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

by Kim Ghattas

new UN census determined that the Jewish population of Palestine had grown to one-third, with the other two-thirds a mix of Muslim and Christian Arabs, but the plan divided the land in half between Jews and Arabs. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved the Partition Plan. On May 14, 1948, as the last British troops departed, Jewish leaders declared the creation of the State of Israel on the land apportioned to them by the UN plan.

On August 29, the shah was in the middle of a banquet with visiting dignitaries when he received a phone call from Saddam Hussein, the vice president and de facto ruler of Iraq. The shah broke protocol by leaving the dinner table and listening to the stunning suggestion from the Iraqi leader: Ayatollah Khomeini was becoming a nuisance for everyone; it was best to get rid of him. Saddam wanted the shah to agree first. After discussing the proposal with close aides, the shah decided against it.

There was a third crucial element: France’s leftist intellectuals. Hugely influential in shaping public opinion, they were antiestablishment, antipower, and anti-imperial. They saw in the Iranian revolutionaries the embodiment of the values they had fought for themselves in the revolution of May 1968 on the streets of Paris. They wanted to believe in Khomeini, the sage under the apple tree. As early as 1964, Banisadr had enlisted Sartre to preside on a committee to raise awareness about Iranians in the shah’s jails. Sartre had once declared: “I have no religion, but if I had to pick one it would be Shariati.” Though the opposition had indeed inflated the numbers of those in jail and those killed by the regime, for those who had been imprisoned by the shah the experience was very real. Reza Baraheni, one of Iran’s greatest poets of that era, was tortured brutally while in prison for 102 days. His release was the result of pressure from American and European writers. His verses were irreverent and unforgiving:

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. There had even been a tomb in the city that was said to be Eve’s. For centuries, pilgrims would visit the site, especially barren women, with supplications to the divine. Famed travelers wrote about and sketched the tomb, which was approximately five hundred feet long with a carved square stone representing the navel. It had survived the passage of time and the weight of countless pleas, only to be destroyed during the 1926 conquest of the Hejaz by Abdelaziz ibn Saud, who was working to unify the provinces of the Arabian Peninsula under his rule. His son Faisal, the future king, had led the assault on Jeddah after the city had been besieged and starved for over a year. Barely nineteen, Faisal was named viceroy of the province, and he ordered the destruction of the tomb. An ancient cemetery in Medina dating back to the days of the prophet was also razed. The

Although Juhayman and his gang were Muslims, an argument could be made they were acting like disbelievers. The clerics were now working on the text to make their case. More and more pilgrims were managing to escape. One Iranian pilgrim had fled and managed to make it all the way back to Tehran, where he spoke to journalists. He added credence to theories of a Shia takeover by saying the rebels had described the Mahdi in line with Shia beliefs, as the Twelfth Imam, hidden for eleven centuries and now returned to establish God’s kingdom on earth. The Iranian pilgrim said he didn’t buy any of it. Speaking either of Juhayman or Qahtani he said: “The moment I met this guy, I knew he was fishy.” On the third day, the wannabe Mahdi died. He had survived a dangerous game of capturing grenades thrown at him by Saudi soldiers and throwing them back at the troops—until one of them exploded in his hands, shredding his body.

One virulent critic of Western influence, and a rising star, was a young blind cleric named Abdelaziz bin Baz. His influence would shape the minds of those who would transform the region in the decades to come. In 1940, Bin Baz, neither an Al-Saud nor an Al-ash-Sheikh, had the audacity to call for a ban on all non-Muslims on the Arabian Peninsula. He landed in jail. After his release, he would continue to issue anachronistic religious opinions; among them were refusing to believe the Americans had landed on the moon, insisting the sun orbited the earth, complaining about the introduction of radio and television, of girls’ education, of anything that was modern and novel. But he had understood the lesson of his time in prison: never undermine the House of Saud and the pillars of its power. No matter the failings of the Al-Sauds, the clerics saw them as a bulwark against worse dangers, like communism and secularism.

The young girl lived with the

double legacy of Ibn Abdelwahhab’s fundamentalist teachings on one side and, on the other, the forgiving, inclusive vision of her ancestor Mufti Dahlan. At school, Sofana learned all about Ibn Abdelwahhab’s unitary version of extreme Salafist, Hanbali Islam. Her parents told her to study it for her school tests and then forget about it—to retain only what she was getting in private tutoring in Shafi’i Islamic teachings. At school, she was taught that you could not be friends with Jews and Christians; at home and on travels, her parents socialized with all kinds of non-Muslims. At school, she was taught that all human representations were a sin, even photographs, which were described as al-shirk al-asghar, the lesser idolatry. But at home, there were family portraits and pictures on the wall. There were too many contradictions for a child to comprehend and reconcile. She was too young to fully grasp this separation of the private from the public, but it produced intense inner turmoil. She would outgrow the confusion and would eventually challenge the system to become one of the first Saudi woman lawyers. But the one teaching that she couldn’t leave behind, that would remain seared in her mind, was the notion that music was haram, forbidden. “Listen to music,” the teacher had told Sofana when she was just six years old, “and you will have melted iron poured into your ears on Judgment Day.” She could never outgrow that frightful image. She would always startle when she heard ...

“Who are the second-best-paid women in Egypt?” “Belly dancers, because Saudi tourists throw banknotes of a hundred dollars at their feet while they are dancing.” “And who are the best-paid women in Egypt?” “The converted belly dancers, because Saudi sheikhs transfer banknotes of a thousand dollars to their account if they stop dancing.”

Decades later, once society had settled into its new cultural and religious references, a speech given by President Nasser in 1965 to mark the anniversary of Egypt’s victory in the Suez crisis would resurface and circulate as people asked themselves, “What happened to us?”—because of a passage in which Nasser had spoken irreverently about the veil. He was the greatest orator the Arab world has ever had, and his speeches—broadcast on the radio—enthralled audiences across the Arab world as he fluidly moved from rousing exhortations to serious explanations to jokes, all delivered in an easy, man-of-the-people style. He was a masterful storyteller. In front of his usual massive crowd of supporters, a mixed audience of men in suits and women in skirts hanging on his every word, he came to the subject of the antagonism with the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of its members had tried to assassinate him, hence the brutal crackdown. He recounted how he had met with Hassan al-Hodeibi, the leader of the Brotherhood, in 1953. Hodeibi had made a number of requests, including apparently making the veil mandatory. The crowd, men and women, erupted in laughter and applause at such a preposterous idea. One person in the crowd screamed: “Let him wear it!” leading to more riotous laughter. Nasser said he had tried to explain to Hodeibi that this was a personal choice, but Hodeibi insisted: Nasser was the leader, he had to set the tone. Nasser continued: “I told him, you have a daughter in the facu...