>> and now on c-span2 book tv, more television for serious readers . >> good evening. i'm andrew natsios, the director of the scope institute on international affairs at the bush school of government at a and m university. i'd 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 forty-year rivalry unraveled cultural, religion and collective memory in the middle east. that said i spent the weekend reading it, i didn't quite get through it but i couldn't put it down it was so interesting if you haven't read it after this evening, i'm sure youwill find if you haven't already but i would urge you to read it . it's absolutelyfascinating . it's well-written, very well researched . there's a narrative flow to it and it's 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 award-winning 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 news coverage 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. she's 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. it's 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 i'm 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. i'm here to you about my recent book, just out of two weeks ago. lack wave. as anybody, it's the result of a journey. every writing and never is a journey, many of you i'm 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, i'm 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. i'm 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 wasn't 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 i've 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 it's 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 it's 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, it's 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, it's 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 they've been killing each other for millennia, it will always be like that, i would like to point out has been like thatand it also doesn't 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 doesn't 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, it's 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. it's 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 east's history, whether it's 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 six-day 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 other's throats and people will therefore because of the headlines over the past two decades or so invoke that it's always been like that, it's inevitable, it's 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 saudi's 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 that's what's 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 that's 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 that's why i was very keen to have the words elective memory in the title. because i think it's important to understand the processes that are unleashed by events like that when they revel across not just years but several decades, over time people's 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 it's 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, i've 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 there's 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, they're very intertwined as well. pakistan's 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. that's why pakistan is central to the narrative in this book as i look at how the iran revolution rippled out. there's a tendency to look at the iranian revolution to some extent in isolation, how did it affect iran or entrance role in the region there's 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 it's not easy when you're living in such a people, when you're living in such heavy days to come to terms or analyze what you're 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 children's 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 people's studies for their living rooms as they poured their hearts after me.i am a journalist, i'm not a historian. i'm 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 it's 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 are sorry to see the shop go, he was there friend and they were initially concerned about the ability that there would be a communist takeover of iran because those were the trends at the time, political islam is not the dominant story. when they saw the guy rising to the top was somebody they could relate to even though he was she ya, hewas a very conservative man .he wanted to bring the koran to the country and they welcomed that. they said hopefully we can cooperate on the basis of our understanding of how it should be applied to society so when you look at these events, when you look at these details, you put it all together. you put together a puzzle of known events, forgot events, overlooked events and when you have a puzzle in front of you, it gives you a very different understanding, a very different reading of the last four decades of history and it spans seven countries as i mentioned, i go from egypt to pakistan, there iraq and lebanon. and it shatters some of those accepted truths that we have, that even we had in the region because i can tell you sometimes even we forget that sunnis and shiites have not always been killing each other. i grew up in the civil war in lebanon and those two words were never really used. it wasn't that kind of conflict but today it's so accepted in our collective memory that we forget what it was like before. and that saudi iran rivalry mutated over time with consequences no one could have foreseen in 1979 . there has been a lot written about the middle east, i know that . but i am trying to present a different approach. you will find a lot of poetry in literature, lyrics and music and cultural references in this book because i think it is important also to remember the richness of this region and to humanize this region which has been so devoid of context in the headlines so this is not a book about terrorism, it is not about isis, nor is it a book about sunnis or shiites and it is not even about dangerous violence fundamentalists posing for the west. this has been everything you've already read, everything you've seen on television and the headlines. with all due respect to my colleagues but even i sometimes because that's the nature of our business and i think that's why i wanted to take a step back and write this book. this is the story of the people and there are very many whose voices who have not necessarily been heard, who have been silenced but who are not silent because they continue to fight against the intellectual and cultural darkness that has engulfed us in the region. they are intellectuals, they arepoets, they are warriors, they are young progressives . they are arab, iranians and pakistani and. they are men and women and an equal number of women and men characters in the book because you don't hear enough from women in the region. even though they are very feisty, they are very strong, very powerful. you should see what is happening in iraq and lebanon with women really leading the protests against the corruption and mismanagement of our country.they are mostly devout. my characters are mostly devout.they pray, they talk, they go to mosques and church and can still believe in the separation of church and state so you have the secular muslims, it's not a knock on seymour. you can believe in the separation of mosque and state. these are progressive thinkers who present a very vibrant pluralistic society that are still there underneath that black wave. they've suffered immensely at the hands of those who wield power or the gun and who are relentlessly intolerant of other people . some paid with their life. many of them. some are in the pages of this book like my friend and colleague jamaal khashoggi, the saudi journalist who was murdered in the saudi consulate in istanbul in 2018. you will find his story in these pages starting from one of the first chapters in 19, right after 1979 when he returned to the us to saudi arabia and his days as a student in the us and you meet him again a few chapters later in the show are when he becomes a journalist covering the jihad in afghanistan. you meet him a few chapters after that again when he returns to saudi arabia and the narrative right after 9/11 and he's the editor of a newspaper who gets fired for having printed a very critical op-ed by one of his fellow writers criticizing the very austere puritanical creed of islam that is practiced in saudi arabia . generally you will meet him in the last chapter. i was writing a passage about jamal khashoggi's life and he disappeared and was later killed . it was a very macabre twist to the tale i was telling about the saudi iran rivalry, one i did not expect but one that i do think is deprived in that rivalry, the connections were not clear as to why this was part of the larger story but it really was. i've given you the conclusion , the concluding story and i've given you the ending with this last chapter but of course this is not a novel althoughi am being told it reads like a thriller . but we know how it ends to some extent. we know where we are today and it's not in a great place but we don't know how it ends because i do believe that there is a better future ahead of us. i believe that because i look at the people who are protesting in iraq and iran and lebanon today who are again paying with their lives and facing the bullets and continuing to take to the streets including the women, the women in lebanon stand as a defense line between the men behind them and the police in front of them because they believe that they will be attacked less quickly than the men standing behind them by the repression of the police. the women in tyree are square are absolutely incredible in how they are taking to the streets and mocking the politicians calls for the women to return home and their calls for segregation in public places between men and women. they mock them and say you want to take us back to which century? we are in 2020. i'm giving you a little bit of the ending. i've given you some of the conclusions but the tail actually begins in just a few years before 1979 on the shores of the mediterranean in lebanon, in my own country which plays many times an unfortunate role in developments in the region. today again as well. a fuse years before 1979 on the shores of my country there is a little-known episode that played a crucial role in setting the stage for theresolution . and i'd like to begin, to start the book with that because there's such an irony to the fact that this revolution that turned around from a persian kingdom to a theocracy, a revolution that was organized by secular leftists and islamist moderates as you are now reminded of, the irony is that that revolution, the revolution that brought fundamentalist ayatollahs to power owes its ultimate birth to beirut and paris, beirut, the paris of the middle east, the capital ofarab modernity and paris, the city of the enlightenment , the birth a place of the ageof enlightenment . it brought freedom in both of these countries, ayatollah khomeini may have died forgotten in a cold the sack in the holy city of nostra in iraq. i'm not going to tell you too much more about how the story unfolds, but what i loved about the research that i did for this book is that i learned a lot about the region. i found a lot of interesting gems hidden in the pages of our history. things that were surprising. the role that the palestinian leader at the time, yasser arafat played as well in helping the iranian revolution come to be. the fact that the muslim brotherhood, the sunni muslim brotherhood which was still the power to be reckoned with to some extent in some of these countries but was still in many ways a marginal political force , the muslim brotherhood looked to khomeini's success and thought perhaps we can do this here and even though they were sunni and he was shia, they went to visit him in tehran to see what he could offer them. those are all episodes that are forgotten. but i think it's important to go back in the past because it is important to look back at the different pieces of the puzzle to understand why we got towhere we are today , but as i mentioned, the characters like comay and arafat are not the keys that drive the narrative. it is the characters like jamaal, like the television anchor in pakistan who said defiantly, no two the future of pakistan, who are really at the heart of this book. their stories overlap in time , some of them know each other, some of them don't. they cross paths, perhaps not but they are all fighting for the same thing. they are fighting for a more progressive, a more tolerant society, fate for a more progressive, more tolerant future. their stories are contained within the other stories of historical seekers so what you end up with is a type of 1001 nights of middle eastern geopolitics. i'd like to say that the story is not over because as i mentioned, we are still in the throes of upheaval and as i was writing this book , i really went back and forth between true despair, but i eventually settled on hope because there is no other wayforward . what one of the reasons why, i grew up in a civil war. for 50 years we waited for it to end and you could perhaps say we were crazy to wait for so long but it's not thateasy to leave your homecountry and have to start from scratch somewhere else , unknown . it's hard. to leave your savings behind, your homes, your belongings so we stayed in hopes that things would one day get better and that is the hope that i see still today in the region when i look around me. i know that a lot of people in the united states have different eyes on the region but i urge you not to because progress takes time. we have a lot of factors at work against us. the arab uprisings are not over and they are not a failure. they are only beginning . the united states took some time to become what it is today. after the french revolution, democracy was not, the instant result the day after. it takes time so i settled on hope because i look around me in the region at young people who've never known, probably never heard much about the days before 1979 and ic how they want to escape the ghosts of the past. they want to build a different future. they want to escape the ghosts of 1979 and so while i have written this book for people in the west, the united states andelsewhere , to wonder what went wrong in the region , while i did write this book for those who remember times before 1979 and after, what happened, perhaps i wrote it especially for the younger generation who today asks their parents why didn't you do anything to stop what was unraveling? why did you let this happen? and i was amazed to see that same question posed in both saudi arabia and iran, two countries which had a different directory with very different societies but in both countries people were asking their parents why? why did you let 1979 happen to us like that? so i hope that not only will the book provide you with a different perspective, a much richer perspective on my region and our society but i hope that this book also provides clues for the younger generation to help them find a better path forward. one that is not determined by iran and saudi arabia. it is important to look back so that you can understand what happens because as the danish philosopher kierkegaard once said, it is perfectly true that life must be understood backwards but they forget the other proposition that it must be lived forwards and that is the only way to know. thank you very muchfor listening . [applause] >> thank you very much if i may, but before i begin we have our own scholar of iran here, mohammed to bark who's written a remarkable book on religious statecraft. if you haven't read it, you should read it because it's a reinterpretation of the iranian revolution and i remember one summer coming back from a summer vacation, mohammed was very excited. he said i found a diary in the library at harvard of people, leaders of the iranian revolution and i found written evidence by the leaders that they never intended to take over the embassy for the illogical reasons. they did it because they wanted to prove to the leftists that they were not in bed with the cia or us government and i remember his excitement in finding these diaries. very prominent people that you see in the headlines in iran and i noted that you used his book, your book because i kept looking at the footnotes, the endnotes and you were quoting his book. >> it was instrumental to understanding that period and understanding how not only were the saudi's and iranians trying to outdo each other but even withincountries and withingroupings, people were trying to outbid each other to come on top . it is really always about power . >> i raised this and i understand why you didn't do it but i wanted to raise this . the one country that was under the muslim brotherhood for 30 years is barely mentioned in your book and that's sudan. tourabi was educated at the sorbonne and a brilliant intellectual . he went to the london school of economics, i don't know what that did for the economy of sudan but he orchestrated the coup that brought bashir to power in the summer of 1989 and i remember i was working for usaid and we took out a bottle of champagne, after hours of course, not paid for by the federal government and we had a toast because we finally got rid of the democratically elected government which had stonewalled the relief effort in the middle of a famine for a quarter of million people and i should have remembered the statement of mister scowcroft, when you think it's a light at the end of the tunnel it's a train about to run you over and i learned that painfully because as time went on we realized tourabi was a very dangerous guy and 2 and a half million people died while bashir was president so why didn't you mention this because it fits into your narrative quicker. >> i'm trying to find the one line where i do mention it but i rifling through the book quickly, it's very interesting. ihave it . so there's a technical reason why. the technical reason is that when you write a book that is really driven bynarrative , it is really like writing fiction where you have to keep the reader engaged. and if you have too many side notes and detours, it's hard to keep your reader engaged and hanging on. that's why you couldn't put it down, right? so that's, i'll take that to the bank now. but it's true that i felt terrible that i couldn't write more about yemen. yemen is another one of those stains on our collective conscience as humanity that we could let happen. i felt terrible that i only had one chapter on syria, but there was an narrative that i was following, not an agenda, don't get me wrong. there wasn't a specific story i wanted to say by ignoring other parts of the story. but i was looking at the trendlines across the 40 years and trying to pinpoint a key moment either cultural or religious or social and pin them down in a specific country wherethey had happened , so the rise of islamic militancy and sunni shia killings, the first moment when that happens in modern times because remember i said sunnis and shiites have not been killing each other forever, in fact over the course of history they kill each other less than class catholics and protestants except these are the headlines of today but i'm more aware of when it happened was in modern times was in pakistan. it wasn't even in the middle east so pakistan is a chapter where i explore that. so in every chapter there's a specific point or turning point or issue that i explore what it is all in the narrative and i had this big corkboard on the wall where i had the seven countries that i explore and the four decades and i had posted with various events happening in each of these countries and at the various eras, just to detect the trendlines so i have to eliminate a lot and unfortunately, sudan was important, but it didn't fit the wider narrative. but i do mention it in the book and i'll tell you why, it's very important and is part of what we have forgotten. even in the region. florida was an egyptian intellectual, secular progressive thinker who was trying to fight back against this rise of intolerance that was beginning to sweep his country after 1979 and he had this fierce debate with muslim thinkers from the muslim brotherhood and other groups and he pushed back against them in a public debate once where he said you know, i would never accept that islam be insulted. i am a muslim, i will always be a muslim. you can insult communism, you can insult socialism, don't insult is wrong. this is a progressive thinker talking and then he said when you asked for an islamic state, he speaks to his opponents, which one are you suggestingexactly as a model ? this is the 90s. there were no successful examples. around, saudi arabia and sudan have been failures. so this is an islamic thinker intellectual in the 90s in egypt pushing back against more conservative thinkers by saying point to me one successful islamic state in our modern times and he goes on by saying why the sudden obsession with an islamic state? for 1300 years this is the first century after the prophet, one percent of people have advocated for a religious state while 99 percent have advocated for what we are calling for which is a civil state area i was fascinated, not long after and it's one of those key turning points where you see that this man who is so outspoken is mourned as a martyr of the nation when he is killed by radical extremists . 20 years later, the same thing happens in pakistan where a governor is declared an apple state for defending a christian woman. he is murdered in cold blood in broad daylight and no one dares anymore to come out and mourn him and declare him a martyr area at how fast things unraveled. >> one thing that's curious but interesting is that shia only make up 10 percent of islam. it's not 50-50 or even two thirds one third, it's 10 percent versus 90 percent . >> it's a bit more's a little bit more but not very much. 9010, i thought somewhere around there . and most of the shia, the only majority country shia is of course iran, 20 percent of pakistan is shia muslim as you point out. 35, okay. >> they're the largest shia population outside iraq. >> i'm sorry, in pakistan. >> some of them i brought up the aga khan who is the leader of a sect within shia islam and even the shia object and they say he's really a heretic and i brought it up to and a saudi diplomat and he started yelling at me, they're not muslims and on and on so even within each of these great traditions, there are some sex and of course the sufist, who i kind of like. i walked into a transport mosque and i thought it was an orthodox church and because the chanting of the men issimilar to the chanting in an orthodox church, it's very beautiful, very mystical . >> part of the heritage we've lost with the destruction of aleppo. >> exactly right so the question is in a country that makes up 10 or 15 percent , white is it posed as a formidable threat to saudi arabia and you talk to king abdul in jordan or the injectionsprivately , there is this huge threat from iran . it's a small percentage ofthe arab world and yet there's this beer out of the muslim world, why ? >> i think it goes to 2 factors in a nutshell. one is that after 1979 as i mentioned, ayatollah khomeini wanted to appeal to the wider muslim world. he didn't want to be just an iranian leader, he didn'twant to be a shia leader , he wanted to appeal to the wider muslim world and he did 2 things. one, he challenged the saudi's as custodians of the holy sites and is lamb, the iranians until recently still often called for a joint body to be custodians of the two holy sites and that drives the saudi's crazy, because that is where they derive a lot of their legitimacy, their power and a lot of their money as well. it's very lucrative to be a custodian of these two holy sites. at the time in right after 1979 or as a part of the preparation for the revolution of iran, ayatollah khomeini had cleverly identified the palestinian cause as one that would give him appeal beyond his borders, beyond the shia community so this is one of the episodes that begins the book where i speak for that alliance between khomeini and the palestinians where assad having been disappointed by what he lost in 1967 against the israelis, having felt betrayed by anwar sadat whose starting to make moves towards the american camp and then makes moves with the israelis, assad says who's going to help me now? so there are connections made with iranians in lebanon, young iranians, militants who are working towards the fall of the shop and they are trained, many of them are trained in the palestinian camps in lebanon and that's how that connection unfolds. but khomeini had identified the palestinian cause as a way to transcend iran and shia and take over the sunni cause par excellence to appeal to people across the region as the man who could come in where the arabs had failed and potentially as they put it, liberate jerusalem and regain lost arab lands. >> even though arafat was very secular and he's married to a christian. >> but it's about policy, it's about power. arafat had no problem greeting khomeini and he was the first leader, the first foreign leader to visit khomeini immediately after the revolution. he was the first foreign dignitary if you want to call him that who landed in tehran a week after the revolution and was greeted as a hero by people in iran and they chanted today tehran, tomorrow jerusalem. but 40 years later, what happened in the interim is that iran has worked very doggedly and strategically on maintaining its appeal to people outside iran and outside of the shock community, they discarded that and have always only paid lip service to the palestinian cause. they are friends with hamas, the radical palestinian militant group and they have an outfit called the coots force, part of the islamic revolutionary guard, it's named after a mosque in jerusalem. the arabic word for jerusalem is getting tangled up in my languages here . the kudz force is their parrot to paramilitary force headed until recently by kassem suleimani killed by a drone strike on the orders of president trump so the kudz force was meant to liberate jerusalem for palestinians and the muslim nation. but people like kassem suleimani saw the road from tehran through jerusalem went through baghdad and aleppo for untold devastation for people along the way so the reason why saudi arabia feared its expansionist policies is because it appealed to people because saudi arabia is not in the american while iran is in the anti-imperialist but i will say i think both of these countries at this point need each other. i think to some extent these counties need for benefit from seeing iran continue to be a negative player in the region because that means that saudi arabia cancontinue to be america's best friend in the region . >> you mention general soleimani's name, is not in your book because it happened after your book was published . >> is killing is not in the book. >> it's all over the book. >> the last page of the last chapter is a description of a video animation put together by some online saudi outfit that shows saudi forces liberating tehran from the regime of soleimani on his knees, haggard, giving himself up tothe saudi's. that's their fantasy. in reality you have to give it up to the americans . >> tell us, you wrote i thought one of the one or two most to leon panetta, not that you collaborated, you didn't say the same thing but the two most sought articles after soleimani's killing that i saw were one you wrote and i can't remember where i saw. it was in the atlantic where you describe what the us needs to do now and you were no advocate of soleimani but you said if you leave it in disarray it's going to be a problem. you need to follow up with an additional message. what is the effect of soleimani's death on the calculus because we know that al-sadr has switched sides, now he's living demonstrations to get the united states out of iraq . >> is also visited rihanna in hopes that the saudi's will back him. he broke with the wind. it's important to remember that soleimani did run a network of murderous camps from iraq to syria and so while course the focus here in the aftermath was is this going to be war between the us and iran, there was a sense in the region that in many ways it already is conflict and war and violence and there were people in syria who celebrated the demise and in iran the cause we have seen that the footage of people coming out in morning but there were also a lot of people who were very relieved that this man also was in a crackdown against peaceful protesters in the country in 2018 and just now 2019 that this man was finally gone. i think that what is happening in the region now is that all the different parties that are allied to iran thatare profiting . militias, closer allies or slightly more detached allies are jockeying for position, trying to use this moment to come on top and i think that's what al-sadr is doing. he's looking at how the wind is blowing and wondering how he can seize this moment to become the ultimate leader in the region. i will say that iran and their allies in the region are very good at turning moments of potential weakness and vulnerability into moments of strength . if you remember after 2003, the us invasion of iraq, tehran feared it could be next with the mask us and instead of cowering , they see the moment as well as they could, as much as they could and now many years later or until very recently, the accepted state of affairs was that the us had really lost iraq to iran. because they were ready from the get-go to try to turn this to their advantage and i think the same is happening now. they're trying to turn this moment after soleimani into a moment where they can solidify their gains because they will not stop at using violence to rob who is it whoever is in front of them and sees what they can except they are facing a lot of headwind because of these protests that you're seeing in iraq and lebanon and in iran against iran's stranglehold on the politics of this region. >> you mentioned the women's movement. i might add that the revolution, the uprising that led to the demise of president bashir was led by women. >> i call this image of the young sudanese women dressed in white with big gold earringsstanding on top of the car leading the men in chanting .these are the examples. >> and the foreign minister of sudan, i just had a meeting with her. it's unheard of in sunni policies but you mention women but is there some connection between young people in the middle east and the demands they're making for reform and change and opening up of the society and for democracy? because democracy is under attack around the world. >> democracy is under attack around the world. i try to avoid to some extent the word democracy when i talk about the region because it has become associated with specific us driven agendas and i think that people in the region want to set their own agenda and i think we have to trust that i trust that we know what we want and what we want is a more progressive, more diverse, more tolerant teacher democracy as a cookie-cutter template doesn't work exactly the same everywhere. you have variations in representation, and electoral systems, etc.. i think people across the region are connected in many ways. if you listen to the chanting in the streets of beirut, you will hear them say open. [ speaking arabic] one revolution but that does not die, they are very much talking about the protests taking place today that are challenging the corrupt leadership , the mismanagement and the sectarianism and i know that our focus so far in the conversation has been very much on iran, lebanon and iraq and she is an iran's role but it's important to remember that there have been uprisings also in sunni countries, this is not a denominational thing. this is not only an anti-iran thing, a lot of people are fed up with the influence that saudi arabia has had on religion and culture in the region and saudi's although today they have a crown prince who wants to appear as a reformer and does many things that feed into the agenda of reform, a lot of saudi's also live in fear of what their crown prince is doing and the repression that is falling upon their country . women activists fought for the right to drive. this is a fight that has been going on for decades. a lot of the young activists and older activists have found themselves in jail but before the king because the orders still come from the top where the decrees are signed at the top. they found themselves in jail for the right to drive just as that right was granted to women in the kingdom goes in the kingdom of saudi arabia, those rights are still granted by the king. it is up to his magnanimity to make this possible so i think yes, in saudi arabia young people are learning yearning for a different future. they are getting a lot of what they've missed over the last few decades with cinemas opening and museums opening and dj parties and jazz concerts and all of that but again, that is the western model of culture that the crown prince thinks he should bring to the kingdom and young people in the country are asking what about our traditional artsand culture and our traditional dancing ? >> .. because, i mean it is a very interesting theory, the united states seems to be pulling back even though the president ordered the killing of soleimani, many of the supporters are now saying it now killed and let's get out. the united states may not be seen as central in the middle east. or pivotal in the middle east any longer. and so maybe the saudis say the united states is not reliable so we are going to half to make that with iran. you see that happening? and if it does what happens to the complexity of the middle east question asked. >> we have had the taunt in the region before these two countries. the '90s, where a period in the middle east where we had fewer oars, we had no proxy wars were very few battles because they were actually on good terms. that made a huge difference. this saudis often rushed towards the tot or talks with iran and they feel endangered when they feel their position is in danger. and have been during the iran iraq war when the iranians were on the verge of what it felt like to the saudis as a possible pull out victory against saddam hussein. so the saudi's rushed to direct talks with the iranians, they exchanged visits, the foreign minister into iran, the iran foreign minister went to toronto if i'm not mistaken, and they offered huge compensations to iran, billions of dollars if they would just bring an end to the conflicts. they did not want to see an outright iranian victory. the iranians had wrecked requirements the saudi simply cannot abide by. that included this issue of joint custody over the two holy sites. that something the saudis could not handle. we have seen these moments of talks before. in the '90s the taunt was ushered in at the end of the iraq war and the iraq war when again the iranians are worried perhaps the iran he and were sort of defeated enron iraq war but now they're going to have to deal saddam. and so they tried to find a way that they could keep iran on their better side. to talk between the two countries is not impossible. however all the moments were used by iran to solidify its position. so while the diplomats were the revolutionary guards were thinking they are going deeper into areas of the region, opening cultural centers that posed as a front for revolutionary guard activities. he acted very clearly that he will not be fooled again. those are his words. he will not be fooled by the smiles of iranians, diplomats anymore. does he want and all that work? no. i think he wants the status quo to some extent. he does not want iran to gain too much more, he wants to curb and contain. but he also worries about president trump not being enough of a solid illini that he is not an illini who will actually go to bat for the saudis. there two strategic interests in america and he will not necessarily come to the defense of its threatened by iran. the saudis feel they need to hedge their bets a little bit and they have been in direct talks between the saudis and the iranians of the last few months. but i don't see peace between them. i think by now it is going to require real change in behavior of the authorities in iran. and i don't see that happening either. >> one other big massive change, i sought in an article in the "washington post" i can't number what year it was but five or six years ago one of the prince's in the royal family in saudi arabia said israel now has the same interest that we have. you never hear that in the royal family saying that so israel now is not the threat it was before. israel always saw egypt since the signing of the peace accordance, but to have other arab states sing sunni states seeing israel as a counterbalance to iran and therefore consistent with their own interest. that is a big change. >> that is a big change, it explains why arab countries did not forcefully reject president trump's peace plan. even though they made they may disagree with that, they put out a sharp statements at the arab league, but the arab league does not serve much purpose. in the statement was just lipservice to the palestinian cause because countries like saudi arabia at once to stay on president trump's good side. because they want this to be about the focus to be about countering iran. even if they don't feel president trump will necessarily come to their immediate dissent, if they are threatened by iran or attacked by iran they still feel this is the camp that will serve them best. therefore they are willing to be silent on such an issue as long as israel is also doing some of the countering of iran jobs in the region. just today i think i saw the headline that the eye iranians, and the americans, and the israelis sort of agreed that one will take on iran and syria and one will take on iran and iraq. that will serve those interest perfectly fine. >> you have a lot of stories you did not put in the book. >> yes, i do it for another book. there are so many. >> will there be a sequel to this book? so i don't know if it will be a perfect sequel, maybe in 40 years i can write what happened after this book. but before that, i hope to write more before that. their little gems i found in the research that i would like to explore, i don't know which one will have state power over the course of a book. it's always a process and dig into the archives to see where you have the most information that you can work with do i maybe want to use some of this to write a novel set in the region? i'm not sure. there's one the incident that i liked it's about the safari club. the safari club was the name of an intelligence corporation -- and intelligence a group that brought together the saudis, the iranians, this saudis, the iranians, the french, the americans if i'm not mistaken. and possibly the british. they met in kenya at the safari club. and it was a grouping of intelligence officers from these countries where the height of the cold war they plotted and debated coups in various countries where they were worried about communism. they always wondered about what more do we know about this? i have not found any books about it. >> i don't think there are many books written about it. [laughter] but i know it existed. it existed, there are lots of interesting aspects to it. and i sort of think it would be good to write an article about it and then write a novel based on that. >> with president bush in sudan i met with the intelligence chiefs in egypt, several times, ethiopia, kenya, uganda and libya. and libya was the most interesting one because i meant for hours with him. he left very quickly when the government was going down the tubes. he was very powerful, he had a map, that's why i was appointed to the dark for peace agreement, there were 70 agents of the intelligence service in libya, indoor forgiving money and weapons out to the rebels because they did not like him. and i said wait a second, you were handing out weapons? and he mentioned all the leaders and i realize the oversight we had made and the american dust promise he did not realize how central libya was to what was going on. so the best conversations i had with the intelligence. when i wrote my history sudan i could not mentioned in the notes, where the information came from. but it was very useful to understand the complexity of the region. they keep shifting, they should keep shifting. so i think it's a spy novel set in the 70s it's very interesting. >> it would be a bestseller it would be a movie "after words". [laughter] so what is a moderating influence there are and iran, let's put some time aside for a while now, certainly the regime is using this to reunite the population behind them and the bureaucracy. but that is not going to last forever. >> i think it already ended. >> i think that was a very brief moment of unity i have seen some iran and dispute the numbers of people who participated in the funeral. of qassem soleimani and the large crowds. i am not an expert at video footage and things like that, but some people have disputed the numbers. i also think in moments like that, people come out out of fear for what could happen to their country no matter what they think of the regime. out of fear that they can be punished if they don't show up. it's still a country that's run in an autocratic way. so shops were closed, you have to shut. i do not doubt that out of a sense of nationalism people also mourn him, of course. i am not an iranian expert, i would like to make that clear. i have not spent enough time there. but i think when you look at what is happening in iran today and particularly what happened after the downing of the ukrainian plane, when 117 people died, full of young promising eye iranians, canadians, and very hyphenated nationalities. the authorities very clearly the guards very clearly lied over the course of several days as to the fact they were responsible. lies or hid the reality, the truth from the president. the outrage that people expressed on the streets in the aftermath of the admission that this had been iran's fault. tells you that how brittle things are. i am not one to protect the fault of the regime at all. i also think that it would be very chaotic. but i do think that something is coming undone. you never know what speed accelerates. and you never know to what extent the regime is willing to go to hold onto power. but whether it is the young people protesting, if it's the women protesting against the mandatory veil on a daily basis and or if it's a war of attrition against the regime's control over society, whether it's the labor movements that are organizing the country, i do think the challenges aren't mounting. if not to the regime, then at least to the regime's way of doing things. so these are the moderating influences in society. >> i had a student from afghanistan tell me, and i looked it up he was right, that in the 1960s, there were afghan women in cabo wearing miniskirts. that the perception that afghanistan was a medieval society for thousand years, and they have not made any progress and there is no more identity isn't merely nonsense. this is in the city not in the rural area. >> i've seen this picture and i wrote an article about sids as well to point out when you look at some of these pictures, particularly in a country like afghanistan, what you are looking at is the westernized elites, the minority. when you see pictures like that in a country that is larger and was at the time more modernized, like egypt, then women in skirts was not westernized minority elites, but an expression of choices made by more than a minority. what i like to make clear, is a women in the middle east once, it's not the right to wear a miniskirt and maybe they don't want to wear a miniskirt, what they want is a right to choose. whether they want to wear this curtain out. and that is what we have lost, the freedom to choose. which is what defines our society before. even iran today the women who are protesting against the mandatory veils, some of them where it's by choice. they want their fellow i iranian women to have the choice to wear it or not. and that is what people are protesting against. but when it comes to afghanistan particular they say that afghanistan is i will paraphrase it is a broken country can every put together, we take issue with statements like that. i think it is too easy to dismiss a whole country like that, whether it is iran or iraq. similar statements were made at the time. and it ties into that statement of always kill each other to been that way for millennia. it's a little bit of a copout. it is a way of saying we can't do anything about it, we are not even going to try. that's not to say we are calling for u.s. intervention or invasion to fix is not the solution either. but it's simply too easy to dismiss us as people who can't get their act together. we are facing tremendous odds. some of those odds include u.s. backing for dictators. in egypt, and other countries of the region or dictators who use preconceived ideas about the region and how it is a backwards place to say it's either meet the modernizing the modern looking man in the suit, or the fundamentalist crazies. that is not the binary choice that is available to us in the region. i think we need to have more faith in us and in the region. >> we are past or do in terms of time we are going to have this talk together. so i would like to thank you for being with us. we think of this as the center of the united states, but the rest of the country does not necessarily see it this way. we appreciate you coming all the way to coming from washington or beirut, thank you. >> thank you so much for having me as a pleasure to be here. [applause] here is a look at some books being published this week. former charlottesville virginia mayor offers his account of the unite the right rally and cry havoc. in capital and ideology, french economist weighs in on how to correct to wealth and equality. and in in our prime, university of michigan communication and media professor susan douglas, argues against the negative portrayals of older women. also being published this week, investigative journalist reports on the pharmaceutical industry with pharma, greed, lies, and the poisoning of america. in the smart phone society, editor nickel ash offer explores how new technologies have empowered community organizing. "new york times" beirut bureau chief ben hubbard examines the rise of saudi arabia crown prince jim prince in m bs. and in pursuit of disobedient women, "new york times" reporter reflects on her time as the papers west africa bro trey. look for these titles in bookstores this coming