by Kim Ghattas

Summary

Kim Ghattas opens with a question she heard repeatedly across the Middle East: "What happened to us?" The answer she constructs spans forty years and seven countries, tracing how a rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, ignited by three events in 1979, progressively dismantled a region that had been far more pluralistic and open than the world recognizes today.

The Iranian Revolution, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan each set forces in motion that the other two amplified. What followed was not a clash of ancient hatreds but a deliberate competition for Islamic legitimacy, waged through oil-funded religious indoctrination, exported revolutionary ideology, and the violent suppression of intellectuals, artists, and reformers from Beirut to Karachi. Ghattas tells that story through the people who lived it, and lost.