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

by Kim Ghattas

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: