The Black Wave

I recently read ‘Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East’ by Kim Ghattas which I consider to be one of the most insightful and informative books about Islam, Islamism and the middle east that I have come across. I urge anyone interested in what is happening in the middle east (or indeed, as we shall see, what is happening in some of the communities in Britain) to read this book. What I want to do here is try my best to summarise its core ideas.

First – some important definitions

Jihadism: Jihadism is driven by the idea that jihad (religiously-sanctioned warfare) is an individual obligation (fard ‘ayn) incumbent upon all Muslims, rather than a collective obligation carried out by legitimate representatives of the Muslim community (fard kifaya), as it was traditionally understood in the pre-modern era. Modern jihadist groups generally aim to incite their coreligionists to rise up and fight the enemy en masse, wherever they happen to be and by any means necessary including by taking individual violent action.

What is the ‘Black Wave”?

Egypt’s famous filmmaker Youssef Chahine believed that the intolerant Islamist interpretation of Islam was alien to Egyptians and described it as a “black wave” from the Gulf. It is the term used by some intellectuals in the middle east to describe the profound change that has swept across the middle east and the wider global community of muslims since the crucial year of 1979. These changes have wrought havoc and death for many, and oppression and suffering for most. Ghattas argues, entirely correctly in my opinion, that a series of separate events in 1979 set in motion profound changes that have transformed most of the Islamic middle east, as well as the wider Islamic world. The Islam we encounter now is not the Islam that existed prior to fifty years ago.

As Ghattas recounts in the book if you were to wander through the middle east in the early 1970s you would have mostly seen a profoundly different place compared to today. It was, for sure, a conservative place where religion, and often intense religious belief, were more common than in the west but it was also a place where you could find diversity and tolerance, where the non-religious could prosper, where the various different strands of Islam and islamic philosophy could flourish in a fairly relaxed coexistence along with various currents of secular politics from nationalism to leftism. You could wander in cities like Tehran, Beirut, Bagdad and Cairo and see women casually going about their business without covering their hair or bodies, where women could could wear make up and short skirts in public if they chose, where women were present in ever increasing numbers in the media, intellectual life and politics. In most of the cities of the middle east there were bars selling alcohol, there were innumerable night clubs, cinemas and dance halls. The numbers attending the mosques were in decline, local films and TV were dominated by secular stories and shows. Generally the western view was that the middle east was slowly but surely modernising and becoming more secular like the west, nobody foresaw what was about to happen, nobody foresaw the Black Wave, except those who were planning it.

In 1979, for reasons we will explore shortly, a profound inflection point occurred as a series of separate but interacting events unleashed a terrible new dynamic which in a few short years created a great wave of social, cultural and political change which has transformed the region and the wider islamic world. Instead of continuing to decline the Islamic religion suddenly took on a great new and terrible energy and began to invade all spheres of social, cultural and political life demanding submission and obedience. Religion took over everything, rapidly.

In 1985, barely 6 percent of books published in Egypt were religious, in 1994, it was 25 percent, and by 1995, 85 percent of books sold at the Cairo book fair were religious. In the mid-1980s, there was a mosque for every 6,031 Egyptians; by the mid-2000s there would be one for every 745. In the 1970s, 30 percent of Egyptian women wore the headscarf mostly in the poor rural hinterlands; by the mid-1990s, it was 65 percent. Egyptian taxi drivers played less Umm Kulthum (very famous Egyptian female singer) and more Quranic recitations. Family photographs came off walls and mantels and were stored in drawers, especially photos of grandmothers wearing short sleeves and low necklines, or sporting the big hairdos of the 1960s. Modesty was the new norm. Drawing nudes in university art classes was a thing of the past. Everything was now determined by halal or haram, permitted or forbidden in religion. Every second of peoples lives became regulated by religious edicts and the search for heavenly salvation. The beliefs and practices of Islamists, once on the margins, entered and then took control of the mainstream. In Pakistan from 1927 to 1985, only ten blasphemy cases were heard in court. Between 1985 and 2011, an estimated four thousand cases of blasphemy of all sorts were tried, from desecrating the Quran to defiling the name of the prophet. The penalty for blasphemy was death. And yet in all 6,236 verses of the Quran, there is not a single verse calling on Muslims to silence blasphemers by force.

As the Black Wave transformed the societies of the middle east it brought much terrible violence, awful oppression and sectarian conflict. There had been no meaningful sectarian conflict between the Shi’ite and Sunni for two centuries and then in Pakistan in the late 1980s serious ethnic conflict between these two branches of Islam broke out costing hundreds and eventually thousands of lives. By the 2000s full blown civil wars between he Shi’ite and Sunni were raging in Iraq and Syria costing hundreds of thousands of lives, and there was similar intra-muslim sectarian violence on a smaller scale across the middle east as well as attacks and pogroms against the various minority religious sects such as Copts, and Yazidis. Countless thousands died, hundreds of mosques were blown up by muslims, car bombings of civilians became common, suicide bombings which were first used by Hizbollah in the 1980s became a permanent feature of life, and kidnapping and public ritualised beheading, all became common. In the Islamic countries of the middle east nothing like this level of violence and atrocity had been seen for hundreds of year. The violence became ever more grotesque. The televised burning to death of a young man in a cage live streamed, the public execution of a fifteen year old girl in Iran who had been raped and had thus deemed to have committed fornication, gay men hurled from roofs, public crucifixions, endless videos of throats being cut and heads chopped off. Since the beginnings of the Black Wave in 1979 many, many hundreds of thousands of muslims have been killed by other muslims, the number of muslims killed by muslims in this period dwarfs the numbers killed by non-muslims.

1979: The Year That Transformed Islam

So what was the ‘Black Wave’ and where did it come from? The key year is 1979, a year when a series of separate events occurred which unleashed a powerful set of new interconnected and deadly dynamics that transformed everything and everywhere in the middle east and in the wider global Islamic world.

The first event of 1979 was the revolution in Iran. All the previous year a mounting wave of broad based insurrectionary opposition to the rule of the despotic Shah had grown across Iran. The opposition to the Shah included various currents of leftism, as well as democrats, liberals and republicans, and a wide range of diverse Islamic religious leaders and Imams. One religious leader, an exile since 1964, stood out and his name was Ruhollah Khomeini, his title was the Grand Ayatollah and he was the most senior Iranian cleric. He was also the proponent of the most intolerant form of Islam and of a theocratic form of government. In particular he had over many years, both inside Iran and then during the years of his exile, developed and promoted a radical new politicised concept of ‘Wilayat Al-Faqih’ which means the Guardianship of the Jurist. This concept is the central pillar of Iranian Islamism.

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 some mystical dimension, 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 and that the prophet and Imam Ali had intended for learned men to implement them: with these tools, a wise man, or faqih, could be the guardian and rule over such a state, or wilayat, with absolute power and bring about a perfect and just Islamic society. The ‘Guardianship of the Jurist’, or wilayat al-faqih, had been a theoretical minor subsection of Shia jurisprudence which until Khomeini’s radical new interpretation had only previously been used to regulate and legitimate things like clerical guardianship of widows and orphans. Khomeini’s radical new ideology transformed this minor part of Islamic jurisprudence into an immediate, all encompassing political ideology which would shape the remaking of an entire society and government placed under the controlling guidance of clerics. Khomeini’s radical idealogical mutation has had enormous impact, it is the foundation of the Iranian Islamic Republic (in which the Grand Ayatollah and the clerics rule over the secular state) and it was to have incendiary and terrible consequences all across the region. Many mainstream clerics were appalled at Khomeini’s concept of the wilayat al-faqih including Musa al-Sadr a very prominent Iranian-Lebanese Shia Muslim cleric and politician, and leading figure in the Iranian opposition, who said of Khomeini’s ideas “This is the juice of a sick mind” (after Khomeini’s political victory in Iran Sadr was kidnapped in Libya at Khomeini’s request and never seen again).

As the revolutionary movement inside Iran moved closer to toppling the Shah, Khomeini moved to France and became the centre of media attention as the leading figurehead of the Iranian opposition. Clustered around Khomeini in France almost none of the leading figures of the Iranian opposition shared Khomeini’s concept of the wilayat al-faqih, in fact they considered it religious nonsense from a senile old man, but they hoped to harness Khomeini’s popularity as they prepared for a post Shah Iran. As the western media interviewed Khomeini the opposition leaders translated for him and edited out the voluminous references he made to the new radical idea of a generalised wilayat al-faqih. When they returned to Iran with Khomeini in February 1979 they were shocked that Khomeini was far from senile and was in fact a very skilled and cunning political operator. Rapidly marginalising all other strands of politics Khomeini quickly implemented the wilayat al-faqih with himself as the supreme leader. Very rapidly all opposition forces were crushed and their leaders either executed, imprisoned or exiled.

The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) was born. Soon the bars, clubs, dance halls, and cinemas of Iran were closed, books and newspapers were censored, education and TV remade on Islamist lines and militia began patrolling the streets to enforce strict female dress codes. Non-compliant women began to be purged from public life. Led by Khomeini the IRI’s explicit ambition was to lead and remake the entire islamic world. This was going to be tricky because Khomeini and the new Islamic republic were Shi’ite and most muslims were Sunni. Moreover the Two Holy Places of Islam, Mecca and Medina, were controlled by Sunni Saudi Arabia and right from the beginning of the Islamic Republic of Iran Khomeini longed to seize control of them (more on this later). As well as its ambitions to lead the entire muslim world the Islamic Republic of Iran was also very rich because of oil revenues. This combination of extreme radical Islamism awash with endless oil revenues, a pattern that as we shall see was to be replicated in Saudi Arabia, was to have disastrous consequences. This exciting but awful and deadly new revolutionary state was celebrated by many intellectuals across the west including Michel Foucault, who never recanted in his support of Khomeini.

After the revolution and the creation of the IRI inspired Islamists came from across the muslim world to seek support and guidance from the first successful Islamist revolution (the parallels at this time with the early days of Bolshevik rule are uncanny at times). But before the Islamists arrived in Tehran another visitor came first, Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian political leader came seeking support from the IRI. Arafat was of course no Islamist, the organisation and ‘national’ cause he led was the product of Soviet attempts to channel Arab hatred of Israel and the Jews into a more ideologically comfortable framework of a national liberation struggle. Khomeini was familiar with and very supportive of the cause of Palestine from the writings of Sayyid Qutb the anti-semitic leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (who had been executed by Nasser in 1966), and he welcomed Arafat and the PLO team in Tehran. But their profound idealogical differences meant a close alliance was impossible, by the end of 1979, the Palestinians would become disillusioned, with some describing the Iranians as “real nut cases.” The “nut cases” were in turn disappointed with the Palestinians: most didn’t pray, they drank, they wore ties, and had dalliances with women. Instead Khomeini would adopt and then remake the Palestinian cause (in reality the anti-Israeli cause), as a way to broaden his appeal across the sectarian divide and attract Sunnis to his leadership, and ultimately as a way to create an extended regional alliance led by Iran. The IRI would spend many years and countless billions of dollars building a new Islamist Palestinian movement.

The day after the PLO delegation left a private charter plane arrived from Islamabad carrying several members of the Syrian and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the current leader of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e Islami Islamist organisation, and others from Kuwait, Indonesia, and (according to some reports) even from Saudi Arabia. They were warmly welcomed by the IRI but this initially warm relationship also foundered. The Brothers offered to pledge allegiance to Khomeini and elevate him as the leader of the new transnational Muslim nation. They hoped that Khomeini could be the spiritual leader of all Muslims across the world. But it required that Iran shed Shiism as the official state religion and become simply a Muslim nation. This Khomeini was not prepared to do. Next door to Iran in Syria the dictator Hafez al-Assad had watched the Iranian revolution carefully. His despotic Baathist regime, which was composed mostly of Shi’ite Alawites, ruled over a restless and insurgent majority Sunni population, and he had faced several uprisings, and persistent opposition from the mostly Sunni Syrian Muslim brotherhood and he feared that Iran would back them. In fact Khomeini opted for a close working partnership with the secular Syrian Baathist leadership and working with the Syrians the IRI began to intervene deeply in Lebanon where a sectarian civil war had raged, where the Israelis were fighting the PLO, and where a large and marginalised Shi’ite minority was ripe for recruitment to the cause of the Islamic revolution. Soon hundreds of Iranian Revolutionary Guards were arriving in Lebanon, via Syria, and they were awash with limitless money, weapons and a blazing new ideology curtesy of Khomeini’s concept of the Wilayat Al-Faqih (the rule of the clerics). Very rapidly a new Lebanese predominantly Shi’ite political force was born: The Party of God (Hizbollah). Hezbollah was dynamic and innovative, it was the first Islamic resistance group in the Middle East to use the tactics of suicide bombing and systematic assassination of opponents, combined with a social program of welfare services to win hearts and minds in its Shia constituency. Eventually Hizbollah would become the most powerful force in the fractured Lebanese political system. It would also form a close partnership with the Iranian sponsored Sunni Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (known by its acronym Hamas), perhaps the one example of Iranian Islamism bridging the Shia-Sunni religious divide.

Meanwhile the various strands of Sunni militant Islamism, having failed to convince Khomeini in 1979 to abandon Shi’ite in order to become the leader of all muslim began to drift towards another place that was suddenly ideologically welcoming and also very, very rich: Saudi Arabia. And as it happens in 1979 very dramatic events were about to turn Saudi Arabia into a sort of rich Sunni Islamist clone of Iran. 1979 was a turning point for Saudi Arabia, and like the Iranian revolution this would have enormous and terrible consequences across the Muslim world.

In order to understand what happened in Saudi Arabia in 1979 and why it matters we need a little history. Saudi Arabia was founded in the 1920s when the militant Saud dynasty from the inland, isolated and backward Najd region of the Arabian peninsular conquered the entire region. This conquest meant that the House of Saud took control of the Hejaz region that includes the majority of the west coast of Saudi Arabia, and the cities of Mecca and Medina (the Two Holy Places), a region that was much more cosmopolitan in culture and much more connected to the outside world than the isolated Najd. From the beginnings of its rise in the Najd region the House of Saud had worked in close partnership with the religious movement known as Wahhabism. The Wahhabi movement was extremely intolerant of all other shades of Islam. It opposed all forms of idolatry which it defined very broadly to include music, dance, and representational art, all the rituals practiced by other muslims, all veneration of religious sites. Wahhabites consider all other forms of Islam to be heretical and this makes them profound enemies of Shiism. Because of their opposition to anything that they perceive to be idolatry they have always tried to demolish and erase not only anything seen as non-Islamic but also anything Islamic that, in their opinion, had become iconic and thus idolatrous. As early as 1926, after the House of Saud had captured the Hejaz, they tried to demolish Al-Baqi Cemetery in Medina, and its associated Mosques and monuments, which is the burial place for many of Muhammad relatives and companions which meant it had been considered one of the two holiest cemeteries in Islamic tradition. It is considered especially holy by the Shi’ite. Decades latter when the Taliban blew up the statues of Buddhas of Bamiyan, and ISIS smashed the ancient ruins of Palmyra, smashed statues and artefacts from the Assyrian and Akkadian empires in the museum at Mosul and beheaded the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, they were all just playing out the same Wahhabite ideology.

Crucially, and unlike Khomeini’s wilayat al-faqih, mainstream Saudi Wahhabism does not seek to take over and subordinate secular power, instead its role was to guide secular leaders in all things spiritual. In practice this means the Wahhabites aim was to run all of society, control culture and religion, but leave the rulers to make the decisions of state. This lack of explicit political ambitions is what makes the partnership with the Saudi monarchy possible. Radicalised Jihadi versions of Wahhabism (Al-Qaeda, ISIS, etc), strongly influenced by the ideologies of the Muslim Brotherhood, are far more politically ambitious and want to claim, like Khomeini’s Wilayat Al-Faqih in Iran, the right to govern supremely. These strands of Wahhabism the Saudi monarchy opposes and suppresses.

The Wahhabi intolerant form of Islam was imposed across the Arabian peninsular from the 1920s but in previously open regions like the Hejaz its hold over social life was relatively light compared to what was to come later. By the 1960s and 1970s many Wahhabites were becoming disillusioned with what the saw as the corruption of the Saudi Royal family, as they enjoyed their rich indolent lives of sexual debauchery and compulsive consumption of western goods, many Wahhabites thought the House of Saud was no longer fit to be the guardians of the Two Holy Places.

In November 1979, eight months after Khomeini had established his Wilayat Al-Faqih in Iran, several hundred armed men from a militant Wahhabite sect seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca which is considered to be the most important mosque and holiest place in Islam because it encloses the Kaaba in Mecca, which all pilgrims on the Hajj must visit. Days of intense fighting ensued, including the use of artillery, much of the Grand Mosque was destroyed, hundreds died including many pilgrims. Eventually in a deeply humiliating act the Saudi authorities had to employ the assistance of infidel French special forces to retake the Mosque. The siege profoundly shocked the Saudi royal family, nothing like this had ever happened before, and in Iran it confirmed Khomeini in his view that the Saudi royal family was unfit to be the guardians of the Two Holy Places. The response of the Saudi monarchy was to sharply pivot back to the close embrace of the Wahhabite clerisy. Internally this meant intensifying Wahhabite social rule through a powerful new clerically controlled religious police and immediately Saudi women lost what little freedoms that had previously possessed. All liberal and dissenting Islamic voices were suppressed. The kingdom became a closed and oppressive place. At the same time, again to placate the Wahhabite clerisy and secure their continuing rule, the monarchy pledged vast sums of money so that the Wahhabite interpretation of Islam could be widely disseminated and promoted around the Muslim world by sponsoring and funding like minded Islamic foundations, charities, political parties and publishing houses, and by training many new Imams that would preach the Wahhabite creed (many of these are still preaching in the UK), and by funding hundreds of Mosques and Madasses (religious schools) all teaching the Wahhabite interpretation of Islam.

Here are two examples of the way that the newly empowered and state financed Wahhabite apparatus has shaped Islam far beyond the borders of the Kingdom.

In 1984, King Fahd launched the King Fahd Holy Quran Printing Complex. One of the largest printing plants in the world, it had a capacity to print eight million copies of the Quran and produce thirty thousand audio and video cassettes of Quran recitations, every year. A committee of scholars had worked for months to produce a supposedly “perfect,” error-free Quran in its annotations and commentary. All other copies were confiscated, and the “perfect” version was distributed instead. Editions of this new Quran were produced in many languages including English. Millions of copies were given to pilgrims and distributed abroad through various channels, including through the Saudi embassies Islamic affairs sections, which had replaced the cultural affairs sections in Saudi diplomatic missions.

The Saudi-endorsed translation came with egregious modifications or footnotes, turning those editions into polemics against Jews and Christians and promoting the strict intolerant Wahhabite version of Islam. The most widely distributed Quran published in 1985 relied heavily on the explanations of medieval thinkers inserting their commentary into the actual verses. For example A verse in the “Fatiha,” the opening of the Quran, had the words “Jews” and “Christians” inserted in parenthesis, making them the target of hate in an otherwise general call to the faithful to stay on the right path: additions made by the Saudis are shown here in parenthesis – it now read: “Guide us to the Straight Way, the way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not [the way] of those who have earned Your anger [such as the Jews], nor of those who went astray [such as the Christians].” Contemporary politics was also injected into this version of the Quran, with the addition of the word “Palestine” in verses about the Holy Land, for example: “O my people! Enter the Holy Land that God has assigned unto you” became “O my people! Enter the Holy Land, Palestine.” The Saudi-endorsed versions remain the most wide-spread, offering non-Arabic speakers a very specific, one-sided reading of Islam, which is hard to question without Arabic knowledge. These strict, polemical, medieval explanations of verses of the Quran were also the basis of religious studies in Arabic and are used in the Quran’s that are read and studied around the world today including in Mosques, study groups and Islamic religious schools in the UK.

This second example comes from the world of Egyptian cinema, perhaps the most popular in the Arab world, and where until the 1980s many famous and revered female actors regularly appeared unveiled, hair in full display, in dramas and roles that reflected a wide range of secular stories. The Wahhabites did not like this ‘heresy’. The most dramatic visual impact of the black wave crashing over Egypt was the veiling of dozens of its most famous and popular actresses who had delighted generations of Egyptians and Arabs. One after another, they had their come-to-Islam moment. The first was Shams al-Baroudi, whose most famous film was ‘A Woman With a Bad Reputation’ in which a woman has an office affair with her boss and in which the women wear hot pants and miniskirts, and featuring scenes where partygoers including women dance, smoke cigarettes, and drink alcohol. None of the women in the film wore the hijab. In 1982 Shams al-Baroudi, went to Mecca on the pilgrimage, encountered the intense Wahhabite interpretation of Islam, and returned veiled. Baroudi went on to actively encourage others to repent and leave behind their sinful lives as actresses.

By 1993, dozens of well-known actresses had donned either the veil or the niqab and were explicitly spreading their message in weekly religious lectures known as “Islamic salons” in the homes of Cairo’s elite. They impressed other women, who were mostly uninformed about religion, with these sermons, and they encouraged them to urge others to wear the veil and distributed booklets, supplied by Riyadh. Moved by their faith and injunctions, some of those attending the lectures decided to veil on the spot. Over time, hundreds of women passed through these salons, and most of them spread the message further. The veil was the new chic; it was a status symbol. In the past, middle-class and rich Egyptians may have looked to Europe for the latest fashions. Now they looked to Saudi Arabia and adopted not just the veil but even the niqab, which was previously an unknown phenomenon in Egypt. The “repentant” actresses, as they were known, were highly visible and public in their proselytising. Several Egyptian female stars, including the Faten Hamama, who had appeared in the landmark Egyptian film ‘I Want a Solution’, alluded to the fact they had been offered vast sums of money by Saudi Arabia to abandon acting and wear the hijab but had refused: one said she was offered one million dollars and a monthly salary of $150,000 to veil. The actresses who veiled denied they had been paid. But they did have close new connections to Saudi Arabia. Baroudi lived in Jeddah for a while, another traded in Islamic-style fashion and lived in both Jeddah and Egypt. Others spoke at events in Saudi Arabia about their born-again experiences in return for high speaking fees. Still others were driven by the necessity of keeping their job: the Saudis were setting up satellite television channels and production houses, they funded films and serials, and they didn’t want to see too much skin. Some of the repentant actresses renounced their art completely, but others wore the veil specifically to stay on-screen. Saudi Arabia was a big market for Egyptian cinema, and whereas in the 1960s and 1970s Saudis had enjoyed watching actresses in short dresses and big hairdos, the mood and the market in the kingdom had changed after 1979.

The these two key events of 1979, the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the post-siege transformation of Saudi Arabia, created two very rich but competing centres of evangelising intolerant totalising Islamism that have together since utterly transformed Islam across the globe. Because these two different version of militant Islamism are each officially sponsored by large, rich, competing and important regional powers, separated by ethnic and religious divides, so the drive to proselytise their respective version of Islamism is hitched to political and regional ambitions and rivalries. This means that the wealth and power of Iran and Saudi Arabia have since 1979 relentlessly driven a dynamic, extensive and very succesful campaign to spread Islamist ideology throughout the wider muslim world.

But 1979 wasn’t finished yet.

In 1977 Prime Minister of Pakistan Bhutto was overthrown (and subsequently hanged) by General Zia ul-Haq. When Zia took over he described himself as a soldier of Islam and he quickly set about remaking Pakistan as an Islamist country. Women came under increasing pressure to wear the veil and men were encouraged to adopt traditional dress and reject western suits and ties. All opposition was suppressed. In early 1979 Islamisation suddenly accelerated in Pakistan. In Iran on February 11th 1979 the Islamic revolution had been declared victorious. But just a day earlier, on February 10th, Zia had made a forty-eight-minute speech and announced he was imposing Nizam-i-Islam (‘Order of Islam’) on Pakistan, effective immediately, in other words, Pakistan would now be governed by sharia (Islamic) law. Nizam, the Arabic word for “system,” is also often used to mean a regime, and so, appropriately, Zia’s dictatorial regime would now rule as an explicitly Islamic system of government. This meant changing the country’s legal code and introducing harsh punishments for offences that violated the boundaries of behaviour set by God in the Quran: in particular intoxication, fornication, false allegations of fornication, and theft. The ordinances, known as ‘hudood; Arabic for “boundaries”, were very detailed and took up whole pages in public announcement in the Pakistani newspapers. From then on, drinkers would be flogged, adulterers would be stoned to death, thieves would have their hands chopped off. Relations between Zia’s Pakistan and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia grew warm and close. Saudi money and Wahhabite ideology began to pour into Pakistan.

Then in the final awful twist of 1979 on the 24th of December the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In 1978, and without prior Soviet approval, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), the Afghan communist party, had recklessly seized power and then clumsily tried to quickly modernise Afghan society by reducing the role of religion and of the Imams, introducing equality for women and modernising the Afghan state including the educational system. Almost immediately the communist reform program was met with armed resistance led by mullahs (clerical leaders). Soviet advisers were ambushed and killed. By December 1979 the senile old men in the Kremlin had had enough and in December they invaded, special forces were dropped into Kabul where they killed the leader of the communist regime and then installed a more compliant president. Thus began a terrible grinding war that was to cost the lives of over a million Afghanis and contribute to the fall of the Soviet Union. As the anti-Soviet insurgency surged, and as a million refugees flooded across the border into Pakistan, the Pakistani border province of Peshawar became the place to go for all those wanting to support the anti-Soviet insurgency. The USA began to pour in money and arms but the biggest flow of both cash and weapons came from the Saudis because 85% of the Afghan population were Sunni. Not to be outdone Iran began to channel support to the minority Shias who lived on both sides of the border. Both the Saudi and Iranian money each came with a thick wrapping of their respective competing Islamist ideologies. Saudi money helped set up more than 400 Madrassas religious schools, all teaching the intolerant Wahhabite interpretation of Islam, many of these schools were for the huge Afghan refugees population. Many of the graduates from these schools went back across the border to lead the most fanatical and ruthless islamist guerrilla bands who, because of their origins in the Saudi funded Madrassas were known as “The Students’: in the local language Pashto the word for student is ‘Taliban’. At the same time the Saudi’s were encouraging and funding the most dangerous and committed of their their home grown Saudi Islamist fanatics to go off and fight in Afghanistan which meant they wouldn’t be causing trouble back home in the Kingdom and as a result several thousand Arab Jihadi came to the border to fight the infidel.

The intense dynamics in Peshawar, the widespread efforts of the Saudi’s to promote the virulent Wahhabite ideology by splashing huge sums of money around, the American arms and funding programs focussed narrowly on winning the cold war fight with the Soviets oblivious to the rapidly evolving radical Islamist ideology of some of their clients, Iran trying hard to radicalise the Shia minority, Zia’s intense commitment to a strict Islamic social programme, the ever more radical and deranged Arab volunteers, plus the usual raft of grifters and arms dealers, all meant that things slipped rapidly out of anybody’s control. Peshawar became a laboratory where various currents of armed Jihadi inclined Islamists could grow, organise, practice Jihadism and radicalise even further. It’s the place where the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were born, it was where the first armed clashes between Shia and Sunni broke out, and where JIhadi’s from many countries learnt their trade and adopted the ideology of murderous Islamism.

The core argument of Ghattas’s book is that by the end of 1979 a series of seemingly unrelated events had created two powerful centres in Iran and Saudi Arabia which would go on to use vast oil revenues over the the next four decades promoting their competing versions of radical intolerant Islam and conducting an endless struggle for regional and ideological dominance. In 1987 fighting once again broke out in the holy city of Medina as Iran, still committed to seizing control of the Two Holy Places from the Saudi’s, sponsored armed demonstrations by officially organised Shia pilgrims from Iran who fought running battles with Saudi National Guardsmen leading to over 400 deaths.

Immediately after 1979 these new Islamist ideologies morphed rapidly into an aggressive Jihadi ideology in the cauldron of Afghanistan, Pakistan and especially in Peshawar, and violent Jihadist ideology spread and metastasised across the Islamic world including the muslim diasporas of Europe. Latter other places would become far bigger and far worse laboratories of Islamist Jihadi violence, and arenas for the playing out of the murderous struggle between the Iranian and Saudi versions of Jihadic Islamism. Places like post Baathist Iraq, where the USA helped things along by collapsing the state and then crashing around the place smashing things up, disempowering previously powerful elites and social groups, and killing lots of local people in spastic outbursts of violence creating vast reservoirs of resistance. In Iraq what started as an incoherent proto nationalist resistance to foreign infidel occupation quickly morphed into a ghastly and deadly civil war between Iranian sponsored Shia and Saudi sponsored Sunni militias, and both became deeply infused with their respective Islamist ideologies. Syria was even worse.

Chapter by chapter Ghattas’s book charts how the dynamic unleashed in 1979 has unfolded over the years and across the region in places like Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan and Iraq. The Black Wave also spread far beyond the middle east and crashed through the muslim communities across the globe, including in the UK, spreading its militant and intolerant version of Islam. As muslim migrant communities settled into the UK they began to be drawn into its secular culture, this threatened the power of the local religious leaders just as the radicalising Black Wave of Islamist ideology washed over them radicalising many imams and leading to a raft of new activist Islamist community organisations full of urgent and angry young men infused with Islamist ideas. In the midst of all this the Satanic Verses by the British Indian writer Salman Rushdie was published. It initially caused no reaction. In Iran it was translated into Farsi and published with no controversy. Then in Leicester Faiyazuddin Ahmad started photocopying extracts of the book and sending them around to Muslim organisations and to the embassies of forty-five Muslim countries in the UK. A recent arrival in the country, Ahmad had previously worked in East Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as a managing editor of newspapers, and was now at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, a local chapter of the Pakistani Jamaat-e Islami an extremist Islamist organisation. Ahmad, who also had ties with the Saudi-funded World Assembly of Muslim Youth, traveled to Jeddah in October to brief members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. At the Saudi embassy in London, the head of the Islamic affairs section, Mugham al-Ghamdi, helped set up the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs to campaign against the book and get it banned. Only a few Muslim countries answered the call. But by December, British Muslims were protesting, burning a copy as they marched through the small town of Bolton. Meanwhile in Iran Khomeini was smarting from being sidelined in the Afghanistan peace negotiations, and at having to end the war with Iran without total victory, and this new issue of blasphemy was an opportunity to regain the political initiative and once again reach out and try to lead the Sunni muslims. On the 14th of February 1989, right before the 2:00 p.m. news, the newscaster on Tehran Radio read out a statement Khomeini had dictated: “I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, which is against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all Muslims to execute them where they find them.” Any Muslim who might die in the process, Khomeini added, would be considered a martyr. Rushdie survived but has lived the decades since under armed guard and mostly in hiding, in 2023 he was stabbed and partially blinded by an Islamist, and the Japanese and Turkish translators of his book, and the publisher of the Norwegian one, were all assassinated for their association with Rushdie. Blasphemy against the new narrow definition of Islam committed anywhere by anybody is now effectively a capital offence.

Since that first flare of Islamist mobilisation around the Satanic Verses Islamism has developed deep roots inside the Islamic communities of the UK and Islamist violence has killed over a hundred people in the UK and wounded and maimed hundreds. Three of the suicide bombers who attacked the transport system in London in 2007 killing 52 people and injuring hundreds were born in Leeds and Bradford. The Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi who attacked a concert in 2017 killing 22 people and maiming many others (including children) was born in Manchester. Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale who murdered and tried to behead an off duty soldier in 2013 in London were both born in the UK.The ISIS cell known as the ‘Beatles’ (because of their London accents), who tortured and beheaded numerous hostages, were British citizens, two were from London and the other two came to UK as young children and grew up in the UK. All these violent Islamist had encountered violent Jihadi Islamism being preached and disseminated inside the UK. The UK security service M15 says that it actively monitors over 43,000 UK muslims because of their affiliation to violent Jihadi Islamist ideology. Beyond these thousands of committed and potentially dangerous Islamists lies a large reservoir of passive support and sympathy for Jihadi sentiments and an even larger group of supporters and believers in Islamist ideology. It’s not that all muslims in the UK are violent Islamists but it is true that Islamist ideology now thoroughly saturates UK Islamic religious, cultural, political and communal life.

You can see the visible impact of the Black Wave in the Muslim communities of the UK. In the late 1970s I spent a lot of time fighting fascism and racist violence in the East End of London and helping the Bengali community defend itself. In those day there were not that many muslim women on the streets but there were some. Some of those Muslim women wore loose head scarves, many didn’t and showed their hair uncovered, none wore the Hijab, and the Niqab was never seen. Recently I have been visiting Whitechapel on a regular basis and now everywhere there are women wearing the Chador and Niqab. Generally as a rule of thumb the more young men with beards wearing dishdasha, and young women wearing the Chador or Niqab, that you see in a UK muslim community the more it’s the visual evidence that the Black Wave has washed through that community transforming how Islam is practised.

Can the impact of the Black Wave be overcome, can intolerant and dangerous Islamism be defeated? In Iran there are plenty of signs that the Islamist regime is deeply unpopular and, hopefully, one day there will be a second secular and democratic revolution. In Saudi Arabia the powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has moved to push back against the Wahhabite establishment internally but rules despotically. Who knows how long MBS will last, and the Saudi ideology machine is still churning out its endless stream of its reactionary version of the Quran. There seems little chance of Saudi democracy. Meanwhile the response of the Left in places like the UK is truly pathetic. The Left’s ideological feebleness means that most of the time, hypnotised with the shouts of “Death to America” and “Free Palestine”, it at best cannot see the Islamists even when they stand next to them, and at worst some parts of the radical left have disgraced themselves by seeking opportunistic alliances with the Islamists. Whatever happens it will take decades to roll back the Black Wave.

Some videos featuring Kim Ghattas talking about the Black Wave

Kim Ghattas | Surfing the Black Wave

Here is a video discussion about the book with the author Kim Ghattas, Maha Yahya (the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut), Marwan Muasher (vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment)

The Forty-Year Rivalry Between Saudi Arabia and Iran with Kim Ghattas

Here are two other reviews of Kim Ghattas’s book.

Black Wave by Kim Ghattas review – insightful history of Middle Eastern conflict

Book Review – ‘Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry that Unravelled the Middle East’ by Kim Ghattas