Kim Ghattas > Quotes

“People in Europe or the United States often ask blithely, where are the Muslims and Arabs speaking out against extremism and terrorism? It is deeply troubling to expect that all Muslims should apologize or take responsibility for a minuscule fraction of those who share their faith. Furthermore, the question ignores the devastating sacrifices of those who have been fighting intolerance and its violent manifestations within their own countries long before anyone in the West even thought to pose the question.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

“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.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“For decades, Lebanon had lured not just revolutionaries but also poets, ideologues, artists, and all types of opposition figures and plotters. A weak state was both a blessing and a curse. In Beirut, there was no dictatorship to muzzle opinions—or your guns. The war had made the small Mediterranean country even more of a haven, a live training ground with a casino and restaurants that still served smoked salmon and caviar during cease-fires. There were breadlines and economic hardship, massacres and literary conferences. Every spy agency was in town: the CIA, the KGB, the Mossad.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

“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.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

“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.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“In their despair there was nothing left to hold on to but guns and religion.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

“Every king had tried to put his imprint on the city and the mosque; some were worse than others. King Faisal had been a parsimonious man and the expansion works reflected as much—measured and reasonable, nothing too ostentatious. The current ruler, King Fahd, was a spender who disliked all that was old. He loved glitz and gold. More ancient neighborhoods were being torn down, and Mecca’s classical Islamic architecture was vanishing rapidly. Ugly modern buildings were rising, and more chain hotels were being built to accommodate yet more pilgrims.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

“The victory of the people of Iran did not end with the defeat of the shah. Our hope is to raise the flags of Iran and of Palestine on the hills of Jerusalem.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“In this country of mind-boggling diversity for its small size, there were three groups: Christians, the minority to whom the departing colonial rulers had given the power to dominate; Sunni Muslims, the traditional bourgeois merchant class, city dwellers who also swelled the ranks of the bureaucracy; and Shia Muslims, forgotten and downtrodden, who tilled the soil for potatoes or cannabis in the Beqaa Valley or picked tobacco in the south. In the cities, Shias were the shoeshine boys, the newspaper sellers, the restaurant busboys. There were Shia landowners, but they, too, lorded it over the others. There were also Shia notables and politicians like Husseini,”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“The Ottomans were the first to describe it as Wahhabism, to denote a movement outside the mainstream of Islam, one that seemed intently focused on one man as though he were a kind of prophet.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“Arafat. “Landing in Tehran felt like I was approaching Jerusalem,” said the Palestinian leader. “Iran’s revolution doesn’t belong only to Iranians, it belongs to us too. What you have achieved is an earthquake and your heroism has shaken the world, Israel, and America . . . Your honorable revolution has lifted the siege on the Palestinian revolution.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“In all 6,236 verses of the Quran, there is not a single verse calling on Muslims to silence blasphemers by force. Not in 1989, when Khomeini called on believers to kill Salman Rushdie, not in 1992, when the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda was shot in Egypt, and still not in 2011.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

“Meanwhile, the CIA was apparently unaware of Khomeini’s thesis about Islamic government and was more obsessed with a possible communist takeover of Iran.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“The largest number of victims of jihadist violence are Muslims themselves within their own countries.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

“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.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“Some of those who would come to oppose Arafat’s leadership would be Palestinian Islamists, like the Hamas movement, and they would look to Iran for support.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“the Mahdi. Sunni beliefs also allowed for an apocalyptic redeemer whose arrival by the Ka’aba, alongside Jesus, signaled the end of times before the age of righteousness. But unlike Shias, Sunnis did not hold this as a central tenet, nor did they believe the Mahdi been born centuries ago and gone into occultation. He would instead reveal himself as a man from the people with particular attributes spelled out in the hadiths, the records of prophet Muhammad’s sayings and actions, written after his”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“But article 12 of the new constitution declared that Iran’s state religion was still Shia Islam. The Brothers who had visited Khomeini in Iran were deeply disappointed. Khomeini wanted to be a leader on his own terms; he wanted to be separate from the rest. He didn’t want to dissolve himself into a Muslim world that was 80 percent Sunni; he wanted to lead the opposition forever. When it suited him, he would reach out to those Sunni groups that could serve his agenda. Article 154 of the constitution was designed exactly for that, implicitly expanding the jurisdiction of the faqih beyond the borders of Iran. Indeed, the constitution declared that the Islamic Republic of Iran supported “the just struggles of the oppressed against the oppressors in every corner of the globe.” Khomeini’s revolution was just beginning. 7”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“The Persian empire was 2,500 years old, but the Pahlavi dynasty was young. In 1925, with help from the British, Reza Shah, a brigadier general in the Persian Cossack army, had put an end to two centuries of Qajar dynasty.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“There were those Salafists who believed that following the righteous salaf, al-salaf al-saleh, dictated a return to the exact way of life of the prophet.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“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.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“The struggle opposed two visions for the succession: one religious, through a line of the prophet’s descendants known as imams (leaders of prayer); and the other, more earthly, centered on power, caliphs (literally, “successors”), chosen by consensus among wise men.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“That same month, Arab honor died too, or so it felt for millions across the region, who watched, incredulously, as Nasser’s successor, president Anwar Sadat, crossed enemy lines and traveled to Jerusalem to address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Tears streamed down the faces of children as rage burned inside the hearts of men. How could Egypt break rank and betray the Arab and Palestinian cause?”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“Although one man was Shia and the other Sunni, this was not an obstacle, as those words rarely featured in the politics of that era. The tension that was setting in was between nationalism and religion, between secular activism and religious fundamentalism”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“Traditionally in Shiism, the perfect Islamic state can come into existence only with the return of the Mahdi, or Hidden Imam, a messiah-like redeemer and the twelfth imam after Ali, who had gone into hiding, or occultation, in the ninth century. Until the return of this infallible man, governance would be in the hands of the secular state. But Khomeini asserted that the Quran had in fact provided all the laws and ordinances necessary for man to establish an Islamic state”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“It seemed that the duty of the intellectuals was to bring Khomeini to Tehran and hand him over to the mollahs.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“At exactly the same time in Saudi Arabia, a similar crisis was unfolding. The Mahdi had seemingly returned from occultation and appeared in Mecca. And he, too, had taken hostages.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“Although our countries have been changed by the hegemonizing influences of both Iran and Saudi Arabia, the headlines in the Western media have always reduced matters of extraordinary depth and complexity to a mere snapshot, which more often than not has catered to an orientalist audience that regards Arab or Muslim cultures as backward and to security-focused policymakers. Over time those two groups have worked to reinforce each other, merging to such an extent that everything was viewed through the prism of the security of the West, especially after 9/11.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

“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.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East

“If Beirut was the supermarket of the left in the 1970s, where Marxists, communists, Egyptians, Iraqis, and all the Palestinian factions debated and theorized, published and drank in bars arguing over ideas and the fought in the streets, Peshawar was the supermarket of the Islamists in the 1980s without drinking: there the discussions were about Islamic law, fatwas, the war of the believers, the unity of the Muslim nation, and the humanitarian needs of Afghan refugees.”
― Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East