Wave saudi arabia, iran and the fortyyear rivalry that unleashed collective memory in the middle east. I have to say i spent the weekend reading it. I didnt quite get through but i couldnt put it down it was so interesting. If you havent read it after this evening you can get the book if you havent already but i would urge you to read it to be at its fascinating and very wellwritten and very well researched. There was a narrative thats very troubling. I would like to announce that our event with ambassador dennis ross is another expert in the middle east is unable to come to college station. Hcollege station. He had a family emergency and so kim ghattas is an awardwinning journalist and writer covered the middle east for 20 years for bbc and the financial times. She reported from iraq, saudi arabia, syria, and covered the war between israel and hezbollah earning an emmy for International News coverage. On the state department and on american politics regularly traveling with secretaries of state as well as condoleezza rice, Hillary Clinton and john kerry. Shes been published in the atlantic, the washington post, foreignpolicy an and as a non resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in. Her first book the secretary was a New York Times bestseller. She regularly continues to speak on American Television and radio and was born and raised in lebanon but now lives between beirut and washington, d. C. If you have questions, please write them on the cards, the ambassadors that have the blue blazers on dave walked up and down the aisle that they will continue to do that and then once you write the questions, pass them to the idle and they will pick those up and ge give m to me and i will then go through them after she speaks. The two of us will sit up here and i will ask some questions and then take your questions from the cards. Please join me in welcoming kim ghattas to the stage. [applause] good evening, everybody. It is a delight to be here this evening. Thank you for the very generouss introduction and for hosting me here at the Annenberg Conference Center into the scowcroft is and the bush school for hosting me. I see in the front row my good friend thank you very much for helping to make this happen. I am delighted to be back in texas. I havent been here in a long time. I must complain about the weather but this gives me a good excuse to return. I am here to speak to you about my recent book just out a few weeks ago. As any book, it is the result of a journey. Every writing endeavor is a journey im sure many of you have written books and you know that it can be very isolating and very intellectual and lonely experience. Its a combination of my experience as a child of war in beirut i grew up during the civil war during the 80s and i wanted to write a story that wasnt your typical story about the region. A lot has been written about the middle east and im sure many of you have read about the region and are probably experts sitting here this evening. I had questions i did not find the answers to in the classic books that are out there and i wanted to ask the questions about the region that are often asked what went wrong and what happened and why is it the way it is but i wanted to come at this from a different perspective its not enough to explain how we got to where we are and i also think that it does justice to the people of the region who have tried very hard to find a different path forward. In my talks and readings i try to make it accessible and 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 into different perspective as to why the region is the way it is today. What drove me to write this book is the fact i found there wasnt much that address to the core of the problem and it took me a while to even put my finger on what it was or what was the point at which things had changed but i want to give you the conclusion and i know that it is important because i think what i try to do with my writing and Research Goes against some of the preconceived ideas that people have about the middle east because of the kneejerk coverage and the headlines and the intensity of the news that comes at us from the middle east so i want to start by telling you some of the things you know about the middle east are wrong and i hope that you will allow me to start on that. I want to point out three things. I want to start by saying iran and saudi arabia, despite the headlines we see today at the last feand thelast few decades o indicate its always been like that, saudi arabia and iran have not always been rivals. They have not always been enemies and they forget that. It was a time that iran and saudi arabia were to counter communism in the region. They were friendly competitors in that endeavor. They called each other with titles and they were not necessarily the closest of friends but they were friendly and cooperative in a lot of ways so that is an assumption that its always been like that between iran and saudi arabia, and it wasnt. Its always going to be like that and theyve always kill each other. Those are the two that simplify. Some people thought that his error should be the closest relatives and some people thought that it should be his closest confidant and that eventually became the sunnis but even the first few decades following, those identities were not as clearly defined. It evolved over time and so that is tha another preconceived ides and misconceptions they will havbothhave about the region evn president obama said he had been killing each other for women wanting millennia the final misconception people have particularly because of the constant droning on at the headlines that are focused on tyrants and dictators is that the region has always been in the throes of finance and intolerant, but total intolerance and i would like to tell you that it hasnt always been like that. So, what happened i know that is the classic question that Bernard Lewis once asked if i would like to give you a very different approach because the question what happened to us does haunt us in the arab and muslim world. We do repeated like a mantra from my own country of lebanon all the way to pakistan from saudi arabia to syria. For the past it is really a different country. Its one that isn isnt mightir thamired in thehorrors of sectae vibrant place without the crushing. Now the past wasnt perfect but they were contained in tiny manned space into the future didnt hold much promise. The question perhaps today in the region doesnt necessarily occur to those that are too young to remember when vibrant parliament societies were the norm, those are the ones whose parents didnt tell them. They have very different connotations these days and debating in beirut. They would surprise those in the west but assume it has always been as it is that is not what drove me. I wasnt idealizing the past but i wanted to understand. It unraveled very slowly at first without people noticing in the first decade or 15 years. There are many turning points in any country or any regions in history that explain. Its the end of the Ottoman Empire and fall of the calipha caliphate. The u. S. Innovation is the moment when everything became worse that had already been like that. Sunnis and shiites in iran at each others throat. Over the last two decades or so its always been like that. Its for the inevitable and eternal it is completely correct and the eternal part of these explanations greatly if you a complete understanding of why we are where we are today. As i dug deeper and deeper to find the answer of what happened, i kept coming back to the one year, 1979. A lot of you will remember that year as the year of the hostage crisis. It was of course also the year of the iran resolution, the hostage crisis was in november. At the same time as the hostage crisis in tehran, there was another type of hostage crisis in saudi arabia that led to the holy mosque for two weeks and later that year in november or december on Christmas Eve h thee was the soviet invasion of afghanistan. Those events, and i focus on the resolution because the crisis as the result of god but the resolution and the siege of the holy mosque and the invasion of afghanistan were seemingly independent of one another but they became completely intertwined in the combination of all three. First of all, from this confluence of events as i mentioned there was no immediate reason why they should have become enemies. Except for the fact they were leaders of the muslim world and custodians of the sites of mec mecca. In tehran in 1979 also had grand ambitions beyond just iran and the community in his own country and beyond. So you have two countries, saudi arabia, one shia suddenly vying for leadership of the muslim world and that is not only the change of the politics in the region started slow growth of sectarian language as both countries yielded those identities and their efforts to dominate the region and rally the people to their side and in that battle, they both distort and exclude religion and the pursuit any leader would understand and that is raw power, but that is the constant from 1979 to this day. I believe nothing has changed as deeply and fundamentally as the events of 1979 and the ways that started after those events. Other pivotal moments and or start wars. They began a process that transformed the society. I think its important to understand when they ripple across not just years but several decades over time peoples memories of what came before. But it didnt begin as an effort to bring theocracy to the country. They rode that wave and came out on top. The story that i tell the rivalry went beyond to the politics and the efforts to outbid each other in this holier than thou effort to show the leader of the muslim world they thought the islamic legitimacy through the religious and cultural domination. But the result may not in saudi arabia in a more subtle way that countries that extended all the way from egypt to pakistan and beyond. I couldnt include everything is so mentioned and its hard to keep the negative on track if it includes too many details and countries and places. I know that you will see pakistan isnt part of the geography, but what i wanted to really do is show how the dots are connected across countries and across even continents, because theres a tendency to look at the middle east is not only the middle east and a tendency to look at it them as separate but they are very intertwined as well. And of course everyone remembers or should or that it was the u. S. Backed as well and its central to the narrative to the book as i look at how the revolution was pulled out again. To look at how it rippled across the region and how the world reacted and interacted with it. They were not all negative and a lot of people admired for some people admired how they managed to rise on top and bring the theocracy to power the fact that i pointed out in 1979 as a crucial turning point was i found everywhere i asked the question i found the reactions were very validating to my thesis. I was met with a flood of emotions. Tell me about 1979 and out came all the memories and emotions and everything that they kept bottled up this was a question that no one had asked them before because when you are living in such an upheaval to come to terms or analyze what youre going through so some people thought yes, 1979. 1979. What they tell you about 1979 and held wrecked my career or marriage or her childrens education ochildrens educatione at this time and how i have to lose my job after 1979 and why. Theres the beginning of the understanding in the region about what that fear has done to us. It felt a little bit like i was conducting actual therapy with peoples studies and poured their hearts out to me. I am a journalist, not a historian or academic but this is more than a recorded narrative with my interviews of people in these countries. They dug deep into the archives of my research and looked at old footage and read articles, academic articles written at a time because it is interesting to see the prospect of change when you look back at the archives after the iran revolution or the siege in mecca 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 of printed papers but told the story because i thought it was important to be able to see in front of me the pictures, the headlines. Imagine finding a headline of some february 1979 where they welcome the iranian revolution because the Port Authority key was their friend and they were initially concerned about the possibility that there would be a communist takeover of iran because those were veterans at the time because it was not a dominant story and when they saw that he was rising to the top and somebody they could kind of relate to and they welcome that and said we hope that we can cooperate on the basis of the common religion and understanding of how it should be applied to the society. When you put it all together you put together a puzzle of no event, forgotten event and when you have the puzzle in front of you it gives you a very different understanding, a different reading of the last four decades of history and expands seven countries as i hai mentioned i went from egypt to pakistan, saudi arabia and lebanon and it shatters some of those truths that we have in the region because even we forget they havent always been killing each other. I grew up in the civil war in lebanon and they were never really used. It wasnt that kind of conflict but it is accepted in our collective memory that we forget what it was like before. And that rivalry evolved and mutated over time with consequences that no one could have foreseen in 1979. Now there has been a lot written i know that, but i am trying to present a different approach you will find a love of poetry and literature and cultural references because its important to remember and humanize the region that has been devoid of context in the headlines so thi this isnt a bk about terrorism, it isnt a book about al qaeda or isis. It is and even about the dangers that the fundamentalists pose for the west. Its about everything that you have already read and seen on television. With all due respect to my colleagues even i sometimes because that is just the nature of our business and why i wanted to take a step back and write this book. This is the story of the people and they are very many whose basis hasnt necessarily been heard, who have been silenced but are not silent because they continue to fight against the intellectual and cultural darkness in the region. They are intellectuals, poets, lawyers, iranians and pakistan pakistanis, they are men and women, they have an equal number of women and characters in the book because you do not hear enough from women in the region. For the corruption and mismanagement of the countries. They are mostly devout. They pray, they go to the mosques just like you did go to church and you believe in the separation of church and state. It isnt an oxymoron. You cant believe in the separation of mosques. These are progressive thinkers that represent the very vibrant pluralistic societies that are still there underneath the black wave. Theyve suffered immensely at the hands of those that wield power or a gun or are relentlessly intolerant of other people. Some paid with their life, many of them. Some are in the pages of this book as my colleague, the saudi journalist was murdered in the consulate. You will find stories in the ane pages starting from one of the first chapters break after 1979 when he returned from his days as a student and then again a few chapters later when he becomes a journalist covering afghanistan. He is the editor of a newspaper that gets fired for having printed very critical criticizing the puritanical creed of islam that is practiced in saudi arabia. Fortunately you will meet him in the last chapter. The connections were not immediately clear as why this was part of the larger story that it really was. I have given you the conclusion, the concluding and the ending with the last chapter, of course this is not a novel although im being told it reads like a thriller. But we know how we didnt to some extent, we know where we are today and its not a great place, but we do not know how it ends because i do believe there is a Better Future ahead of us, i believe that because they look at the people who are protesting in iraq and iran and lebanon today who are paying with their lives and facing the bullets and continuing to take to the streets including the women and lebanon stand as a defense line between them and to behind them in the place in front of them because they believe they will be attacked less quickly than the man standing behind them by the repression of the police, the women in the square are absolutely incredible and how theyre taking to the streets and mocking the politician calls for the women to return home and their calls for segregation and Public Places between men and women, they mock them and say you want to take us back to which century, we are in 2020. Now, im giving you a little bit of the ending and similar conclusion but the tail actually begins just a few years before 1979 on the shores of the mediterranean and lebanon, my own country which plays many times and on fortunate role in development in the region antedate as well. In a few years before 1979 on the shores of my country there was an episode that played a crucial role in setting the stage for the resolution and i would like to start the book without because there is such an irony to the fact that this revolution that turned around from a persian kingdom to a bureaucracy a revolution that was feared and organized by sekulow leftist and modernism as now youre reminded of. , the irony is that that revolution, the revolution that brought this fundamentalist to power to two cities of sin, beirut in paris. Beirut, the paris, the capital and paris, the city of the enlightenment, the birthplace of the enlightenment. It is not for freedoms of both of these countries he may have died forgotten in a culdesac in the city in iraq. I am not going to tell you too much more about how the story unfolds but what i loved about the research that i did for the book, i learned a lot about the region, i found a lot of interesting gyms headed in the pages of her history, things that were surprising, the role that the Palestinian Leader at the time played as well. In helping the iranian resolution come to be. The fact that the muslim butter under brotherhood which was still a power to be reckoned with us to some extent and some of these countries but was still in many ways a marginal Political Force in the muslim od