Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

by Kim Ghattas

Trying to answer the question “What happened to us?” led me to the fateful year of 1979. Three major events took place in that same year, almost independent of one another: the Iranian Revolution; the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Saudi zealots; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the first battleground for jihad in modern times, an effort supported by the United States.

Instead, these pages bring the untold story of those—and they are many—who fought and continue to fight against the intellectual and cultural darkness that slowly engulfed their countries in the decades following the fateful year of 1979.

The two countries were both part of the Safari Club, an alliance of intelligence services started in 1976 along with Morocco, Egypt, and France, which fomented anti-Soviet operations and coups from Angola to Afghanistan.

a Pakistani jurist doing a review of the work of the Council of Islamic Ideology uncover what he described as the “revolting” details of what had happened in its offices as Saudi Arabia imposed itself on Pakistan, effectively writing a defining chapter of the country’s history.

Four years into the war with Iraq, Iran was sending waves of weaponless young boys to their death. Wearing red headbands and armed only with a metal key supposed to open the gates of heaven, thousands of teenage boys walked across minefields to clear the way for tanks, their bodies hurled into the air by the explosions.

No, the bloodletting in Pakistan was the first premeditated, state-sponsored attack by one sectarian militia against another sect, the first such killings that the Muslim world had witnessed in modern times. The sectarian killings were born out of the seeds of the Iranian Revolution and its clash with Saudi Wahhabism,

As often, the Western media focused on the fanaticism of a few in the religious seminaries but ignored a much bigger problem: even the minds of those who did not espouse violence were closing, being molded into something more doctrinaire, less tolerant than what had shaped their parents’ understanding of the world.

The Quran is immutable, and all it does is tell believers to respond to blasphemy with dignity.