J was done with the book and loaned it to us. I thought the husband would want to read it too, so I got a digital copy. But he procrastinated. So I decided to thumb through the hard copy instead. That always makes reading easier on the eye.
This is 'Black Wave' (2020) by Kim Ghattas. The Lebanese author was a journalist with BBC for years, and is currently based in Beirut. She is careful to point out this isn't an academic study, but more of a reported narrative. (Reviews here, here, here here, and here.)
She attempts to show how Pakistan and Lebanon have been affected by the Saudi-Iranian rivalry, much of which could be traced back to the momentous year of 1979. She collected interviews and thoughts from everywhere. In the book's 'Introduction', she explains,
Although the 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.
I had to study this extensively in school, academically. But I didn't want to understand it till adulthood when I was forced to revisit it for historical linkages. For me, I simply didn't want to understand Middle East events after the decline of the Ottoman Empire because the entire region fractured into a zillion pieces that is too complicated for my brain to process. 1979 meant different things to peoples of different countries. It meant different things to young Saudis and Iranians today. Then, there's Syria and Syrians.
Today, as the events unfold in the Middle East, and I read it not just for knowledge, but a huge part of it is work-related, I can't be thankful that I do not live in that reality right now. Even as a 'reader', I want to bury my head in the sand and not think about the fallouts the wars have on this part of the world, what more the suffering that the people in the affected countries are going through. Nearer home, there's Myanmar, and another story.
This isn't an easy book to read. I couldn't finish it even over two sittings. I had to cross-reference historical timelines and a number of other op-eds. It took three sittings. It was too heavy, even though I regularly pore through political essays.
In the Conclusion the author acknowledges that it's a huge challenge to remind those that there are diverse opinions even within the Muslim world. The hegemonizing influences of Iran and Saudi Arabia have changed many countries, and matters of extraordinary depth and complexity cannot be just mere snapshots in the Western media's headlines.
Traveling around the region to conduct my reporting for this book, I oscillated between despair and hope. The challenges are so immense, the dynamics seemingly so intractable, the players so entrenched, that it is easy to conclude there really is no way out. After four decades of rivalry between two foes in constant competition for influence, both abusing religion, both weaponising sectarian identities, the past is no longer history for some. Rather, it is alive in the boiling rancor of the present, and there is no chance of forgiveness. Once obscure, forgotten historical wrongs have been turned into fresh memories in the collective consciousness, as a result of the relentless crescendo of sectarian spin created by Iran and Saudi Arabia.
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I started this project with the full awareness that the extremist partisans on either side of the Saudi-Iran divide would find fault with everything I wrote—or perhaps they would pick apart the sections that depict them and applaud passages about their nemeses. I did not write this book for them. I wrote it for peers and colleagues and a wider audience of readers who want to understand why events in the Middle East continue to reverberate around the world. I wrote it for those who believe the Arab and Muslim worlds are more than the unceasing headlines about terrorism, ISIS, or the IRGC. Perhaps above all I wrote it for those of my generation and younger in the region who are still asking, "What happened to us?" and who wonder why their parents didn't, or couldn't, do anything to stop the unraveling. I hope the book provides them with some clues and helps them find a better path forward, separate from the one imposed by the leaders of Iran and Saudi 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."
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