CANCELED - Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry

Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry that Unraveled Culture, Religion and Collective Memory in the Middle East

Kim Ghattas's most recent book Black Wave tells the story of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a conflict born from the 1979 Iranian revolution. Ghattas, a native of the region, explores the distortion and deployment of religion in a competition that went beyond geopolitics, where each side proceeded to strategically feed intolerance, suppress cultural expression and encourage sectarian violence from Egypt to Pakistan. 

Kim Ghattas is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and writer who covered the Middle East for twenty years for the BBC and the Financial Times. She has also reported on the U.S State Department and American politics. She has been published in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy and is currently a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Her first book, The Secretary, was a New York Times bestseller. Born and raised in Lebanon, she now lives in Beirut and Washington, D.C.

Talk will be moderated by Brett McGurk, Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at FSI.