The Muslim theocracies are the most backward shithole countries in the world.

Demonstrators in Tehran hold a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini (1979).

Wall Street Journal book review: Amazon - Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East  – Hardcover – January 28, 2020 by Kim Ghattas (Author)

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‘Black Wave’ Review: Islam Against Itself

Saudi Arabia, Iran and the 40-year rivalry that unraveled culture, religion and collective memory in the Middle East.

By Josef Joffe

January 27, 2020

In the first line of “Black Wave,” Kim Ghattas raises the question that haunts the Muslim realm: “What happened to us?” It recalls a famous line by Bernard Lewis, the great Middle East historian. There are two ways, he argued, in which cultures and nations deal with doom and decay. The first is to ask: “What did we do wrong?”—triggering self-scrutiny and self-help. The second: “Who did this to us?”

No. 2 is a classic from Algeria to Afghanistan. It was “them” who did us in. The culprits are colonialism, then Western domination and the Yahud, the Jew. It is a tale of conspiracy and victimization. Ms. Ghattas, a Lebanese-born journalist who has worked for the BBC and the Financial Times, lays out a story that whispers: We did it to ourselves.

The book is packed with accounts of ambition, treachery and cruelty—with a wealth of historical detail down to the hour of the day. Yet the reader gets plenty of rest, too, profiting from the author’s reportorial savvy. She serves up a wealth of human interest wrapped in ambiance and atmosphere. She paints riveting portraits of the protagonists: the murderous zealots, and the reformers who preached moderation until they were exiled or murdered.

Ms. Ghattas recalls the Khomeinist takeover of Iran as of February 1979. At first, the nation cheered the fall of the Shah. But a few weeks later, Mahmoud Taleghani, the country’s second-ranking cleric, warned that Iran could “once more fall back into the hands of dictatorship and despotism.” It did. In September, the ayatollah mysteriously died. His sons called it murder.

Sadly, despots begetting despots defines the course of Mideast modernization. The world admires that region’s ancient culture, starting with the three A’s of algebra, astronomy and Arabic numerals 0 to 9. Luckily, these digits have deposed those clumsy Roman symbols. Try to write out 1,234,589.00 in capital letters.

What, then, went wrong? Colonialism-as-culprit cannot quite explain democratic India, nor the spectacular rise of China, once a playground of empires. Nor can it explain the tragedy of postcolonial independence. Two generations of self-rule may not suffice to embed liberal democracy. But what about implanting the seeds of peaceful change and economic growth not based on oil?

The subtitle of “Black Wave” puts it concisely: “Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion and Collective Memory in the Middle East.” Extend the list, as the author does, to include Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Pakistan, plus non-state actors like the PLO, ISIS and sundry terror groups. Here is what you get. Cairo and Damascus struggled for supremacy in the ’60s. Baghdad entered the ring under Saddam Hussein, who went after Iran in the region’s longest and most deadly war (1980-88). Add relentless strife between tribes, sects and classes. Lebanon’s civil war from 1975 to 1990 claimed some 120,000 lives. From Jordan’s Abdullah to Egypt’s Sadat, peace-minded potentates were slain. Iran’s imperial-ideological designs keep shaking the Middle East from Basra to Beirut.

Israel fought eight wars against Arabs, depending on how you are counting. The Jewish state is said to be the source of all trouble. The numbers say “no.” Warfare and terror have killed some 23,000 Israelis since 1948. Yet the toll of Muslim-on-Muslim violence runs into the seven digits. Just take one million dead in the Iran-Iraq War and half a million in Syria. Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” had it wrong. It is not Islam vs. the West, but Islam against itself.

Top-down modernization having failed, Islamization is forging ahead. The author quotes from Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses.” “What happens when you win? . . . Compromise is the temptation of the weak; this is the test for the strong.” Analyzing the aftermath of George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished,” Ms. Ghattas shows how “regime change” merely produced false dawns. “Realities flipped,” while “the strong began to feel like victims and the oppressed began to subjugate.”

Sunnis had dominated the past, now it was the Shiites’ turn in Iraq and Lebanon, where Hezbollah has effectively captured the government while serving as advance guard of Iranian expansion. As winners and losers traded places, it was a time not for liberation, but score-settling and Islamism.

In Egypt, a democratic revolt toppled the autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Soon the promise of freedom paled, and two years later, millions marched against the freely-elected President Mohammed Morsi who tried to install an Islamic regime. In a familiar denouement, the military grabbed power. Gen. Sisi is still in charge. Iran’s “Green Revolution” of 2009 came to naught. So did the angry protests that began in 2017 and continue even now.

Post-Gadhafi Libya turned into a free-for-all, with Russia and Turkey rushing in. In Riyadh, Mohammed bin Salman bestrode the stage as a great modernizer. The script did not include Jamal Khashoggi, the reformist journalist dismembered in Istanbul’s Saudi consulate. Plus ça change.

The question “What happened to us?” leads the first and the concluding chapters. The pages in between limn a dispiriting answer: We happened to us. To avoid the charge of “Orientalism,” a perspective said to downgrade Arab-Islamic culture, the author refuses to end on a dissonant note. Almost in an afterthought, she fingers the outside world: “Far too many progressive minds in the wider Middle East have been left to fend for themselves.” True. They were “bludgeoned to death by forces . . . that most often served Western interests.” Not quite, unless ISIS and Hezbollah, Syria’s Assad or Iran’s Khamenei are cast as lackeys of the West.

Such an invocation of Western guilt is a minor blemish when compared to a superbly researched and subtly told story—current history at its best. “Between despair and hope,” Ms. Ghattas writes, “I ultimately settled on hope.” This blood-drenched plot deserves it. So, “Amen” and “Inshallah.”

Mr. Joffe, a fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, serves on the editorial council of Die Zeit in Germany. He has written widely on the Middle East.