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

by Kim Ghattas

Iran’s hands were soaked in Syrian blood. Iran had saved Assad, and was just as responsible as the Syrian dictator for the horrors that had unfolded: more than half a million dead, more than five million refugees, more than six million displaced within Syria, hundreds of thousands disappeared in jails. Mohsen could not understand how Iran, which had suffered so much during the war with Iraq, could now help inflict such devastating pain on another country. And for what—shrines?

They seethed as US secretary of state John Kerry and the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif exchanged pleasantries and smiled for the cameras during the negotiations.

On the women-only section of the Tehran metro, on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2018, three young women removed their veils. They had short hair—one of them was bottle-blond, another wore big silver earrings. They held hands and sang like they were marching.

MbS wanted to give the kingdom shock therapy, but there was something delusional about his Vision 2030, which came complete with a futuristic city in the desert and a Six Flags amusement park in a country where male-female segregation was still strictly enforced and shops were required to close whenever the call to prayer sounded.

pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat outlining the more basic hopes of Saudi citizens: more jobs, yes, but also green spaces, better sidewalks, better health care. Who needed a new robot city in the desert when suburbs of Riyadh and Jeddah were falling into disrepair?

In it he wrote about the time that King Abdallah had appealed to his citizens to embrace one another in all their diversity of thought and political leanings.

Sofana’s generation was confused. They were the product of the era of 1979, and their past was being rewritten with no acknowledgment of the suffering they had endured.

poignant move that sent shock waves around the world. That same day, in Riyadh, MbS was sitting down for an interview with a team from Bloomberg News and was asked about Jamal.

Qahtani had formed a hit squad in 2015 to monitor and silence dissent, online and in real life. He had overseen the interrogations of those detained in November 2017 at the Ritz-Carlton.

“We know that the main goal of the Iranian regime is to reach and control the Holy Shrine of Islam,” MbS once declared. “We won’t wait for them to bring the fight to Saudi Arabia,

At the end of the video, a defeated, haggard Qassem Suleimani falls to his knees and surrenders to the Saudi soldiers.

it wasn’t so much the slow realization of what had happened as the growing disbelief at the naivete of their parents and grandparents who had cheered on a revolution that replaced the tyranny of monarchy with the even worse tyranny of religion, one that was politically but also socially and economically repressive, effectively freezing the country in time and disconnecting it from the world seemingly forever.

“Let go of Syria, think about us!” In a video that circulated online, one young woman also addressed the older crowd of mostly men around her during a night protest with this remonstration:

After four decades of rivalry between two foes in constant competition for influence, both abusing religion, both weaponizing sectarian identities, the past is no longer history for some.

Yazid was the caliph who faced off with Imam Hussein in the battle of Karbala in 680 AD, and the term “Yazidi state” was being used to refer to Saudi Arabia,

Saud al-Qahtani deployed an army of Twitter trolls to defame the women activists who had been jailed, branding them traitors to the nation.

Ahmed Naji was finally able to leave Cairo.

Yassin al-Haj Saleh

and even Shia clerics joined the marches to denounce Tehran’s influence, while some protestors scaled the walls of the Iranian consulate in Karbala to hoist the Iraqi flag on its roof.

Far too many progressive minds in the wider Middle East have been left to fend for themselves for decades, as they and their countries were bludgeoned to death by forces of darkness, forces, such as Zia in Pakistan, that most often served Western interests.

Nobel Peace Prize–winner and Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi believes the regime can no longer be reformed and has suggested a UN-monitored referendum to change the constitution and remove the position of Supreme Leader.

Removing the article about Iran being the defender of the oppressed everywhere could also help defuse anxiety about Iran’s designs. Meanwhile, many Iranians and Shias will continue to see Saudi Arabia as the enemy as long as it does not moderate anti-Shia rethoric and teachings in the kingdom.

and the kingdom should reintroduce the diversity of teaching in Mecca to reverberate a kinder, softer tone out of the heart of Islam.