Iran, 1979.
On November 4, 1979, an angry mob of Iranian students, stoked by the Iranian Islamic Revolution that took place earlier in the year, ransacked the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held sixty-six American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days. [...]
Egypt, 1979.
Predating Iran’s Islamic Revolution by only seven months, Egypt became the first Arab Sunni country to sign a peace treaty with Israel. For his bravery in pursuing an elusive peace, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize [...]
Saudi Arabia, 1979.
Also in November 1979, was the largely lesser-known seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia by young Saudi militant Juhayman al-Otaybi. Al-Otaybi and several hundred followers believed his brother-in-law Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani to be the Mehdi (Islam’s prophesied [...]
Iraq, 1980.
Meanwhile, next door in Iraq, Saddam Hussain, head of a secular political movement, the Ba’ath party, perceived the time ripe to emerge from the yoke of Ottoman and Western colonialism and return Iraq to glory not witnessed since the Islamic [...]
United States, 1981.
It was the death of the Shah and subsequent Iraqi invasion of Iran that led the Iranian government to negotiate with the United States over the hostages. With Algeria’s mediation, and via Canadian intervention, the Iranians released the sixty-six captives [...]