Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

by Kim Ghattas

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. Volunteers or forcibly rounded up, these human waves were breaking enemy lines. Religious fervor permeated Iranian troops and the volunteer Basij forces, willing to die for the nation, for Khomeini, and for Imam Hussein. As ideological resolve took hold and death in martyrdom became desirable, Ashura was every minute of every day—at least for Khomeini, who insisted on war until victory. This was not an understanding of the Shia faith that Husseini could recognize, neither was it the one that Imam Sadr had preached. Even the martyrdom of Imam Hussein had been disfigured by Khomeini, according to former Iranian prime minister Bazergan, who wrote a celebrated open letter to the ayatollah in 1986 decrying how the revolution had made martyrdom a goal into itself.