A Muslim is the one who avoids harming Muslims with his tongue and hands.
—PROPHET MUHAMMAD, SAHIH BUKHARI, VOL. 1, BK. 2, NO. 10
Imagine Saudi Arabia as a stagnant pond. Nothing is transparent in the murky waters. The surface is littered with the detritus of a dysfunctional society—unemployed men, frustrated women, angry youth, forgotten poor, inadequate education, and an immobile economy. All are obstacles for the Saudi leadership. But another sort of social debris floats beneath the surface, more immediately menacing than the rest. These are the Saudi terrorists, once admired and supported by the Al Saud and their countrymen as Islamic jihadists when they murdered infidels, but now, when they threaten the regime, branded as outlaws.
They blasted to global attention on September 11, 2001. In the wake of that attack, a shocked world discovered that fifteen of the nineteen mass murderers were Saudis acting under the aegis of Al Qaeda.
September 11, however, was not the beginning of Saudi jihadism. During the 1980s, thousands of young Saudis had joined their countryman, Osama bin Laden, in waging war against Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan; others in the 1990s demolished a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia and bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa; and still others attacked the USS Cole in Yemen. In the years following their successful destruction of the Twin Towers and damage to the Pentagon, these jihadists turned their terror on sites in the kingdom itself. Only at that point did the Saudi regime focus serious attention on its homegrown terrorists.
Some of these young Saudi terrorist recruits are rebelling against a rigid and repressive society and gravitate to terrorism to escape boring lives; others turn to terrorism in an attempt to impose even harsher religious repression on a society they see becoming corrupted by infidel influences. Some of the Saudi terrorists thus are motivated by an extreme version of fundamentalist Islam and others more simply by hatred of America, the West, and the Al Saud, whom they see as American lackeys. Some, like most of the 9/11 terrorists, are the alienated sons of middle-class families, while others emerge from the urban or rural poor. While their backgrounds and motivations may differ, all the young terrorists seem to share contempt for the society they see around them in Saudi Arabia and a yearning for more meaning in their lives.
No one, including the vigilant and technologically sophisticated security services of the Al Saud regime, knows for sure how many active or incipient terrorists there are inside the kingdom. The regime knows the number it kills or arrests, the number it holds, and the number it claims to have rehabilitated since starting in 2005 a much-touted program to reform them, but it does not know how many Saudi terrorists now are biding their time behind the walls of Saudi homes and mosques. No doubt they are there—as Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who heads the antiterror strategy, found out firsthand.
Even as the prince was receiving Western accolades in 2009 for the success of the kingdom’s antiterror campaign, he narrowly escaped assassination by a homegrown terrorist. The “reformed” terrorist asked Prince Muhammad to receive him in order that he might help facilitate the surrender of a group of Saudi terrorists in Yemen. Muhammad, who meets regularly with young extremists he hopes to convert, agreed. His guest cleverly came to the prince’s home on a weekend, thereby avoiding the intensive security at the kingdom’s fortresslike Ministry of Interior, where the prince works. Muhammad’s bodyguards patted down the visitor but failed to detect plastic explosive hidden in his rectum. Seated beside Prince Muhammad, who offered tea, the terrorist dialed his friends in Yemen on a cell phone and handed it to the prince to arrange the supposed surrender. No sooner had the prince greeted the men on the other end of this deadly conversation than his guest exploded, his body blown into what investigators later counted as seventy-three pieces. The largest piece, an arm, hit the ceiling and fell on the floor in front of the prince, who miraculously was barely scratched. The prince, still holding the phone, could hear the terrorist cell in Yemen cheering “Allahu Akbar” at his presumed death. The assassination attempt later was posted on YouTube by the terrorist cell.
The Saudi regime, belatedly focused on its internal terrorist threat, still is inclined to blame the West for the problem. In the regime’s view, the West spawned and continues to spawn Saudi terrorism by its covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, its invasion and long occupation of Iraq, its war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and especially its backing of Israel against the interests of the Palestinians. As is so often the case, the Saudi regime finds it easier to blame external forces than to acknowledge its own culpability. But if some of these external events were germs that set off a fever, it was Saudi Arabia that provided the petri dish in which the germs fed and spread. For most of the past three decades, the Saudi regime allowed religious fanatics to set the rules and thus produced a rigid society offering no political, social, or cultural outlets for youthful energy and frustration other than jihad. Not surprisingly, bored, frustrated, and only in some cases pious Saudi youth had little resistance to the blandishments of Osama bin Laden and other jihadist messiahs. To these alienated youths, violence offered an opportunity for action and meaning now and for paradise later.
Khalid Sulayman al Hubayshi, born in 1975 in Jeddah, is typical of the young Saudis who turned to terrorism to escape boredom and find purpose in life. Now in his midthirties, Khalid spent more than a decade on the run as a fighter in the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and then as a prisoner of the United States in Guantánamo and of the Saudis in Riyadh. He then underwent so-called “rehabilitation” at the hands of the Saudi government and gained his freedom in 2006.
Khalid fit the profile of Saudi terror recruits—a young high school graduate from a middle-class family. Always politically aware, he says, he began reading newspapers at age ten. When he finished high school, he studied power systems and earned a certificate with a 4.8 out of a possible 5 that helped him secure a job at an electric company in Dammam, some 720 miles from his Jeddah family. “I missed my family. I didn’t like my life,” he recalls, “so I decided to become religious, though my family never had been very religious. I bought videotapes of jihad. I liked the idea of doing good for others. I liked the real jihad—helping other Muslims get freedom—so I went to the Philippines to help the freedom fighters there.”
In Mindanao he met other Arabs who gave him the idea of training in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had just won control of Kabul. So off he flew to Islamabad and drove into Afghanistan. “I spent two months training on everything from a pistol to antiaircraft plus mines and explosives,” he says. “You feel this is the real life. You discover something in yourself. Every day is new. No regularity, like at work.”
During his time in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the mid-1990s, Khalid fraternized with a plethora of high-profile terrorists, including Abu Zubaydah, still in Guantánamo prison, and Osama bin Laden, now dead. “When you stay more, you see more. When you see more, you see mistakes. You see they aren’t all honest. Some are looking for money, some for power, some for fun, and only some are there out of belief.”
With this new awareness, Khalid decided to return to Saudi Arabia. Because his passport had been confiscated earlier by Pakistani police, he flew to Yemen, got a fake identification, and walked across the border into the kingdom. He had told his father he had been in Malaysia and Turkey spreading Islam. He told his mother something closer to the truth: he had been in Bosnia for jihad. “My mother supported me,” he says. “She supported my brother when he married an American woman, and she didn’t question me about my jihad.” She helped him hide the truth from his father.
Remarkably, he returned to his old job in Damman without any questions being asked about his absence of more than three years. But soon he felt drawn again to the excitement and purpose of jihad, so again he fled Saudi Arabia for Afghanistan, using his brother’s passport to exit the country. Thus, he found himself in Kabul on the night of September 11. “I got in a taxi and heard on the radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center,” he recalls. “Everybody was cheering, including me, because at last something big had happened. It was sunset in Kabul. At eleven P.M. we got a videotape from Al Jazeera. When I saw people jumping out of the building, I began to ask, ‘Is this religiously right?’ I could not show doubts in front of the group, or I would be killed.”
When the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan began, Khalid fled from Kabul to Jalalabad to Tora Bora as the American strikes succeeded in breaking the Taliban’s hold on city after city. He recalls Osama bin Laden telling him and the other fighters to be patient. “He said the bombing would get worse but that the Americans will lose the war as it is far away.” After another six weeks, Bin Laden reappeared to order all the fighters to leave Afghanistan, saying supplies were running out. “He did nothing for us,” Khalid says with bitterness. As Khalid and the others sought to enter Pakistan, the Pakistani police rounded them up for jail and then turned them over to the Americans. “It was the worst night of my life,” he says. “We never thought it would end like this. The Americans punched and kicked us, and a Marine jumped on me with his shoes and broke my middle finger.” But at least after the near starvation in Tora Bora, Khalid relished the U.S. military’s MRE (Meals Ready to Eat). After two weeks of intermittent interrogation at least ten times each night, his U.S. captors shaved his head, dressed him in an orange suit, covered his eyes with goggles, and put him on a plane that he hoped was bound for Saudi Arabia but instead terminated in Guantánamo. “On the plane they gave us the best apple I ever ate and the best peanut butter and honey sandwich.”
He is philosophical about his time in Guantánamo, where he soon told his captors the truth about his activities in Afghanistan because his friend Abu Zubaydah already had done so. “Most of the people I knew in Afghanistan are dead, so I was lucky to be in Guantánamo,” he says. He used the time there to read U.S. Civil War history and came away with an admiration for the American work ethic. “I learned from the guards about hard work,” he says. “We thought in Tora Bora standing guard for two hours was hard work. The guards in Guantánamo worked twelve hours.”
These days Khalid has a new Toyota Corolla, a job, a new wife, and a baby daughter, all thanks to the Saudi regime’s commitment to rehabilitating terrorists in hopes of quelling extremism, which the regime clearly sees as a threat to its survival. Upon Khalid’s arrival in Riyadh from Guantánamo in 2005, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef greeted Khalid and other returnees with a handshake. “You are our children,” Khalid recalls the prince saying. “We hope you learn from what you did. We are going to take care of you, get you married, get you a job. We aren’t perfect, but we are a family. If you see a mistake in Saudi Arabia, don’t blow up the house. Let’s talk about it.”
Khalid, who tells his story in fluent English in the lobby of the modern Hilton Hotel in Jeddah, could be any of the professional Saudi men who frequent Western hotel lobbies. His white thobe is immaculate. He is clean shaven with short black hair barely visible beneath the red-and-white scarf that he adjusts constantly to ensure perfect placement. He recounts his life’s story and his prolonged foray into terrorism with intelligence and evident enjoyment, as a thirty-something American man might fondly recount his wayward college days. He smiles often and conveys a desire to get on about life after a decade of what he now says were futile efforts to help fellow Muslims. “I was angry in Guantánamo. I wanted to kill Americans. But then I realized I wasn’t innocent.” His U.S. interrogators wanted to know why he and others turned to terrorism. “If you are someone with no job, no family, and you find someone who says ‘I have the way,’ it is easy to follow,” he says, though he had both a job and a family. (Saudis often fail to see the obvious contradictions in their conversations.)
Khalid excuses himself to go pray in the corner of the Vienna Café, where he has been telling his story for nearly five hours. When he returns, he recalls one of his American guards at Guantánamo telling him upon release that he didn’t blame Khalid. “ ‘If I had grown up like you, I might be here too,’ ” he recalls the American saying. For the first time, Khalid shows emotion. “I will never forget this,” he says, his voice choking. “If you grow up in Saudi Arabia, you are for sure affected by the religious atmosphere.”
Other young Saudis who chose jihad and wound up in prison in Guantánamo or Saudi Arabia say they were motivated not by religion but by a desire to escape abusive fathers—or fathers too busy to give them any attention. Khalid al Bawadi, thirty-two, says he went to Afghanistan in his early twenties to escape a father who beat him and his eight siblings as well as both his wives. “I tried to defend my mother and brothers, but we suffered too much,” he says in a meeting arranged by the Prince Muhammad bin Nayef Care Center in Riyadh, which seeks to rehabilitate young jihadis whom the center calls “beneficiaries” because they benefit from a second chance extended by the Saudi government.
A shy young man who clearly isn’t as worldly as Khalid, Al Bawadi says, “I was not religious. I hadn’t memorized even one line of the Koran. I just used religion as an excuse to justify leaving Saudi Arabia to find independence and adventure.” Al Bawadi departed via Bahrain for Afghanistan just two months before September 11. When the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan began in the wake of 9/11, he, like Khalid, was shunted toward the Pakistan border, where he was arrested and then imprisoned at Guantánamo for six years and six months before being freed in 2007. “Muhammad bin Nayef met us here in Saudi and told us, ‘Forget the past. You are born today,’ ” recalls Al Bawadi. Like other beneficiaries, Al Bawadi was given a job and a car and help in securing a wife. He is currently working at the chamber of commerce, pursuing a high school degree and focusing on his young son. “The whole experience is like a bad dream. I don’t want to have enmity for America. I want to get some benefit from it.”
What did he learn from six years in Guantánamo? Surprisingly, two things that are absent in Saudi Arabia: respect for the rule of law and punctuality. “There were rules, and everyone had to obey them, and they were applied fairly to everyone,” he says. “This was something new.” His second lesson from prison, says Al Bawadi: “Everything happened with precision. Showers, lunch, everything had a time, and everything occurred on time. This also was new.” (In Saudi Arabia time is an elastic concept, and rules are made to be broken by those in charge.)
Muhammad Fozan, another “beneficiary,” says he was arrested even before he could reach his jihad destination—Iraq. His family informed the government of his disappearance, and he was nabbed at the Saudi border as he returned from seeking training in Syria and was sentenced to three years in a Saudi prison. Muhammad illustrates another piece of the Saudi terrorist profile: young men who receive little time or teaching from their fathers. One of twenty-three children from his father’s two wives, Muhammad was a high school dropout with no religious piety. “I smoked. My father had no beard. We were not religious,” he says. “I traveled a lot, and God knows what I did when I traveled.” His induction to jihad came when he saw a report on Al Jazeera television showing an American soldier in an Iraqi mosque killing a wounded man. “I snapped,” he recalls. “After that moment I couldn’t sleep. My life went upside down. I decided to go help the Iraqis and asked a relative in Mecca to facilitate my trip to Iraq. If I had slept through that report, none of this would have happened to me.”
Like so many other rehabilitated beneficiaries, Muhammad insists the idea of jihad was out of his mind even before he entered the Prince Muhammad bin Nayef Center for Counseling and Care. And like Khalid al Bawadi and Khalid Sulayman al Hubayshi, he doesn’t seem truly to accept responsibility for his decision to pursue jihad. “I was tricked into jihad,” he says. “When the government showed me the right way, I repented. Some people say to me, ‘You benefited a lot—a wife, a car, a job.’ I say everything the government gave me isn’t worth one night in prison.”
Like Khalid al Bawadi, Muhammad has found something he admires about America. Holding his new iPhone in his hand, he displays a photo of his new baby boy. “This is the best thing America ever made,” he says, holding the iPhone aloft for emphasis.
The inescapable conclusion from the stories of these young Saudi men who chose the path of jihad largely for escape and to find some purpose in their lives is just how ordinary they are. They obviously aren’t terrorist leaders. They are the willing foot soldiers bred by a society that protects the young from learning to think and judge issues for themselves by wrapping them in a straitjacket of religious rules that, as often as not, they see prominent Saudis, including religious officials and royal rulers, violate. Accustomed to following without thinking, the young are susceptible to the siren song of jihad as a route to authenticity in life and paradise in death.
Belatedly, the government is trying both to rehabilitate those who chose terrorism and to moderate religious extremism, to prevent yet more young Saudis from straying down a path that threatens not just Western lives but also the Al Saud regime’s survival. For the past half-dozen years, the government has pursued these twin goals of rehabilitation and prevention and clearly has managed to curb the number of terrorist attempts inside the kingdom. But it is far less clear what progress has been achieved in the hearts and minds of young Saudis, all too many of whom are undereducated, unemployed, bored, and frustrated.
Senior government leaders can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the government’s own role in spawning terrorism. Prince Muhammad, the English-speaking deputy minister in charge of combating terrorism, insists in a midnight meeting at his ministry that terrorism was imported by Egyptians in the Muslim Brotherhood who began coming to the kingdom to work in the 1960s. He expresses no regret for the Saudi government’s own generous financial and political support of fundamentalist Islam in the 1980s inside the kingdom, and then throughout the Middle East and beyond. For him, the battle seems to be more a military challenge than one of changing the mind-set of young Saudis, admittedly much more difficult. As we conclude our meeting in 2007, he points to a photo of two of his security officials dressed in camouflage carrying on their shoulders a dead comrade. They have a look, he notes, that is grim but proud. “So long as they have that look on their faces, we will win,” he says—grimly and proudly.
Not necessarily. “If you just cut the weeds, they will grow back,” says Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who covered Osama bin Laden’s rise and then was editor of the Al Watan newspaper, until he was fired in 2010 for running afoul of the government’s unpainted red line on investigative journalism. “The government has won the military battle but not removed the roots,” he says. “It is wishful thinking that an anti-extremism campaign will work when this country was founded on puritanical Islam. We have to grow out of this, like England had to grow out of the Church of England with an archbishop who could veto whatever he opposed.”
At the Interior Ministry’s Ideological Security Directorate, Dr. Abdulrahman al Hadlag is in charge of tracking terrorists’ efforts to recruit young Saudis. Despite ever improving technology and deeper cooperation with Western security agencies, especially the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, he acknowledges that the task gets harder, as the terrorists too use technology and information to stay one step ahead. For instance, the government banned objectionable books, but the terrorists turned to posting their documents and writings on the Internet as well as using the Internet to recruit. As a result, the government now is paying religious clerics and scholars to visit jihadi Web sites and participate in the debate, in an effort to dissuade impressionable young Saudis.
The government monitors mosques, schools and universities, Internet chat rooms, religious lectures, and all phone communication in Saudi Arabia. Still, with Internet usage by young Saudis growing at a rapid rate (from half a million to nearly 10 million users between 2000 and 2010), along with the number of radical Web sites, from roughly fifteen in 1998 to thousands now, the opportunity for the young to become seduced by terrorist recruiters expands exponentially. Al Hadlag says most of the radical Web sites are hosted in the West and cannot be shut down by the Saudi government, so the government tries to block them. Roughly 35 percent of Saudis’ requests for Internet sites are blocked, he says, but most of those blocked requests, he adds, are for pornography; only 2 percent are for radical Web sites. Extremists, he says, have new ways to get around Web site blocks. Furthermore, the extremist theoreticians have issued fatwas allowing radical recruiters to do whatever it takes to appear “normal” and thus avoid detection. For instance, he says, fatwas endorse extremists trimming their beards, wearing Western clothes, and even carrying pornographic magazines in their luggage to avoid appearing religious and arousing suspicion.
Terrorism requires men, money, and mind-set, Al Hadlag says, so the government is focusing on all three. On the first, the government approach is ruthlessly to kill the leaders and to treat the foot soldiers and their families as victims, offering these young Saudi terrorists cars, education, jobs, and wives. Obviously, money is plentiful in Saudi Arabia, where cash is as ubiquitous as credit cards are in the West. “It is common for men to have seven thousand Saudi riyals [roughly $1,800] in their thobe pocket at any given time,” says Al Hadlag, “so it is hard to control who gives donations to whom when three million people pass through Mecca for Hajj every year and return around the world.” But he insists that despite America’s continued criticism of Saudi Arabia for insufficient efforts to control terrorist financing, the kingdom is doing all it can. “Please tell us what else we can do,” he says.
Mind-set is the hardest issue to tackle. “A mind isn’t a building you can destroy,” he says. “Nor can you see what is inside the mind.” To understand and reprogram the minds of terrorists, the government created the rehabilitation center. It is a thirty-minute drive from Riyadh and largely hidden from public view. A right turn off the highway at a Lebanese restaurant takes one down a poorly lit road that soon ends at a large complex of buildings, surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire. Inside are dormitories where the “beneficiaries” live and then three public buildings: a large tent for receiving visitors, an adjacent house for dining, and a tent used for art therapy. The men, who live here for four to six months, also have a library and sports facilities and meet regularly with religious sheikhs and psychologists. Ironically, such facilities are unavailable in the wider society, where the young lament the dearth of anything to occupy their time.
That isn’t the only irony. Here the “beneficiaries” are encouraged to talk openly and discuss candidly their religious, social, and family issues. But, in the larger Saudi society, individuals—especially the young—are trained to hide their feelings, to act and think in harmony with the social norm, to listen and obey. Here the young beneficiaries are taught not to trust that a religious appearance signifies a righteously religious man. Yet, ironically, Saudi society is built around the concept that appearance is reality. What is unacceptable isn’t what you do in private but how you appear in public. Furthermore, beneficiaries are encouraged to take responsibility for their decisions, actions, and lives, which is at odds with the larger societal stricture of just-do-as-the-religious-say and subsume individual responsibility to social conformity.
Nowhere is the irony more pronounced than in the art course that is part of the rehabilitation program. Awad al Yami, who is head of art therapy, was educated at Purdue University and received his Ph.D. in art therapy in 1995 from Penn State. “Art in Saudi Arabia is typically devoid of human beings or living things,” says Dr. Al Yami. “The idea isn’t expression but appreciation of the perfection of Allah’s creation.” Here, however, the idea of art is expression—to find out what is in the minds of those undergoing rehabilitation. Even the bearded religious sheikh who works with the so-called beneficiaries waxes positive about art. “It is expression that helps vent feelings and discover the beauty in life through imitation of beautiful things,” he says.
Al Yami points to a painting of a brown road with a black sky; in between are telephone poles with lines strung to connect them. “Those poles and lines are like bars showing this man’s mind is still in prison,” he says. He points to another drawing of a blue sky with a sun in the left corner and in the center a brown tent with a fire in front of it. “This man is ready to welcome me in for a talk,” he explains.
Al Yami tells the story of a group of prisoners who painted a mural on the wall of the rehabilitation center. It depicted a man squatting on a black-and-white cell floor with his knees drawn to his chest and his feet shackled. Above him outside the cell was a flame with the words “Make your imprisonment a candle that lights your life.” The prisoners went home to see their families, as they are allowed to do regularly during their stay in the rehabilitation center. When they returned, they wanted to destroy the painting by tearing down the wall, he says, a sign of their hostility to prison. Finally they agreed to whitewash it. First they blotted the shackles, then the admonition to use their prison time wisely, and finally they whitewashed the entire mural. Dr. Al Yami insists this was a sign they wanted to erase their prison lives and rejoin society. What the West has to hope is that the rehabilitation process is more than a whitewash. Only Allah, of course, truly knows what is in the minds of rehabilitated young terrorists.
The idea of individual expression—through art or anything else—is truly foreign to Saudis. So this intense effort to listen to young Saudis who chose terrorism and to encourage their honest expression is one that might pay far greater dividends in prevention if applied to the society as a whole. That thought, however, is not on the minds of the Al Saud.
As government efforts to monitor and eliminate terrorism have gained ground, terrorist recruitment has simply gone underground. “When radicalism goes underground, it becomes ever more difficult to study,” says Thomas Hegghammer, author of the thoroughly researched book Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism Since 1979. Fluent in Arabic, this senior fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment studied almost eight hundred Saudi militants and their paths to terrorism. Unlike in the 1980s and 1990s, when Islamic leaders like Bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri (the Egyptian medical doctor who is one of the leading architects of contemporary radical Sunni Islam) could recruit followers openly, Hegghammer writes, recent recruitment is more private and subtle, leading many recruits to believe the decision was their own.
“No one recruited me in Mecca,” one young detainee told his captors. “I met a man who told me about the idea of Jihad … He gave me money and put me on a plane to the Arab Emirates first going to Pakistan. He didn’t train me or anything like that. He just gave me the idea about fighting,” Hegghammer quotes him as saying.
Because mosque sermons now are monitored, radical sheikhs and other religious zealots engage individuals in Mecca during Hajj or Ramadan, or during semi-informal religious group meetings, such as religious camps or evening assemblies of young men in istirahat, rented guest houses, where the young (and sometimes Saudi families) can gather in privacy.
While the regime has expended enormous resources to eliminate or convert terrorists inside the kingdom—both because security in exchange for loyalty is the implicit pact between the Al Saud and Saudis and because the regime feels directly threatened by terrorists—the government has been far less forceful in combating terrorism against Western infidels, which for now is the primary focus of Al Qaeda. In the past, Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri and other leaders have argued over how much to focus on the “near enemy” (corrupt Arab regimes) and how much to focus on the “distant enemy” (the West’s infidel regimes). Al Zawahiri favored the former and Bin Laden the latter.
Al Zawahiri, who went to Saudi Arabia in 1984 after he was freed from an Egyptian prison for playing a supporting role in the murder of Anwar Sadat, often is called the “brains” of Al Qaeda. A jihadist from age fifteen, he is dedicated to reestablishing an Islamic caliphate by eliminating both the corrupt Islamic leaders and the Western infidels who preserve their leadership.
“Liberating the Muslim community, attacking the enemies of Islam and waging a jihad against them require a Muslim authority, established on Muslim territory, that raises the banner of jihad and rallies Muslims around it,” he wrote in one of his many exhortations to the faithful, this one entitled Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. “If we do not achieve this goal, our actions will be nothing more than small-scale harassment and will not bear fruit—the restoration of the caliphate and the departure of the invaders from the land of Islam.”
Islam’s enemies, as defined by Al Zawahiri, are Jews, Christians, and Muslims who associate with them, especially the Saudi royal family. Relying on the Koran’s words “Take not for friends unbelievers rather than believers,” Al Zawahiri builds the case for separation from Jews and Christians. “God said: ‘O you who believe! Take not into your intimacy those outside your ranks.’ ” In this verse, according to Al Zawahiri, “God prohibited believers taking unbelievers, Jews, and heretics as advisers or from trusting them with money. It is said that you must not speak to anyone whose creed or religion is different from yours.”
Because the Al Saud regime ultimately depends on the United States for its protection and preservation while presiding over Islam’s two holiest sites, the Saudi regime is a key target of international jihadists. “We saw the noblest of dynasties placing itself in the service of American interests while claiming to defend monotheism; we saw impious imams imposing secular constitutions, judging on the basis of positive law and rushing to normalize relations with Israel, while supervising Quran memorization competitions,” Al Zawahiri writes, in a clear reference to the Al Saud family.
As for the United States, its sin is not only supporting the Al Saud regime but believing in and promoting democracy. “Democracy is a new religion,” he writes. “In Islam, legislation comes from God; in a democracy this capacity is given to the people. Therefore, this is a new religion based on making the people into gods and giving them God’s rights and attributes. This is tantamount to associating idols with God … Sovereignty in Islam is God’s alone; in a democracy, it belongs to the people.”
The Saudi regime walks a fine line between discouraging extremism—to assuage its American protectors and to protect itself—and openly attacking this radical reading of Islam, since the regime’s legitimacy rests on protecting and propagating puritanical Islam. Small wonder then that only in 2010, some seven years after bloody attacks by terrorists began inside the kingdom, did the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia issue a fatwa condemning terrorism and declaring “any act of terrorism, including providing financial support to terrorists, is a crime.” Even then his focus seemed as much on protecting the reputation of Islam as on protecting innocent victims from terrorism. “Terrorism is criminal and spills the blood of innocents,” Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al Ashaikh acknowledged, according to the Saudi Press Agency. “It attacks security, spreads terror among people and creates problems for society.” He went on, however, to deplore its damage not so much to the victims of terrorism as to Islam’s reputation: “It is necessary to fight the attempts of some to attach terrorism to Islam and Muslims with the goal of distorting the religion and assailing its leadership role in the world.” But what of the victims?
Efforts to plot terrorist attacks continue inside Saudi Arabia and around the world, though in recent years most have been disrupted before their successful execution. While Bin Laden is now dead, Al Zawahiri remains at large, presumably along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Anwar al Awlaki, a young English-speaking imam and terrorist leader born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and residing in Yemen, skillfully used the Internet to recruit and radicalize young Muslim men in the West to murder their fellow citizens, until a U.S. drone attack killed him in 2011. But the deaths of Bin Laden and Al Awlaki have not ended the threat level—or tension—between Islam and the West.
While many in the Islamic world and in the United States perceive a clash of civilizations, Islam is and historically has been far too divided to support this simple analysis—unless the West were to do something seen as so hostile to Islam that radicals could rally the wider Islamic world into a convulsive backlash against it. Terrorist leaders like Bin Laden and Al Awlaki surely sought to incite such an act. Dr. Al Hadlag, the Saudi official monitoring the ideological strategies of terrorist groups, says Al Qaeda would like to do something inside Saudi Arabia that would prompt the U.S. military to return to the kingdom. (All U.S. forces withdrew to other Gulf countries in August 2003.) He believes one target is Abquiq, the site in eastern Saudi Arabia through which Saudi oil passes for processing en route to the coast for loading on ships for export to the world. The destruction of Abquiq would cripple Saudi oil exports and thus, terrorists calculate, could trigger massive U.S. intervention—with or without Al Saud invitation—to protect vital Saudi oil facilities from further terrorist attacks. In 2006, terrorists drove two explosive-laden cars through a side gate at the facility, but both were blown up by security guards at the gate, according to Dr. Al Hadlag. More terrorist cells, picked up inside Saudi Arabia since, also have targeted oil facilities.
Osama bin Laden, before his death, continued to call for Islamic unity as a prerequisite for defeating the West. “The only way of repelling the [infidel] invasion is through the combined efforts of all Muslims,” he declared in his definitive 1998 Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries, “so the Muslims must ignore what divides them, temporarily, since closing their eyes to their differences cannot be worse than ignoring the capital sin that menaces Muslims.”
Islamic extremists like Bin Laden and some of the Westerners most fearful of them think in terms of “Islamic civilization,” but is there actually such a thing? Islam is widely spread across vast areas of the world, including large and largely secular societies like Turkey and Indonesia as well as theocracies like Iran. Moreover, since its inception under Muhammad in the deserts of Arabia, Islam has been divided within itself. Three of the first four caliphs who succeeded the Prophet were murdered—two by fellow Muslims—and deep divisions persist today not just among Shias, Sufis, Ismailis, and Sunnis but also within Sunni Islam, as is so evident in Saudi Arabia today. The Arabs are merely a modest component of global Islam, and Saudi Arabia is only a small sector of the Arab world.
Saudi Arabia, however, remains the spiritual center of the Islamic faith and, on a more mundane level, the world’s leading petroleum producer. All the forces dividing the Muslim world can be seen in microcosm here—radical imams and moderate ones, rich royals and rootless youth, radicalization and Westernization, fundamentalism, modernism, and terrorism. So while Saudi Arabia is only a small part of the Islamic world, how these forces play out here will have a greatly disproportionate influence on the outcome of the worldwide war against terrorism.