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

by Kim Ghattas

The two dynasties—the Pahlavis and the Al-Sauds—had come to power around the same time, and both had to contend with the disruptive effect of the rapid modernization driven by the riches of oil.

the wildest members of the human family.” Khomeini felt so strongly about the Saudis that his diatribe against them and Wahhabism was the first section of the book. Soon he would challenge the House of Saud’s custodianship of Mecca and Medina. Throughout 1979, the Saudis were slow to grasp the extent of Khomeini’s enmity.

the end of 1979, the new Saudi policy was to “demote the Iranian Revolution from the status of an all-Muslim one to a purely Shiite one, then to downgrade it to a purely Iranian Shiite one and finally to a revolution of only one party of the Iranian Shias,” the ones who followed Khomeini.

The Saudis became determined to position themselves as the sole defenders of the Muslim faith, at all cost, and on every front, from education to politics, from culture to the battlefields.

Another Khomeinist was Mohammad Montazeri, a young, aggressive, gun-toting cleric nicknamed Ringo who had trained in the Fatah camps in Lebanon before the revolution.

the fall of 1981, the Saudi Crown Prince Fahd had put forward an eight-point peace plan to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While the plan offered neither concessions nor recognition to Israel, it was an admission that negotiations were an option. In Tehran, thousands marched in the streets, calling for the death of the Crown Prince. Banners declared him an enemy of Islam. Iran was now cast in the role of the ultimate defender of Palestine and the Arab homeland, and it was building an Islamic resistance movement against the enemy.

began in a spectacularly violent fashion, with plumes of smoke, twisted metal, and mangled bodies. In November 1982, the Israeli command post in Tyre was blown up, killing seventy-five Israeli military personnel. In April 1983, the American embassy in Beirut was bombed: sixty-three people were killed. The following October, the Marine Corps barracks and the French paratroopers’ headquarters were blown up. The Americans and the French had come to Lebanon as part of a multinational force for peace in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal. More than three hundred were killed, including 241 Americans, in the worst disaster for the United States since the Vietnam War and the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

Their recruiters were more canny operators, like Mughniyeh, the former member of Arafat’s elite force. Mughniyeh had come up with the idea of a suicide bombing against the Israelis in Tyre. His fellow militants thought the idea was ludicrous: Who would be crazy enough to blow themselves up? But he had found someone—a childhood friend—and sent him to his death. Mughniyeh would become the most devilish Hezbollah military mastermind. With his brother-in-law Mustafa Badreddine, they would hijack and kidnap their way through the 1980s and develop the armed wing of Hezbollah, turning it into a highly efficient and sophisticated militia, with ample help from Iran.

By the first half of 1983, the influence of Hezbollah was seeping from the Beqaa Valley into the slums of Beirut—waves of Shia refugees fleeing the south had settled at the bottom of the city, close to the airport, layers of families and clans, villagers converging in neighborhoods. Where you landed determined under whose influence you fell: the more moderate Amal or the Islamist Hezbollah; temperate clerics or firebrand conservative ones.

Every night, explosions began to hit bars and shops that sold liquor in West Beirut, around Hamra Street and on Phoenicia Street, the hub of Beirut nightlife, where clubs and bars had been swinging through the 1960s and ’70s. One evening, a band of a hundred women in chadors went on a rampage on Phoenicia Street, smashing bottles and furniture in restaurants and bars. Gunmen barged into hotels, shooting up every bottle in the bar. Men with beards harassed women near the American University, demanding that they veil.

Israeli occupation in the south was still dominated by a coalition of leftist and communist militias as well as Amal, which was entrenched across the south. Even after the dramatic suicide bombings of 1982 and 1983, the Islamists were not yet the dominant force. The Lebanese National Resistance Front had battled alongside the Palestinians when the Israelis had invaded but they were now on their own, carrying out small attacks against the Israeli occupation across south Lebanon.

But in the end, the left was no match for the zealousness with which Hezbollah applied itself to the battle, not just against the Israelis, but against their own rivals.

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.

But everyone knew. Hezbollah recruited and organized: many joined willingly, others were rounded up. The more men fought in battle against the Israelis, the more there were martyrs, and the more martyrs there were, the more families became indebted to a system of patronage that looked after widows and orphans, ensuring loyalty to Hezbollah. Posters announcing the death of those who had died fighting the occupation began to look different: gone were the smiling faces of young women or clean-shaven men with sideburns who had died for the nation. The battle was now fought in the name of Islam; the men had beards, and the colors were black for mourning and green for Islam—signed: “Islamic Resistance.” Many of the posters were exact copies of those on the walls in Iran—designed with the help of artists who had come specially from Tehran to help train local artists to produce public obituaries that were also used as propaganda.

Fahs had envisioned a borderless Muslim community, and had gone to Iran believing the wave would start from there. Instead, he had found Shia sectarianism and Persian nationalism.

There were benefits. With generous funding from Iran, Hezbollah was creating a copy of the Iranian system in Lebanon: schools, charities, martyrs’ associations,

The gesture of grief and self-flagellation was known as latmiya. In various corners of the world, there were Shias who engaged in a more forceful, sometimes bloody latmiya, self-flagellating with chains, cutting their foreheads and beating them with their hands to make the blood flow—just as Easter passion processions run the gamut from parades through villages in Italy to actual crucifixions in the Philippines. Lebanon had been on the tamer side. But now Ashura, and every funeral of a Hezbollah fighter, was an occasion for mobilizing, indoctrinating, and forcefully thumping one’s chest.

In Pakistan, the time had come for a new phenomenon that had no precedent in recent history: systematic Sunni-on-Shia killings.

In the summer of 1987, Pakistani Sunnis went into a village on the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and killed Shias, fellow countrymen. Then Shias killed Sunnis. Almost two hundred people died. The violence was not the result of communal riots, nor a feud between tribes.

but Iraqi Shias were fighting loyally under their country’s flag against Iran, and the narrative of a Persian-Arab clash was only just beginning to take sectarian overtones. 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.

Pakistan’s Shias were the largest minority in the country, the second-largest Shia population outside Iran, but unlike Shias in the Arab world they had never felt downtrodden. Anti-Shia sentiment existed on the subcontinent, even in pre-partition India, but just as in the rest of the Muslim world until then, its expression was limited to a minority of clerics and their followers, a strand of thought that did not pervade the general population or undermine a country’s stability.

But Zia was putting an end to inclusive Muslim nationalism with his Nizam-i-Islam.

But Pakistan’s army, powerful before, was now so entrenched in politics that they didn’t even need a general in the presidency to rule the country.

emptying the city of a quarter of its inhabitants. On the morning of Sunday, July 3, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air flight 655 over the Strait of Hormuz as the plane made its way to nearby Dubai. There were 290 civilians on the plane, including sixty-six infants and children. No one survived. Their lifeless bodies floated in the sea amid the wreckage of the plane.

In a radio address on July 20, Khomeini endorsed a cease-fire with Iraq. “Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom. Happy are those who have lost their lives in this convoy of light. Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice.” The deadly debacle in Mecca and Khomeini’s repeated failure to rally the Muslim world to internationalize Islam’s holy cities were still weighing on him. The ayatollah needed another tool to revive revolutionary fervor.

Another war was drawing to an end, in Afghanistan. The Soviets were tired by a conflict they too couldn’t seem to win or lose.

The CIA’s post in Islamabad sent a cable to the agency’s headquarters: “We WON.” At headquarters, they popped the champagne. At the US embassy in Pakistan they celebrated. The Saudis also felt they had won. Their money had paid for what they saw as the victory of Islam.

On Valentine’s Day 1989, right before the 2:00 p.m. news, the newscaster on Tehran Radio read out a statement Khomeini had dictated: “I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, which is against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.

martyr. We may never know whether Khomeini timed his move with cunning precision to overshadow the headlines of the Soviet withdrawal on February 15 and the Saudi victory, or whether he seized the opportunity when he saw it. The biggest irony is that he was finishing off what the Saudis and their friends had in fact started.

The Satanic Verses was his fourth book, published in September 1988, about two Indian Muslim immigrants to Britain who die on a hijacked plane that explodes over the English Channel. They fall to earth and are magically transformed into living symbols of good and evil.

Muslims who felt aggrieved and slighted, even those who had not read The Satanic Verses.

The book had been translated into Persian and had been on sale in Tehran—no one seemed exercised about it until Khomeini spoke out.

Death by blasphemy had now been introduced to the Muslim world by a strange twist in the competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia to position themselves as the standard-bearer of global Islam. But Saudi Arabia’s role in this dynamic would be forgotten, and the fatwa against Rushdie would become solely an Iranian story.

On June 3, 1989, Khomeini, eighty-six years old and ailing, died of heart failure. In his will, he left a parting shot against the Saudis. The twenty-nine-page document was read by Ali Khamenei, the president and soon-to-be Supreme Leader. “Muslims should curse the tyrants, including the Saudi royal family, these traitors to God’s great shrine, may God’s curse and that of his prophets and angels be upon them … King Fahd spends a large part of the people’s wealth every year on the anti-Qorani totally baseless superstitious faith of Wahhabism. He abuses Islam and the dear Qoran.”

Khomeini’s death would in fact allow a détente to begin between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The president,...

In August 1990, Iran’s enemy Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait; his troops were on Saudi Arabia’s border. The Iranians and the Saudis were suddenly united in fear of the same madman. By September, the foreign ministers of both countries were talking in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

The Syrian tanks silenced everyone’s guns and imposed the Pax Syriana. Alliances

These fools, by dint of ignorance most crass, Think they in wisdom all mankind surpass; And glibly do they damn as infidel, Whoever is not like them, an ass. —Omar Khayyam, Quatrains, 156

When Nasr was accused of apostasy in Egypt, just a few years after the Rushdie fatwa, the comparison to the British Indian novelist came easily to Western media reporting on a foreign country. But Nasr’s supporters in Egypt preferred to compare him to the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo.

legitimacy and respectability to institutions like the Islamic University of Medina. Founded by King Faisal in 1961 as a gift to the Wahhabi establishment, the university had an explicit mission: to train, proselytize, and extend the reach of the kingdom’s religious establishment beyond the country’s borders.

would give up everything and live the way the prophet and his companions had lived fourteen centuries earlier if God helped him get rid of his doubts.

In 1996, the Saudi government recognized the Taliban government and its Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They, too, were destroying video and cassette tapes, banning music and sports, and enforcing prayer time. The Saudis supported the growth of the Taliban, seeing kindred spirits in these revolutionaries who embraced an Islamic purity that the House of Saud perhaps aspired to, but could never attain as a kingdom allied to the West.

The most radical Saudi youths thought that even Hawali and Audah were too soft. They were reading Abu Muhammad al-Maqdissi, the Palestinian scholar and intellectual heir of Juhayman who had published his books while in Peshawar.

said he was also inspired by Bin Laden. Saudis were in shock. How could young, devout Muslims, some of whom were covered in the glory of the war against the Soviets, engage in such violence against their own country? There was no ability or willingness to recognize that these young men were a product of their environment, of a youth spent learning about the enemies of Islam and glorifying the mujahedeen.

While Rafsanjani was attending Friday prayers at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Crown Prince Abdallah by his side, the resident preacher sheikh Ali al-Huthaifi angrily denounced the Shias, using the pejorative word rafidha, derived from the Arabic “to refuse”—those who had refused to recognize the first caliph, Abu Bakr, and had followed Ali instead. The episode caused deep embarrassment for the Saudis, and Sheikh Huthaifi was removed as a preacher from the mosque (albeit for only a year).

In early March 1991, soon after Kuwait was liberated, Iraq’s Shias in the south and Kurds in the north seized on the momentary weakness of their dictator. They had been encouraged to rise by President Bush, and the uprisings had come close to bringing down Saddam. But America, Saudi Arabia, and even Iran failed to come to their help.

In June 1996, a massive explosion tore the face off an eight-story building housing American Air Force personnel in Al-Khobar Towers, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.

The first suspect was al-Qaeda. But suspicion quickly turned to a Shia group, Hezbollah al-Hejaz, affiliated with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Mansour al-Nogaidan knew very well the danger they represented to his own country and the world, though he could never have imagined the magnitude of what was about to happen.

On September 11, 2001, at 4:46 p.m. in Saudi Arabia, Mansour was visiting his parents in his hometown of Buraidah. He was sitting in the living room watching Al-Jazeera, the Arab CNN, beaming out of Qatar since 1996. State-funded but much freer than the stale, state-controlled news on offer in Arab countries, the channel was quickly making a name for itself—it had already broadcast two interviews with Osama bin Laden.