلال أجزاء من الجنوب واستمرار التغول الإسرائيلي بصورة متصاعدة. أنا لا أقول إن إيران تركت لبنان وحيداً؛ فهذا توصيف سطحي وخاطئ للمشهد. المشكلة أعمق من ذلك بكثير. المشكلة هي في التصور الاستراتيجي نفسه لمواجهة إسرائيل، وفي سياسة «الصبر الاستراتيجي» حين تتحول من أداة لكسب الوقت إلى ذريعة لترك الخصم يفرض واقعاً جديداً على الأرض خطوة بعد خطوة. وهنا يحضرني تماماً منطق سياسة الاسترضاء الأوروبية تجاه هتلر في الثلاثينيات: التراجع أمام كل خطوة على أمل أن تكون الأخيرة، وتجنب المواجهة بحجة منع حرب أكبر، ثم اكتشاف أن كل تنازل لم يمنع الحرب بل جعل الخصم أكثر جرأة ورفع كلفة المواجهة المقبلة. الخطوط الحمراء التي لا تُفرض بالقوة لا تبقى خطوطاً حمراء، والخصم الذي يكتشف أن التصعيد لا يقابله ثمن حقيقي سيستمر في رفع سقف التصعيد حتى يصبح ما كان مستحيلاً بالأمس أمراً واقعاً اليوم.