Religious fervor was truly in the air in 1979. Presumably we don’t need to go into much detail about that year’s revolution in Iran, which brought us Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamic Republic. But across the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia had its own run in with Islamist extremism in 1979, and while it didn’t topple the Saudi monarchy—boy, we all really dodged a bullet there—it did change Saudi Arabia for better (not really) or worse (mostly this).
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
This is great. Prince Turki came to speak to my grad school class at Georgetown, dressed in a linen suit and fedora. He called ISIS “Iranian style terrorism” and said “Arab Socialism” was the disease that infects the Middle East. Good times.