In retrospect, the Saudi ruling bargain was radically changed by the first Gulf War of 1990–91. A country with no mass conscription had emerged unscathed from a potentially ruinous conflict. A vast American-led military coalition had rescued Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein’s bid for mastery over the Persian Gulf, but the rescue and its terms, and the American military role that gave Arabia its lifeline, were to trigger a political crisis and a consuming national debate of deadly seriousness. By the objective measure of things, the custodians of the realm had been vindicated. It was in this vein that the Saudi monarch spoke of the Gulf War and of his decision to invite Western forces: “The Lord of glory and grandeur helped us with soldiers from all parts of the world. Many said that the presence of foreign forces was wrong. But I say it was a case of extreme necessity.” There was no way, though, of staying the wrath of a neo-Wahhabi fringe inspired by that Arabian dread of the pollution of the foreign, infidel world. That dread had always lain dormant in the land, and it was to rear its head in the soul-searching and disputations triggered by this crisis.
Decreed by the rulers, given religious cover by the highest clerical authorities of the land, the American military presence was, for many Saudis, the intrusion into their midst of a power they viewed with a good measure of suspicion and cultural hostility. There were many in the intellectual and professional class who were sure that the Americans had come to stay, that the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait had given the distant power the excuse it needed to impose its dominion in the Arabian Peninsula. There were educated men and women, touched by doctrines and ideas of Arab nationalism, who believed that the entire affair—the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait and the American response to it—bore the mark of a conspiracy rigged by the Americans.
Shortly before the onset of the military campaign against Iraq, forty-three of the kingdom’s best and brightest—journalists, academics, technocrats, a former minister of information—had written to their monarch in that vein. “The Saudi people,” they said:
want the foreign armadas to depart from the Gulf as soon as the conflict is settled…. We hope, Your Majesty, that we can confide in you our fears and the fears of our people that these navies remind us of those navies that colonized the Arabian Gulf under the pretext of protecting it, navies that enjoyed their powers here for tens of years. We fear that these forces might end up with permanent bases in our region and that we may become pawns in their hands…. The Saudi citizens believed that the strength of the Kingdom in men and modern equipment was on par with the best of this region, for we had devoted hundreds of billions of dollars to our armed forces. They were surprised before the rest of the world that we were incapable of checking the tyrannical Iraqi regime on our own. Your Majesty … we ask for mass military conscription for all Saudis, men and women. We feel great sorrow and bitterness that we stood in such weakness before the Iraqi regime, a regime with a smaller national income than ours, and a population base that is not much larger than ours.
The fault line between the secularists of this land and those who wanted no “infidel” presence in their midst was exposed. On November 6, 1990, barely three months after Saddam Hussein had overrun Kuwait, some forty educated and professional women launched their own challenge to the kingdom’s practices. They picked an issue at once symbolic of the country’s restrictive ways and one sure to trigger the wrath of the diehards—the ban on women driving. The women came together in front of a Riyadh supermarket, dismissed their drivers, and drove in a convoy of cars before the police detained them. The liberal elements in the country hailed the women’s courage, but the reactionaries had the upper hand: they saw in the deed a great challenge to the country’s moral code, hounded the women and their husbands, and demanded their dismissal from professional positions they held.
Undeniably, the American presence had emboldened these brave women. The country was overflowing with foreign reporters; there were five hundred thousand foreign (mostly American) soldiers deployed in the Peninsula. And though on the fringe of a huge land mass, these foreign visitors had given the country a jolt. There were women soldiers in the American deployment defending this country. The Saudi women mounting a challenge to that most peculiar of prohibitions had the confidence that their deed would play out under the gaze of foreigners whose judgment mattered to the custodians of political power. The rulers stepped into the fight and imposed a temporary truce between the two warring sides. They withdrew the passports of the women who had staged the protests; they signaled their displeasure with the new assertiveness and hoped that the storm would blow over.
Reluctant as it had been to challenge the customs of its people, the state still could not do right by the religious radicals. Young men from Saudi Arabia who had gone to Afghanistan to fight for the faith had returned home eager to redeem and purify their land. There are no reliable estimates as to the number of Saudis who had participated in the jihad in Afghanistan. The low estimates are in the range of five thousand to ten thousand; other reports speak of thirty thousand. They had done God’s work, they believed, but they had returned to the routine of their homeland and to public indifference. Rulers and ulama alike were branded as kuffar (apostates) by these extremists. The foreigner had “defiled” the sacred earth of Arabia, and the foreigner had to go. There was unforgiving zeal in the diehards’ vision: the Shi’a minority in the Eastern Province would be decimated and the groups of Saudi “liberals” and secularists formed on the campuses of Texas and California would be swept aside in a campaign of zeal and frenzy. Traffic with the infidels would be brought to an end and those dreaded satellite dishes bringing the cultural pollution of the West would be taken down. For this to come to pass, though, the roots of the American presence had to be extirpated and the Americans themselves driven out of the country.
The modern Saudi state was no stranger to religious upheaval. But the new religious unrest had deep roots in the society; its leaders were an educated and resourceful lot. These were not drifters and cultists who rose to challenge the monarchy and the official religious class; they were scientists and professors and religious scholars and lay preachers. They were the kind of men who had risen elsewhere in the Muslim world to organize the forces of political Islam in the 1980s. They were sly in the way they phrased their concerns; they knew the West and its sensibilities. They had a feel for the audience they addressed; they spoke of democracy and civil liberties before Western audiences and offered more incendiary material for their followers at home.
No surprise, the challenge was to be mounted not by the timid Shi’a of the Eastern Province, but by zealots from within Najd itself, the heartland of the Saudi realm. Other provinces of the country, to be sure, partook of this unrest, but the “hardness” of this new era was Najdi to the core. Najd was coming into its own. Religious piety would empower the new Najdi drive. And this agitation rested on a sense of material deprivation. A decade of deficits lay behind the country; an expensive war had been fought; in current dollars the per-capita income had declined from $28,000 a year in the early 1980s to $8,000 a generation later; a state that had a $90 billion budget to allocate in 1981 had at its disposal less than $40 billion in 1994, and a paltry $30 billion in oil revenues in 1998. A rude awakening lay in store for a generation of younger Saudis.
“We love Najd and we are proud to belong to it,” a Najdi who had settled in the Eastern Province says to his son in Adama, a justly celebrated novel by the Saudi academic and liberal commentator Turki al-Hamad, published in 2003. “But we wouldn’t like to live there. Najd has many children, but it doesn’t feed them.” This was a memory of Najd and its age-old reality. Political power and religious agitation, the oil wealth claimed by Najd and its merchants and its clerics and its notables by right of political (and religious) primacy over the Hijazis and the people of the Eastern Province, had remade the Peninsula. The Eastern Province had the oil and the access to the waters of the Persian Gulf, Hijaz had Jeddah and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and the window onto the Red Sea; Najd had its zeal and the conquering ethos that justified its place in the sprawling kingdom. The Sauds’ base was in Najd, and the heartland of their dominion had a fierce sense of entitlement that the other communities could not match.
A new political tool was to make its appearance in the land—the petition to the rulers, the “memorandum of advice” chronicling the nation’s woes, challenging the dynasty’s monopoly on political power. The first petition had been that “liberal” manifesto urging the modernization of the political system. But the floodgates had been thrown wide open; the religious diehards would soon take to this new form with a vengeance. Hitherto, the ethos of Arabia had no place for collective petitions. In its lore and in its narrative of itself, Arabian society exalted the ability of the individual to have his say in the presence of authority with no need for mediation. In an ideal drawn from simpler times, a man with grievances would turn up in the majlis (the council, the court of a prince), put forth his claim, say his “word of truth” without fear or equivocation. The society had outgrown the intimacy of its past; its population had grown, and so had the distance between ruler and ruled. Arabia had become thoroughly urbanized; Riyadh, fifty years earlier a place of no consequence, had a population of two million by 1990. The country may have exalted the tribe, but it had been de-tribalized. The petition was a product of this new urban culture.
A landmark petition, the “memorandum of advice,” turned up in September 1992. This time, 107 religious scholars and prayer leaders attached their names to it. They addressed it to the grand mufti of the kingdom, Shaykh Abdulaziz ibn Baz, the most senior figure of the religious establishment. Ibn Baz, then in his early eighties, was a traditionalist on social mores who had held the line against modernist changes, and a quietist on political matters, committed to upholding the authority of the rulers. This presented some difficulty for the Islamists. It was hard to issue a forthright denunciation of the man. He was addressed as a revered “father” even as the dissidents broke from the authority of the conservative jurists. No one was fooled: the battle had been joined. Where the custom and the practice of the polity had assigned a privileged (but hemmed in) space for the ulama, this new petition came close to asserting a right to political power. In a break with that old division of labor between prince and preacher, the scholars now claimed that they should be able to “oversee and participate” in the work of the ministries and embassies; they called for a powerful army of “half a million men, fired up by the spirit of jihad who would fight the Jews and help the Muslims.” The political order was restrictive enough in cultural matters, but the dissidents wanted more and called for censorship of all magazines and television programs that disseminated “secular ideas.”
These petitioners held the state up to its own ideals; they called on it to enforce “what it had decreed for itself.” In this land which professed the faith, the signatories saw “blatant violations” of God’s law: television programs which promoted “social deviance and sexual enticement,” video stores which sold “thousands, nay tens of thousands of films with explicit sexual scenes which awaken and stir up sinful passions.” This was “Islam’s land and its lodestar,” yet its cultural life was littered with deviations from the faith.
In the traditional division of labor, the House of Saud had held a virtual monopoly on foreign affairs. These people of the “Islamic sciences” now looked on the foreign practices and alliances of the state with a jaundiced eye. There were practices and policies of the state, traffic with outsiders, which ran afoul of the strictures of Islam. There was the country’s alliance with the Syrian despot, Hafez al-Assad. The petitioners did not have to name him, but the reference to him was unmistakable. Here was a secular ruler, from an esoteric sect, the Alawites, with dominion over an Islamic land he had broken and tormented. This was an affront to these signatories: it was “improper” for the kingdom, perhaps “impermissible” for it, to “sustain a tyrant in his tyranny over an Islamic land, build privileged and close relations with him in the fields of economy, politics, and security even though it was known that he was against God and His Prophet and against the believers.” He was not the only tyrant that the kingdom indulged: there were others nearby with whom normal traffic was carried out even though it was known that they “war against Islam and oppress the believers.” In the foreign world, this kingdom had no choice: it had to adhere to Islam and seek to “render it victorious.” There may have been a measure of decorum in the petition, but the very “ruling bargain” of the realm was being contested.
Whether he wanted it or not, Ibn Baz was at the center of things: the dissidents were turning to him in the name of tradition and purity and all those militant ideas that were innate to the Wahhabi creed. But the rulers, and the peace of the land, had their call on him and it was with the order that he would side. The old mufti assembled his council of establishment jurists and issued a stern denunciation of the memorandum of advice on September 17, 1992. He was keen to distance himself from the memorandum. It was not true, the senior jurists said, that Ibn Baz had approved the petition or associated himself with it. Those who prepared the memorandum had only worked to “promote dissension, implant spite, concoct defects, or exaggerate them.” The “good deeds” of the state had been overlooked and the petition had become a “devious tool for malicious enemies.” It was permissible, and within the bounds, to render advice to the rulers. But such advice had its rules: it had to be “sincere” and it had to “emanate from a desire to secure unity and keep away the factions that sow dissension. When condemning this memorandum, we don’t claim perfection. We pray to God to enable our rulers to do what pleases Him and to do what is proper and right for the people and the country. We also pray to God to enable all the Muslim rulers and all the people of Islam to do all that is good.”
For Ibn Baz and the senior jurists, this had not been an easy verdict to issue. Of a group of seventeen of the country’s highest religious authorities, seven had not signed this ruling and were recorded “absent for medical reasons.” There were cracks in the consensus. The dissenters had exposed the fissures in the religious class and the tension at the heart of the dominant creed in the land between the desire for order and stability on the one hand and the passion of Wahhabism on the other.
The religious institution and its custodians had done well by the monarchy. There had been nothing here of the campaign that the Pahlavi dynasty had waged against the ulama in Iran—a steady attack on their prerogatives and turf, a centralizing drive that made the men of religion feel shabby and archaic in their own land. There had been no “reforms” akin to the ones which the Egyptian state had launched in the 1960s, which had shackled that country’s official religious institution and stripped it of its autonomy and power. Shrewd and worldly, the jurists knew that mulk (sovereignty), the power of the sword, was essential to the survival of the religious institution that Arabia had in place. The jurists knew the primacy of the ruler, the advantages of his sword and his treasure. A tale of the realm left no doubt about the ruler’s ascendancy: it was told that the very mild and genial King Khalid (ruled 1975–82) had once said that the ulama were on his head (a sign of respect), but were he to shake his head they would fall to the ground.
The ramparts thrown up by the dominant political-religious order were breached. In 1993, a group of dissidents launched a movement by the name of Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights. Its founders were six men drawn from the judiciary and the professions. The oldest of the lot was a religious judge, Abdullah Masaari, a man who had been a classmate of the grand mufti himself. He was old and distinguished enough to claim a special badge of honor: he had known the legendary founder of the dynasty, Ibn Saud. He had been close, it was said, to the revered King Faisal, the third ruler of the kingdom. The spokesman for this group was Abdullah Masaari’s son, Muhammad, a German-trained physicist who had lived in the United States and was married to an American. There was a Janus-like quality to this group. It wrapped itself in classic civil libertarian banners as it outflanked the monarchy on matters of Islamic governance.
The state struck back: the members of this group were arrested. After a brief imprisonment, the physicist quit the country and turned up in London. In his new home, he persisted with his oppositional politics. He was away from his native land, but he had the modern means of communication: the fax, the long-distance telephone. And he had the world of London, and the traffic of the Arabs in that city, and the Arabic journalism.
The real struggle was at home, though. The temper of the land, and the deadly nature of the political-religious contest, could be read into a booklet that Ibn Baz issued in 1993 on the relations between ruler and ruled and on the propriety and legality of foreigners residing and working in Arabia. Written in an accessible question-and-answer form, there is little subtlety in the issues addressed by Ibn Baz. The jurist takes up the matter of khuruj (rebellion) against the political authorities and its permissibility. He all but writes off the possibility that any good can come out of rebellion. Even the “unjust sultan” is to be tolerated; the community is best advised to “enjoin the good and forbid evil,” for it has no way of knowing whether a “greater evil” awaits those who opt for rebellion.
And here is vintage Ibn Baz on the deadly serious matter of safety for the foreigners in Arabia:
Q: Some young people think that enmity toward unbelievers and infidels who live or visit in Muslim lands is legal and decreed, and that it’s permissible to kill them and loot their property if they were to do forbidden things.
A: It is impermissible to kill the unbelievers who had been given a pledge of safety by the state; it is impermissible to commit aggression against them. Such people, when they err, must be referred to the rule of the sharia (Islamic law).
Two deeds of terror would give these theological ruminations a brand-new seriousness. The first took place in Riyadh in November 1995: a car bomb struck an American training facility for the Saudi National Guard, killing five Americans. A more devastating deed of terror took place in the oil town of Dhahran in June 1996. This time, a housing facility for American military personnel was hit; nineteen American servicemen were killed and more than four hundred were wounded as they rested in their dormitory. The American contingent in Dhahran was there to monitor the “no-fly zone” over southern Iraq, which had been put in place in the aftermath of the military campaign against Saddam Hussein. The “splendid isolation” of Arabia, perhaps made more tranquil by the telling, had been brought to a cruel reckoning.
Ibn Baz and his colleagues in the religious establishment had an urgent new task before them: the rulers and the peace of their realm needed religious warrant. Ibn Baz was to supply it in a fatwa he issued after the attack in Dhahran. The deed, he said, was a “transgression against the teachings of Islam.” But the jurist tipped his hand: in the ruling, the words “America” and “Americans” do not appear. The damage to lives and property befell many people, “Muslims and others alike.” These “non-Muslims” had been granted aman, a pledge of safety; they were owed protection. The shaykh found enough scripture and tradition to see a cruel end for those who pulled off the “criminal act.” There was a hadith, a saying, a tradition, attributed to the Prophet: “He who killed an ally will never know the smell of paradise.” And there was the word of God in the Quran: “Those that make war against Allah and his apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be put to death or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides; or be banished from the country. They shall be held to shame in this world and sternly punished in the next” (5:33–34).
Ibn Baz permitted himself a decent drapery: there was no need to acknowledge that the Americans were present in large numbers in Arabia. The welcome for the Americans was wearing thin. Even hard-core expats who once loved the order and the perks and the life in the compounds were unnerved by a new hostility. The Americans were encountering a new belligerence in the shopping malls; there were young religious militants now turning up at the gates of the compounds to stare down and bully the Americans. The fire, and the prohibitions, of Wahhabism were astir. They were there in Ibn Baz, but held in check.
A fault line, at once generational and cultural, had emerged in Arabia. Possessed of new wealth and eager for the skills of the modern world, tens of thousands of Saudis had been sent abroad for higher education in the universities of the West in the 1960s and 1970s. They had returned home to man the new bureaucracy and to prosper in the private sector. They had done well by the West and felt no great disjunction in their world. But a population boom hit Arabia in the mid-1970s (the country’s birthrate, 3.8 percent a year, was one of the highest in the world), and this generation was to stay at home. The country had built its own universities; there was less wealth around for scholarships abroad. The curricula of these universities gave pride of place to religious subjects. The skills and the advantages of the generation of the oil boom could not be passed on to those large numbers of young people coming into their own in the 1980s and 1990s.
Wealth had altered the age-old balance between man and the land. Those desert and farming towns in Qasim—a fertile belt of Central Najd, which now seemed to have more than its share of religious dissidents—had become cities in their own right. Qasim’s most consequential urban center, Buraida, some two hundred miles north of Riyadh, was by the early 1990s a city of nearly three hundred thousand. In the chroniclers’ accounts of a century earlier, when the “penetration of Arabia” began, Buraida had been a town of some seven thousand inhabitants. The facts of Buraida, before the age of oil, were simple and timeless. There was water “at the depth of a camel stick.” By the measure of the harsh desert world at its edge, Buraida was prosperous and settled, living off its wheat fields and palm groves. There was also its location on the trade and pilgrimage routes to Mecca and Medina. Buraida’s people had been shrewd about religious and worldly matters: alternately fierce and accommodating, moving back and forth between the call of the faith and their worldly needs. Acquisitive and curious, the people of Buraida had been good at pressing both their worldly and their religious claims. The agitation that erupted in Buraida in September 1994—demonstrations were held and the leaders of the dissidents were imprisoned—was in keeping with Buraida’s style.
There is an image of Najd and of Central Arabia: it is partly earned, and partly a projection onto it of the need for an impenetrable realm where there is something pure and uncompromising and untouched by the world. The travelers and explorers who first went to Arabia in the late 1800s gave voice to that view and passed it onto us. Palgrave, that gifted British writer and rogue of many disguises—a one-time officer in the Indian army, then a Jesuit priest in Lebanon, a traveler who went to Arabia in 1862–63 posing as a Syrian Christian physician—caught and gave currency to this view, which still lives on today. “The central provinces of Nejed,” he wrote:
the genuine Wahhabi country, is to the rest of Arabia a sort of lion’s den, on which few venture and yet fewer return. Hada Nejed; men dakhelaha f ’ma Kharaj, this is Nejed, he who enters it does not come out again, said an elderly inhabitant of whom we had demanded information; and such is really very often the case. Its mountains, once the fortresses of robbers and assassins, are at the present day equally or even more formidable as the strongholds of fanatics who consider every one save themselves an infidel or a heretic, and who regard the slaughter of an infidel or a heretic as a duty, at least a merit.
Palgrave had come to Najd during a time of troubles. A cholera epidemic had broken out; the zealots had taken this as a sign of divine disfavor and had set out to uproot the deviations and the vanities. Tobacco had vanished from the markets; “torn silks strewed the streets or rotted on the dunghills; the mosques were crowded and the shops deserted.” By the outer appearances of things, the zealots armed with “rods and Qurans” had imposed their utopia. But even as he depicted the stern Najd of the holy warriors, Palgrave lets us see the cracks: orthodoxy, he wrote, was “destined to meet with but a partial triumph. A compromise now took place, dresses wherein silk should not exceed a third part, or at most a half of the material, were permitted, though with a sigh; tobacco vendors or smokers were henceforth content with observing decent privacy in the sale or consumption of the forbidden article, on which condition they might do as they choose, unmolested, save in the public streets or marketplace. Compulsory attendance at prayers was rarely enforced … ”
The self-sufficiency of that desert world was never whole and unalloyed to begin with: the merchant caravans, and the trade routes, and the workers from Qasim who could be found, in the late 1800s, as far away as the Suez Canal, bear witness to that. “For a consideration,” the Wahhabi warriors in Palgrave’s time allowed the passage through their domain of the “heretics” of Persia to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina: it took “eighty gold tomans” per Persian pilgrim to guarantee the travelers immunity from danger and pillage.
The temptations of the world have grown by leaps and bounds in that long stretch of time that separates us from Palgrave and from the Wahhabi warriors of that simpler age. The satellite dishes in Najd were not about to be taken down. There was enough cunning in that world of Central Arabia to permit a stern visage in public and plenty of backsliding in the shadows. Arabia had once been largely desolate, its history an unbroken spectacle of brigandage and disorder. The vast territories had been knit together—a subcontinent, for all practical purposes—by right of conquest. Order had come, and men had made their peace with it. The Peninsula’s truth could have come straight out of the pages of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: a “commonwealth by acquisition” had emerged in the land. It had provided order where there had been insecurity of life and of possession. “And though of so unlimited a Power, men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is the perpetual warre of every man against his neighbor, are much worse.” There was a measure of unrest in the land, to be sure. But the realm held together because of that deeper knowledge that the zealots could not rule, that their rods and their anger would throw the place back into its dreaded past.
Ibn Baz and the traditional jurists arrayed around the dynasty knew the history of their land: the first Saudi state (1744–1818) had burned with fury and zeal and had self-destructed. The purists had risen in Najd but had tempted the fates. In the isolation of Najd, the Wahhabis had been no threat to the rule of the Ottoman authorities. But conquest and the zeal of a stern religious creed had tugged at them. They overran Hasa on the Persian Gulf, then they struck into Iraq. In 1802, Wahhabi raiders sacked the Shi’a holy city of Karbala. They killed some five thousand of its people and leveled its shrines, including the tomb of the Prophet’s grandson, Shi’ism’s iconic figure Imam Hussein. The attack on Karbala was a blow to the prestige of the Ottoman state. But more was to come, and on more sensitive terrain still. In 1802–4, the Wahhabis ventured into the Hijaz. They overran the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and brought to that worldly part of the Peninsula a reign of terror and religious rigor. The pilgrimage was interrupted by the zealots; the claim of the Ottoman caliph to sovereignty over the holy cities was being challenged by the Wahhabis.
A Wahhabi empire beckoned. And the warriors paid no heed to the British interest in the sea lanes and the coastal lands of the Gulf. A “political resident” in the Persian Gulf oversaw “maritime peace” and the safety of the trade routes to India. The Wahhabis, bent on dominating Central Arabia and the coastal lands alike, violated the British red lines. The fall of this Wahhabi dominion was quick to come. Foreign intervention in 1817–18—an Egyptian expeditionary force on behalf of the Ottoman imperial state—laid their towns and fortresses to waste, killed or imprisoned their leaders. Faith had not been enough. And faith—this kind of blind fury—was sure to lead to even greater ruin today. A skilled hand was needed to keep the oil flowing, to carry on traffic with the world beyond.
The outline of the realm’s history has been repeatedly told: the reconquest (the third attempt by a new generation) of the Peninsula by Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud, a young man who had spent his youth in Kuwait, under the protection of that principality’s ruling family. He had relied on the townsmen and the sedentary communities of Najd in Central Arabia; religious enforcers had been crucial to the establishment of the realm. Another instrument had been crucial in the early history of this expanding Saudi state, the Ikhwan (literally “the brothers,” a religio-tribal corps), who came to serve as the shock troops of this new order. The Ikhwan had been drawn from tribesmen who had been brought into the fold of Islam and instructed about the faith by the religious specialists. The discipline of a religio-political order warred with the anarchy of their old ways. It was a state that these Ikhwan had helped build, and a state ran counter to their deepest impulses.
Their work of conquest done by the mid-1920s, the Ikhwan had begun to bristle under the new system of control. On the borders of this new Pax Saudica, there was British power—in the sea lanes and coasts of the Persian Gulf, and in neighboring Jordan and Iraq. Ibn Saud understood the magnitude of British power, and indeed sought its patronage. The Ikhwan could not accept this order of states and national boundaries; in truth, they had grown uncomfortable with the regimentation of state power. The new order provided some opportunities for agricultural work, but these tribesmen disdained it. They had conquered more worldly, more settled people (the luxury-loving Hijazis, the Shi’a agriculturalists and merchants in the Eastern Province), but now they had to let those communities be.
Ibn Saud wanted order in the new dominions. He needed loans from the merchants of Jeddah, and he needed tranquility in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina lest the image of his realm be damaged in the wider world of Islam. He would not let loose these warriors on his new provinces. The Ikhwan were literalists; having been given the faith by their mentors, they had set out to enforce it in newly conquered lands.
In vain, Ibn Saud had tried to rein in these warriors. On one occasion, he reminded them of his rights—and power—over them: “Beware, oh Ikhwan. Encroach not upon the rights of others. If you do, your value and that of the dust are the same.” The sword decided the matter. In a seminal, defining battle for the new realm on March 29, 1929, at a desert patch by the name of Sibila in northern Najd, Ibn Saud’s forces overwhelmed the Ikhwan. The three tribal confederations that provided the Ikhwan with their backbone—the Ajman, the Mutair, the Utaybi—were broken. The age of raiding had drawn to a close.
The state had had its way. What opposition erupted in the years to come was of the secular, nationalist variety that was the fashion of the 1950s and 1960s. But the fury that had given rise to the Ikhwan was too deep and innate to the land to simply disappear. Five decades later, Juhayman al-Utaybi, a former corporal in the National Guard, a Bedouin with rudimentary education, then in his early forties, pulled off an audacious deed: he and some three hundred of his followers seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. It was November 20, 1979, and by the lunar calendar, the dawn of a new Islamic century.
Juhayman had parodied the Ikhwan: the sandals, the shin-length thoub, a flowing, unkempt beard. His themes were straight out of those warriors who had been cut down half a century earlier: the corruption of the rulers, the “pollution” of the realm due to its traffic with infidels. In an odd twist, Juhayman had called on the fifty thousand pilgrims who were trapped in the Grand Mosque to declare his brother-in-law the mahdi (savior) of the present age.
The notion of the mahdi is integral to the Shi’a worldview, while Sunni Islam is silent on it. But this was not an orderly, or an “orthodox,” religious movement. It was a millenarian rebellion harking back to an early golden age, driven by rage at everything that the modern state had built. Its leader was apocalyptic and deranged. In “seven letters” which he had addressed to the faithful, Juhayman had prophesied that the main battle for Islam would be fought in Constantinople, with horses and swords. He was an avenger; he had risen to claim vindication for the Ikhwan, “may God rest their souls,” who had given Al Saud their dominion, “conquered the country” for them only to be betrayed. Ibn Saud’s betrayal, he said, had been accomplished with the help of the Christians; acquisitive and supplicant ulama had acquiesced in that betrayal, and people had become “ignorant of the ways of Islam.” The scholars may possess religious knowledge, the rebel had opined, but what they knew they utilized in the service of corrupt rule. The wealth of the land, its oil, was being wasted, bartered for American protection. Juhayman would follow the Prophet’s example: there would be vigilant warfare and propagation of the faith.
Juhayman’s revolt was doomed. It had offended the faithful by violating the sanctity of the Grand Mosque. But Juhayman had unnerved the rulers. It took two weeks to flush the rebels out of the mosque. Religious warrant was sought for a police incursion into the Grand Mosque. French advice and help had been secured; quietly, officers and units of the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie were dispatched to the scene. The rebel had been a genuine embarrassment to the state. He and sixty-two of his followers were dispatched to eight of the kingdom’s cities, where they were beheaded.
It was not just the rebellion of Juhayman and the phantom ghost of the Ikhwan that had unsettled the dynasty. Four years earlier, a modernizing monarch, King Faisal, who had prodded his country along by giving legitimacy to women’s education, television, and travel to foreign lands, had been struck down by an assassin from within the House of Saud itself. It was a fight over the introduction of television that had set the stage for the monarch’s murder. And at the dawn of this new Islamic century, a turbaned, fierce revivalist, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had ridden mass discontent to great power in nearby Iran.
There was no kingship in Islam, Khomeini asserted, and this Islam in the Peninsula was only “American Islam,” an instrument of the Great Satan. The Saudi rulers had always held the Shi’a minority in the Eastern Province in great suspicion, and now in November of 1979—the very month of the upheaval in Mecca—trouble came to the Shi’a towns of that province. Quiescent men hitherto content to live their lives away from the gaze of the authorities took to the streets in the city of Qatif after a confrontation with the police during a celebration of Ashura, the annual ritual of mourning for Imam Hussein. The demonstrators were not a threat to the survival of the regime, but a threshold of fear had been crossed. No mercy would be shown them. The helicopter gunships of the National Guard would be called into action. True to their worldview and their practice, the rulers were quick to see in these protests the fine hand of their Iranian rivals. The example supplied by Iran—the spectacle of militant Shi’ism—was no doubt a factor, but these protests were a response to the material and psychic disinheritance of the Shi’a. There was widespread deprivation in the Shi’a towns, and there was the sense fostered by the Wahhabi creed itself that the Shi’a of the country were outcasts and heretics.
The sense of political mastery and control on the part of the rulers had given way. It was in the grip of this uncertainty that the monarchy chose to outflank the new puritanism, and take it onto itself. It was in the time of the “armed imam” in Qom that the monarch of the Saudi state would claim the title of Khadim al-Haramain al-Sharifain, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, to emphasize the religious dimension of his authority. (The reference is to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.) And it was in this turbulent era that a discernible retreat from modernism took place. Juhayman had been beheaded, but he had frightened the rulers and had demonstrated the dangers of modernism. The radical preachers grew more emboldened, and the technocratic Western-oriented elite became increasingly uncertain of itself and of its own world.
In the age of scarcity and hunger—there were older Saudis who still remembered that locusts were a source of protein in a harsh, unforgiving world—there had been a yearning for progress. A chronicle from the early 1920s documented a crippling poverty unimaginable in today’s Arabia. In Riyadh, hundreds of people came to the ruler’s palace twice a day, in the morning and in the afternoon, for two square meals. Concealed under the abayas of some of them were “kettles or wooden platters for the purpose of taking some rice and lamb to their kith and kin outside the city.” A talented physicist born in the early 1960s, with an American doctorate (three of his brothers have advanced American degrees), told me of his father making the journey in the late 1930s from one of the villages of Qasim to Riyadh. The journey took this man’s father nine days; he attached himself to a caravan, or tried to do so, to be more precise. The leaders of the caravan did not want the additional burden, another mouth to feed. They administered a harsh beating or two to this unwanted companion of the road. But the young man persisted; it was this caravan or the risk of death from thirst and hunger. Today, this passage would be made in an air-conditioned car; it would take five or six hours. Yet amid this sudden, new prosperity, there was grief and a brittle kind of anger. The new religious unrest grieved for a world that an earlier generation had been eager to escape.
The trail of sedition had been blazed by a respectable kind of critic: a scholar at a religious institution, Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, by the name of Safar al-Hawali. He was forty-one years of age when fame came his way in the tumult that followed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. This was not a man to follow an official line. He belonged to a respectable tribe in the southwestern part of the country, by the resort town of Taif. He had had a thorough preparation for his role: he had been a child prodigy in religious studies. In the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, he had earned a doctorate. Along the way, he had written treatises against secularism and secularists. In 1990–91, he stepped outside the bounds of the religious academy. It was a speech in a Riyadh mosque, we are told by an admiring chronicler, that had helped spread this man’s fame.
In that speech, Hawali condemned Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait, as was obligatory during that menacing time for the Saudi state. But the startling surprise lay in what he said about the American forces that were there with the dynasty’s blessing and permission: “The Baath of Iraq is the enemy of this hour, while the Americans and the Franks are our enemy until Judgment Day.” Hawali challenged the silence of the realm. Half-learned in Western sources, stitching together citations from authoritative Western periodicals, Hawali warned that “the Crusaders” had come to stay. In a book-length letter he addressed to the highest jurist in the country, Shaykh Abdulaziz ibn Baz, he saw the coming of the Americans as a fulfillment of his worst fear, as something scripted and inevitable: “I have been fearing something like this ever since the beginning of this so-called détente between East and West and the unity of Crusading Europe under one banner. This has been a bigger calamity than I had expected, bigger than any threat the Arabian Peninsula had faced since God Almighty had created it.” The Americans, he wrote, had always wanted dominion over the Peninsula, and now they had achieved what their hearts had desired. This was no ordinary military intervention but one that aimed at changing the country and its mores, “particularly on the matter of women’s rights.”
Hawali had cut to the heart of the matter. His country’s code—the seclusion of women, the restrictions on their right to travel, to drive cars, to move about in a normal way—was threatened by the American example and the American presence. For Hawali, the landing of this alien army in the Peninsula was an event on par with the great thrusts that the West had made into Islamic lands, a successor invasion to the Crusades in the Middle Ages and to the “Age of Western Discovery” of the East in the 1500s. How else could one account, he asked, for the hubris of the invaders, for the way they belittle the land and its religion and its people and its ulama and its rulers? This was no rescue that America offered: “A huge army of five hundred thousand soldiers have been dispatched to the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, thirty thousand of them women, and an undeclared number of Jews who had Israeli rabbis performing ceremonies on the sacred earth of the Arabian Peninsula.”
Rebellions always entail a good measure of contagion: a dissident steps forth from the shadows, better yet a respectable sort, then others who had been nursing quiet grievances are emboldened. In no time, there emerged some other dissidents of note: Salman al-Awda, a lecturer in the Najdi city of Buraida; Ayid al-Qarni, a lecturer from the city of Abha, in the southwest; Muhammad ibn Saad al-Qahtani from Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, etc. Some fifty men—preachers, imams (mosque leaders), judges, academics drawn from the nation’s universities—came forth in May 1991 with a petition addressed to King Fahd. The petitioners spoke as loyal men of the state, eager to keep at bay foreign predators and foreign influence: they called for the building of a “powerful army, equipped from a variety of sources” and for a foreign policy that “guarantees the interests of the umma (the Islamic community) and keeps it away from alliances which contradict the sharia.” And the petitioners spoke as men of reform: they wanted “forthright conduct and honesty from all state officials.” This was a shot across the bow, and a battle was not far behind.
The most radical of this group of politicized preachers was Shaykh Salman al-Awda. He was to become Hawali’s partner in the ideological war that had been sparked by the coming of the Americans. A label of honor was given Hawali and Awda by the throngs that bought their audiocassettes and leaflets, crowding the prayer halls where they spoke: they were dubbed Shuyukh al-Sahwa, the Shaykhs of the Awakening. Five years younger than Hawali, Awda had received his education at Buraida, then moved on to Riyadh, to the Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, where he studied the sharia. For his graduate degree he wrote a thesis with a title suggestive of zeal to come, “Ghurbat al Islam,” referring to the exile or the absence of Islam. (This theme of Islam’s estrangement and solitude even in the lands which nominally profess the faith is dear to the Islamists and would recur in Awda’s audiocassette tapes and printed lectures.) Restless and eloquent, this preacher had an unerring instinct for the seam between the religious and the political: to judge by the tone and content of his tapes, he had in him the combined talents of the storyteller and the caller’s zeal. Thousands would flock to his sermons, he was in demand everywhere, his opinions sought after and at the ready.
His one big theme was corruption—not the small type that afflicts princes and bureaucrats but the corruption that overtakes nations and brings about their downfall, the corruption that eats into a society and implicates its people in great deviations. In the face of such corruption, the believer has no choice, Awda exhorted. In matters large and small, the believer has to speak out “against the corruption taking root in our country and, to varying degrees, in all Muslim lands.” The road to reform was not strewn with roses but with thorns. It was “not enough to eat and drink and move about”; a whole generation of educated people owed it to itself, and to the wealth spent giving it new skills, to speak out about the sad state of affairs in public life. Awda knew the risks, and he drew a marker for the rulers: he was not concerned with the threat of imprisonment, he said. The cause of Islam was transcendent and the political realm was capricious at any rate. No one, he said, knew why political prisoners are rounded up and why they are released. He trusted his fate to the Almighty; he left it to Him to dispose of this “weak creature.”
Hawali and Awda tested the rulers’ patience and skills. It was not easy to silence these men. There were serious jurists, men of the religious establishment, who gave these two firebrands their support and their approval. They were not extremists, an authoritative cleric of the realm, Abdullah ibn Jibrin, said of them. They were well intentioned and fought for the faith. They were a “thorn in the side of the Christians, the Communists, the atheists, the Ba’athists, the secularists, the polytheists.” They knew the tricks of the “heretics” (read: the Shi’a) and the apostates, and it was no wonder their enemies had seen fit to besmirch their reputations. The xnmost authoritative traditionalist of the religious class, the revered Abdulaziz ibn Baz, weighed in on the side of the two men: they were not infallible, he said, but they meant well. They had not strayed from the path; their “tapes were useful” and free of heresy and sedition. The dissenters had stayed within the bounds of the dominant tradition, and this gave them no small shelter.
There is a great “empiricism” to this desert world: you have to tell the difference between a mirage and the real thing if you are to survive in the desert. And this seemingly theological struggle took place against the background of dwindling riches in the country and of a fight over wealth and subsidies and material benefits. Two decades earlier, God’s baraka (blessing) had been expressed in the windfall fortune that flooded the country after 1973. Now recession and retrenchment had come, and this new austerity was seen as proof of the withdrawal of divine grace. The patronage system was breaking down. Public debt had begun to rear its head. Three years into these troubles, the state had had its fill.
The crackdown came in September 1994. More than one hundred politico-religious dissidents—Hawali and Awda at the head of the pack—were taken into custody. The two firebrands were given a choice: they could cease their preaching and admit their errors, or face imprisonment. They chose the latter course. When the state finally struck back, it was keen to have religious cover. The writ for their arrest was wrapped inside a ruling by the Council of Higher Ulama. The old traditionalist himself, Shaykh Abdulaziz ibn Baz, was for all practical purposes turned into a partner to this deed. It couldn’t have been a happy choice, but the old scholar obliged. He served the state, and the rulers had come calling in the midst of mounting disorder. He called on Hawali and Awda to apologize for their “excesses” and to cease their agitation.
The state would make the most of Ibn Baz’s support. The authority of “His Eminence the Grand Mufti of the Kingdom, Shaykh Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Baz” was attached to the judgment of the Ministry of Interior. Ibn Baz knew the wages of riding with the rulers. He gave his writ knowing that younger, more radical preachers had begun to brand him, with his senior colleagues, as ulama al-sulta, the scholars of the regime. But he had a whole jurisprudence to fall back upon: in his doctrine sedition was a greater evil than tyranny, and rebellion knew no legitimacy.
The faith had to be capped. In the view of the religious establishment, it was the proper thing to “enjoin the good and forbid evil,” but it was imperative to do so with restraint. Shaykh Saleh bin Abdulaziz al-Shaykh, who was the minister of Islamic affairs and endowment and guidance (and a direct descendant of the eighteenth-century preacher Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab), found a tradition attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that a judge cannot render binding rulings when he is in a state of agitation. For this conservative jurist, the call to the faith had to be made, but without stridency and belligerence.
The state that had hauled off the religious dissidents to prison now set out to display its own fidelity to the faith. It would try to outflank these dissidents on their own terrain. It was out of this struggle and its dangers that a parallel strategy was born whose consequences would be there for everyone to see a decade hence. The zeal was channeled to foreign lands: there were pan-Islamic duties that exonerated that state and gave its brand of religion a new legitimacy. There were religious obligations in Palestine and Bosnia and Chechnya and Afghanistan. Religious merit would be gained in those zones of battle. A mosque to be built in Rome, a mission of rescue in Bosnia against the enemies of Islam: the faith served and fortified beyond Arabia’s borders. The philanthropies, and the preachers, and the restless young in search of an outlet for their zeal would be encouraged to look to those places as new battlegrounds.
The ennui of the youth, bottled up at home, would find satisfaction in other lands. And the “good works” in those lands would offer proof that here was a political order that looked after Islam where its truth, or its peoples, were under assault. The work of da’wa (the call to religion) knew no borders; a state that spread it abroad could not and should not be subverted at home. This land had known rebellions and had seen them blow over. It had an unsentimental faith in property and old age and responsibility, and the prince’s favor. It was hoped that this new zeal, too, would give way and come to terms with the established order of things.
It had worked this way with one challenger to the dynasty: the physicist Muhammad Masaari, who had been hounding the monarchy from London. Three years into exile, his effort had fizzled out; he was in debt and living on social security. “It is no secret; I am broke and I am not going to lie about it,” he said in January 1997. Masaari owed money to his lawyer, who had successfully appealed a deportation decision by the Home Office, some to British Telecom, some to Feature Fax for the messages he had been sending back home. What the Egyptian-American scholar Mamoun Fandy aptly described as “cyberresistance” had been a nuisance and nothing more.
The Arabic press carried news of Masaari’s bankruptcy. The message was not subtle: the wealth of the realm and of the ruler, the impossible odds against the dissident. The rulers knew their land and its ways; they left it to their people to judge these odds and to weigh the protagonists.
In the time of oil, fi zaman al-naft, the ruler not only provided protection and order but, of course, allocated the treasure of the land. When a relative windfall, higher oil prices in 1996, materialized and brought to Saudi Arabia some $10 billion in unexpected revenues, the rulers proceeded to pay off some of the private debts and the arrears that had accumulated over the preceding years. Some $1.8 billion was handed out to the farmers (the Qasimis must have received a fair share of the spoils). More subsidies would be paid in the year to come, they were assured.
Masaari’s challenge was easy to turn back. While the physicist was in London granting interviews to Western journalists, a wholly different challenge was gathering force. Its leaders were made of sterner stuff, its recruits ready to die and kill in pursuit of their own cruel utopia. It was past the fax machines and the petitions. A year after Masaari conceded his defeat, a man of the city of Jeddah, Osama bin Laden, and a physician who belonged to the upper reaches of Egyptian society, Ayman Zawahiri, announced the launching of a new movement, the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders. It came in a call to arms published in a London-based Arabic daily, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in February 1998. These two men were without qualms about terror and its efficacy. They sought no interviews with Western reporters; not for them was the language of human rights and the method of petitioning the rulers. A violence of unprecedented ferocity lay in store for people in Arabia and lands beyond.
The late 1990s were the era of globalization. No one would pay Bin Laden’s declaration of war much attention. In the zeitgeist of the era, the time of ideology had passed and the gurus of the market and of globalization were ascendant. A band of Arabs in the forlorn land of Afghanistan was of no interest at the time. It fell to the distinguished historian of Islam Bernard Lewis to see the declaration for what it was: a license to kill and a declaration of a new jihad. Bin Laden’s starting point was the American presence in his homeland. In prose of great beauty and power, the self-styled jihadist evoked the defiling presence of the United States in Arabia, the holiest of Islam’s territories. “Since God laid down the Arabian Peninsula, created its desert, and surrounded it with seas, no calamity has ever befallen it like these crusaders that have spread in it like locusts, crowding its soil, eating its fruits, and destroying its verdure; and this is at a time when the nations contend against the Muslims like diners jostling around a bowl of food.” Bin Laden was not a cleric, but this was the new way of the faith, and the declaration contained this all-important fatwa:
To kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Haram Mosque [in Mecca] are freed from their grip and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim…. By God’s leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to obey God’s command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can. Likewise we call on the Muslim ulama and leaders and youth and soldiers to launch attacks against the armies of the American devils and against those who are allies with them from among the helpers of Satan.
The jihadists who had made their way to Afghanistan and had found new leaders in Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri were men on the run from the security services, a disaffected breed in search of a new calling. They saw in the struggle for Afghanistan proof that holy warfare, the zeal of a “believing minority,” would carry the day against larger powers given to doubt and compromises. The true believers had skipped over the role played by American weapons and Saudi governmental money and Pakistani intelligence in the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. A sense of power came to the jihadists; Afghanistan—mountainous, possessed of an austere, harsh landscape—had fed the jihadists’ conviction that their mission recalled the ordeal of early Islam and its triumph.
It had been a heady undertaking, the jihad in Afghanistan. There had been warfare and comradeship, and exposure to volunteers and preachers drawn from countless Arab and Muslim lands. Now the state was done with all that; the jihad was to be decreed and legitimized by the ruler and his religious apparatus. Consider this discourse by the minister of religious endowments, Shaykh Saleh bin Abdulaziz al-Shaykh, and the play of things is laid bare. The discourse of this establishment jurist was delivered in late 2001—after the terrors of 9/11, at a time when Saudi Arabia was under a glaring spotlight. The jihad, said this jurist, was the prerogative of the ruler; no one could second-guess wali al-amr (the ruler, the decision maker) as to the timing or legitimacy of declaring the jihad. Mosques, he said, were places of worship and prayer where scholars who know the faith “enjoin the good and forbid evil and rule on religious matters and perform the rituals of the faith.” It was becoming harder for the state to juggle its puritanism and its alliance with the United States, the cornerstone of its policies abroad. The state had been crafty and skilled, but a profound change had taken place: large numbers of rebellious, disaffected types were now contesting the power of the state and its dominant worldview.
The old traditionalist, Grand Mufti Ibn Baz, died in 1999. And his loss would be felt as the crisis of the realm intensified. To be sure, he hadn’t always had his way. But the authority and standing he had with some of the dissidents went with him into his grave. Modernism and its bearers were in retreat. The state must have reasoned that the modernists in the business class and the professions had nowhere else to go, and that the rulers could tilt toward the Islamists without incurring an appreciable political cost. In this new environment, the diehards moved about with greater confidence. A young American-educated merchant described for me the authority and swagger with which the zealots had begun to carry themselves in public life. They commanded more attention when they turned up in the majlis of a noted prince or provincial governor. “All you had to do was turn up with an unkempt beard and a shin-length thoub and your presence and demands were given greater weight,” he said. He noted that the mutawwa, the religious enforcers, had better cars and facilities in Riyadh than did the police. He told me of a young religious enforcer who came up to him at a local hotel during a business meeting he was having with a group of Italian visitors to berate him for meeting with “infidels” and breaking bread with them. He had warded off this enforcer by telling him that these foreign visitors were there with “King Fahd’s permission,” that the man should take his objection to the ruler of the realm. The diehards were reshaping public life to their own preference. The relative daring with which the state had pushed through earlier modernizing endeavors was put aside. There had been fights in the history of the realm over the introduction of radio, the telegraph, and television; women’s education; and the permissibility of traveling into bilad al-kufr (the lands of unbelief) and mixing with peoples of other faiths. The state had won those fights, but now the state was on the defensive.
“He who eats the sultan’s bread fights with the sultan’s sword,” goes a desert maxim. There was less money to go around; the state was accumulating a huge public debt that outstripped its gross domestic product. There were farmers who could no longer count on subsidies; there were contractors who had not been paid money owed them by the state treasury. More important, there were young people whose claims and expectations could no longer be satisfied. Something new and alien to the land had begun to occur in this country: there were reports of four hundred suicides, principally among the young, in the year 2000. The old world and its verities were being undermined. In hushed tones, and in the privacy of their homes and gatherings, the modernists spoke of the necessity of taking on the religious diehards. Some even harked back to the battle of Sibila in 1929, when Ibn Saud had cut the Ikhwan to shreds and turned back their challenge to the authority of the state. But the political order and the dynasty opted for accommodating the religious current.
This dynasty abhorred and dreaded hard decisions. Besides, “reform” had its own hazards. The small group of princes—and a handful of old trusted advisers around them—who ruled the kingdom had for years been fixated on the fate of the Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. In the years of his splendor and power, the occupant of the Peacock Throne had treated the Saudi dynasty as a relic of an old, doomed political world. He was a modernizer and a secularist, and he had in mind turning his country into an “Asian Germany,” herding his population, kicking and screaming, into modernity. An influential member of the dynasty was given to a memory he savored, and he recited it endlessly as a reminder of what befalls those who run ahead of their people, or administer to them profound cultural shocks. In the early 1970s, the shah had written a note to his Saudi counterpart, King Faisal. The note had in it the pride of a man sure of his primacy. The Saudi monarch was advised that he had better opt for modernizing his traditional, hidebound country, reining in its religious classes, pushing it into the modern world, lest the Saudi dynasty be swept aside.
Fate was cruel to the Shah of Iran. The mullahs he offended had risen in an upheaval of enormous fury. The middle classes he had relied upon had succumbed to a wave of religious devotion of their own and had turned on him with a vengeance. The shah himself had ended up a Flying Dutchman looking for a port of call—spurned by his American allies, in search of a place that would afford him shelter for what little remained of his life. This was not a fate the House of Saud wanted for itself.
Deep down, the Saudi rulers distrusted the middle class and the Western-educated professionals, suspecting that they would desert the dynasty or duck for cover if a fight for the realm ensued. The principal men of the dynasty were without illusions about that segment of their population. There were educated, prosperous people in the country whispering sweet things about Osama bin Laden, and the rulers understood the fickle nature of men, the ease with which regimes come apart.
No descendant of Ibn Saud would embark on some hazardous new course. In the early 1960s three or four princes had such ideas. They were dubbed the “Free Princes,” and they took a ride with radical Arab nationalism, hectoring their brothers from Gamal Abdul Nasser’s Cairo about a new order in Arabia. But the Free Princes had come to their senses; they had been taken back into the fold. They had given up on the dream of reform; they had seen Nasser go down to defeat in 1967 and die three years later a broken man. The leading Free Prince, Talal ibn Abdulaziz, had put aside his youthful rebellion and resumed his place as a senior figure in the realm. Few Saudis believed that so difficult, so idiosyncratic a place could be reinvented.
The leading men of the dynasty were old, governed by a code of primacy and discretion and ritual transmitted to them by their legendary father, the desert chieftain Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud. But the realm had changed. The quaint desert world had become more difficult to govern. A man of the Saudi elite, Ghazi Algosaibi, put it well in August 2002 when he said that the crisis in Saudi-American relations was an “accident waiting to happen.” That accident had been heard with a big thud of course on September 11, 2001. A relationship of cold calculation of interests—American protection in return for Saudi oil—was now beset with mutual recriminations.
The congenitally secretive Saudi realm had to own up to what its world had spawned: jihadists waging war against the infidel powers, networks of financiers and “charities” which empowered the boys of terror, and a public more willing to wink at the terror and to justify it to anyone from the outside who came to inquire into the workings of the Saudi state. A measure of Saudi introspection would have been helpful, an acknowledgment of the hidden furies and dysfunctions of the realm: the boredom of the young, the quiet rage of a business class that submitted to the monarchic system and did well by it but resented its own political weakness, the intolerance of a new breed of preachers pushing at the limits of the old system of political-religious control. But this was not the Saudi way. It was easier to hunker down, alternating between righteous anger at the foreign press and the foreign scrutiny on the one hand and self-pity on the other.
One of the principal figures of the monarchy came to embody this Saudi inability and unwillingness to arrive at a reckoning with the new terror, and with the need to come clean on it all: the minister of the interior, Prince Naif ibn Abdulaziz. A full brother of King Fahd, a dour man who had held that portfolio since 1975, Prince Naif partook of the old ethos of his clan. For him, the realm was at peace, and radicalism alien to its makeup. There were no Saudis aboard those planes of 9/11, there were no “sleeper cells” of terror in Arabia. The “lobbies” in America (code word for American Jews) were out to smear the kingdom’s reputation, to affix the label of terror onto Islam itself. Some “misguided” Saudi youth may have been tricked into networks of terror, but the leaders, he insisted on one occasion, came from Egypt, and the “original sin” of radicalism had been the work of elements of that country’s Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi Arabia had sheltered and protected the leaders of the Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s when secular radicalism was the malady of the Arab world. But a trusting Arabia had been betrayed; this was the furthest this man of the royal household could go. More than an old prince’s obtuseness was on display here: it was the self-image of the Saudi realm as a kingdom at peace, and a place where princes and commoners come together as a “family” immune to the call of sedition and political trouble. A choice had to be made: the realm could look inward, or it could conjure up the specter of foreign conspiracies, of enemies bent on shattering Arabia’s peace. A conviction took hold in Arabia that a vast American conspiracy was being hatched against the country. Even the royals began to give credence to this view; it was an opportunity for the rulers to bond with the disaffected in their midst. A heavy dosage of anti-Americanism was seen as a sly way of buying off those disaffected with the order of power.
Saudi Arabia had not been hermetically sealed, but the kind of scrutiny that came its way after 9/11 was a plunge into a whole new world. There were foreign reporters now scouring remote hamlets in the country looking for the trail of the “death pilots.” The reporters went up and down Highway 15, in the Saudi southwest, into pockets of economic neglect—twelve of the fifteen Saudis who took part in the attacks of 9/11 hailed from that part of the country. This was “Bin Laden country,” the new inquiries confirmed, provinces that stretched from Mecca into the summer resort town of Taif, then climbed upward to the mountainous country of Asir. This mountainous land merited its name: Asir meant “difficult country.” The windfall wealth of Arabia and the largesse of the dynasty had been sprinkled lightly around here: there was a sense of separateness that set this place apart from the Najdi heartland of the country and from the polished and skilled Hijazis. There was boredom aplenty, a forlorn hinterland, deeply tribal, and a fertile ground for the kind of religious-political radicalism Bin Laden and those preaching his message had set ablaze.
Nor were the reporters disappointed when they ventured into the worldly city of Jeddah on the Red Sea. There were tycoons and American-educated professionals (the Jeddah yuppies, a man of the Saudi state dismissively labeled them) who whispered to the reporters sweet things about Osama bin Laden—he had grown up in Jeddah, and Jeddah was full of people secretly proud of his deeds and his fame. In the palatial home of a Western-educated businessman, I was told that henceforth 9/11 would be like the Kennedy assassination, a contested matter, mysterious, the assailants unknown. The man was young and worldly, his English precise and fluent. I had called on him only months after 9/11; I was made to understand that he came from one of the wealthiest merchant dynasties, and the glitter of his home (bordering on a kind of gaudiness) showed it. Yet he could not let stand the thought that his country had produced this kind of radicalism. The country had opened up to the outsiders only to reveal the rage beneath the surface of harmony and public consent.
The realm was what it was: part imara (principality), part religious edifice. A monarch who had styled himself “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” was destined to stay close to the religious obscurantists. The religious call had a privileged place in the life of the realm. There were television programs that were given over wholesale to the preachers, religious pages in the daily papers where the scholars of the “religious sciences” expounded on the law and the conduct of the “righteous ancestors” and the requirements of the faith. There was an educational system which favored the religious practitioners—universities and colleges where their writ ran. The men of religion had access to court and to royal favor. The regime and its media—the tedious television programming of the state—covered the visits of the scholars to the senior figures of the dynasty. The coverage, often running without commentary, was meant to convey the unity of the realm. And it conveyed, as well, the ascendancy of the ruler: the members of the ulama approaching the king and, depending on their rank and proximity to the ruler, kissing the king’s shoulder or nose, offering their allegiance. It was his dominion, and the ritual underlined the primacy of kingship.
There was a message here to the devout, and perhaps to the religious class as well. Rulers could be capricious and could challenge the faith, but these Saudi rulers don’t. In neighboring Muslim lands—in Egypt, in Turkey, in Tunisia—the public order had relegated the ulama to the sidelines and the religious scholars had not been able to resist the power of the sword and the “reforms” of the state. Arabia was different: the sharia was the source of its laws; the religious scholars were everywhere, honored and obeyed. The state deferred to them on the great moral issues—the place of women, conduct in the public space, the very nature of what was halal (permissible) and haram (impermissible) in personal and public conduct. In return, the religious class acknowledged the primacy of the ruler.
The play between prince and preacher and the willingness to leave the door open to the religious activist is illustrated in the banishment, and then the return to political grace, of a preacher by the name of Ayid al-Qarni. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Qarni had had his troubles with the rulers. Based in Asir, in the southwest, Qarni had clashed with the powerful governor, Prince Khalid al-Faisal. A son of the late King Faisal, the prince was the undisputed master of this domain. Qarni had gravitated into oppositional politics. He had been pushed to the sidelines and banned from preaching.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Qarni was back in the thick of things. A reporter for the London-based Al Hayat sought him out in Riyadh in February 2002, and the result is a long, illuminating interview that casts a floodlight on the terms of engagement between the rulers and the preachers. Qarni was not in the least timid or modest about his calling: he had come back to the field of preaching, he said, to combat the darkness that had descended on the world of Islam, and to do battle against Islam’s enemies, to unite the ranks against the “Zionist attacks aimed at the Islamic religion.” His return, he let it be known, had come “with the permission of the decision makers and those in authority”—i.e., the rulers. An understanding had been reached, and bygones were bygones. Qarni was keen to set out the terms of the accord he had made with the state and its functionaries. First, there were the teachings of the Quran and the sunna (the conduct) of the Prophet, and those were inviolable and beyond discussion. Second, there was national unity that had to be shored up, lest the country be torn asunder: “We have to remember that we were warring tribes until God Almighty brought us together under the banner of the Wahhabi creed.” Third, a pledge of obedience was owed the imam (the king in this case), which must be honored and observed. In other words, there would be no freelancing this time around. The preachers had their work cut out for them, he added: there were “idle youth” who had taken to new forms of restlessness—blocking traffic in Jeddah, defying the police, harassing women, celebrating Saudi soccer victories with open displays of lawlessness. These youth, said Qarni, had to be called back to the “straight path” and to the ways of the righteous ancestors, and this was a task that only the religious scholars could perform.
Qarni was in the limelight; his passion of the moment was satellite television. He loved the medium and kept count of his television appearances on Al Jazeera, on Abu Dhabi television, on Middle East Broadcasting, etc. He was no hidebound traditionalist, he wanted it known. He noted the shift from the audiocassette tapes of an earlier era to the big, new possibilities opened up by the satellite television channels. A decade earlier, he said, his emphasis was on the “Saudi situation” and its specificity. Now the globe had opened up to him: “When I speak now I imagine that the whole world with all its races and religions is watching me. Our discourse has thus become global, and through it we seek to highlight what men everywhere have in common and to respect the differences among them.”
If the discourse has a new “globalizing” tone, the vigilance against “the enemies” remains. The anti-Americanism is never far: “America,” he said:
is an oppressor in the garb of an aggrieved nation. It has used the attacks against itself to prosecute a war that had been decided upon in advance. If we look at the world, and not just the Islamic world, we find that everyone was overjoyed at this attack against America. That was the case in Korea, Japan, and Mexico…. The whole world has had its fill with American arrogance and aggression. Perhaps the decision makers in the United States will learn a lesson from these attacks. As for America’s war against terror, we don’t support it. Instead, we call on America to change its aggressive ways, particularly in the Islamic world, where it has used the veto at the United Nations in favor of Israel more than seventy times.
There was no “clash of civilizations” in the world today, he added. What Saudi Arabia and the Islamic world faced was a campaign against Islam, “carried out by the Jews, spread by Jewish writers, and Jewish publishing houses and institutions. We thank God for this campaign, for it offers proof that we have merited Jewish enmity and suspicion. What is needed are powerful media with credibility and skills, and that the Muslims should rise up together as one man and avoid their internal squabbles at this critical moment.”
The peace at home bought with vigilance abroad, and perpetual struggle against the enemies of God and of his people: Qarni was not alone. There was still Safar al-Hawali, imprisoned back in 1994 and released five years later. Imprisonment had not dampened the man’s zeal. Less than a month after the terror attacks of 9/11, Hawali turned up with an “open letter” to President George W. Bush. Widely circulated in the country and published abroad in a radical pan-Arabist daily in London, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, the letter had the stridency and belligerent self-confidence of the man. This was not the sort of man to apologize for the attack on America or to fault the ideology that spawned the terror. There was pure schadenfreude and no trace of guilt in Hawali’s text. And there was no modesty either: Hawali was writing, he said, as an “heir to the righteous Prophet Muhammad, who taught men to speak truth to the mighty and the arrogant in this world so that they may fear God…. It is thus that Moses, peace be upon him, spoke to pharaoh, and Jesus, peace upon him, spoke to the Roman governor and to the Chief Rabbi of the temple. I write to you as a member of a community that is persecuted in the same manner that Jesus was persecuted when he faced the aggression of the Jews from one side and of the Romans from the other.”
New York was still digging out of the rubble, but Hawali knew only righteousness. “It is regrettable,” he wrote, “that America, which had been discovered and peopled by immigrants fleeing persecution, had replaced the Roman Empire in its arrogance and cruelty.” For Hawali, Rome is America’s true historical predecessor and analogue. In its days of hegemony Rome, too, he wrote, spoke the language of liberty and believed it was the heiress to world culture, Greece’s inheritor. On its own terrain, Rome was good to its citizens and blessed with democratic rule and a senate, and the individual Roman was free in his ideology and personal conduct. But Rome had been cruel and arrogant to others. And God sent Rome’s way the Vandals from the north, who descended on it and put its civilization to the torch. “It was natural,” said Hawali, “that the nations that had suffered at the hands of Rome and endured its might and arrogance were thrilled at Rome’s destruction at the hands of these northern barbarians, even though these nations did not know or love these new invaders.” The new “American pharaoh” was told to entertain no illusions about the Muslim world and its real feelings toward America and America’s grief. “There is no Muslim on the face of the earth who loves and supports you even if he gave blood to your victims, or established intelligence services on your behalf, or authorized you to come up with an educational system for his schools. Anyone who claims to love and support you—and no Muslim can make this claim—has for you the love that a frightened, trapped creature has for its cruel pursuer.”
Hawali was speaking to what was playing out in Arab and Muslim streets: the young people were handing out sweets in the West Bank city of Ramallah in celebration of America’s grief when Yasser Arafat, in a clear attempt at damage control, turned up at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem to donate blood for the Americans. In the shadows, the Arab regimes were offering covert help of every kind to the American campaign to hunt down the Islamists. Hawali wanted it known that these rulers were on their own, moved by fear and hypocrisy.
Hawali wanted nothing of the new order in the region that America began to espouse in the aftermath of the terrors of 9/11. “The enemy of liberty can’t grant liberty,” he said. In Washington there was talk about educational reform in the Arab world, and the Islamists had taken note of that. For this new American bid, Hawali saw only the prospect of sure failure and frustration:
You will say that you aim to remove the sources of hatred and extremism in the sermons and the schools and the media. To that we say, ask what you wish, but be sure that you will not succeed, for our hatred of oppression and love of truth is granted us by our religion, and our Quran, and is mightier than your mountains. Should you persist in your errors, and your intoxication with your might, you will have no choice but to wipe out the Muslims with nuclear and biological weapons, and other means of destruction in your hellish arsenal.
To be sure, Hawali was a true believer willing to risk the wrath of the regime. But there was belligerence in the air. It was hard to draw a line between mainstream jurists and their more radical colleagues. In June 2002, the prayer leader at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, in his khutba (Friday sermon), took up the matter of travel and tourism to foreign lands. There were Islamic rules and guidelines, Shaykh Abdulrahman Sudais decreed, to such travel. It had to be to “conservative Islamic lands,” for travel to the “swamps of wicked countries” was impermissible. Islam, said this jurist, authorizes travel to “infidel” lands only for the purpose of medical care, work, or study. And for that travel to stay within the bounds of the faith, the traveler had to be “equipped with enough religious faith to ward off temptations, enough knowledge and education to deal with suspicions and with the gaze of non-Muslims.” When embarking on such travel, the Muslim had to be on guard: he had to avoid visiting the shrines and tombs of other faiths, he had to stay away from wine and sin. “God Almighty has given our blessed country enough cultural and historical assets to enable people to stay at home and partake of righteous and proper travel.” (No small irony: seven years later, in the summer of 2009, Sudais would turn up in London and Birmingham, preaching to several congregations there and urging Muslims in non-Muslim lands to be “ambassadors” for their religion.)
The rulers grew nervous about the wages of religious extremism. They took to calling on the religious scholars and authorities to rein in the extremists. But there was retrogression and belligerence aplenty among those who knew how to stay within the bounds of the religious-political order. On Friday, April 19, 2002, in his khutba, the same Shaykh Sudais, whom we already encountered ruling on the dangers of traveling to foreign lands, had let loose on the Jews and Judaism. The Jews, he said, were the “scum of the earth,” the “rats of humanity,” the “killers of prophets,” and the “breakers of promises.” The media carried his words. He had the pulpit and the authority. There was a Saudi diplomatic initiative making the rounds. The Crown Prince had been its sponsor. It aimed, we were told, to bridge the gap between Israel and the Arabs. It promised Arab recognition of Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal from the Arab territories occupied in the Six-Day War of 1967. Sudais paid it no heed. The diehards had operated within a permissive environment. They were no isolated band.
The country is opaque, the walls of its privacy are high and prohibitive. There is only so much the fatwas of the jurists and the pamphlets of the dissenters can reveal. The closest we are likely to get to a portrait of that time of sedition and trouble is a remarkable work by Abdullah Thabit entitled The 20th Terrorist (Al-Irhabi 20), published in 2006. The author, an educational administrator from the town of Abha, in the mountainous land of Asir, was born in 1973; he had been recruited into the ranks of the diehards as a boy in his early teens. He was to break with them, and his work, a memoir in the convenient guise of a novel, catches that period and the seductions of religious extremism. It took no small amount of courage for this poet and writer to come forth with this chronicle, for the culture frowns on self-revelation of this sort.
The inspiration for this book came of course on 9/11. To Thabit’s great surprise, one of the nineteen Arabs who struck America on that day, Ahmed Alnami, came from Thabit’s hometown. A horrific event was perilously close to him. “I felt like someone who’d gotten off a boat just in time and watched it cap-size with him and the others onboard,” Thabit told Faiza Saleh Ambah, a reporter for the Washington Post. (See Faiza Saleh Ambah, “The Would-Be Terrorist’s Explosive Tell-All Tale,” Washington Post, July 24, 2006). Had he not jumped, he might have been easily “the 20th terrorist.” There was nothing unusual about the beginnings of Thabit’s stand-in fictional character, Zahi Al-Jabali. He was born in the countryside around Abha, his family moved to the small city when he was two, he was one of nine children. His family was not particularly privileged, but there was enough to have a decent home—and a television set, which at the time set this family apart from its neighbors. The life of the young boy was mean, his father a veritable tyrant, the physical beatings at home and school a source of great misery. He tended his father’s goats in his spare time and did an unusual amount of reading. He was good at school, and this brought him to the attention of the religious extremists. The hook was soccer. He loved the sport, and the recruiters on the lookout for new adherents to their ideology used it to draw him into their web. His family had wanted nothing to do with politics. A generation earlier, an older brother of his had been on the fringe of Juhayman al-Utaybi’s band of zealots. The forces of order had let him go, but the panic of that time had remained with this family.
But some doors are made to be broken, not opened, the narrator says in The 20th Terrorist. The young boy was now willing to defy his parents. There was the companionship of soccer camps, and there was steady religious indoctrination. He came to despise his family members; he wanted them to rid themselves of their television set, to remove the photographs in the household, to banish music—much beloved in Asir. He told his father that he was robbing the family of its share in paradise. He took on the habits of the jamaa (the group). He donned a shin-length thoub, he grew a long beard, he mimicked the affectations of the group. “We learned that ours is a world of unbelievers,” he said. “We were the band of the saved, all the others were condemned.” He wondered how his group and its leaders financed its activities; he learned that they did it through theft, and that theft from the state in the interest of jihad was pleasing to Allah. By 1990, when Saddam Hussein swept into Kuwait, the boy of seventeen had become something of an enforcer in his own right. He bullied his schoolmates, frightened the more timid of the teachers. When a teacher gave an assignment that asked for an essay on a preferred television program, he warned the teacher that he was leading his students to damnation and ruin. The jamaa had power in the school. The more attractive of the boys sought the jamaa’s protection to ward off the sexual predators who stalked them. The jamaa decreed that it was permissible to cheat on English examinations because English was the language of the infidels. Even the English teacher was embarrassed about the subject he was teaching. In the bigger world beyond the school, this was the time of the “killer fatwas” and of the ideological war that the preachers had launched against the Saudi state.
A chance came the narrator’s way to go to Afghanistan. He decided against it; it was not the time to become a mujahid. His alienation from his family had grown extreme. A year would pass without him sharing their food, riding in their cars. He became something of a freelance preacher, giving Friday sermons in mosques in neighboring villages. This is a rainy part of the country with deep wadis, and often he would go out in the rain, bareheaded for hours at a time. He tells of a truly bizarre ritual that an older companion introduced him to. The two of them would make weekly excursions to the cemetery. They would lie down for hours in open graves while listening to sermons played on the car’s cassette player that warned of the terrible fate that lay in store for the apostates and the unbelievers.
There remained something in young Zahi that helped rescue him. There was still deep within him a love of music and of poetry. Jealousies and suspicions played a part, too, in his break with the group that came when he was twenty. Younger boys had been drawn to him, and others in the jamaa were circulating rumors about sexual relations with the youngsters. He had grown weary of the bigotry, he says. He enrolled in university, in Arabic literature. He rediscovered his love of the poem and the song and of sports. His family bought him a car, and this gave him freedom to roam about and to be on his own. On the way to the world out of the zealot’s grip, he was given a savage beating by members of the jamaa who had lured him into the mountains on the promise of a “dialogue” with his former companions.
Zahi Al-Jabali heals. He graduates from the university, becomes a teacher, publishes his poetry, comes into fame in Abha and its surroundings. In the spring of 2001, he publishes an essay on the beauty of music, and on the follies of those who keep it out of the educational curriculum. Thirty religious scholars ask the preeminent leader of the tribe to which Abdullah belongs to bring the “apostate” to heel. His own father denounces him; the father is told that his son is declaring halal what is proscribed by God—and in a secular newspaper. Before a larger assembly, an influential cleric beseeches God to bring about Zahi’s ruin, to “freeze the blood in his veins,” to make of him, and of secularists like him, a lesson in this world and in the hereafter, to make widows of their wives and orphans of their children. Help comes from the emir of the province, a poet, painter, and patron of culture and of the arts. For two whole months, the narrator tells us, he went around with a pistol in the pocket of his thoub.
It is Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. He couldn’t believe it, he couldn’t believe that young men from his country—and Ahmed Alnami from his hometown, a face familiar to him—had pulled off that catastrophic deed. Now he wanted vindication, an apology, an acknowledgment that he had spotted the troubles early. It was a “bitter victory,” he adds. “My country was seared by a fire she had not bothered to put out before.” The small world he knew, the training camps he had been part of a few years earlier, had become part of a big story.