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

by Kim Ghattas

Perhaps he had done it on purpose, a spiteful man eager to show his mettle and determination to avenge all those who had been brutally killed or had disappeared in the darkness of Saddam’s republic of fear. Saddam issued pardons on holidays, but he also delivered body bags. Every holiday, families grew anxious, never knowing what a knock on the door would bring: reunion with a loved one, bruised and gaunt but alive, or the heartbreaking confirmation of their death. “We have become Saddam,” thought Jawad. “We have become him. We have adopted his ways.” Jawad thought back to the decades of history of Shias as a minority, always in the opposition, rarely in power, always seeking justice from oppression. Now, at this key moment in their history, they had failed the test of magnanimity, the very test that Imam Hussein would have passed. They had become the oppressors.