On May 12, 2003, the chickens came home to roost. Three bombings in Riyadh brought home the wages of religious radicalism. Three housing compounds were targeted by terrorists. Thirty-four people were killed, including eight Americans, two Britons, and nine of the assailants. It was immediately proclaimed that this was Saudi Arabia’s 9/11. The Saudis had held themselves apart from the terror that had struck American shores. They had insisted that 9/11 was no affair of theirs. They had explained away the “death pilots” and the Saudi prisoners at Guantánamo. No less than twenty-five percent of these prisoners, rounded up in the aftermath of the terror attacks, came from Saudi Arabia. But there had been a closing of the ranks. Those were “innocent boys” who had been unjustly imprisoned, idealistic and pious youth who had made their way to Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight for the faith: philanthropic and charitable work had taken them to these lands, and a blindly indiscriminate American policy had rounded them up as part of a campaign to smear Arabia’s reputation. Now, with the attacks on Riyadh, there was a sudden break with the official line. This was not remote Bali (the scene of the bombing some seven months earlier which had targeted Western, principally Australian, visitors to that once tranquil paradise) or a tourist site in Egypt, nor was this an assault in infidel lands.
A different sentiment now took hold. The secretive realm that had insisted on its innocence was willing to do things it had hitherto resisted. The U.S. Treasury Department had been pressing for access to the country’s banking system and to the workings of Saudi charities. It had been difficult to enlist Saudi help. In their fashion, in 2002, the Saudis had promised that a commission would be established and given the powers of oversight of the country’s charities. Those charities numbered in the hundreds, by one estimate close to five hundred organizations of varying reach and size. Nothing had come of that commission. Now a new pledge was made that the Saudis would do better. A team of Internal Revenue Service and FBI agents, it was announced, would be stationed in Arabia. The country’s finances would be made more transparent and the charities would be directed to focus their work, and their wealth, on the problems of Arabia itself. There was growing poverty in the realm, and the rulers were now willing to own up to this fact.
Breaking with custom (and pride), the Crown Prince had begun to visit impoverished neighborhoods in the capital, accompanied by reporters, promising that “reform” and help were on the way. The self-image of a prosperous country at peace had to be set aside. As the state hunted down the conspirators, the preachers went to work, and a full-scale assault began against the ghulat (extremists). The very nature of the faith was being redefined away from excessive zeal and from the jihadists.
Within days of the Riyadh attacks, forty-seven members of the country’s ulama issued what must be reckoned as one of the principal political-religious documents to come out of that country. The signatories included establishment, quietist jurists, but there were also dissidents familiar to us by now: there were the firebrands Safar al-Hawali and Salman al-Awda; there was Ayid al-Qarni, now rehabilitated and playing by the rules. There was an older scholar who had straddled the fence between the rulers and the religious radicals: Abdullah ibn Jibrin, now retired but still a figure of genuine standing among the diehards and the purists. The religious-scholarly establishment was rallying around the regime. A compromise had been struck and a price had been paid for the consent and the support of the radicals.
The text opens with an unequivocal denunciation of the deed: “We condemn the bombings which took place in Riyadh, and we affirm their impermissibility and state that they are counter to the sharia. Any discussion of this deed must proceed from a candid denunciation of it, with no ambiguity whatsoever in the face of a deed at once shameful and prohibited. This country is a refuge for Muslims. The jurists have decreed that the blood of anyone who entered a Muslim country and was granted a pledge of safety cannot be shed, even if that pledge was in violation of the principles of the sharia.” Eight Americans had been killed in these attacks; the jurists had ruled that the presence of those Americans in the land had been at the invitation of the rulers. The larger question of whether “infidels” should enter Arabia was sidestepped. It was enough for now to acknowledge that foreigners who had been given safe passage by the authorities had been betrayed and murdered.
A number of the signatories had given explicit fatwas in support of jihad; now the jihad had to be theologically fenced in. Jihad is a duty, to be sure, these men ruled. But it has its “principles and conditions.” The resort to bloodletting is particularly strict in “Quranic texts, in the hadiths (sayings) of the Prophet, and in the severe punishment held out to those who violate its strictures and commit aggression.” The signatories found ample rulings in the Quran to sustain their view. There was God’s word: “He who kills a believer by design shall burn in hell forever. He shall incur the wrath of Allah, who will lay His curse on him and prepare him for a woeful scourge” (4:93). And there was another verse cited by the jurists: “Whoever killed a human being, except as a punishment for murder or wicked crimes, shall be looked upon as though he had killed all human-kind; and that whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as though he had saved all mankind” (5:32).
This was a land of many nationalities and faiths and creeds and sects, these men of religion observed. The “enemies of Islam” were keeping watch; they were eager to wage war against the Muslims, and this sort of sedition was likely to give them the perfect cover. “Nor do good intentions acquit wrongful deeds. Love of religion cannot take precedence over the sharia.” In other words, the zeal that had once acquitted young jihadists was no longer acceptable. The jurists looked to the sira (conduct) of the Prophet Muhammad and found ample precedent for prudence. After quitting his native Mecca, the Prophet had bided his time in Medina: it had taken him thirteen years, these men noted, to authorize a military campaign against Mecca. Faith can’t be unbridled; the world imposes its limits and restraints. And this Saudi realm, in particular, was to be off limits to those who would commit violent deeds. “We note the danger of bringing war and terror inside this country, for it is the fortress of Islam and the home of its revelation. We ask that the ulama, and the seekers of religious knowledge, should be aware of this, and should speak out against the sowing of dissension.”
The order, and the rulers, had been given their due. But the signatories still saved some of their fire and ammunition for the United States. “It is important that this episode not be used by the Americans as a pretext for their own designs against the educational system, and the judiciary, and the laws of this land.” The educational system in the country was sound; it had schooled all the literate people in the country “without spreading evil.” It was in the nature of the Bush administration and of “some extremists in its ranks” to try to use this crisis to penetrate Saudi Arabia, to shut down its charities and religious institutions. A line had to be drawn for the Americans, and for those secularists within, who might have their own schemes and accounts to settle. Terror was one thing, but the integrity of the educational system of the country was beyond reproach and beyond the scrutiny of outsiders. Opposition to America, these men opined, was not the “monopoly of a religious country like Saudi Arabia, or of other Arab and Islamic lands. Hatred for the evil policies of America is growing in all corners of the world. There is an additional hatred in the Muslim world only because the Islamic world is targeted in its religion and culture and wealth and way of life, as it is easy to see.”
There was a manhunt for the plotters who planned the bombings and the preachers who had lent their support. Nineteen men were being sought by the authorities. The terrorists were now beyond the pale. This realm that dreads naming and acknowledging troubles now had to admit that there were indeed “sleeper cells” in that country, that some of its own people had taken up arms against the state. There were armed clashes in Riyadh, terrorists with rocket launchers slugging it out with the forces of order in the capital. There were clashes in the holy city of Mecca between the police and armed bands of zealots. Denial had run its course, and the theological arguments against the terrorists grew increasingly emphatic. “He who would brand another man an unbeliever will have his own words rebound on him,” the head of the judiciary in the country, Shaykh Saleh al-Luhaidan, declared in mid-August 2003. It is important to think well of one’s fellow man, “to forgive those who err.” There were people out there, he warned, claiming the mantle of religious scholarship and authority without possessing the qualifications and the temperament to do so. There were “external and internal conspiracies” that would divide “the flock from its leaders” and the “Muslim community from its ulama.”
It was a moment of peril: order and obedience were now uppermost. In the same vein, one of the luminaries of the religious establishment, the minister of Islamic affairs, openly said that “excess in religious piety” was a form of sedition, a pernicious attack on the faith. A circle had been closed, a return to Wahhabism’s emphasis on the need for the ruler’s protection and the knowledge that religious faith must be anchored in a public order and a ruler’s embrace. Within three months of the May 12 attacks, the state owned up to the extent of religious radicalism. It announced that seven hundred clerics had been removed from their posts and more than a thousand preachers had been banned from delivering sermons and leading prayers in the mosques. The radicalism had drawn on a vast apparatus and had become entrenched in the religious and educational system in the land.
Only a handful of religious scholars remained outside this consensus. Three of them in particular held on: Nasser al-Fahd, a young religious scholar from Riyadh, a diehard with uncompromising views who had served a three-year prison sentence in the mid-1990s; Ali al-Khudeir, also of Riyadh, who had issued a fatwa authorizing war under “the banner of the tyrant Saddam Hussein against the Crusaders”; and a Kuwaiti-born preacher, Ahmad al-Khalidi, who had left his country in his mid-twenties in 1993 to make his home in Saudi Arabia. For these three, the battle continued. They issued a common fatwa in support of the nineteen fugitives implicated in the Riyadh bombings. They declared them mujahidin, holy warriors. They declared impermissible, haram, “informing on them, or harming their reputation, or rendering any form of assistance against them.” Furthermore, they declared kafir anyone who aided the war against the Taliban. And they wrote off as a form of heresy the work of Muslims who engaged in science, medicine, or mathematics. In more tranquil times, the opinions of these extremists may have been ignored. But it was a time of peril, and the rulers were determined to show that no mercy would be granted those who endanger the realm. The three men were sent to prison.
In June 2003, a young merchant in his late thirties, educated at one of the great private universities in the United States, wrote to me an anguished letter about the state of U.S.-Saudi relations. A month earlier, I had talked with him late into the night in Jeddah about the mood of his country, and about the spreading influence of this new Islamism and the “orphaned” modernity. He was to return to these themes in his letter: “I see a great burden to fix U.S.-Arab relations in turbulent times—I feel there is a voice not being heard today in America. There are people here genuinely keen to see Arabia move into the modern age—but require an interested audience (the United States) and, more importantly, the vehicle to get there. I owe it to the country that provided me the finest education and worldly experience to shed light and perspectives on this current conflict lest we do disservice to that old bond.”
A year or so earlier, this young man and his Jeddah-born (and also American-educated) wife had been kind enough to receive me and my wife in their home. They had invited another couple of the same generation and outlook. And we were joined, as well, by a brother of our host, a refined man, a psychologist with a deep interest in Christianity and in the educational theories of John Dewey. It was the kind of evening you travel for. There was candor, a lack of any dissimulation. And like practically all evenings there, it lasted well into the night. There was to the evening a touch of the Levant: it was the town (Jeddah) and this class of young people formed by their own land, but by America and by Beirut as well. Our hostess was a young woman of flair and assertiveness. She was a woman of this city, she wanted it known. Her university education had taken her to the United States. But she had been made ready for that passage by her early schooling in Jeddah. That was a different era, she lamented, and more open. There was less emphasis on religion and religious subjects, and there was in the land a genuine desire for the modern world, a curiosity about the movies of Egypt and about the literary output of Beirut, about the pop culture of America.
All this has been wrecked, she said. She had two young boys of school age; she had pulled all sorts of strings to get them into a private international school. She dreaded the prospect of their return to the government school system and the knowledge that would be transmitted to them were they to be forced back into that system. She spoke nostalgically of the Jeddah of her childhood and of the promise of change in the air. There had been realism, she insisted. It was known that the country placed its own limits on social and cultural mores, but there was optimism and a sense that the modern push had become irresistible. Now the country had taken a different turn, and this immensely articulate woman dreaded what lay in store for them all.
A sense of superiority, she noted, had come with this piety: an insistence that this land and its ways were infallible, that other lands and peoples were fallen or depraved or lived in error. It was new, this feeling of perfection. Again she returned to a comparison with what had been the norm in the years of her schooling. She and her peers had not been given this sense of separateness from other nations and other religions. Now that belief had been sharpened, and driven into the young. There were these perfectly respectable jurists preaching the folly of traveling to foreign lands and mixing with infidels, calling on Saudis to hold themselves aloof from other nations. There was Arabia’s true way and there were the ways of others. Jews and Nasranis (Christians) and even Muslim secularists were to be avoided. One could not greet them, share their joys and sorrows.
For all this despondency, these men and women were not about to pack up and leave. One couple had quit the country for Europe, only to return. They had means and the skills for a good life in London, but they could not conceive of a normal life beyond their extended families. Moreover, they had done well by the system and they had no trouble admitting it. What was discernible among them was a strong sense of political disinheritance. They had made their peace with their political lot—they couldn’t rule, they would always come into the courts of princes reconciled to the hegemony of Al Saud. Once upon a time, in the 1950s and 1960s, their fathers and skilled men like them had had a sense of place: their skills and modern education had given them real functions in the building of a more modern Arabia. They had been favored by the dynasty and they could see the possibility of breaking the back of the religious obscurantism. But the new religious breed now had the upper hand, and those zealots had no regard for what had been accomplished in the past.
It was not so much the prospect of revolution that troubled young people of skills and education, but the grinding down of the modern edifice, the drawing down of the country’s assets, the infrastructure and the modern will overwhelmed by the numbers and by the anger all around. In their despairing vision, the state would no longer defend modern ideals and practice; it would continue to give ground to the religious reactionaries. They and their like would have no choice but to submit to the logic of things or to pack up and leave.
I could not see this group of men and women, and their peers, winning a test of wills against the vigilantes and the zealots. They knew their political and cultural weakness. The erosion of the Saudi-American relationship was a nightmare to this class. So long as the shadow of American power hung over the land, they felt a measure of security and confidence. America had helped midwife the modern Saudi world. Saudi Arabia had slipped into the American orbit. The American presence had given my hosts, and thousands like them, a vital connection, perhaps some political shelter and cover.
The American presence was under attack; the American embassy in the Diplomatic Quarter in Riyadh—it was once in the relative tumult of Jeddah, along with other embassies—was a gilded cage in a silent, remote part of the city. The police kept track of the comings and goings of Saudis who ventured into the Diplomatic Quarter, and the Americans who broke out of compound life were few and far between. There was only so much a foreign power could see and could really know about a country with a fierce sense of privacy and reserve.
America could not win the battle of modernity for the besieged liberals. The despairing note of my young Saudi correspondent who had written to me about the state of U.S.-Saudi relations had something of that desire written into it. At any rate, the royals monopolized that strategic relationship. It was they who granted military facilities and air space for the Americans, and oil discounts. In the main, it was they who knew the details and the subtleties of that relationship. There was little traffic between these two societies that escaped the control of the Saudi state.
Nor was this liberal class itself immune to the call of anti-Americanism. Our hostess in Jeddah gave away the dilemma of the modernists. At one point in our discussions, she sensed that I had wanted some acknowledgment of what had befallen America in the terror attacks of 9/11. She would not provide it. “We have no power in this land,” she said, “and where there is no power, there is no responsibility.” In this young woman’s reckoning, the American presence and its terms were negotiated by the House of Saud. She was not a party to the terms of that encounter. She knew that young men from her country had flown into the Twin Towers in New York and had crashed into the Pentagon; she was not one to partake of the nihilistic denial given voice by large numbers of Arabs who refused to accept that nineteen young men of their own had committed those horrific crimes. She knew that a wealthy heir to a construction dynasty from her own city, Osama bin Laden, five or six years older than herself and her husband, was at the center of a terror campaign of global reach. But the political powerlessness offered her a measure of absolution from all that.
These modernists knew the cunning of the diehards and the chameleon ways of their sympathizers. And in the privacy of their intimate gatherings, they could, with reasonable confidence, name the businessmen who hedged their bets by feeding and financing the forces of terror. They themselves were paying dearly for the spreading influence of this cultural radicalism. But their ways were what they were, and the anti-Americanism was the reflexive response of otherwise intelligent and educated people who bristled at their own political weakness but could do nothing about it. They claimed that they savored the American message but hacked away at the messenger.
This was a battle this class could not win. They could never be more anti-American than the diehards; they could not outdo the militant traditionalists in their aversion to Israel and Zionism. The temptations of anti-Americanism, and anti-modernism, were too strong to resist. These modernists could not let well enough alone. They hailed the suicide bombers in Jerusalem without realizing that the ruin would spread from the streets of Jerusalem to the compounds of Riyadh.
It was only when the terror hit Riyadh in May 2003 that a handful of brave commentators drew a line, and drew the proper conclusions: if you bless violence and its perpetrators in Jerusalem and New York, they are sure to turn up at your doorstep in Riyadh. Here is an enlightened and brave columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, once a columnist for the Jeddah-based Arab News, making the same point forthrightly in the Arabic daily Al-Watan after the terror attacks in Riyadh: “We have made the same mistake that many cultures do when they tolerate fanatics. Now, thank God, we have awakened.” More directly still, the editors of Arab News were able to see after the attacks of Riyadh the price of winking at terror abroad: “Those who gloat over September 11, those who happily support suicide bombings in Israel and Russia, those who consider non-Muslims less human than Muslims and therefore somehow disposable, all bear part of the responsibility for the Riyadh bombs. We cannot say that suicide bombings in Israel and Russia are acceptable but not in Saudi Arabia. The cult of suicide bombings has to stop.”
For this culture and its permissible ways of expression, for its tendency to close ranks and to leave things unnamed and unacknowledged, this introspection was a remarkable break with routine. The specter of “Talibanization” threatened the society, yet another journalist of Al-Watan wrote:
Though few would publicly admit it, Saudis have become hostages of the backward agenda of Bin Laden supporters who in effect have hijacked our society. Progressive voices have been silenced. The religious and social oppression of women means that half the population is forced to stay behind locked doors. Members of the religious police harass us in public spaces, and sometimes even in our homes, about our clothing and haircuts. A civil war is raging, one we have long pretended does not exist.
The writer, Sulaiman al-Hattlan, was speaking for a wing of the society that had seen the steady erosion of its rights. The modernists had found a measure of daring. (There were limits to the new openness. Khashoggi lost his editorship of Al-Watan over what was deemed an unacceptable cartoon: a sketch of a member of the religious police with a belt of explosives, and the word fatwa scrawled across the belt. The senior clerics in the realm weighed in, and the man was pushed out from the helm of a paper which he had turned into a relatively open, and brave, forum of expression. After a decent interval, he returned to his job.)
In truth, the modernists had been sowing the wind. In April 2002, Ghazi Algosaibi, a luminary of this class of Saudis, provoked a storm in the United Kingdom, where he was serving as his country’s ambassador. He published a poem in the London-based Al Hayat in praise of a Palestinian bomber, a young woman who had killed herself and two Israelis at a supermarket in Jerusalem a fortnight earlier. Algosaibi was a self-styled poet and gadfly who had held several cabinet portfolios and an earlier ambassadorial appointment to Bahrain. He was heir and beneficiary to the best his country had to offer. Born in 1940, he hailed from an influential merchant family from Bahrain. An island people with exposure to the wider world, the Algosaibis had been agents and representatives of the legendary Ibn Saud in the years of conquest and royal consolidation. When Arabia was still battling its way through poverty and illiteracy, Ghazi Algosaibi had been given the chance to study in Cairo, then Southern California, capping it with a doctorate from England.
Algosaibi handed his country’s diplomacy a full-blown crisis with his elegy to the young bomber, Ayat Akhras. He praised her as a “bride of loftiness,” and saw in her cruel and violent end a contrast to the impotence and supplication of the Arabs. To her and other suicide bombers, he paid tribute, acknowledging a debt owed them:
May God and the prophets and the holy men be my witnesses, you are martyrs
You died to honor God’s word in lands where the dearest are prisoners
You committed suicide? It is we who committed suicide in a world of the living dead
We have grown so impotent until impotence grew weary of us
We have wept until weeping disdained us
We pleaded and complained to the tyrant of the White House whose heart was full of blackness
Tell Ayat, the bride of loftiness, that when the mighty men, the pride of my people, grow impotent, a beautiful woman embraces death with a smile while the leaders are running away from death
Doors of heaven are open for her
Tell those who compose fatwas to tread carefully, perhaps there are fatwas that the heavens disdain
When jihad calls, the ink will go silent, and the jurists
There is no plebiscite of fatwas when jihad calls, on the day of jihad it is blood that calls.
There were religious scholars and jurists who had taken a jaundiced view of suicide operations; indeed, a high-ranking member of the Saudi religious establishment had been forthright enough to say that such suicide/homicide operations were in violation of Islam. Algosaibi had upped the ante—he had outflanked those who render fatwas and religious edicts; the man of diplomacy and of the state exalting blood and terror. This was chic, and among the Arabs of London it had an audience. The ambassador of a country within the American orbit writing of a White House with a black heart and a tyrannical master—the crowd loved this, and Algosaibi was not above catering to the dark instincts of the crowd.
Algosaibi had found the perfect vehicle. The London-based Al Hayat, owned by a member of the House of Saud, Khalid bin Sultan (a son of the defense minister), was staffed by Arab nationalists; the Arab intellectuals in Europe and the United States loved it and filled its columns with the pieties and fidelities of Arab nationalism. Algosaibi was on favorable terrain, and he gloried in the attention. He could never fully grasp and accept that a price is paid for this fling with extremism: the fire would rage, he was sure, in Jerusalem and would never engulf his land. “It is poetry,” said the assistant editor of Al Hayat, Ghassan Charbel, in praise of the poem. “There is strong feeling in the Arab street that is reflected in this piece.” The street rules, and its furies exempt and ennoble even all ruinous and terrible things.
In the months that followed, Algosaibi would be relieved of his diplomatic post and dispatched back home. But he came back to a cabinet appointment as minister of water. A second appointment, as minister of labor, would follow. To judge by an account that surfaced in the press in mid-January 2003, Algosaibi was unrepentant, and an educated audience at a cultural festival in Riyadh gave him a hero’s welcome. “Don’t applaud,” he quipped, “lest they expel you from London.” For this audience and this speaker, the morality—let alone the practicality—of suicide bombings was not to be questioned.
In a twist of irony, a group of Palestinian intellectuals in the West Bank and Gaza, led by Sari Nusseibah, scion of a noted Jerusalem family and a political philosopher and educator of genuine moderation, had opened a searching debate about the entire phenomenon of suicide/homicide bombings and about the damage they had done to Palestinian political culture. It was easier for Algosaibi. He was feeding distant fires. That very evening in Riyadh, he was still exalting the young boys and young women of terror redeeming the Arab world with a “river of blood.” He called up the memory of the great Muslim warrior Saladin: were that warrior to turn up amidst the Arabs again, he would throw himself into his grave covered up with shame. “It is my dream to cut down the dove of peace and to replace it with a falcon that would slay this fear.”
There is no record of what Algosaibi said four months later when the terrors hit Riyadh, whether he offered a view of what had descended on the capital of his country. Given his love of the limelight, and the genuine sense of shock that overtook the Saudi political elite and public, it would be safe to assume that he must have had some choice words for the plotters and those who aided and abetted them. It would be safe to assume, as well, that the man could see no connection between the terror he hailed in Jerusalem and the terror he condemned in Arabia. It was enough for him to rail against the Americans and to proclaim a holy struggle against Israel. The age of restraint and introspection had not dawned. An elite that would turn away from the temptations of extremism had not yet stepped forth to accept the possibilities, and the discipline, of modernity.
The terror would not subside: the stubborn assertion that there were no “sleeper cells” in the country would be shown for the idle and self-defeating boast it was. On the night of November 8–9, 2003, during the holy month of Ramadan, the terrorists struck again. This time, they chose a housing compound in Riyadh within proximity of the Diplomatic Quarter. This compound’s residents were almost entirely Arab and Muslim expatriates, Lebanese and Egyptians in particular. Gunmen had struck first, then a booby-trapped car full of explosives was driven into the compound: nearly 120 people were wounded in the attack, and seventeen were killed. The minister of interior, the monarch’s full brother, Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz, turned up at the scene. He vowed swift retribution against the perpetrators.
To judge by the regime’s public response, and by the way the Saudi press covered the episode, a choice was made by the custodians of the regime to take to the airwaves and to work with what the terrorists had wrought. Gone was the old formula of ducking for cover and hoping that the troubles would go away. There were the grim tales of what had befallen simple Egyptian families; there was the story of a bride from Lebanon cut down in her prime. There were “human interest” stories about the men of the police so devoted to the work of rescue that residents of the compound brought them their Ramadan pre-dawn meal, because the police had worked through the night. Here was proof, the men of the regime said over and over again, that Saudi Arabia was stalked by indiscriminate terror that struck Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
By now we were in a familiar world: the theological and political arguments were an echo of what had played out in the aftermath of the terror attacks that had hit Riyadh six months earlier. There was a new twist to the story, though, that laid bare the play between the religious diehards and the secularists. The radical preacher Safar al-Hawali came forth with an odd and transparent offer. He would mediate between the regime and the terrorists, he said. He would help cap the volcano and use his authority with the militants. The price, he let it be known, would be deeper concessions to the religious current, a rollback of some of the reform measures that had been introduced into public life, an olive branch to the militants, the promise from the authorities of good treatment for those on the run. In other words, there would be peace for the authorities in return for a bargain between the rulers and the Islamists.
Hawali’s message was not subtle; the terror had sprung from the “deviations” and the compromises and the backsliding in public life. Only a return to the rigors of the faith, and a rupture of the alliances with “infidel” powers, would bring about social peace and the acquiescence of the disaffected youth. There was a diplomatic initiative that the Crown Prince had put forth in 2002 for accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians: it was moribund, but it would have to be scrapped nonetheless. There was girls’ education: it once had been a monopoly of the religious enforcers but had been taken away from them; the old system would have to be restored. Some committees were looking into the textbooks and trying to strip them of passages of intolerance of Westerners and other Muslim (non-Wahhabi) sects; those committees would have to be disbanded. “Peace” could be bought at the price of greater social and cultural retrogression.
Those eager to keep the religious reactionaries at bay could only marvel at Hawali’s proposal. “Saudis are among the most religiously devout and observant in the world,” observed Mashari al-Thaydi, a writer for Asharq Al-Awsat and a journalist noted for his courage in the face of the obscurantists. “They are in no need of those who would call for more rigorous enforcement of the faith. What the Saudis need is a full-scale plan for social development and political and economic reform.” It is their life in this world, he added, that required repair. Those Islamists had wanted nothing less than a monopoly over the domestic and foreign policy choices of the country.
For the rulers, the choice was starkly put. As they hunted down the terrorists, they gave an initial response to Hawali and his like: there would be no dialogue with the terrorists. The answer would come, they said, from “the rifle and the sword.” They were sure, it seemed, that a society that had seen and experienced the wages of terror would grant them a warrant for a wider crackdown on a radicalism more deeply entrenched in their land than they had been willing to admit. This religious radicalism was blowing through a country possessed of considerable wealth. These religious agitators were not at work in the caves of Afghanistan, or the slums of Cairo and Karachi. Amid the second thoughts, one of the militants, Ali al-Khudeir, came forth with a declaration of repentance. Typically, this was the “new” religion, and its ways: the declaration was made in a television interview with one of the “born again” moderates, Ayid al-Qarni. Khudeir had been one of the holdouts; he had issued fatwas in favor of Saddam Hussein, he had ruled against informing on the terror cells in Arabia. In the debate in his country, his had been a particularly merciless voice: he had declared kuffar a number of Saudi intellectuals of secular leanings. He had been in error, Khudeir declared on Saudi state television. The terror attack in Riyadh some days earlier changed him, he said. He “wept” for the children and the women who had perished in that attack. Those who had done that deed had been carried away by excessive zeal.
He had done ideological battle against the state; that, too, was wrong: “The state is a Muslim state, its ulama are Muslims.” He had authorized attacks against “infidels” living in Arabia, but he would do so no more. Those in Arabia with valid permits granted them by the rulers were off limits: they were given a pledge of safety, and their “blood and property” are impermissible. There was no “apostasy” in Arabia, Khudeir now proclaimed. There was religious observance everywhere, all the obligations of Islam were fulfilled, and one can’t attribute apostasy to a society of this kind. Nor was it permissible, he added, to take up arms against the police, which he had authorized as well in another fatwa. “I now realize that the fatwa is wrong, and I completely disassociate myself from it…. The police and the men of the army are Muslims, and it is forbidden to war against them.”
The practice of the Islamists permits a measure of dissimulation in the face of adversity and difficult odds. There was no way of knowing whether Khudeir was sincere in what he said. He was, it should be noted, in prison when he made his statement of repentance. But his retreat was astounding for its repudiation of practically everything he had stood for. He no longer sought war with the Jews and the Christians, he said. If these people entered “the lands of Islam” for a legitimate goal, then war against them is prohibited, for there is in their presence a “benefit for the Muslims.” The jihad remains, Khudeir said, but only the powers that be, the ruler to be exact, can authorize it. Young men now seeking jihad in Iraq were advised to stay away from Iraq, for it had become a land of “sedition” and war.
Ayid al-Qarni became a Pied Piper of this new mood of repentance and reconciliation. In January 2004, with these media breakthroughs behind him, he now saw merit in the right of women to drive their cars. He hedged his bets: this was the best of a bad lot, he said, and his opinion should be taken as a statement of personal preference. On balance, he observed, were he to choose between a woman driving her own car or “being alone with a foreign driver,” he would take the first option. Were his own daughters and sisters to ask for this right, he would probably not grant it to them, he added, but it was important to take up this controversial public issue, to distinguish between “fundamental” and “marginal” things. For himself, he wanted it known that he was a man of “dialogue,” interested in raising new, urgent questions. “Saudi society,” he added, in a rare display of introspection, was a “hard society that only accepts the truth of a singular line of thinking. He who disagrees with us is deemed to be in error, while we are always and invariably, in our view, in the right. In this age, it is important to acknowledge that there are other opinions that have to be heard.”
Qarni’s days of freelancing were clearly behind him. He was a poster child now of the new “moderation.” There were jihadists on the run, and he issued a public appeal to them yet again to lay down their arms, to honor the obedience they owed to the authority of their elders and of the rulers. It was idle to go underground, he said; it was better to turn back to the “straight path” and to have faith in the mercy of those in authority. If zeal and good intentions and ignorance of the truths and strictures of the faith had led these militants astray, the door was open to those who would return to the fold.
Amid this critical time of trouble, in early January 2004, there was a big media spectacle staged by the authorities: Saudi television broadcast the taped confessions of twenty-nine people who had been rounded up by the police from the ranks of the armed militants. The names of the men were not released, nor were their faces shown on the television screen. The privacy given them was a display of the ruling order’s discretion, part of the social pact between the rulers and the families and clans from which these militants hailed. The officials of the Ministry of Interior who oversaw these confessions knew, of course, that the strategy carried with it the risk that the whole thing would be dismissed as a stage-managed affair. But that was a risk they were willing to take.
The penitent is always a witness to an orthodoxy’s self-image. In a society heavy with censorship and self-censorship, access to the airwaves is jealously guarded and a rebel’s testimony is intended to buttress the reigning truth. The theme underlined again and again by the official truth is that of innocence led astray, of “ignorance” of the “true religion” leading young men down the path to sedition and ruin. Here is “Terror Cell Member Number 1” on how the evildoers worked their will on the gullible:
They take advantage of the ignorance of the young, they give them hadiths and religious proofs and they twist these sources to their desires…. They come to you with strange utterances, tell you what to do. In return for what? In return for paradise, they said. This was the exchange, for the promise of paradise you had to use explosives in Saudi Arabia, slaughter this or that man or that particular king or attack the Americans. They told us that they wanted to build an Islamic state, and carry out the instructions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, of banishing the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula.
“Member Number 3” spoke of the incitement of recruiters who knew holy warfare and combat: “They brought me two men they called mujahidin who had been in Afghanistan. They told me about jihad and raids in Afghanistan, about the good merit earned by those who partake of jihad.”
The idea that the sedition was bred on foreign shores, away from the faith and the consensus of Arabia, is dear to the rulers and their allies in the scholarly-judicial establishment. And “Member Number 11” gave evidence of that contagion from foreign sources. “Imported fatwas were coming from outside, over the internet, urging combat and struggle against the tyrants, for to these preaching these foreign fatwas the Saudi government had become a tyranny.” The next testimonial, that of “Member Number 12,” is meant to convey the guile of the recruiters who begin with religious matters and then inevitably end up with political sedition. This is what he said of the man who had pulled him into the net: “When I met him he always talked about jihad and about coming to the aid of Muslims. He then took the number of my mobile telephone; he sent me messages about jihad. At the beginning he never talked about takfir (declaring others apostates) or about the impermissibility of modern sciences. After he saw my increasing receptivity to him, he began maligning the state. He ended up declaring it a state of unbelief and apostasy.”
For the custodians of religious and political power, the cure to all this sedition, this confusion in the realm, is of course a proper knowledge of the faith, deeper study of it. And “Member Number 26” confirms this reasoning: “Saudi youth is most easily reached and influenced by religion, and through the religious message. This is due to two factors: the dearth of religious knowledge in the Saudi street, and the fact that the ulama have not engaged in a proper confrontation with the sources of trouble.”
What begins with religion ends with politics: the target of all these religious messages, the rulers were keen to underline, is the order of the kingdom. “Member Number 27” makes the state’s case: “They only talk about the Saudi rulers; they all talk about the ulama of the Saudi state. All their effort is concentrated against the Saudi state.” God and God’s religion had been made a party to the naked ambitions of men, this man said. It had been a brush with disaster, and “Member Number 28” is relieved that the matter had ended the way it had: “I say praise be to Allah that we were arrested before we committed a crime or harmed the Muslims.”
The faith assaulted and the faith confirmed: the retrieval of the ground lost to the extremists was not an easy enterprise. The upheaval ignited by Juhayman al-Utaybi in 1979 had come full circle. It had been deemed prudent to give theocratic puritanism an unfettered run, and bureaucratic institutions to support it, and considerable treasure. Now, moderation was the way out, and obedience to those in the religious and political hierarchies, and mercy to outsiders who uphold rival truths. The new official stand against extremism carried with it an admission that the obscurantists and the diehards had fed at the trough, and that the state had indulged them.
Deliverance—a good measure of it—came in the most unexpected of ways. The escalating violence that hit the country in the critical period of 2003–5 tipped the scales against the militants. Terrorism frightened the Saudi population. It had come in steady, spectacular episodes after the first attack of May 23, 2003. Car bombs struck a residential compound in Riyadh in November of that year to brutal results. In the year that followed, there were attacks again in Riyadh against the security forces and in the city of Yanbo against Western expatriates. Vaunted symbols of the state—the Ministry of Interior itself—were not spared. The oil complex in the Eastern Province came under attack as well. Al Qaeda was on the ground in Arabia and had bet it all on armed confrontation with the state. This was a battle the militants could not win. They were no match for the state; they had presented the population with a stark choice, and mainstream society opted for the comfort and the shelter of what it knew and lived with. The forces of order drew from the full spectrum of Saudi society. The society had drawn back as it watched ordinary policemen being cut down by the militants. The state and its organs played this with skill. There were the life histories of many of those who fell in the line of duty. If a struggle played out between the state and the militants for the sympathies of the broad population, the state won it outright. Those who had winked at the violence now ducked for cover. The fear of the unknown and the untried had worked to the advantage of the dynasty. The violent struggle took some thirty months to settle. By December 2005 the matter had been settled: Al Qaeda’s Ayman Zawahiri conceded the fight in a message entitled “Impediments to Jihad.” The Al Qaeda franchise in Saudi Arabia, he admitted, had been dealt a devastating blow.
There was more to the victory of the dominant order than the superior firepower of the state. Oil wealth, the purse of the state, was no small factor in tranquilizing the realm. A stock market frenzy had seized Arabia; the state would draw down its debts, and in one of those capricious shifts that men are given to, the passions would subside and cold calculations of interest would carry the day. Where the state had taken in $63 billion in oil revenues in 2002, those would rise to $162 billion in 2005, to $203 billion in 2006. (When the oil treasure was counted, the Saudi state had taken in something in the range of $1.1 trillion between 2003 and 2008.) Where the debt as percentage of gross domestic product was a staggering 120 percent in 1999, it would be drawn down to 27 percent in 2006, and to a paltry 5 percent in 2007. Infusions of wealth are of course double-edged: they can undo political orders or deliver them from troubles. This Saudi windfall was a great boon to the state. That innate sense of desert practicality and acquisitiveness prevailed. The Saudis had played a devastating role in the events of 9/11, and in the wars and the vigilance that followed. In one of those cruel ironies of history, they would sit on the sidelines as American power engaged in great taxing struggles in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.
The Saudi state did an about-face on the American war in Iraq. The Saudi rulers had given the war a green light; in their fashion, they had waited for the Bush administration to make the final decision to go to war before they themselves committed to this endeavor. In the second of his four books on the history of the Bush presidency, Plan of Attack (2004), Bob Woodward tells that the long-time Saudi envoy to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, had been briefed about Washington’s plans for the war four months before its onset. He had given his government’s blessing but said that in return for Saudi help, the House of Saud expected their country to “play a major role in shaping the regime that will emerge not only in Iraq but in the region after the fall of Saddam Hussein.” There was no love lost in Riyadh for the Iraqi despot; if Washington had finally decided, after more than a decade of paralysis, to be rid of him, the House of Saud was ready to ride with the Americans.
But this ride would have to be by Saudi terms: it was discreet and secretive, war had to be an option of last resort, and the door would be left open for Saddam Hussein to take his looted wealth, and his family, to a comfortable exile. In truth, the Saudis wanted a change of regime in Baghdad that would retain Sunni primacy. They did not possess the powers of prophecy; the kind of upheaval that would play out in Iraq was not foreseen by them, or by the war planners in Washington. The war would beget an Iraq altered beyond recognition. The Shi’a of Iraq, quiescent for a millennium, would rise from a long slumber. A community of lament and historical passivity rose to stake a claim to its country. Neither the Americans nor the Saudis had anticipated the rise of this new Iraq. The influence the Saudis sought in Iraq could not be had in a country in the grip of a bitter war. The Sunnis of Iraq refused to reconcile themselves to their loss of dominion; they ignited a war, a terrible season of slaughter, and they lost. Saudi Arabia could not reverse the outcome in Iraq; no Saudi (or Egyptian or Jordanian) cavalry was to ride to the rescue of the Sunnis.
The balance of power in the Persian Gulf had been altered, and room had to be made for a Shi’a-led government in Baghdad. This was a verdict the Saudis were unwilling to accept. They were to do some revisionism of their own. The war they had supported would now be branded a great strategic blunder. Fittingly, the same historical material reported by Bob Woodward confirms the change in the House of Saud’s sense of this American project in Iraq. By the time of the events in Woodward’s fourth volume, The War Within (2008), the old green light given the war was forgotten, and Abdullah, now monarch in his own right, had become a bitter foe of what the war had wrought. It is April 2006, a time of great difficulty in Iraq; an American diplomat, David Satterfield, is dispatched to Riyadh to meet with the Saudi ruler. The king has no patience for the briefing: the Americans, he says, had handed “Iraq to Iran on a golden platter. You have allowed the Persians, the Safavids, to take over Iraq.” The Safavids, the dynasty that brought Shi’ism to Iran in the early years of the sixteenth century, were gone and forgotten, but this was the label flung in the face of the Iraqi Shi’ites by their Sunni detractors, and such was the dominant worldview in Saudi Arabia. “I warned you about this,” says the king. “I warned the president, the vice president, but your ears were blocked. I have no interest in discussing this further.”
The Saudis could protest that the “execution” of the war was not to their liking; they could, alongside so many others, maintain that the conduct of the war had shown enormous ineptitude. But their objections were rooted in the very Wahhabi creed itself. A sect of outsiders had arisen in Iraq; their culture reeked of rituals the Saudis loathed, indeed banned in their own country. Arabia was possessed of a healthy measure of xenophobia, an unease with difference. Iraq tested—and pushed at—that Wahhabi unease with “the other.” In their outrage that this American war begot a radical new polity in Iraq, the Saudi rulers were at one with their public and with the religious scholars of the realm. It would be easy for them to rewrite the history of that war and to feign that they had nothing to do with this project of American folly. The skies over Iraq had been monitored from the Prince Sultan airbase, and it was from that base that the air campaign against Saddam Hussein had been launched. But the American forces and crews had withdrawn by August 2003. By then the costs of an open alliance with the Pax Americana had risen. This was quite early in the Iraq war, and the years would only sharpen the Saudi unease with America’s work in Iraq. Colonel James Moschgat of the 363rd Air Expeditionary Wing had given the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the airbase a soldier’s retrospect. “The mission thrived and prospered here, and I believe our legacy will live on. It’s bittersweet, but it’s time to go” (New York Times, September 22, 2003). The commander had been generous, but he was right to assert that an era had come to an end. If nothing else, the Saudis are consummate observers of power: the authority of the Bush administration was draining at home, opposition to the Iraq war had taken hold in Europe, and that fabled “Arab street” (read: the Sunni street) had declared this war nothing less than a colonial assault on an Arab land. It was the better part of wisdom to duck for cover and go with the crowd.
An Iranian bid for power was unfolding in the region, and the Saudis could not grant the Iraqi Shi’a the benefit of the doubt; they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that this community of Shi’a Arabs could keep Iran at bay. The new political class in Iraq would give it a try. One of the shrewdest of Iraqi leaders, Shaykh Humam Hamoudi, a cleric-politician from the leadership of the Supreme Council and a parliamentarian with pedigree and education, narrated for me the details of a meeting he had with the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz (a half-brother of the king). Hamoudi sought to reassure his Saudi interlocutor that Iraq’s leaders were keen on preserving their independence in the face of Iran’s ambitions. He told Muqrin that a Shi’a-led government in Baghdad would make a better neighbor for Saudi Arabia than had been the case under Saddam Hussein. Saddam had been overbearing, it had been a nightmare for Saudi Arabia to keep him at arm’s length. He had extorted money, he had invaded Kuwait, and he had tormented and bullied his neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf in the name of militant Arab nationalism. A Shi’a-led government, Hamoudi argued, would be content to live and let live, it would make the better neighbor if only because it would always understand its “differentness” from the Sunni Arab states around it. The argument was subtle, but it did not carry the day. By early 2008, other Arab governments at odds with the order in Iraq—the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, even Syria’s radical rulers—would signal in word or deed, by visits to Iraq, that they had accepted the new verdict in Baghdad. The Saudis stood apart, their suspicion of this new polity ran deep.
The rulers and the clerics did not have the play on Iraq all to themselves. There were the jihadists, predominantly young Saudis eager and willing to make their way to Iraq. A trove of documents and computers captured by the American military in a desert camp near Sinjar, by the border with Syria, in September 2007 laid bare the role of the Saudi jihadists in Iraq’s mayhem. Out of 700 foreign fighters who crossed into Iraq in the preceding year, 305 were Saudis. (The Libyans ranked second, their distant country a veritable prison in need of repair; charity should have begun at home, but it was easier to venture to Iraq in search of redemption and heroism.) The steady propaganda campaign against Iraq had put the neighboring country beyond the pale, and young militants could be forgiven the thought that “holy” war in Iraq was God’s work.
The Saudi jihadists came in two distinct categories: muqatils (fighters) and intiharis (suicidals). This was a closer field of battle, geographically and linguistically, than Afghanistan, the culture nearly identical to their own. Wahhabi raiders had sacked Shi’a holy cities in Iraq in times past, and the new warriors could reenact the deeds of their righteous ancestors. A Saudi jihadist making his way to the safe houses of Anbar Province or Baghdad could be forgiven the thought that he was doing God’s work in Iraq. All around him the media were saturated with nothing but enmity toward the Americans in Iraq and toward the rafida (the Shi’a heretics) coming into a new sense of power in Baghdad.
The biographical sketches of these fighters show younger Saudis drawn from mainstream society—former members of the National Guard, a muezzin (a man who calls the believers to prayer), a student of the Arabic language, a lawyer, a licensed electrician, a teacher, a physical trainer, a university student, a bank clerk, etc. Geographically, these fighters were representative as well: forty-five had come from Riyadh, thirty-eight from Mecca, twenty from Buraida and its surroundings, thirteen from Jeddah, twelve from Medina. There was wealth in the realm, and the Saudis came with respectable sums of money. Some had brought their own money, more had carried funds raised for them in local mosques. The Syrian “contractors” and middlemen who led the jihadists to the border with Iraq helped themselves to a good share of that money—no zeal for the Syrians, just an opportunity to fleece these gullible men traveling into deadly territory. A student from Mecca brought with him 5,190 Saudi riyals; the Syrians helped themselves to all of it. A lawyer from Riyadh brought with him 10,000 riyals; the middlemen kept half of it. A teacher from Riyadh brought with him a staggering sum, 22,300 euros. He handed “some money,” he said, to the Syrians, exactly how much he did not say. Nadi Marzuq Khalaf of Riyadh, twenty-four years of age, brought with him 350 riyals and 10,000 Syrian liras. The Syrians took “everything by force,” he said, “they demanded it.” A fighter from Riyadh by the name of Khalid Muttaire brought with him a “pack and a half”—$1,500. His Syrian handlers took a pack and a half, they “asked me for it.” The story repeats: the muezzin who brought with him 90,000 riyals said the Syrians took 80,000, and two mobile phones. These fighters came without mercy, but they were dupes as well: they hadn’t been given a better, saner world. For the Syrians who escorted them to the border, it was all in the nature of a day’s work. In the age of oil, the desert Arabs had become a source of livelihood for many “northern” Arabs. The jihadists were of a piece with that traffic.
The ways of the jihad, and of the jihadists, were illuminated for me in a chance encounter in Jeddah with two brothers of a young man I shall call Anwar Qahtani, who had made his way to Iraq and had been killed there. The brothers spoke of him with a subdued resignation. I had pressed for a narrative of their brother’s life, and they obliged. Anwar, born in Saudi Arabia in Jeddah, was of Yemeni background—from Hadramout, at that, Bin Laden’s ancestral land. He was a workingman, he had followed his brothers into their trade. But he had been dissatisfied with his life, he had wanted more for himself. He had yearned for admission to the university, but had been denied. He had not been given Saudi citizenship. It was the luck of the draw; he had uncles who had been granted citizenship, and cousins who were given that privilege, but he was without citizenship. He had married a Yemeni woman but was unable to secure permission for her to join him. On the surface of things, he had reconciled himself to all that. He played cards in evening gatherings (indeed it was at the gathering of his old clique that the brothers were giving me the account of his life). He sang and was good at the drums called the tabla. His brothers insisted that there were no signs of trouble that they could see. But an American-educated scholar of high birth and an eye for his country’s ways gave a different version. In the final months of his life in Jeddah, Anwar had grown depressed and less talkative. His beard grew longer, he gave up the qutra (the traditional headdress of the Saudis) for the headgear of Yemen. He told his brothers that he was leaving for a short visit to his wife and infant child in Yemen. But he confided to a friend that he was on his way to Iraq.
Anwar Qahtani hadn’t stayed long in Yemen. He had gone to Iraq after a brief stopover in Syria. He was killed soon after his arrival in Iraq. The terrible news of his death was delivered to his family through the cell that had facilitated his passage to Syria. The jihad may be said to have its consolations, but the death of this man broke his mother and unhinged his wife. The family had grown concerned that the wife could take the life of her own child. The brothers had told of the life of a jihadist, but the American-educated social scientist who had arranged for this encounter had an interpretation of his own. His narrative was made of the disappointment in Anwar Qahtani’s life—the opportunities he yearned for and was denied, the humble means. The regime, he said, and the Americans who take the regime’s truth at face value, insist that it is all about belief and ideology, while it is in truth about the socioeconomic facts of the country, the modest means of those who prefer the jihad to the frustrations of normal life. My host was the same age as Osama bin Laden; they had gone to the same school and knew one another. He remembered him as shy and polite and “never a leader.” But Osama, a child of privilege, was the exception; the norm were ordinary young men of limited means taking up the jihad because avenues of mobility are denied them. In the story of Anwar Qahtani he saw a man pressed by life and finding in the jihad in Iraq a religiously blessed form of suicide. It was easier, my host said, more flattering for the rulers and their truth, to attribute this phenomenon to psychological theories of unsettledness, to the gullibility of younger men who cast their chances aside in pursuit of a religious utopia.
“Go look at our young men, the pool from which the militants are drawn,” he said. “They don’t have decent medical care in a country rich with oil. They are unwanted in their own land. The best they could do is try to get hired as security guards at the entrance of the big hotels and the large business concerns. They’re truly superfluous, they are proud, good people but they are trapped.” A point was made for my benefit. At the end of a long day, he drove me to the Jeddah Intercontinental, and at the checkpoint we had to go through, he made sure to inquire about the young security guards. They were men both from Jeddah and from the countryside. This was the best they could do, this modest work at paltry pay. He told me of a nascent movement, “Saudi for Saudis,” with its own website, made up of young people. They are “nativists,” he conceded, they are disaffected from the rulers and the big merchants alike. They wish to reclaim their country, they want a share of the wealth and the spoils. “They will not succeed, the deck is stacked against them, there are more skilled and cheaper Filipinos and Indians to do the technical work, there are more pliable Egyptians. So these young people turn inward, or escape into religious solace.”
The trail of these superfluous young men finding in the jihad religious merit and a substitute for the confinement of their life was illuminated by testimony given by a twenty-seven-year-old Saudi picked up in Iraq. He told his story in captivity, in the Green Zone in Baghdad. There was nothing unusual about the man, Muhammad Abdullah al-Obayd; his themes narrated in Asharq Al-Awsat (October 12, 2009) echo those told by Anwar Qahtani’s brothers in Jeddah. The young man had been a history student before he made his way to Iraq. A fellow student at the Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh had approached him about joining the fight against the Americans in Iraq. He had given him some literature about Al Qaeda and some DVDs. There was a band of militants at the university, and Muhammad al-Obayd joined them. He was told that he had a choice to make: he could join “the fighters” now or forget about the entire endeavor. Once the jihad called him, he never went back to the classroom and “never looked back.” He told his family that he wanted to make the pilgrimage to Mecca; they gave him five thousand riyals (about $1,300) and wished him well. In early 2006, he took a bus to Bahrain, where a prepaid air ticket provided by the supporters of the jihad awaited him. He then traveled to Damascus through Dubai.
The contact in Damascus arranged for him a journey to Aleppo. There he joined a group of fighters drawn from Yemen and Tunisia and a number of other Arab lands. They were taken to the Syrian-Iraqi border and shown the road to the Iraqi town of Qaim. He was given a cell phone and a forged Iraqi identity card. He and his companions found their way to Anbar. For himself, Obayd chose to be a muqatil rather than an intihari. He wanted to learn the use of firearms and he wanted the experience of combat.
It so happened that Obayd joined the fight weeks before an American strike located and killed the Jordanian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. “This was the time of the big battle with the Americans. I planted many roadside bombs, and I was one of three best marksmen in the group. I know I killed many people, how many I don’t know. I am sure I killed American soldiers.” His material needs were looked after by the insurgency, and he was given a monthly stipend of forty dollars. He lived with an Iraqi family, sharing the room of their sons, who were fighters as well. When he intimated that he favored one of his hosts’ daughters, he was given her hand in marriage. The newlyweds agreed that no children would be born to them because “my wife wanted to be a martyr. There were many women at the time who yearned for martyrdom. Her parents supported her in that desire. We began to make plans for her martyrdom, and I was proud of her.” “Martyrdom” apparently lost out, the wife turned up pregnant. For the first time in three years, Obayd called home; he and his wife wanted to leave for Saudi Arabia. “I told my family everything, I told them of my desire to go back to my homeland, and they said that they would arrange everything for me.” Iraqi intelligence was on his trail, they had been listening in on the conversation. In early 2008, at a checkpoint on the road to Baghdad, he was picked up. He had no regrets, he had been happy to join the holy fight.
This young fighter gave the (Saudi) thing away. He had fought and he had killed, but he still wanted a way home, and an indulgent family and a country with means were still willing to have him back and to have him resume the normal life he had warred against in a neighboring land.