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

by Kim Ghattas

While the shah was focused on controlling the message on television, radio, and in the newspapers, the underground business of revolutionary tapes was mobilizing the masses and chipping away at the facade of a king in control.

The problem with Saudi imperialism, cultural or other, was that they were bad managers. More often than not they lost control over their product—then feigned ignorance or innocence.

The 9/11 hijackers did not stand out in their country; they were unremarkable, representing the average Saudi man of that generation, the generation of 1979, the fateful year around which most of them were born. It was as though they had been born and raised for nothing else but death in the fireball of a raging hell, victims and killers at once.

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.

And so the Saudi rulers now also had the death of a country on their conscience. But neither they nor the Iranians seemed able to step back from their fight to the death—they were unable to reflect on how their quest for supremacy had been unmaking the region over decades, culminating in the destruction of Syria and Yemen.

Beyond the headlines about war and death, the region is alive with music, art, books, theater, social entrepreneurship, advocacy, libraries, cafés, bookshops, poetry, and so much more, as old and young push to reclaim space for cultural expression and freedom of expression. Their defiance is a source of hope, their steadiness contagious. Even when they go into exile, they don’t give up.

Arabia. As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “It is perfectly true … that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”