And now on cspan2 book tv, more television for serious readers. Good evening. Im andrew natsios, the director of the Scope Institute on International Affairs at the bush school of government at a and m university. Id like to welcome our special event site for this evening with kim dennis is going to speak on our recent book black weight, saudi arabia, iran and the fortyyear rivalry unraveled cultural, religion and collective memory in the middle east. That said i spent the weekend reading it, i didnt quite get through it but i couldnt put it down it was so interesting if you havent read it after this evening, im sure youwill find if you havent already but i would urge you to read it. Its absolutelyfascinating. Its wellwritten, very well researched. Theres a narrative flow to it and its very troubling, i have to say that the purpose of the book. I would like to announce proportionally that our event in two days ambassador dennis ross who is another expert in the middle east is unable to come to the station. He had a family emergency and so his lecture wednesday evening will be postponed until later. Kim ghattas is an awardwinning journalist who covered the middle east for 20 years for the bbc and the financial times. She reported from iraq, saudi arabia, syria, lebanon and covered the war between israel and hezbollah earning an emmy for International NewsCoverage Area she has also reported on the state department and on american politics, regularly traveling with secretaries of state including condoleezza rice, Hillary Clinton and john kerry. Shes been published in the atlantic, Washington Post, or in policy and is currently a nonresident color at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in washington. Was a New York Times bestseller. Miss gaddis regularly speaks, continues to speak onamerican television and radio. She was born and raised in lebanon but now lives to beirut and washington dc. If you have questions, please write on the cards, the Bush School Ambassadors who have the blue blazers on. Have with them, they will have walked up and down file it will continue to do that and then once you write the questions, pass them to the isle. They will pick them up you give them to me and i will then go through them. After this dentist seeks, two of us will sit up here and i will ask her some questions and then take your questions from the car. You join me in welcoming kim ghattas to the stage. Good evening everybody. Its really a delight to be here this evening. Thank you for the very generous introduction. Thank you for hosting me here at the Annenberg Conference Center and thank you to the Scowcroft Institute for hosting me and i see in the front row my good friend, tamari, thank you for helping to make this happen and im delighted to be back in texas. I havebeen here in a very long time. I must complain about the weather. This is going to give me a good excuse to return i hope. Im here to you about my recent book, just out of two weeks ago. Lack wave. As anybody, its the result of a journey. Every writing and never is a journey, many of you im sure have written books. You know that it can be very isolating experience, a very intellectually lonely experience. Every book is a journey but this one is also more than the journey of the writing area is a journey of 20 years of covering the middle east and is in a way the culmination also of my experience going up in the region as a child of war. In beirut i grew up during the civil war in the 80s. And i wanted to write a story about that region was not your typical story about the region. A lot has been written about the middle east, im sure many of you have read about the region, many of you are experts sittinghere this evening. I wanted to write our story because i had questions that i did not find the answers to. In the classic books that were out there. I wanted to answer the classic questions about the region that are often asked what went wrong, what happened, why is it the way it is that i wanted to come at it from a different perspective. I wanted to come at it from our perspective, from the region because i do think that what is out there at the moment is not enough to explain why we got to where we are. And i also think that it does not do justice to the people of the region who have tried as well very hard to find different paths forward. The way i do my talk and my readings is that i tried to make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Im sure many of you here tonight are experts on the middle east but i hope that even for the experts, i can bring some different answers in a different perspective as to why the region is theway it is. What drove me to write this book is as i said, the fact that i found that there wasnt much out there that really addressed what i found was the core of the problem and it took me a while to even put my finger on what it was that was the core of the problem or what was the point at which things have changed but what i want to do as a starting point is actually give you the conclusion and i know that was the wrong way around but i do think it is important because i think what i tried to do with my writing and the research that ive done is go against some of the preconceived ideas that people have about the middle east because of media coverage, because of headlines, the cause of just the intensity of the news that comes at it from the middle east so i want to start by telling you some of the things you know about the middle wrong. I hope you will allow me to start like that. I want to point out 3 things. I want to start by saying iran and saudi arabia by the headlines today and the past few decades indicate its always been like that. Saudi arabia and iran have not always been rivals. They have not always been enemies and we forget that. There was a time when iran and saudi arabia were twin pillars in us policy to counterterrorism in the region. They were friendly competitors, allies in that endeavor. You had visits exchanged between the royals of two countries. They call each other with honorific titles. They were not necessarily the closest of friends but they were friendly and cooperated in a lot of ways so that is one assumption people make about the middle east that its always beenlike that between iran and saudi arabia. The other one is the phrase that we hear bandied about very often, muslims have always killed each other, its always going to be like that and listen closely and you will hear sunnis and shiites always killed each other. Those are the two sex in islam, just to simplify, its a little bit like the catholicsand the protestants. A split after the death of prophet mohammed when people thought that his heirs should be his closest relatives and those who came to the crs and some people think his heirs should be his closest confidant and those became the sunnis even in the first few decades following the profits, those identities were not as clearly defined. They evolved over time so that is another preconceived idea, this conception people have about the region when even resident obama said theyve been killing each other for millennia, it will always be like that, i would like to point out has been like thatand it also doesnt need to be like that forever. That is part of what drives the writing in this book is to remind us that there was a different time and therefore there can be different future. And the final and third misconception that people have, particularly because of the constant droning on of the headlines that are focused on tyrants and dictators is that the region has always been in the throes of violence and always been intolerance, that cultural intolerance is part of what defines the region and i would like to tell youthat it has not always been like that and again, that means it doesnt always need to be like that. So what happened . What happened to us . At the classic question but i would like to give you a very different approach. Because that question, what happened to us does taunt us in the arab andmuslim world. We do repeat it like a mantra, from my own country of lebanon all the way to pakistan, from saudi arabia to syria. The past is really a different country, it is one that is not mired in the horrors of sectarian killings, its more a vibrant place with out the crushing intolerance of religious zealots and the seemingly endless wars. The path the path was not perfect, it had wars as well they were seemingly contained in time and space and future. Its so much promise. The question perhaps today in the region that does not necessarily occur to those too young to remember when vibrant tolerant societies were the norm, those are the ones whose parents did not tell them of a youth exercising poetry in partial are, it has different connotations these days or debating marxism late into the night in the bars of beirut or writing your bikes on the banks of the river tigris in baghdad. All these things were seen as impossible today but especially the question was which will surprise those in the west who assume it has always been as it is today. The buffet is a complicated, it makes us think that the past was perfect. I know that sometimes in the United States there are people who have nostalgia for a different time from the 60s or 50s and they forget things that were wrong at the time because we tend to idealize the past. Not what i, what drove me. I would not idealize in the past but i wanted to understand why things had unraveled, what was the starting point . And they had unraveled very slowly at first without people really noticing what was happening around them. Then it took on an unexpected force the last decade or 15 years. There are many turning points in any country or any region or history that explains what happened and there are of course many turning points in the middle easts history, whether its the end of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of the last islamic caliphate after world war i. People will say this is the moment when the muslim world lost its way. There are some people who will point to the creation of israel in 1948 and the subsequent defeat of the the sixday war in 1967 as a moment where there was a real picture in the psyche of the era and muslim world and others will skip directly to 2003 and the us led invasion of iraq as the moment everything became worse that had already been like that. Sunnis and she is killing each other, saudi arabia and iran at each others throats and people will therefore because of the headlines over the past two decades or so invoke that its always been like that, its inevitable, its eternal. Apart from the inevitable and eternal, none of these explanations are completely correct on their own. The inevitable and eternal part is both wrong, i insist on underlining that but none of these explanations about what was the turning point in the region really give you a complete understanding of why we are where we aretoday. As i dug deeper and deeper into trying to find the answer of what happened to us , i kept coming back to that one year. 19 79. A lot of you will remember that year as the year of the hostage crisis in tehran. Was of course also the year of the iranianrevolution in february of that year, the hostage crisis in november. At the same time, as the hostage crisis in tehran, we had another type of crisis in saudi arabia in mecca when saudi laid siege to the holy mosque in mecca for two weeks. And later that year, in november of four in december, on christmas eve, you have the soviet invasion of afghanistan. Now, those three events and i focus on the three, the iranian revolution and the hostage crisis as a result, but the iranian revolution, the siege of the holy mosque and the invasion of afghanistan were seemingly independent events and they were independent of one another but they became completely intertwined and the combination of all three was toxic. First of all, from this confluence of events was born a saudi iran rivalry area as i mentioned the two countries were friendly rivals before. There was no immediate reason why they should have become enemies right after. There was no apparent reason why they should have become enemies or arrivals after the iran revolution except for the fact that the saudis saw themselves as leaders of the muslim world. There were also custodians of the two holy sites of mecca and the two holy sites of neck and india. But Ayatollah Khomeini had landed in tehran in february 2000, of 1979, also at grand ambitions beyond just ran. Beyond just even the community of shiites in his own country and beyond you had two countries, one city, saudi arabia, one shiite, and ran suddenly going for leadership of the muslim world and thats whats not only changed the geopolitics of the region started slow growth of sectarian language and sectarian identity that both countries wielded as identities in their efforts to dominate the region, to rally the people to their side. And in that battle, they both wield religion in the pursuit of something very simple that any world leader will understand and thats raw power. But that is the conflict from 1979 to this day. The torrents that flattens everything in its path and i believe that nothing has changed the arab and muslim world as deeply and fundamentally as the events of 1979 and the wave that started after those events. Other pivotal moments and alliances, the end or start wars. They bring an end or they see the beginning of political movements and political ideologies. But 1979 in all of this, it changed the geopolitics, turned countries into enemies did more than that because these two countries started using religion as a tool. It had an impact on society, on culture. So what 1979 it was it a new process that transform society. An altered cultural and religious references. The dynamics that were unleashed since 1979 changed who we are in the region and hijacked our collective memory. And thats why i was very keen to have the words elective memory in the title. Because i think its important to understand the processes that are unleashed by events like that when they revel across not just years but several decades, over time peoples memories of what came before our resolve and for a lot of people in the United States, they forget actually, the iranian revolution did not begin as an effort to bring a theocracy to the country. It was an effort to topple the shop where a lot of leftists and secularists and islamic moderates were involved except Ayatollah Khomeini wrote thatway and came out on top. The year 1979 and the 4 decades that follow are the story that i tell in black wave. Because as i mentioned the rivalry went beyond geopolitics. It descended into this constant effort to outbid each other in this holier than thou asked to show who was the real leader of the muslimworld. They fought islamic legitimacy through religious and cultural domination and a change society not just within iran, very obviously, not only in saudi arabia in a more subtle way in countries extended all the way from you to pakistan and beyond area i included everything in this book because i really tried to write as a story, as a narrative. As you so well mentioned and its hard. On track. If you include too many details and to many countries and to many places. And i know that you will say that pakistan is not part of the middle east, ive not forgotten my geography. But what i want to really do is show how the dots are connected across countries and across even continents because theres a tendency to look at them at least as only the middle east and a tendency to look at pakistan and the continent as separate but actually, theyre very intertwined as well. Pakistans modern history is reconnected events in the middle east area only but not only the cause of the jihadist against the soviets in the 80s that began after the soviet invasion of afghanistan and which of course pakistan later crucial role and of course everyone remembers or should remember that that was a war that the us backed as well. Thats why pakistan is central to the narrative in this book as i look at how the iran revolution rippled out. Theres a tendency to look at the iranian revolution to some extent in isolation, how did it affect iran or entrance role in the region theres not enough effort to look at how it across the region. How the sunni world reacted and interacted with it and other grab countries. Because there were a lot of reactionsacross the arab world and initially they were not all negative. A lot of people admired or some people admired how khomeini had managed to rise on top and bring a theocracy to power in iran. What was interesting about the research that i conducted for this book and the fact that i had pointed out 1979 as the crucial turning point was that i found everywhere i asked the question, tell me about 1979 i found the reactions were validating to my thesis cause people, i was met with a flood of emotions really. When i ask people in pakistan or in egypt or in baghdad tell me about 1979, came all their memories and all their emotions and everything that they had kept almost bottled up. This was a question that no one had asked them before because its not easy when youre living in such a people, when youre living in such heavy days to come to terms or analyze what youre going through. So some people but yes, 1979 and let me tell you about 1979. Let me tell you how that wrecked my career or my marriage or my childrens education. Why i had to go into exile at that time or how how i had to move my job after 1979 and why. Even people who were not born before 1979 had a story because there is a beginning of an understanding in the region about what that year has doneto us. It felt a little like i was conducting national therapy, sitting in peoples studies for their living rooms as they poured their hearts after me. I am a journalist, im not a historian. Im not an academic but this is more than reported narrative. I can only rely on my interviews with people in these countries. We got deep into the archives with my research assistance. We looked at all the old footage, we read articles, academic articles, which just at the time because its very interesting to see how perspectiveschange. With time when you look back at economic articles which is immediately after the iran revolution or the siege in my head to see the assessment at the time and read about it now area when you put it all together, you get a Virtual Library of the history of the region. I have 19 binders full with printed papers that tell the story because i thought it was important to be able to see in front of me the pictures, the writings, articles, the headline. Imagine finding headline from february 1979 where saudi arabia initially welcomes the iranian revolution because although they