Spies and Holy Wars: The Middle East in 20th-Century Crime Fiction

7. Jihad, the Apocalypse, and Back Again

s e v e n The Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979 sparked a resurgence of novels about religious jihad against the West. By the mid-1980s, authors were once again writing about trouble emanating from Iran and spreading throughout the entire Islamic world. The fear that something “ugly and unprecedented was threatening civilization, democracy and the entire Western liberal tradition ” kept CIA agent Peter Randall up at night, “much as the rising terror of Nazism had troubled his father’s dreams in the mid-thirties.” Randall, the protagonist in Daniel Easterman’s novel The Last Assassin, was worried about “militant Islam.”1 By the last third of the twentieth century, literary references had certainly moved away from the “Great Game” or plots designed to bring down the British Empire to an Islamic fanaticism that threatened America and the entire world. During the runup to the twenty-first century, plots drew on themes of jihad against the West, jihad against the Arab-Israeli peace process, and a fictional flirtation with the millennium, eschatology, and the apocalypse—the Battle at Armageddon— after all, is to occur in the Middle East. Agent Randall confronts all of these demons in a novel that incorporates all types of villainy under the aegis of Islamic fanaticism. Religious zealots are groomed by an evil mastermind to assassinate seven world leaders in order to set in motion the sequence of events that will ultimately bring Jihad, the Apocalypse, and Back Again J i h a d , t h e A p o c a l y p s e , a n d B a c k A g a i n 111 about a new world order dominated by the black-robed mullahs. Equating militant Islam with the Nazi threat of forty years earlier, Easterman contrives a massive Shiite conspiracy against the West, combining real events of the late 1970s–early 1980s that metastasize into a fictional world-shaking crisis. The return to Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the ouster of the Shah, the American embassy takeover by Iranian students, plots against the pope and President Sadat of Egypt, an abortive assassination attempt against President Jimmy Carter, the failed attempt to rescue the American hostages , and the siege at the mosque in Mecca held by a Shiite “mahdi” and his followers all lead to the coup de grace—the explosion of a nuclear device detonated from Iran—the catalyst for an East-West conflict that would end with the apocalypse and a new Islamic order. Age-old villains are revived and new ones added: the descendants of Hasan-ı Sabah’s Assassins are at work again, organizing their minions from all over the world—merchants from Hong Kong and the United States, a professor from Columbia University in New York, and scores of impressionable poverty-stricken young men with religious fanaticism in their eyes are manipulated by the one-handed mullah dressed in black who has joined forces with the Nazi German scientist to destroy Western civilization. Although a thematic hodgepodge, Easterman’s novel provides a useful introduction to this chapter because it incorporates what will become significant tropes by the turn of the twenty-first century, when the United States, not unlike Britain at the beginning of this story, becomes the target of religious fanaticism. Under the broad conspiratorial umbrella of jihad, novels published during the last two decades of the twentieth century reflect concerns with jihad and religious extremism as the enemy of the ArabIsraeli peace process. Authors flirted with the apocalypse as the millennium approached, and returned to jihadist attacks against the West after 9/11. While Americans were reading Soldier of Fortune magazine, Iran became an Islamic republic in 1979, a pivotal year in Middle East politics although few realized it at the time. In February, the secular regime of the Shah was overthrown and replaced by a Shiite regime; in March, President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement in Washington; and in December, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.2 A year later, Islamic extremists assassinated Anwar Sadat and Iranians held Americans hostage in the United States Embassy in Tehran. The government of Prime Minister Begin took on religious nationalist overtones, and the United States began to arm Islamic religious militants in their struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan. S p i e s a n d H o l y W a r s...