Black Wave is a historical book about Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the 40-year Confrontation that has shed light on culture, religion, and collective memory in the Middle East by author Kim Ghattas.
Vivid storytelling, extensive historical research, and factual reporting, Ghattas dispels accepted truths about a region she calls home.
She explores how Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, once allies and twin pillars of US strategy in the region, became arch-enemies after 1979. She shows how they used and squeezed.
How to distort religion in a competition that goes far beyond geopolitics. Feeding intolerance, suppressing cultural expression, and encouraging sectarian violence from Egypt to Pakistan, the war for cultural supremacy led Iran against author Salman Rushdie, assassination countless intellectuals, the birth of groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the September 11 terrorist attacks and the rise of ISIS.
Ghattas also introduces us to a fascinating cast of characters whose lives have been ended by geopolitical drama over the course of four decades: from the Pakistani TV broadcaster who challenges his country’s dictator, to the Egyptian novelist sent to prison for his indecent writings to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
