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.
