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“What happened to us?” The question haunts us in the Arab and Muslim world. We repeat it like a mantra. You will hear it from Iran to Syria, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and in my own country of Lebanon. For us, the past is a different country, one that is not mired in the horrors of sectarian killings; a more vibrant place, without the crushing intolerance of religious zealots and seemingly endless, amorphous wars. Though the past had coups and wars too, they were contained in time and space, and the future still held much promise. “What happened to us?” The question may not occur to those too young to remember a different world, or whose parents did not tell them of a youth spent reciting poetry in Peshawar, debating Marxism late into the night in the bars of Beirut, or riding bicycles to picnic on the banks of the Tigris River in Baghdad. The question may also surprise those in the West who assume that the extremism and the bloodletting of today were always the norm.

Although this book journeys into the past, it is not driven by wistful nostalgia about a halcyon world. My aim was to understand when and why things began to unravel, and what was lost, slowly at first and then with unexpected force. 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.

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. From this noxious brew was born the Saudi-Iran rivalry, a destructive competition for leadership of the Muslim world, in which both countries wield, exploit, and distort religion in the more profane pursuit of raw power. That is the constant from 1979 onward, the torrent that flattens everything in its path.

Nothing has changed the Arab and Muslim world as deeply and fundamentally as the events of 1979. Other pivotal moments undid alliances, started or ended wars, or saw the birth of a new political movement. But the radical legacy of 1979 did all this and more: it began a process that transformed societies and altered cultural and religious references. The dynamics unleashed in 1979 changed who we are and hijacked our collective memory.

- KIM GHATTAS, Black Wave

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This book came with the highest possible recommendation and so far it's a great read!