On Monday, February 10, journalist and writer Kim Ghattas will deliver a talk on her recent book, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry that Unraveled Culture, Religion and Collective Memory in the Middle East, at Texas A&M University’s West Campus.
The book 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.
The lecture, hosted by the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, will begin at 6:00 p.m. in Hagler Auditorium at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center. Registration to attend this free public event can be found at bush.tamu.edu/events. Reservations are strongly recommended by Monday, February 10.
Ghattas is an Emmy-Award-winning journalist and writer who covered the Middle East for twenty years for the BBC and the Financial Times and also reported on the U.S State Department and American politics. She is currently a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Her first book, The Secretary, was a New York Times bestseller.
