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

by Kim Ghattas

But by October 2017, America could claim victory against ISIS. The Iranians would be quick to come back to Raqqa, to rebuild the shrines ISIS had blown up.

the end, the most emblematic confrontation between ISIS and the IRGC happened not in Raqqa but seven hours away on the southernmost point of the Syrian border with Iraq, at the crossing of al-Tanf, in the summer of 2017. ISIS launched a surprise attack against a Syrian government border post where IRGC advisers were positioned. The battle lasted over two hours, leaving only one Iranian alive, Mohsen Hojaji, a twenty-six-year-old officer who was captured and paraded in front of the cameras.

In Iran, resentment had been rising about the country’s costly involvement in wars outside its borders. Hundreds of Iranians had died in the fighting in Iraq and Syria. Hojaji’s death, his haunting face and stoic look, briefly united Iranians. His body was given a hero’s welcome.

Despite the oppression ushered in by the Islamic Republic, Iran had never become a fully totalitarian state. Iranians were simply too argumentative, too cultured and cultural: within the sanctioned parameters, there were still surprises in elections, lively parliamentary debates, reformist media that pushed the agenda, and intellectuals of all classes, who kept writing, meeting, and sketching a different future.

Abdolkarim Soroush, who had played a key role in the cultural revolution that Islamized university curricula. But since the early 1990s, Soroush had been challenging the system from within, asking the same questions that the Egyptian intellectual Nasr Abu Zeid had been wrestling with. Soroush, like Nasr, wrote about hermeneutics and tried to understand the context in which the Quran had come into existence rather than accepting it as the uncreated word of God.

But he wasn’t delivering. Student protests in 1999 demanding more rapid reforms led to five days of rioting that turned Tehran into a battle zone as thousands of students chanted “Khamenei, shame on you, leadership is not for you.” The Basij and other paramilitary groups were let loose into the crowds and beat the protesters. The unrest spread across the country in what was the worst challenge so far to the twenty-year-old Islamic Republic. But the system survived. And despite his failure to deliver change, Khatami was given another chance and reelected in 2001 for a four-year term, because even while he was one of the founders of the Islamic Republic, he was more moderate than his predecessors who had ruled since 1979.

The veil was being used to shroud the country with a semblance of homogeneous unity, keeping women docile and silencing those who dared ask questions.

Masih understood then that the veil, the hijab, was not a secondary issue, it was one of the ideological pillars of the revolution envisioned by Khomeini, part of the scaffolding holding up the structure—but it was also the Islamic Republic’s Achilles’ heel, because the women were suffocating. The women who had marched in 1979, chanting “in the dawn of freedom, there is no freedom,” were still there, and with them a new generation of daughters, along with all those who had embraced the revolution before being disillusioned by it.

these elections, Ahmadinejad, Khatami’s successor and president since 2005, had been headed for a loss and a moderate candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was expected to win. But Iran was consolidating its gains in the region in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and Ahmadinejad was serving the cause well. In the eyes of the Supreme Leader and people like Suleimani, this was not the time to change course with a softer image. The official results were announced soon after the polls closed: Ahmadinejad had won.

The Green Movement protests went on for three months; at least sixty-nine people were killed and hundreds imprisoned. Mousavi was put under house arrest and would remain so, with his wife, for years.

In 2012, almost ten years after the US invasion of Iraq, two years into the Arab uprisings, Ahmadinejad’s second term as president was coming to an end and Iran was feeling secure about its regional gains. But Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards were increasingly worried about the sanctions that were squeezing Iran’s economy—not only because they feared popular protests but because there was less revenue for them to siphon off.

The Saudis were shocked and felt deeply betrayed. They had long since moved on from the era of détente in the 1990s and had a particular aversion to back channels between Iran and the United States.

Saudi-US alliance, based on oil for security, had its limitations, and the relationship had been sorely tested by events like the September 11 attacks.

Obama was hoping to bring more balance to America’s posture in the Middle East. If Iran was less of a threat, the United States could decrease its military presence in the region.

But it would ultimately fail—in part because, in its obsessive pursuit of a deal, the Obama administration did not appreciate how much the regional context had changed between the time the talks began in 2012 and the time they concluded in July 2015 and how this had adversely shaped perceptions of the deal and of America’s standing among its allies in the region.

As she explained her campaign to the Western press and Persian-language media, she kept emphasizing that she was not objecting to a piece of cloth but to the mandatory veil and the lack of choice. She was protesting against the men in power who stamped their ideology on women’s bodies, on their hair.

Iran had initially kept its involvement in the war in Syria quiet. Men were dying but there was no official death toll. By 2017, the deaths were in the hundreds and discontent was bubbling.