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Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East
Top of the pile
89
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
92/100Critics
86/100Scholars
89/100Author:
Kim Ghattas
Publisher:
Henry Holt and Co.
Date:
January 28, 2020
The story of the rivalry between between Saudi Arabia and Iran, born from the sparks of the 1979 Iranian revolution and fueled by American policy.
What The Reviewers Say
Kim Ghattas has not only drawn the big picture of how those events shaped the region but offers timely and thought-provoking insights into their continuing destructive influence. The weaponisation of sectarianism, women’s rights, the frustrated hopes of the Arab spring, the rise of Al-Qaida and Islamic State are all richly contextualised and illustrated.
...[a] sweeping and authoritative history.
The book is packed with accounts of ambition, treachery and cruelty—with a wealth of historical detail down to the hour of the day.
Kim Ghattas’s book shows, however, that similarity can be as dangerous as difference. Discussing the involvement of the Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, she notes that his ‘ways were also the ways of the Islamic Republic, hunting down its dissidents everywhere, imprisoning and torturing women, instilling fear in its neighbours’. Ghattas, a Lebanese-born reporter for the BBC and the Financial Times, also presents a series of more admirable individuals, such as the Iranian scientist and revolutionary Mostafa Chamran, who lived in Lebanon for a number of years among a Shi’a community ‘in harmony with their Sunni and Christian neighbours’, until those powerful factions started radicalising sectarian differences for political gain.
