by Kim Ghattas
ALSO BY KIM GHATTAS
The Secretary:
A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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In memory of my father,
who told me so many stories about before.
Where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.
—Agricola, Tacitus (Roman senator, d. AD 120)
NOTE ON NAMES AND SPELLINGS
I have used the most common spellings for well-known names and terms in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. In other cases, I have used my own transliterations. Translations of Arabic newspaper headlines and text as well as of some of the poetry are my own. Wherever similar concepts exist across the three cultures I cover, I have indicated their equivalent in Arabic.
For the concept of the Guardianship of the Jurist introduced by Khomeini, which is mentioned repeatedly, I have used the Arabic transliteration wilayat al-faqih (rather than the Persian velayat-e faqih) throughout the book to avoid confusion. In Arabic, both ibn and bin can be translated as “son of.” I have used both depending on the most common usage (Mohammad bin Salman versus Abdelaziz ibn Saud). The name Muhammad can also be transliterated as Mohammad and I have used both depending on the most widespread usage or the preference expressed by characters in the book. I have chosen to refer to many of the central characters by their first names to distinguish them from prominent or historical figures.
PEOPLE
Lebanon
Hussein al-Husseini: Shia politician and speaker of parliament during the 1980s
Musa Sadr: Iranian Shia cleric, moved to Lebanon in 1959, disappeared in Libya in 1978
Hani Fahs: Shia cleric, lived in Iran 1979–86; supporter, then critic, of the revolution
Badia Fahs: daughter of Hani and journalist, lived in Iran as a student
Sobhi Tufayli: founding member of Hezbollah
Hassan Nasrallah: secretary-general of Hezbollah since 1992
Rafiq Hariri: billionaire politician and three-time prime minister, assassinated in 2005
Iran
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: president 2005–13
Masih Alinejad: journalist and activist
Abolhassan Banisadr: leftist nationalist and first president after the revolution
Mehdi Bazergan: founding member of the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI), first prime minister after the revolution
Mohammad Beheshti: loyal Khomeinist and founder of the Islamic Republican Party
Mostafa Chamran: key member of the LMI, first defense minister of revolutionary Iran
Sadegh Ghotbzadeh: key member of the LMI
Mohammad Khatami: president 1997–2005
Mohsen Sazegara: student activist with the LMI, founding member of Revolutionary Guards (IRGC)
Ebrahim Yazdi: key member of the LMI, first foreign minister after the revolution
Saudi Arabia
Sami Angawi: architect and founder of the Hajj Research Center
Abdelaziz bin Baz: powerful cleric, vice rector of Medina University in the 1960s, grand mufti of the kingdom 1993–99
Sofana Dahlan: lawyer and descendant of nineteenth-century mufti Ahmad ibn Zayni Dahlan
Turki al-Faisal: intelligence chief 1979–2001
Muhammad ibn Saud: founder of the Al-Saud dynasty in the eighteenth century
Muhammad ibn Abdelwahhab: ultra-fundamentalist orthodox preacher in the eighteenth century, ally of Muhammad ibn Saud
Mohammad bin Salman: crown prince since 2017 and defense minister since 2015, son of King Salman
Abdelaziz ibn Saud: founder of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, ruled 1932–53
Faisal ibn Saud: third king of Saudi Arabia, assassinated 1975
Iraq
Saddam Hussein: president 1979–2003
Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim: Iranian ayatollah in exile in Iran 1980–2003, assassinated in Iraq in 2003
Atwar Bahjat: Iraqi journalist, assassinated 2006
Abdulmajid al-Khoei: Shia cleric, exiled in 1991, assassinated in 2003
Mohammad Taqi al-Khoei: Shia cleric, killed in 1994
Jawad al-Khoei: Shia cleric, son of Mohammad Taqi, exiled in 1991, returned to Iraq in 2010
Mohammad Baqer al-Sadr: ayatollah executed by Saddam in 1980, founder of Islamist Shia Da’wa Party
Moqtada al-Sadr: cleric and founder of the Mahdi army
Syria
Hafez al-Assad: president 1970–2000
Bashar al-Assad: son of Hafez, president since 2000
Yassin al-Haj Saleh: student communist activist jailed in 1980, Syria’s leading intellectual since 2000
Samira al-Khalil: activist and Yassin’s wife, kidnapped by militants in 2013
Sa’id Hawwa: key ideologue of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood
Zahran Alloush: leader of Islamist rebel group Jaysh al-Islam, killed in 2015
Pakistan
Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto: prime minister 1973–77
Benazir Bhutto: daughter of Zulfiquar, prime minister 1988–90, 1993–96, assassinated 2007
Mehtab Channa Rashdi: television anchor
Faiz Ahmed Faiz: one of the most celebrated poets in the Urdu language
Arif Hussaini: Shia cleric, supporter of Khomeini
Zia ul-Haq: president 1978–88
Ehsan Elahi Zaheer: Sunni religious scholar, author of anti-Shia books
Egypt
Gamal Abdel Nasser: president 1954–70
Nasr Abu Zeid: secular professor of Arabic literature and Islamic studies
Farag Foda: secular intellectual, assassinated in 1992
Nageh Ibrahim: Islamist student activist, founding member of Gama’a Islamiyya
Hosni Mubarak: president 1981–2011
Ahmed Naji: journalist and novelist
Anwar Sadat: president of Egypt assassinated in 1981
Ebtehal Younes: professor of French literature and wife of Nasr Abu Zeid
Ayman al-Zawahiri: leader of Islamic Jihad in Egypt, number two in al-Qaeda
Others
Yasser Arafat: chairman, Palestinian Liberation Organization
Issam Berqawi, aka Abu Muhammad al-Maqdissi: Jordanian Salafist, mentor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
Muammar al-Gaddafi: ruler of Libya 1970–2011
INTRODUCTION
“What happened to us?” The question haunts us in the Arab and Muslim world. We repeat it like a mantra. You will hear it from Iran to Syria, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and in my own country of Lebanon. For us, the past is a different country, one that is not mired in the horrors of sectarian killings; a more vibrant place, without the crushing intolerance of religious zealots and seemingly endless, amorphous wars. Though the past had coups and wars too, they were contained in time and space, and the future still held much promise. “What happened to us?” The question may not occur to those too young to remember a different world, or whose parents did not tell them of a youth spent reciting poetry in Peshawar, debating Marxism late into the night in the ba
rs of Beirut, or riding bicycles to picnic on the banks of the Tigris River in Baghdad. The question may also surprise those in the West who assume that the extremism and the bloodletting of today were always the norm.
Although this book journeys into the past, it is not driven by wistful nostalgia about a halcyon world. My aim was to understand when and why things began to unravel, and what was lost, slowly at first and then with unexpected force. There are many turning points in the Middle East’s modern history that could explain how we ended up in these depths of despair. Some people will identify the end of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of the last Islamic caliphate after World War I as the moment when the Muslim world lost its way; or they will see the creation of Israel in 1948 and the defeat of the Arabs in the subsequent Six-Day War of 1967 as the first fissure in the collective Arab psyche. Others will skip directly to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and point to the aftermath as the final paroxysm of conflicts dating back millennia: Sunnis and Shias killing each other, Saudi Arabia and Iran locked in a fight to the death. They will insist that both the killings and the rivalry are inevitable and eternal. Except for the “inevitable and eternal” part, none of these explanations is wrong, but none, on its own, paints a complete picture.
Trying to answer the question “What happened to us?” led me to the fateful year of 1979. Three major events took place in that same year, almost independent of one another: the Iranian Revolution; the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Saudi zealots; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the first battleground for jihad in modern times, an effort supported by the United States. The combination of all three was toxic, and nothing was ever the same again. From this noxious brew was born the Saudi-Iran rivalry, a destructive competition for leadership of the Muslim world, in which both countries wield, exploit, and distort religion in the more profane pursuit of raw power. That is the constant from 1979 onward, the torrent that flattens everything in its path.
Nothing has changed the Arab and Muslim world as deeply and fundamentally as the events of 1979. Other pivotal moments undid alliances, started or ended wars, or saw the birth of a new political movement. But the radical legacy of 1979 did all this and more: it began a process that transformed societies and altered cultural and religious references. The dynamics unleashed in 1979 changed who we are and hijacked our collective memory.
The year 1979 and the four decades that followed are the story at the heart of this book. The Saudi-Iran rivalry went beyond geopolitics, descending into an ever-greater competition for Islamic legitimacy through religious and cultural domination, changing societies from within—not only in Saudi Arabia and Iran, but throughout the region. While many books explore the Iranian Revolution, few look at how it rippled out, how the Arab and Sunni world reacted and interacted with the momentous event. All the way to Pakistan, the ripples of the rivalry reengineered vibrant, pluralistic countries and unleashed sectarian identities and killings that had never defined us in the past. While Pakistan is geographically located on the Indian subcontinent, its modern history is closely linked to the trends that unfolded in the Middle East, and the country features prominently in this narrative. Across this Greater Middle East, the rise of militancy and the rise of cultural intolerance happened in parallel and often fed into each other.
Everywhere I went to conduct interviews for this book, from Cairo to Baghdad, from Tehran to Islamabad, I was met with a flood of emotions when I asked people about the impact the year 1979 had on their lives. I felt I was conducting national or regional therapy, sitting in people’s living rooms and studies: everyone had a story about how 1979 had wrecked their lives, their marriage, their education, including those born after that year. Although this is neither a work of historical scholarship nor an academic study, it is more than a reported narrative: I dug deep into archives, pored over thousands of newspapers, interviewed dozens of people, and built a virtual library of the history of those four decades. The result is a new reading of known events, some forgotten, some overlooked, most heretofore seen in isolation. Brought together, spanning four decades of history and seven countries, they shatter many accepted truths about the region and shed an unprecedented light on how the Saudi-Iran rivalry evolved and mutated over time, with consequences no one could have foreseen in 1979.
Although geopolitical events provide the backdrop and stage for Black Wave, this is not a book about terrorism or al-Qaeda or even ISIS, nor is it about the Sunni-Shia split or the dangers that violent fundamentalists pose for the West. This has been the almost obsessive focus of the headlines in the West. Instead, these pages bring the untold story of those—and they are many—who fought and continue to fight against the intellectual and cultural darkness that slowly engulfed their countries in the decades following the fateful year of 1979. Intellectuals, poets, lawyers, television anchors, young clerics, novelists; men and women; Arab, Iranian, and Pakistani; Sunni and Shia; most devout, some secular, but all progressive thinkers who represent the vibrant, pluralistic world that persists beneath the black wave. They are the silenced majority, who have suffered immensely at the hands of those who are relentlessly intolerant of others, whether wielding political power or a gun. Some paid with their life, like the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Jamal was a colleague and a friend. I was writing a passage about his life when his brutal death provided a macabre twist to the larger tale of the Saudi-Iran rivalry.
The lives of all the characters at the heart of this book overlap in time, across generations. Some know each other; most don’t. They live in different countries, but they are fighting the same battles. Their stories are contained within other stories of historical figures, famous writers, or infamous militants, a sprawling tale, a One Thousand and One Nights of modern Middle Eastern politics.
This tale begins just a few years before 1979, on the shores of the Mediterranean, in Lebanon, in a little-known episode that played a crucial role in setting the stage for the Iranian Revolution.
PART I
REVOLUTION
1
CASSETTE REVOLUTION
LEBANON-IRAN-IRAQ-FRANCE
1977–79
Peace died in the homeland of peace
Justice succumbed
When the City of Jerusalem fell
Love retreated and in the hearts of the world, war settled
The child in the grotto and his mother Mary are crying, and I am praying.
—Fairuz, lyrics from “Jerusalem Flower of all the Cities” (1971)
There is an irony lodged deep in the heart of the revolution that turned Iran from a Persian kingdom into an Islamic theocracy, a revolution cheered and organized by secular leftists and Islamist modernists. The irony is that the Iran of the fundamentalist ayatollahs owes its ultimate birth pang to cities of sin and freedom: Beirut, capital of Arabic modernity, once known as the Paris of the Middle East; and Paris, birthplace of the Age of Enlightenment. If not for the permissive freedoms in both, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—a patient man with a cunning mind—might have died forgotten in a two-story mudbrick house down a narrow cul-de-sac in the holy city of Najaf, in Iraq. The Iranian cleric had agitated against the shah of Iran for over a decade and spent time in prison in Tehran. He was sent into exile and arrived in Najaf in 1965, where he languished in anonymity for thirteen years, popular among his circle of disciples but shunned by most of the Iraqi Shia clergy. In Najaf, clerics stayed out of politics and disapproved of the firebrand ayatollah who thought he had a special relationship with God. Outside the cities that busied themselves with theology, there were those who saw in Khomeini a useful political tool, someone who could rouse crowds in the battle against oppression. Different people with different dreams, from Tehran to Jerusalem, from Paris to Beirut, looked to Khomeini and saw a man who could serve their agenda, not realizing they were serving his.
* * *
On the coast of Lebanon, on the terrace of a house overlooking the glisteni
ng sea, a trio of men animated by a yearning for justice talked late into the night, remaking the world and their countries. They were an unlikely assortment: Musa Sadr, the magnetic, turbaned Iranian cleric with green eyes, known as Imam Sadr; Hussein al-Husseini, the witty, mustachioed Lebanese politician, in a suit; and Mostafa Chamran, the Iranian physicist turned leftist revolutionary in fatigues. Only one of them would survive the crush of what their dreams unleashed.
The year was 1974. The antiapartheid activist Nelson Mandela was in jail in South Africa. The Irish Republican Army was fighting the British, bombing pubs and telephone exchanges in England. In Vietnam, American firepower had come to naught. The fighting continued between the pro-American South and the Communist North, but all US troops had gone home. After nineteen years of war, the toll was devastating: two million Vietnamese civilians, a million and a half Vietnamese troops, and sixty thousand American troops were dead. President Richard Nixon had just resigned to avoid impeachment in a separate episode of infamy: the Watergate scandal. Men wore their hair long, neckties were wide, and Led Zeppelin was the biggest rock band in the world. In April 1975, Saigon would fall to the Communists. That same month, war would erupt in Lebanon and the fire of the Cold War would move from Southeast Asia to the Middle East.
But for now, in the summer of 1974, as the three men gathered in Husseini’s home in the tiny coastal town of Khalde, ten minutes south of Beirut, they looked back on a year of achievements. Their dreams crossed borders, their destinations were different, but their journey against oppression was the same. War was still only a murmur around them.
