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

by Kim Ghattas

Every king of Iran since Shah Ismail I was now the Guardian of the Shia Faith, all the way up to Shah Reza Pahlavi.

The Syrian Brothers had great hopes that the Islamic fervor that Khomeini had brought to Iran’s revolution could spread to their country.

Khomeini likely saw the benefits of a continued relationship with Assad. Again, the ayatollah listened to Hawwa’s plea, but did not answer.

North Tehran looked like Beverly Hills, the queen was known as the Jackie Kennedy of the Middle East, and Warhol was ordering caviar from room service. Now there were snipers on the streets and the portraits were stacked in the vault of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, along with another three hundred masterpieces from the world’s great painters, a collection valued at $3 billion. There would be no more Western art. The only consolation was that the works had not been destroyed.

envisioned, with a people’s army fighting for years like the Vietcong in Vietnam or the National Liberation Front in Algeria, had not materialized. But with the shah still alive and not far away, and the CIA’s intentions always the eternal unknown, everyone was fearful of a possible coup.

The Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enghelab-e Islami, the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, was born: armed vigilantes operating across the country to beat down any dissent, any counterrevolutionary groups, any non-Islamic militias.

The informal resistance movement became an organ of the state, a feared, all-powerful paramilitary organization that struck at anyone who opposed the revolution. Its emblem was a raised fist holding a Kalashnikov rifle. Over time they became known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), their power extending well beyond the borders of Iran.

Revolutionary Guards. The IRP had worked hard to make sure that the April referendum would result in an Islamic republic. It had its own thugs: Hezbollah, or the Party of God, and attacked demonstrators who opposed Khomeini, terrorized students on university campuses, shut down critical newspapers, and rode in the streets in convoys of motorbikes, waving black flags and banners.

Leftist student organizations still wielded huge power across the country on university campuses. They held debates with Hezbollahis and won, because theirs was still the ideology of the day, and anti-imperialism the most popular rallying cry.

Khomeini, the provisional government, and even Beheshti had maintained ties with the United States. They had negotiated the release of US diplomats when a Marxist-Leninist group had briefly seized the American embassy earlier in the year.

Toward the end of October, the shah arrived in the United States for medical treatment. Few outside the shah’s close circle knew of his illness and, in Iran, many imagined this visit was the prelude to another CIA coup. The left jumped on the occasion, mobilizing on university campuses that had just reopened for the start of the academic year, and launched the slogan “Death to America,” Marg bar Amreeka.

On November 4, some four hundred students climbed the walls of the American embassy compound in central Tehran. Led by a group calling itself Students Following the Imam’s Line, they took sixty-six American hostages. Khomeini did not order the seizure but quickly recognized its benefits. He could outbid the secular left, undermine the nationalists, and appropriate the popular anti-imperial slogan.

There had been months of tussles with the ayatollah over governing style and vision for the country but the hostage crisis was the final fissure. The radicals now had free rein.

The Muslim Brotherhood had been waiting for Khomeini’s answer to its proposal that he be the ultimate leader of an Islamic awakening. But article 12 of the new constitution declared that Iran’s state religion was still Shia Islam. The Brothers who had visited Khomeini in Iran were deeply disappointed. Khomeini wanted to be a leader on his own terms; he wanted to be separate from the rest. He didn’t want to dissolve himself into a Muslim world that was 80 percent Sunni; he wanted to lead the opposition forever.

Indeed, the constitution declared that the Islamic Republic of Iran supported “the just struggles of the oppressed against the oppressors in every corner of the globe.” Khomeini’s revolution was just beginning.

fifty-two remained hostages until January 1981, a total of 444 days, throughout which Khomeini continued to eliminate the left and solidify his grip on the country with his radical posse. At exactly the same time in Saudi Arabia, a similar crisis was unfolding. The Mahdi had seemingly returned from occultation and appeared in Mecca. And he, too, had taken hostages.

the beginning of a new century in the Islamic calendar, the first of the month of Muharram of the year 1400.

The discovery of oil in 1938 launched the transformation of a mostly desert kingdom into a modern country. The country was barely six years old and its founder, King Abdelaziz ibn Saud, was already courted by world powers. In 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt struck a deal with the Saudi monarch, sitting aboard the USS Quincy on the Great Bitter Lake. The two men agreed that Saudi Arabia would provide America with unimpeded access to exploit the oil, in exchange for military protection and support.

Thirty thousand Americans had moved to the kingdom to offer their expertise, from oil engineers to hotel managers to accountants, building everything from roads and airports to hospitals and schools. The Americans used the model they knew best. Small urban settlements in the middle of the desert, like Riyadh, began to grow into cities that looked like Arabia’s answer to Houston: urban grids of wide streets with massive shopping centers and no public transportation.

The state budget was the royal family’s private coffers, just as the country was, in essence, their private property.

Unlike the barren, desert interior province of Najd, from which the new rulers of the kingdom hailed, Mecca was in the richer, more vibrant, and cosmopolitan Hejaz province along the Red Sea. The Hejaz, home to both Mecca and Medina, the two holiest sites in Islam, and the nearby port city of Jeddah, had been part of every great Islamic empire, its people open to the world, its architecture delicate and intricate, its practice of Islam rich and diverse. Najd wasn’t poor, but it was sterile and xenophobic, and remained on the periphery of a culturally diverse and rich world religion.

According to one interpretation of the Quran, after being exiled from paradise, Eve and Adam were reunited on Mount Arafat near Mecca. Legend had it that Eve, the mother of mankind, was later buried in Jeddah, the city whose name means “grandmother” in Arabic.

Abdelaziz brought with him two centuries of a particular brand of Islam that his ancestors had espoused in a political and familial alliance with one man: Muhammad ibn Abdelwahhab. Ultra-orthodox and fundamentalist, the eighteenth-century religious preacher led an exclusionary revivalist movement, following in the footsteps of others who had called for a return to the ways of the salaf, the ancestors, the first generation of Muslims. There were those Salafists who believed that following the righteous salaf, al-salaf al-saleh, dictated a return to the exact way of life of the prophet.

The Ottomans were the first to describe it as Wahhabism, to denote a movement outside the mainstream of Islam, one that seemed intently focused on one man as though he were a kind of prophet.

The dynasty had suffered serious reversals, including almost total annihilation and exile over two centuries, but the alliance between the House of Saud or Al-Sauds and the preacher, sealed in the desert in 1744, had persisted. The tomb of Eve became one of its victims.

Among the worshippers from Mecca, from around Saudi Arabia and from the four corners of the Muslim world, were three hundred Sunni men on a divine mission—or so they believed.

The group of three hundred believed another messenger had come—the Mahdi. Sunni beliefs also allowed for an apocalyptic redeemer whose arrival by the Ka’aba, alongside Jesus, signaled the end of times before the age of righteousness. But unlike Shias, Sunnis did not hold this as a central tenet, nor did they believe the Mahdi been born centuries ago and gone into occultation. He would instead reveal himself as a man from the people with particular attributes spelled out in the hadiths, the records of prophet Muhammad’s sayings and actions, written after his death. The truth of this Mahdi’s presence had been revealed to the leader of the group in a dream, while he had been out in the desert: the Mahdi was one of his own companions, soon to be his brother-in-law, Mohammad ibn Abdallah al-Qahtani. His name and physical appearance matched what the hadiths had predicted. The Mahdi was meant to be a descendant of the prophet through his daughter Fatima, and a story was concocted to explain how al-Qahtani, who came from a different tribe and area, did in fact have the right ancestry. Soon, many in the group were having dreams confirming that Qahtani was the Mahdi.

sights set on the House of Saud. The rebels spelled out their demands: they wanted the country to cut ties with the West, stop all oil exports to the West, expel all foreigners, and remove the House of Saud and their clerics who had failed to uphold the purity of Islam. (Some of these demands were similar to ones that Osama bin Laden would make in a few years.)

The Saudis would use the more outlandish religious claims of Juhayman and his men to reduce the movement to the work of religious deviants who had lost their way. But the leaders of the “deviants” had been groomed by the top stars of the Saudi clerical establishment. That too would be obscured by the Saudis. In fact, when the siege began, they tried to hide the news from their own citizens and from the rest of the world.

feared their new lords. Deep in Sami’s DNA and heart was the mysticism of Sufism, a deeply spiritual practice of Islam combining intense, almost transcendental devotion and asceticism, a practice as old as Islam itself, common to Sunnis and Shias and ingrained in the history of Mecca. For Wahhabis, Sufi practices, including melodious incantations and especially prayers to the shrines of saints, were heresy.

By noon of that day, November 20, the country was already cut off from the outside world. All international lines were shut, no calls could be made, no telex or telegrams sent. Land borders were closed to non-Saudis. A total news blackout was imposed.

With Khomeini looming large over everyone’s mind at the White House, the only word that everyone seemed to retain from the information coming out of Saudi Arabia was: “Iran.”

Another article, titled NEW KHOMEINI ATTACK, focused on the ayatollah’s call for the shah to be sent back to Iran for trial, and his threat to put the American hostages on trial as spies. In the bottom half of the front page, a wide picture of the Ka’aba in the courtyard of the sacred mosque was accompanied by an article about the unfolding crisis in Saudi Arabia, reporting “Mecca Mosque Seized by Gunmen Believed to Be Militants from Iran.” In the piece, American officials speculated that the takeover was a response to Khomeini’s call for a “general uprising by fundamentalist Moslems in the Middle East.”

shocking events were trickling out of the country. That morning, the news was on the radio from Egypt to Pakistan where, in some circles, anti-imperialist sentiments needed little stoking. An angry mob of students converged on the US embassy in Pakistan, a sprawling compound with housing and a swimming pool, on the edge of Islamabad. “Death to the American dogs,” they chanted. “Avenge the sacrilege of Mecca!” The mob forced its way into the enclave, setting cars and buildings on fire. The attack lasted six and a half hours, during which time the Pakistani police and army were nowhere to be seen. Two American servicemen died, as did two embassy employees and two protesters. The embassy building was destroyed. The anti-American violence continued to rage across the country, and by Friday more than three hundred Americans had been evacuated from Pakistan.

Wahhabism remained deeply anti-Shia; the clerics of the kingdom continued to issue religious edicts condemning them as heretics, some even calling to kill Shias who did not embrace Sunni Islam.

But the Shias of Saudi Arabia had seen what people’s power had achieved in Iran and, with both inspiration and some instigation from Tehran, had taken to the streets to demand more rights.

Bin Baz had complained about “violations of Islamic morality” in Riyadh, like foreign women eating in public, Christians wearing visible crosses, Western music being played in stores, and the apparently corrupting game of foosball, idolatrous because of the little statuettes. Directives were promptly sent to address Bin Baz’s complaints—but only in Riyadh and the province of Najd.

Despite the religious strictures the House of Saud had imposed on the country since the kingdom was founded, many of their subjects still felt that every year brought more modernity, more freedoms, however small.

Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,

When Jamal Khashoggi returned to Jeddah in 1982, after six years in the United States studying at Indiana State University, he noticed his country had changed.

of Khomeini into their country, Jamal was buying cassette tapes of fiery Egyptian preachers in the shops in Jeddah for two or three Saudi riyals. He was an idealist in a country with no civil society and no politics, and he felt like a minority.

Before he had left for the United States, no one thought twice about sitting together with female cousins and aunts around the dinner table, the women unveiled. By the time he returned, extended family gatherings were segregated. Within each home, there was at least one person spreading the gospel about the sahwa, the Islamic awakening.

If the cultural changes in Saudi Arabia were a case of arrested progress, in Iran it felt like whiplash, the violent and dramatic undoing of decades of social, political, and cultural advancement.

Alcohol was banned. Revolutionary Guards hauled crates of vintage champagne and fine European wines and 250,000 cans of imported beer from the cellar of the Intercontinental Hotel and poured more than a million dollars’ worth of forbidden liquid down the gutter by the hotel’s rear staff entrance.

messages of support to Iranian women. Though Foucault recognized Islam as a “powder keg” that could transform the region and the global equilibrium, he still found in the revolution the spirituality that he missed in the West. For him, the veil was just a detail, an inconvenience. The allure of anti-imperialism can be blinding to those who don’t have to make any of the tough choices required of life under a repressive rule.

University campuses had been hotbeds of activism against the shah, but the ideologies then came in all colors and every possible combination: secular leftists, modernist Islamists, nationalists, leftist Islamists. Now there was only one stance, one narrative allowed. Seven hundred qualified scholars lost their jobs, while the country cut off the funds of a hundred thousand students who were on state scholarships overseas. Sciences were left alone, but the humanities were overhauled, producing textbooks titled Islamic Psychology and Islamic Sociology. Foreign influence had to be ripped out of books and minds.

The purge was everywhere, a reign of terror that would last ten years. The first victims were the royalists, former officials, military and intelligence officers; then came the communists, the leftists … Everything became a crime, yielding an entrenched paranoia and darkness that rolled over the country.

Who knows how the Iranian Revolution would have unfolded if Imam Sadr had returned to Iran and joined forces with other moderate clerics? Would the shah have stayed? If Sadr had returned to Iran after the departure of the shah, would he have survived Khomeini’s ruthless campaign? There was nothing preordained about Khomeini’s becoming Supreme Leader in the wilayat al-faqih he had created. That journey required vigilant cunning, constant maneuvering, and the weakness or naive loyalty of others.

The Saudi kingdom prided itself on being the birthplace of Islam but obscured the rich pre-Islamic past of the Arabian Peninsula dating back to the Nabataeans. Ancient cities lay forgotten, hidden from the world to avoid veneration of buildings, especially ones belonging to the age of ignorance, al-jahiliyya, that preceded Islam.

Khomeini’s desire to upstage the Saudis as leaders of the Muslim world.