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History books

Black Wave — how Saudi-Iran rivalry has unravelled the Middle East
Kim Ghattas’s history of the Islamic world since 1979 reflects on what might have been

Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Tehran in 1979 after the deposition of the Shah © Michel Setboun/Getty Images

Toby Matthiesen YESTERDAY

Barely one month in, the new year has already demonstrated that tensions in the Middle
East show little sign of calming. The assassination in the first days of January of Qassem
Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ overseas forces, in a US drone
strike and the unveiling this week of Donald Trump’s “win-win” Israeli-Palestinian peace
plan only served to remind just how misunderstood the dynamics in the region are.

Against this backdrop, Kim Ghattas’s history of the wider Islamic world since 1979, the
year of the Iranian revolution, is a timely and welcome guide to the politics of a region
that has long been shaken by regional rivalries — between Saudi Arabia and Iran;
between Sunni and Shia — and foreign intervention. Well-researched and elegantly
written, Black Wave focuses on the lives of a number of key individuals — from guerrilla
fighters, revolutionary clerics and spy chiefs to Sufi leaders and journalists — that played
prominent roles or were eyewitnesses to the events of 1979 and subsequent years.

The book is particularly strong and vivid at the start, where the author describes the
Lebanon of the 1970s, a haven for revolutionaries from around the world and from where
some of the Iranian guerrillas would emerge who would play a key role in the toppling of
the Shah. Ghattas’s book is a colourful account of their lives, interspersed with lines of

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poetry and the songs of the divas who defined the sound of that era: Fayruz, Umm
Kulthum, Marzieh and Iqbal Bano.

The book often gets nuances right, as when it traces those personal connections between
activists from Amal (the movement that mobilised Lebanese Shia before Hizbollah was
founded in 1982), the PLO and Iranian dissidents, and explains why in 1979, the Iranian
revolution was hailed by the left, including by French intellectuals, as well as by Sunni
Islamists such as the Muslim Brothers and the Pakistani Sayyid Abu’l-A’la Mawdudi as a
model to be emulated.

Another strength is that the book connects different countries and regions that are
usually looked at separately, such as Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iran but also
Pakistan, and shows how 1979 was transformative in all of them. And indeed, the late
1970s were a time when much changed across the world. As Christian Caryl argued in
Strange Rebels, it was the cradle of many of the defining forces of the 21st century —
from the enthusiastic embracing of neoliberal economics to the slow demise of
communist rule in eastern Europe through to the emergence of political Islam as a global
force.

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Women demonstrating in support of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran in April 1979 © Gamma Rapho via Getty Images
Zia ul-Haqq came to power in 1977 in Pakistan, and soon implemented a Sunni version of
the sharia as state law. After the occupation by militants of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in
1979, Saudi Arabia underwent its own transformation to an even more public display of
religiosity.

President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was assassinated in 1981 by Sunni militants inspired by
the Iranian revolution. That 1979 was transformative is thus well-known, and a sound
argument, particularly when it comes to the Middle East. It is in that transformative
moment that the wider Islamic world becomes divided into countries and movements
allied to Iran, and those opposed to it, with the Americans squarely positioned as the
leaders of the anti-Iran camp since the hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran in
1980.

This is all true and well told. Yet it is not the full story. The notion that all the ills of the

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Middle East can somehow be traced back to

1979 is popular, and one that is espoused not
It is in that least by regimes in the region that seek to
transformative moment blame Iran for all of its problems (most
that the Middle East was recently, Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince
divided into those for and of Saudi Arabia embraced this thesis).
against Iran
In this narrative the pre-1979 era was a golden
one, where ideas were flowering, young people
were dancing, grand dames were singing songs
of love, and women walked around without covering their hair. Needless to say, that
narrative has its limits. For one, Islamic groups and states were built up as a wider cold
war effort since the 1950s, in particular Saudi Arabia, in a massive attempt to strengthen
piety as anti-communism in the Islamic world — epitomised by the Saudi King Faisal,
who died in 1975.

While much of the book is about how Sunni and Shii political parties and regimes started
to use religion to further their political projects, and started attacking each other, Ghattas
also describes how all Islamist movements tried to enforce a certain notion of public
morality.

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A pro-Khomeini demonstration in 1979

In particular there was a focus on the female body, creating a “black wave”, as Ghattas
calls it in reference to the black headscarves, and in some cases full body chadors, that
were imposed as public dress for women in Iran after the revolution. This also became the
norm in other countries, including in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

But the anti-veiling campaigns of the “modernising” autocrats such as the Shah of Iran
were also deeply enmeshed with the power structures and legitimising narratives of the
state and coupled with repression. In that sense they were not unlike the claims of today’s
autocrats, who give women the right to drive but not to vote, and assassinate their
opponents (the life story of Jamal Khashoggi actually features prominently in Ghattas’s
book). Some women also chose the veil as a symbol of Islamic activism, or to take control
of their bodies, and many women were involved in the policing of dress codes.

Ghattas, a journalist who has worked for the BBC and the FT, was born in Lebanon, and

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has no love lost for the Islamic Republic of Iran or its client Hizbollah. In a nutshell, she
writes “the puritanism of Khomeini’s Iran was flattening Beirut’s joie de vivre.” For her,
the cosmopolitan Middle East gave way to one dominated by Islamist politics, and the
Saudi-Iranian rivalry.

But the book is not essentially about the veil,

or about women, it is about power politics, and
the complicated relationship between the
Iranian revolution and its supporters on the
one hand, and its enemies on the other —
although the role of the US and Israel as key
drivers of that rivalry could have been
emphasised more.

Black Wave is a sobering testament to all those

who have dreamt of a different Middle East,
and sometimes paid with their lives for it. And
yet, there is also hope, which Ghattas finds in
the ways in which people manage to deal with
historical trauma, and the suffering that has
been inflicted on the region by the Saudi-
Iranian rivalry and foreign intervention. “Their
defiance is a source of hope, their steadiness
contagious. Even when they go into exile, they
don’t give up.”

For, if you listen carefully, you can still hear Umm Kulthum in the taxis of Cairo, Fayruz
in the streets of Baalbek, and you might even be able to buy a tape of Marzieh’s famous
songs of longing in Tehran. Perhaps then, in today’s Middle East, it is understandable
that people are nostalgic for a period that most have never experienced themselves, but
that in comparison with the last few decades, seems more open and diverse.

Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry that Unravelled the Middle
East, by Kim Ghattas, Henry Holt, RRP$27/Wildfire, RRP£20, 400 pages

Toby Matthiesen is a senior research fellow in the International Relations of the Middle
East at Oxford university, and is writing a global history of Sunni-Shii relations

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