In Lebanon, the black wave came from Tehran, as Iran began to export its revolution. The chador, the all-enveloping black cloth, spread in Shia villages and in the southern suburbs of Beirut. It had been previously worn only by deeply conservative women, mostly wives of clerics. Liquor shops were closed; music disappeared; the black flags of mourning for Imam Hussein, one of the most revered religious figures in Shia Islam, fluttered from lampposts; and the slogan “We are all Khomeini” was scribbled on the walls of posh Beirut shopping streets. The flags, the chador, the niqab, the sectarian hatred, and the threats of apostasy all shaped a new collective consciousness that is only now being challenged by the younger generation.

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I encountered another recurrent question on my travels, one that surprised me, one that young Saudis and Iranians in particular were asking of their parents: Why didn’t you do anything to stop it? In those countries from which the ripples had emanated and in which life had been blunted since 1979, there was resentment toward the generation that had allowed it to happen. For Iranians, 1979 is an obvious turning point in the country’s history. For them, it wasn’t so much the slow realization of what had happened, but more the growing disbelief at the naïveté of their parents and grandparents, who had cheered on a revolution that replaced the tyranny of monarchy with the even worse tyranny of religion. The new system was politically but also socially and economically repressive, effectively freezing the country in time and disconnecting it from the world, seemingly forever.

In Saudi Arabia, the changes were more a case of arrested progress. With a deeply conservative desert interior and more outward-looking coastal provinces, the kingdom had been inching toward more relaxed social norms, with the introduction of television, education for girls, and a handful of makeshift cinemas. But 1979 was an opportunity for the standard-bearers of the ultra-orthodox Islam of the kingdom’s founding fathers—often referred to as Wahhabism—to impose their understanding of religion more strictly and to do so on the whole country. Awash with cash during the 1980s, Saudis could travel anywhere to go to the cinema and the theater, sit in cafés, and shop freely if they wanted to escape the darkness engulfing their country. But now their children want to know why their parents hadn’t protested when the music was silenced, when the male guardianship system was tightened, when the religious police started scaling the walls of private homes if they heard music inside.

There was a brief moment in 2018 when it looked as though the two foes were going to compete to undo the damage of 1979: the Saudis from the top down, thanks to Mohammed bin Salman, a crown prince opening up his country to the 21st century; and the Iranian people from the bottom up, thanks to their own determination to chip away at the system. Instead, the existing competition continued unabated, as though nothing and nobody were equipped to dissuade the leadership of either country from its own worst instincts. Syria, Yemen, and Iraq paid the price, as proxy wars raged in all those countries. People who raised their voices against their respective leaders in Iran and Saudi Arabia were also targeted. The most dangerous opponents were those who spoke softly and who presented the most credible alternative to the absolutism of the leaders—the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a hit team sent from Riyadh in October 2018; Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian human-rights lawyer, was sentenced to 38 years in jail and 148 lashes for defending women campaigning against the mandatory-veiling laws.