Director of the schoolcraft institute of internationalst here at the texas a m university. I would like to welcome our specialco event this evening wih kim ghattas who will speak on a recent book, black wave, saudi arabia, iran and the 40 year rivalry that unraveled culture, religion and collective memory in the middle east. I have to say i spent the weekend reading and did not quite get the right but cannot put it down because it wasnt so interesting. If you have not read it afterre this evening im sure you will try to get the book if you have not already but i would urge you to read at grade its absolutely fascinating and well written and well researched and a narrative flow to it anded its troublingi have to say but thats the purpose of the book. I would like to announce unfortunately that our event in todays with ambassador dennis ross who is another expert in the middle east is unable to come to College Station and had and so hisergency lecture wednesday evening will be postponed till later. Kim ghattas is an Emmy Awardwinning journalist, writer, who covered the middle east for 20 years for pbc and financial times. She reported from iraq, saudi arabia, syria, lebanon and covered the war between israel earning an emmy for International News coverage. Shes also reporter and the state farm it and on american politics, regularly traveling with secretaries of state including condoleezza rice, Hillary Clinton and john. She has been published in the atlantic, washington post, Foreign Policy andn currently a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in washington. Her first book, the secretary, was a New York Times bestseller. Ms. Ghattas regularly speaks and continues to speak on American Television and radio was born and raised in limited but now lives between beirut and washington dc. If you have questions please write them on the cards, the bush school investors who have the blue blazers onn have with them theyve walked up and down the aisle but they continue to do that and then once you write the questions, pass them to the aisle and they will pick them up, give them to me and i will then go throughgh them after mr. Ghattas speaks and the two of us will set up here and i will ask for questions and then take your questions from the cards. Please, join me in welcoming kim ghattas to the stage. [applause] good evening everybody. Its really a delight to be here this evening. Thank you for the very generous introduction and thank you for hosting me here at the annenberg conference center. Thank you to the school dropped institute and the bush school for hosting me and i see here in the front row my good friend thank you for helping to make this happen. D im delighted to be back in texas and i have not been here in a very long time and i muston complain about the weather but this will give me a good excuse to return, i hope. Im here to speak to you about my recent book just out a few weeks ago, black wave. As any book it is the result of a journey. Every writing endeavor is a journey, many of you i am sure have books and you know it can be very and isolating experience and an intellectual lonely experience. Every book is a journey but this one is also more then the journey of the writing but a journey of 20 years of covering the middle east and in a way the combination of my experience growing up in the region as a child of war in beirut and i grew up in the civil war in the 80s and i wanted to writend a story about that which is not your typical story about the region. A lot has been written about the middle east and t for many of yu have read about the region and youre probably experts sitting here this evening and 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 t classic questions about division that are often asked what went wrong and what happened and why is it the way it is but i wanted to come at it from a different perspective and i wanted to come at it frompe our perspective frm the region because i think 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 the different path forward. The way i do my talks and my readings is i tried to make it accessible to wide of margins as possible. For many of you here tonight are experts on the middle east but hope that even for the experts i can bring you different answers in a different perspective as to hyy the region is the way it is today. What drove me to write this boow is as i said, the fact that i found out there wasnt much out there that addressed what i found was the core of the problem and it took me a while y even put my finger on what it was was the core of the problem or what was the point at which things had changed. But what i want to do as a starting point is give you the t conclusion and i know that is the wrong way around but i do think its important because i think that what i try 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 and because of headlines and because just the intensity of the news that comes from the middle east so i want to start by telling you some of the things you know are wrong and i hope youll allow me to start like that. I want to point out three things i want to say that iran and saudi arabia, despite the headlines we see today, despite the last few decades that seemed to indicate that its always been like that, saudi arabia and alan have not always been rivals. They not always been enemies and we forget that. There was a time when iran and saudi arabia were twin pillars in u. S. Policy to battle communism in the region. They were finally competitors, allied and they had physics exchanged between the royals and the two countries and they called each other with honorific titles and they were not necessarily the closest of friends but they were friendly and cooperated in a lot of ways so that is one assumption that people make about the middle east today than its always been like that between iran and saudi arabia. It wasnt. The other one is a phrase that we here bandied about very often was husband have always killed each other and its particularly if you listen closely you hear sunnis and shiites have always killed each other. Those are the two sects in islam and i will clarify but like the catholics and the protestants. Sunnis and shiites are the two sects in islam and they split after the death of mohammed where people thought the heirs were the closest relatives and those became the shiites and some thought his heirs should be the closest competent in those became the sunnis. Even in the first few decades following those identities were not as clearly defined and they involved over time. That is another preconceived idea, misconception, the people have in the region when even president ial obama said they been killing each other for melania and it will always be like that but id like to point out it hasnt always been like that and therefore it 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 path and there can be a different future. The final and third misconception is 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 intolerant and that cultural intolerance is part of what they find in the region and i would like to tell you that it is not always been like that and again, that means it doesnt always need to be like that. So, what happened, what happened to us connect thats the classic question that Bernard Lewis asked that i would like to give you a very different approach. That question what happened to us does haunt us in the arab and muslim world. We do it repeatedly come on cha and for my own country of lebanon all the way to pakistan from saudi arabia to syria and for us the path is really a different country and it is one that is not mired in the horrors of secretary and but more vibrant place without the crushing intolerance of alleges zealots and seemingly endless wars. The past was not perfect and it had wars as well but they were or seemly contained b in time ad space and the future did still hold much promise. The question perhaps today in the region does not necessarilye occur to those too young to remember when vibrant society was the norm and those are the ones whose parents did not tell them of the use over [inaudible] and has very different connotations these days or debating marxism late into the night in beirut or writing your bikes on the banks of the river tigris in baghdad. All these things we are saying would seem impossible today but especially the question would surprise those in the west who assume that it has always been as it is today. Is a complicated state and makes us think the past was perfect. I know that sometimes in the United States are people who have nostalgia for a different time and from the 60s where they forget the things that were wrong at the time because we tend to idealize the past. That is not what drove me. I was not idealizing the past but i really wanted to understand why things had unraveled and what was the starting point and they had unraveled very slowly at first without people u really noticing what was happening around them and it took on an unexpected force in the last decade or 15 years. There are many turning points in any country or any region histories that explains what happens and there are, of course, many turning points in the middle east history whether it is the end of the Ottoman Empire or fall of the last islamic caliphate after world war i and people will say this is the moment when the muslim world lost its way and there are some people who will form to the accretion of israel in 1948 and subsequent defeat of the arabs in the sixday war in 1967 as moment when there was a real fissure in the psyche of the arab and muslim world. Others will fit directly to 2003 in the u. S. Innovation of iraq as the moment where everything became worse that had already been like that, she days and is shiites kill each other, saudi arabia and iran at each others throat locked in a fight to the people because of the headlines of the last two decades or so invoke that its always been like that and its inevitable and eternal and apart from the eternal none of these excavations are completely correct on their own. The internal part isnt totally wrong and i insist on underlying that but none of these exclamations about what was the train point in the region really gives you a complete understanding of why we are where we are today. As i dug deeper and deeper into finding the answer of what happened to us i kept coming back to that one year,we 1979. A lot of you will remember that your and it is the year of the hostage crisis in toronto and it was also the year of the iran revolution, hostage crisis was in november and at the same time as the hostage crisis you had another type of hostage crisis in saudi arabia and mecca when [inaudible] laid siege to the holy mask and mecca for two weeks. Later that year in november of or in december on Christmas Eve the soviet invasion of afghanistan those three events and i focus on the iranian revolution because the hostage crisis is resolved and needs to resolve in some respects but the iranian revolution, the siege of the holy mask 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 the saudi iran rivalry. The two countries were friendly rivals before but there was no immediate reason why they should have become enemies right afte after it was apparent, let me correct that, there was no apparent reason why they should become rivals after the iran revolution except for the fact that the saudis saw themselves as leaders of the muslim world and were custodians of the two holy sites of mecca and medina. But Ayatollah Khomeini who landed in to ron in 1979 also had grand ambitions beyond just iran and beyond just even the community of in his own country and beyond. You had to countries, one sufi, saudi arabia, one shiite, iran buying for leadership of the muslim world and that is what not only changed the geopolitics of the region but started the slow growth of secretary in language and identities as both countries wielded those identities in their efforts to dominate the region and to rally the people to their side. In that battle they both wheel wheeled, destroyed and exploit religion and the pursuit of something very simple that any world leader would understand and that isaw raw power. But that is the conflict from 1979to this day, the torrent that flattens everything in its path. 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 undo alliances, they and or start wars. They bring an end when they see the beginning of movements and political ideologies. But 1979 did all of this, and change the geopolitics turned countries into enemies but it did more than that because these two countries started using religion as a tool and it had an impasse impact on society and culture. What 1979 did was again a process that transform society and altered cultural and religious references. I think its important to understand understand the processes that are unleashed by things like that when they ripple across not just years but several decades. Over time, peoples memories of what came before, and before a lot of people in the United States forget that actually the iranian revolution did not begin as an effort to e bring theocray to the country. It was an effort to topple the shah, where a lot of leftists and secularists and islamists maters were involved except Ayatollah Khamenei road that waving came out on top. The year 1979 and the four decades that followed 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 wholean youth about efforto show who was the real leader of the muslim world. They fought for islamic legitimacy through religious and cultural domination, if they changed societies not just within iranian, very obviously,y not only in saudi arabia in a more subtle way, but in countries that extended all the way from egypt to pakistan and beyond. I couldnt include everything in this book because i really tried to write it as a story, as a narrative, as you so well mentioned. Its hard to keep a narrative on track if you include two new details and to many countries into many places. And i know that you will say that pakistan is not part of the middle east. Ive not forgotten by geography, but what i i wanted to really do is show how the dots are connectedte across countries and across even continents. Because there is a tendency to look at the middle east is in the middle east, and theres a tendency to look at pakistan and the indian subcontinent as separate. But actually they are very intertwined as well. Pakistans modern history is very connected to events in the middle east. If only but not only because of the jihadi against the soviets in the 80s that began after that soviet invasion of afghanistan in which of course pakistan played a a crucial roe and, of course, everyone remembers or should remember that that was warned that the u. S. Backed as well. And thats why pakistan is central to the narrative in this book, as i look at how the iran revolution rippled out. Again, theres a tendency to look at the arena revolution come to some extent in isolation, how did it affect iran irans role in the region. But theres not enough effort to looking at what rippled across the region, how the sunni world reacted and interacted with it and other arab countries. Because there were a lot of reactions across the arab world and initially they were not all negative. A lot ofot people admired or soe people admired how khamenei had managed to rise on top and bring theocracy to power in iran. What was interesting about the Research Data conducted for this book and the fact i have 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 very validating to my thesis. Because people, because i was met with a flood of emotions really. When i asked people in pakistan or in egypt or in baghdad, tell me about 1979, out came all their memories and all their emotions, and everything thathit kept almost bottled up. This was a question no one had asked him before because its that easy when youre living in such a people when youre living in such upheaval to come with terms or analyze what you are going through. So many people thought yes, 1979, 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 i had to lose my job after 1979, and why. Even people who were not born before 1939 had a story because there is a beginning of an understanding in the region about what that year has done to us. It felt all of it like i was conducting National Therapy sitting in peoples studies or their living rooms as they sort of poured their hearts out to me. Now, i am a journalist. Im not a historian. Im not an academic but this is more than a reported narrative. I didnt only rely on my interviews with people in these countries. We dug deep intoou the archives with my Research Assistant we looked at old footage. We read articles, academic articles written at the time. Because its very interesting to see how perspectives change with time when you look back at academic articles written immediately after the iraniv revolution or they seized in mecca to see the assessment at the time and read about it now. 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 ws important to be able to see in front of me the pictures, the writings, the articles, the headlines. Imagine finding a headline from february 1979 where saudi arabia initially welcomes the iranian revolution. Us