" The irony is that the Iran of the fundamentalist ayatollahs owes its ultimate birth pang to cities of sin and freedom: Beirut, capital of Arabic modernity, once known as the Paris of the Middle East; and Paris, birthplace of the Age of Enlightenment. If not for the permissive freedoms in both, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—a patient man with a cunning mind—might have died forgotten in a two-story mudbrick house down a narrow cul-de-sac in the holy city of Najaf, in Iraq. "

― Kim Ghattas , Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East