Name: Black Wave
Rating: 3.75 (10 reviews)
ISBN: 9781472271105

Kim Ghattas

The bestselling author of The Secretary tells the gripping story of the real roots of the Sunni-Shia conflict in Middle East in the 1979 Iran Revolution that changed the region forever.

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

Black Wave

Tim Pendry

What starts as contemporary history drifts into opinionated liberal journalism chapter by chapter but this is a worthy effort to explain something that most Westerners do not fully understand - how the Middle East has been shaped by Saudi-Iranian rivalry since the events of 1979. The initial account of the Iranian Revolution is, as one reviewer has already put it, 'riveting'. The case is well made that Khomeini was a monster in a world of monsters although what is really useful is to see just how far the Arab Left had collapsed into utter ineptitude by the late 1970s. The naivete of liberals in general and the secular Left in particular is what strikes this reader. Ghattas seems not to have quite understood just how much cosmopolitan liberal intellectuals must bear a lot of the responsibility for the situation today as much as then. After all, blaming America for the death toll in Syria is displacement and misdirection, arising from the fact that too many exiled intellectuals think that their preoccupations should dictate 'moral solutions' that will cost American lives. The death toll is just as much down to inept oppositional figures and naive liberal rebels (as the account in the book of the Raqqa story shows) as it is to opportunistic involvements from Saudis who hate Iranians and Iranians who wanted to secure their hold over Lebanon. What, honestly, was Assad going to do once it was demonstrated that oppositions in power treat dictators like dogs to be shot and that Sunni Islamists would most likely repeat (as far as the Alawites and Sunni 'collaborators' were concerned) the horrors of 1979. That does not make Assad good or right (far from it) but it makes him understandable and the consequent assertion of liberal revolt in an illiberal country could not but end in tragedy for the majority of the population. The situation in Libya and Iraq has been scarcely better. But this is journalism and not the cold hard and detached analysis required to write true history. As an idealistic and privileged middle class writer of Lebanese origin but domiciled as much in Washington as Beirut, she cannot but write as a member of her class. Nevertheless, her core thesis is well argued and persuasive - that the Iranian Revolution, Islamist assault on Mecca and Soviet Invasion of Afgahanistan were instrumental in creating the competitive Islamisms of Riyadh and Tehran that have since torn the region apart. Liberals have been crushed like flour between the two millstones of Shia and Sunni radicalism and the determination of two regimes to extend their influence and face off the other. From this perspective, her story is cogent and well worth reading for those unfamiliar with the territory. Unfortunately, I have two complaints - one substantive and one aesthetic which are reflections of a more general liberal internationalist blindness to their own contributions to the mess the region is in. Pointing the finger at previous generations is not enough if the current generation has little understanding of what is wrong with upper middle class cosmopolitan and 'educated' solutions to regional problems. Quoting soulful poetry achieves little in itself. The substantive criticism is that the author gives little time to the tensions and pressures that led to acceptance of Islamism. Shia Islam in Lebanon in particular has devoted enormous energy to providing valuable services to deprived communities. Political Islam would often fill a gap in the provision of services left by 'big men', ostensibly nationalist and liberal but increasingly corrupt. Where it did not, it provided 'meaning' to a generation of educated technologists offended by that same corruption. Some of this was little different from the insidious way that Christianity intruded into the Roman Empire by exploiting Rome's inability to create any form of sustainable welfare for the general population so that allegiance to the Church allowed martyrdom to become a price worth paying. That is how hyperstitional movements catch hold and grow. They are not abstract theory but deliverers of welfare and meaning to classes who feel disrespected and whose conditions of life remain poor. An Islamist literacy is still literacy if none existed before. A hyperstitional movement appears to be a matter of ideas (and the liberal intellectual is entranced by ideas) but the ideas emerge out of a much more complex 'lack' - something is missing and the movement provides it, whether it is bread or meaning or something else. Above all, it becomes coherent and in becoming coherent it draws into itself believers and those who want some sort of security. Liberal capitalism itself is a hyperstitional movement of this type - rational only to insiders but where nearly everyone is an insider. Liberalism in the Middle East, on the other hand, by the late 1970s was fragmented and its hegemony dysfunctional, like the Roman Empire before Constantine. It was as doomed as a fragmented paganism. Of course, Islam is also enormously fragmented but its two state-sponsored political movements reproduced the Roman-Christian model - ideological and organisational coherence and networks backed by state authority and funding (this is where Ghattas is very good in her presentation). Sunni Political Islam may not quite have had the same communitarian impulse as Shia Islam but Saudi funds and Muslim Brotherhood activism undoubtedly improved the lives of many ordinary people disregarded by urban intellectuals except as subjects of theory. While Leftists poets sat in Beirut cafes and expatiated on freedom and intellectuals across the region strove to emulate the Western Enlightenment and demand liberal or social democracy, millions of people were living at close to subsistence with no education and few prospects. Nasserism was probably the high point of a genuinely enlightened attempt to do something for the masses based on propaganda and organisation but the incursion of Israel constantly distracted all secular leaderships until the ones left standing were forced into brutality to survive. While left-liberals became obsessed with Israel and democracy, what was really necessary (the betterment of the masses) was falling by the way-side until 'liberal' Muslims actually found themselves the handmaidens of a revolution by one monster against another, the Shah. The left-liberal obsession with Israel became its own undoing not only because it achieved nothing but because, in making it a paramount issue instead of betterment of the masses, it created the perfect tool for Shia Islam to exploit. The Shia became more Catholic than the Left Pope. Like all liberal upper middle class women, Ghattas tends to excuse people like the Shah or Bhutto whose management of power often permitted the sorts of freedom that the middle class crave but who, equally, fail to see that liberal freedoms do not bake bread. I am not making an argument for the monsters (far from it) but I am making an argument against the lazy and corrupt liberal elite and suggesting that this elite not only dug its own grave but created the conditions for the monsters of all types - national secularist or Islamist A class perspective runs through the book like a vein - not enough to devalue it but enough to realise that the international liberal middle class has learned nothing very much in half a century. It still thinks that rhetoric is a substitute for organisation, morality for practice. The Arab Spring debacles in Egypt and Syria are turned into morality tales instead of what they should be seen as - abject political failures that failed to understand what was possible under local conditions. The implicit demand that America come to save the revolution in Syria says it all. Organisationally Arab liberalism could not stand on its own two feet in the 1970s and nothing has changed since. The squabbling Syrian and Iraqi Oppositions want Daddy Washington to hand them their toys. The aesthetic failure arises out of the substantive weakness - the sentimentalisation and sanctification of particular liberal intellectuals and their testimonies, leading ineluctably, of course, to that martyr of regional liberal journalism, Adnan Khashoggi. I have nothing at all against Khashoggi and deplore his murder and that of anyone else but the man was a 'fixer' and player in a dangerous game who had been party to some of the developments that led to our current impasse. He was Islamist when it suited, radical liberal when it suited. I understand why journalists fixate on one of their own being murdered but I would be more impressed if they took an equal interest in the dead of Yemen. There is an expectation that we should be more horrified by a dead liberal intellectual than a worker or a peasant. That presumption of superiority amongst poets, intellectuals and journalists runs through the book and is perfectly normal in the liberal elite but it does rather suggest a special interest talking to its own. I may be a little unfair here because Ghattas' stories are interesting and worthwhile. My point is not that they should not be told (the stories of women are most enlightening) but that there should be more awareness of the mind-set of the conservative 'other' and less 'sanctification'. I certainly do not want to be over-critical. The soft feminist perspective is very valuable. The stories provide valuable insights into the crumbling world of the intelligentsia in the Arab, Persian and Pakistani worlds. The experience of women under masculine political egoism is often neglected. Unfortunately, Ghattas writes these stories with a journalistic determination to move us emotionally and ends up with giving us a series of 'contes moraux' that start to sound after a while as if they were written for publication by Mills &amp; Boon and eyes start to roll. The individuals come across as romantic, tortured and poetic figures (which is not to say that they have not suffered), generally acquaintances from her class, whose experiences are supposed to evoke empathy. Fine but, after a while, it clashes with the detached understanding we really need. The irony is that Ghattas is creating 'sotto voce' saints and martyrs for liberalism in a manner no different from the Shia as they create their saints and martyrs - as propagandistic story-telling. One even gets the standard trope at the end of hope and despair and choosing hope. Yes, well, maybe. This is a shame because there are two books here competing for space. One is a very well argued case for the political origins of the current Shia-Sunni conflict. The other is an emotional liberal plea for the world to be other than it is with no practical solutions being offered. On the one hand, we are offered a fashionable exercise in liberal empathy without much empathy for the condition of peoples who would enslave themselves to obscurantism because they felt they had nowhere else to go after the failure of Leftism, Arab nationalism and liberalism. On the other hand, we have the basis here for further analysis of what might be required to change things - and that does not include bombing 'bad' Syrians in the hope that utterly inept 'good' Syrians can get their act together to form a viable opposition able to seize power. Secularists strike me as needing more Lenin and Machiavelli and less Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft at this point in history. This book often struck me as an angry comfort blanket for the despairing than a step in the direction of organisation and action. The unresolved issue is the relationship of freedom to Islam. The great hope is, of course, some form of moderate Islamism that respects freedom but, bluntly, any form of Political Islam is, by its nature, going to be fundamentally obscurantist. Moderate 'secularist' Muslims were 'useful idiots' to the revolutionarists around Khomeini. Liberals tend to be 'useful idiots' in every narrative from Tehran to Raqqa. The question is how do those who love freedom become successful revolutionists instead of 'useful idiots' to obscurantists. My view, having worked with and alongside Arabs over many years, is that the only solution lies in Arab radicals eschewing sentimentalism and the romantic and learning the tough and pragmatic art of collective revolutionary discipline in support of the nation. But it is not for me or any Westerner or, frankly, any liberal internationalist living in two worlds, to say what is right and wrong for the region. We Westerners have managed to screw up the region on our own account so many times that we are best walking away in case we do more damage. Westerners who love the region should be fighting a very different war - one inside the West that has nothing to do with the region and yet everything to do with it. That is, an inner war to ensure that Arab democracy and liberalism is privileged in its relations with the West. All in all, worth reading but decide which book you are reading - the one that will confirm your emotional state as a beleagured and depressed liberal or the one that will give you a sound narrative that explains at least part of why the region is a cockpit of war and misery.

The bestselling author of The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power tells the gripping story of the real roots of the Middle East Sunni-Shia conflict in the 1979 Iran Revolution that changed the region forever. Black Wave is a paradigm-shifting recasting of the modern history of the Middle East, telling the largely unexplored story of the rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran—a rivalry born out of the sparks of the 1979 Iranian revolution—that has dramatically transformed the culture, identity, and collective memory of millions of Muslims over four decades. Like George Packer did in The Unwinding, Kim Ghattas follows everyday citizens whose lives have been affected by the geopolitical drama, making her account both immediate and intimate. Most Americans assume that extremism, Sunni-Shia antagonism, and anti-Americanism have always existed in the Middle East, but prior to 1979, Saudi Arabia and Iran were working allies. It was only after that year—a remarkable turning point—that Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia began to use religion as a tool in their competition for dominance in the region, igniting the culture wars that led to the 1991 American invasion of Iraq, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and the rise of ISIS. Ghattas shows how Saudi Arabia and Iran went from allies against the threat of communism from Russia, with major roles in the US anti-Soviet strategy, to mortal enemies that use religious conservatism to incite division and unrest from Egypt to Pakistan. Black Wave will significantly influence both perception of and conversation about the modern history of the Middle East.

kim ghattas presents the history of the last 50 odd years as driven by two primary entities — iran and saudi arabia. every other act and event is downstream of that.  it does not shy away from criticising the US interventionist pitfalls but the agency afforded to the middle east and its live players was refreshing.

the book points to 1979 as the year where the middle east went mad: 1. the iranian islamic revolution 2. the siege of mecca by wahhabi extremists 3. and the invasion of afghanistan by the soviets. not to say that the region was already in a mess, this round, the mess was wholly Theirs. the dynamics shifted to that of two regional hegemons, saudi arabia and iran, as they engaged in a death spiral to prove their own holiness while grappling with modernity

in sum, themes i drew were: the geopolitics of sunnism vs shiism; the contradictions of petrocapitalist islam; the ossifying nature of extremism; the dangers of modernising too quickly; foreign policy differences between clinton, bush, obama, trump, and biden; the state’s capacity and dizzying use of religion to achieve power; nationalism’s abuse of religion; why we should compromise; the dialectical and incestuous relationship that religion has with the state; theories of social change; the tyranny of the minority; how modern islam mediates The Symbolic with The Real; the birth of Hezbollah; ideology’s role and stubbornness; the paranoia of dictatorship; extremism and self-parody; iran’s state-sponsored shia islam and its weaponisation to destroy and kill (eg salman rushdie, countless women, etc) (and everything downstream of that!); how client militant groups like Hezbollah (explicit iran beneficiary) ISIS (ignored saudi son) came to be

something i thought was interesting was the theory of social change — specifically, that it is material. hezbollah’s strategy was used in lebanon and syria: setting up proselytisers, offering public services, caring for families. egypt’s muslim revolution, was eventually crushed, and this was despite efforts from a female cleric who deployed tupperware MLM-style prayer sessions

above all, ghattas shows the depths of depravity that people will go to grasp on to power — be it syria’s assad, iraq’s saddam, saudi arabia’s mohammed bin salman, iran’s khomeini, egypt’s sisi and zia. 

but a better future is possible. despite the horror of it all she highlights the small pockets of progress and liberation that exiles push for. she ends the book with a kierkegaard quote that history is seen backward while life is lived forward.

Ghee

kim ghattas presents the history of the last 50 odd years as driven by two primary entities — iran and saudi arabia. every other act and event is downstream of that.  it does not shy away from criticising the US interventionist pitfalls but the agency afforded to the middle east and its live players was refreshing.

the book points to 1979 as the year where the middle east went mad: 1. the iranian islamic revolution 2. the siege of mecca by wahhabi extremists 3. and the invasion of afghanistan by the soviets. not to say that the region was already in a mess, this round, the mess was wholly Theirs. the dynamics shifted to that of two regional hegemons, saudi arabia and iran, as they engaged in a death spiral to prove their own holiness while grappling with modernity

in sum, themes i drew were: the geopolitics of sunnism vs shiism; the contradictions of petrocapitalist islam; the ossifying nature of extremism; the dangers of modernising too quickly; foreign policy differences between clinton, bush, obama, trump, and biden; the state’s capacity and dizzying use of religion to achieve power; nationalism’s abuse of religion; why we should compromise; the dialectical and incestuous relationship that religion has with the state; theories of social change; the tyranny of the minority; how modern islam mediates The Symbolic with The Real; the birth of Hezbollah; ideology’s role and stubbornness; the paranoia of dictatorship; extremism and self-parody; iran’s state-sponsored shia islam and its weaponisation to destroy and kill (eg salman rushdie, countless women, etc) (and everything downstream of that!); how client militant groups like Hezbollah (explicit iran beneficiary) ISIS (ignored saudi son) came to be

something i thought was interesting was the theory of social change — specifically, that it is material. hezbollah’s strategy was used in lebanon and syria: setting up proselytisers, offering public services, caring for families. egypt’s muslim revolution, was eventually crushed, and this was despite efforts from a female cleric who deployed tupperware MLM-style prayer sessions

above all, ghattas shows the depths of depravity that people will go to grasp on to power — be it syria’s assad, iraq’s saddam, saudi arabia’s mohammed bin salman, iran’s khomeini, egypt’s sisi and zia. 

but a better future is possible. despite the horror of it all she highlights the small pockets of progress and liberation that exiles push for. she ends the book with a kierkegaard quote that history is seen backward while life is lived forward.

Maurice FitzGerald

What with all the anti-vaxxers i am beginning to think a huge majority of people are dangerously uneducated and gullible. The black wave happens among those people. Trump gets elected by those people. We have yet to find an answer for this and that is pretty fucking terrifying.

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

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