He came to America for the very first time in the autumn of 1954.
The war in Korea was history. The New York Giants had just won the World Series. There was a car in every garage. There was a chicken in every pot. Eisenhower was in the White House. And all was well with the world.
Fresh out of the Middle East on a government scholarship, the 24-year-old Yamani was starting a one-year course at New York University, eager to earn himself a Masters of Comparative Jurisprudence.
Before he left home an Armenian friend gave him a very stern warning. He said that America was filled with homosexuals. He cautioned Yamani, you are young and they will try to make you do unnatural things. He admonished, “Zaki, you must be careful.”
Greatly concerned, Yamani wanted to know how he could recognize such people.
The friend assured him, you will always be able to tell a homosexual in America because they wear red neckties.
The flight to the States took 17 hours from Cairo via Scotland. Yamani arrived totally exhausted but thrilled to be in New York. He was so anxious to see everything that, as soon as he got to his hotel, he rushed upstairs to his room, took a fast shower and jumped into clean clothes. He couldn’t wait to get back to the lobby to begin sorting through the pile of tourist brochures he had spotted at the front desk.
He didn’t know where he wanted to go first.
But then, from across the lobby, he spotted a man with a red necktie staring at him.
Yamani turned away.
The man in the red necktie kept looking at him.
Uneasy, Yamani pretended to concentrate on his tourist guides.
Now the man in the red necktie began walking in his direction.
Keeping his face buried in the brochures, Yamani moved away.
The man with the red necktie came closer.
Not sure what to do, or how best to handle such a situation, Yamani finally decided on the direct approach. He reassured himself, I’ll simply confront him and tell him point blank that whatever he has in mind, I’m not interested ...
“Excuse me,” the man in the red necktie said.
Yamani drew in his breath and summoned up his courage. “Listen you...”
“Excuse me, sir,” the man in the red necktie said again. “But your flies are open.”
*****
The birth of modem Saudi Arabia happened at about the same time that a group of geologists from California realized the Arabian deserts were floating on oil.
That was coincidence.
The rise of modem Saudi Arabia as a force to reckon with in the western world began that very same day.
That was anything but a coincidence.
Abdul Aziz bin Abdel Rahman al-Saud - the man who came to be known throughout the world as Ibn Saud - was born in the Nejd, the region surrounding Riyadh, sometime between 1876 and 1880.
For more than a century and a half, the House of Saud had been struggling to dominate and somehow unite the desert’s collection of feudal sultanates and sheikhdoms, each independent of the other. At various times they had stretched their influence across the peninsula from the east coast to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. But maintaining control by force over such a huge expanse of sand - and over such varied and often fanatical groups - was not easy. By the time Ibn Saud came into the world, his family’s hold on the peninsula was well on the way to disintegrating.
In 1891 an attack on the Al Saud by the House of Rashid, leaders of the Shammar tribe, forced them to give up their rights as rulers of the Nejd. Ibn Saud spent the next two years literally slung over the side of a camel, travelling in a saddle bag, living the nomadic life of desert rulers in exile. The family eventually made their way to Kuwait where in 1897 word reached them that Muhammad bin Rashid, the Shammar’s chieftain, was dead. Within a couple of years the now teenaged Ibn Saud was leading small raiding parties into the desert against the Al Rashid, building for himself the reputation of a brave young warrior, dreaming of the day he would take the Al Saud back to the Nejd.
He finally managed it with a daring, if not totally foolhardy, stunt.
Having set off from Kuwait several months before with 40 followers - 40 is the number the Bedouin use in their legends when they don’t know exactly how many there were but are certain that the group was not very large - he arrived at the adobe walls of Riyadh one night, somewhere between mid-January and early February 1902.
Supposedly with as few as nine men, he scaled the walls and hid within the city until dawn, waiting for the Governor of Riyadh to walk by. When he did, Ibn Saud murdered him. Within 20 minutes, on the basis of the sheer bravado of that assassination, Riyadh was reclaimed for the Al Saud.
A large and imposing man – 6’4” he must have literally towered over most of his followers - Ibn Saud spent the next ten years consolidating his power in the area around the Nejd, all the time trying to superimpose a disciplined central government on the area by uniting the various fanatical clans of the central desert. When he defeated the Ottoman Turks in 1913, he extended his rule eastward to the Persian Gulf. Eight years later, when he had finally beaten the last of the Al Rashid, he took his reign as far north as the border with Iraq and Transjordan. Then he sent his son Faisal to the southwest, to command the troops which finally occupied the region of the Asir, between the Hijaz and Yemen. Finally he turned his attention westward, to the Hijaz and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He captured Mecca in 1924 and the following year assumed complete rule of the region, including the trading port of Jeddah. In 1926 he proclaimed himself King of the Nejd and Sultan of the Hijaz.
In all it had taken him nearly 25 years to tie together the particular customs, traditions and interests of the people from four distinct and different regions. Some of it was won by the sword. Some of it was won by marriage. Ibn Saud married several hundred times, many of those marriages being politically astute unions designed solely to bring together various clans.
By 1932 he had fathered 24 of his 43 sons and a countless number of daughters.
He’d formally named his kingdom, Saudi Arabia.
Yet all that Ibn Saud could claim as his own was a £60,000 a year pension from the British for his help during the First World War in their fight against the Turks and a kingdom filled with sand whose only real source of income was the Haj - the annual pilgrimage to Mecca by the faithful from throughout Islam.
By 1932 Ibn Saud could have put the entire kingdom’s wealth into his camel’s saddle bags.
That’s when oil was discovered in Bahrain.
If it was there, geologists reasoned, the whole peninsula could be sitting on oil. A pair of Americans working for Standard Oil of California (SoCal) came to Saudi Arabia and for £50,000 worth of gold they received permission from Ibn Saud to prospect the Eastern Province. The first exploratory well was sunk in 1935. It was dry. So they tried again, six more times, each time going deeper beneath the sand, before they brought in Dammam Number 7.
The moment they struck oil, Saudi Arabia was patched into the world economy. An ancient society was hurled onto a collision course with twentieth century western materialism.
Pilgrimage traffic ground to a halt because of the Second World War, but as soon as it ended, the king turned to the oil companies to keep Saudi Arabia’s books in the black. He demanded $6 million from SoCal and their partner Texaco as an advance against future royalties. Unwilling, or possibly even unable, to come up with that much, they invited another pair of oil companies into the venture: Standard Oil of New Jersey (then called Esso, now called Exxon) bought 30 percent, and the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company (soon to be called Mobil) bought 10 percent.
The four united under the name Aramco - the Arabian American Oil Company.
Nearly 10,000 miles away, a young lawyer named Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, a member of Venezuela’s newly installed government, believed the time had come to increase the nation’s oil revenue by taxing the American companies that exported Venezuelan crude. But instead of allowing the Americans to pay a flat royalty per ton, the Venezuelans issued a decree retroactively taking a 50 percent cut of the companies’ profits.
Then the Iranians renegotiated their agreements with the British.
Now there was no question but that Aramco would have to give more to the Saudis.
So Ibn Saud passed a tax law similar to the one in Venezuela.
By the time the old king died in 1953, Aramco employed more than 24,000 people, had stretched pipelines across the desert all the way to the Mediterranean, and was pumping enough Saudi oil even with the 50/50 cut on profits to make a lot of Americans very rich.
Unfortunately for Aramco, by 1953 a few young Saudis were starting to wonder about that arrangement.
Ibn Saud’s oldest living son, Saud, became King.
The next son, Faisal, became Crown Prince.
However, Saud lacked his father’s political savvy and was a far-distant second to Faisal’s native intelligence. State revenues in 1937 had totaled approximately $24 million. Now, in 1953, thanks to oil royalties and taxes paid to the government by Aramco, Saudi Arabia could count on $200 million coming into the treasury. The Saudis were rich beyond their own wildest dreams. Not surprisingly, financial chaos reigned. With such a fortune his merely for the taking, King Saud figured he might as well spend it.
Ostentatious is too weak a word.
Saud built himself a fabulous palace and lived in some sort of psychotic no-man’s land between mind-boggling extravagance and total debauchery. The amount of money squandered through graft and corruption, not only at the highest level but at all levels of government, must have been ludicrous, even by Arab standards.
The situation wasn’t helped by the Americans who fuelled the fires by tempting the puritanical Saudis with new means of communications, new forms of transport,
American sports, foreign films, gadgets, strange food and rock-n-roll.
Having gone too far morally, socially and even politically - it was Saud’s dream to challenge Egypt’s Nasser in his role as self-appointed leader of the Arab world - a group of royal princes, tribal sheikhs and religious leaders set about pushing Saud aside in favor of Faisal, who would rule as Prime Minister.
It worked. But not for very long. Too many tribal leaders yearned for their handouts. Austerity, as practiced by Faisal, was not to their liking. A group then known as the “Free Princes” made a deal with Saud, promising to return him to power in exchange for some sort of constitutional monarchy. He agreed and in 1960 Faisal resigned. Saud came back to power. But he reneged on his promises to these so-called “modernists.” He even rewarded some of them for their support with imprisonment. The idea of a constitutional monarchy was not one he cared to entertain.
In 1962, a coup d’état in Yemen posed a direct threat to the Saudis. If the monarchy could be overthrown there, the Saudi princes wondered just how secure their own future was. The new Yemeni regime advocated socialism.
The naturally conservative, strongly anti-communist Saudi royal family quickly came to the decision that King Saud might not be strong enough to stem a similar groundswell. Not only was his political base shaky, he was also in failing health. So, the Yemeni revolution was just the excuse they needed to bring Faisal to the throne.
It took them a couple of years, as the Saudis are, by nature, reluctant to make changes no matter what kinds of changes have to be made. Maybe it has to do with life in the desert. Maybe it has to do with their roots as nomads. It’s a trait that plays an important role in all aspects of Saudi life, from the way they raise their children to the way foreign policy is practiced. They simply believe, if you do nothing the problem will go away.
When the Yemen problem had gone away by November 1964, family consensus removed Saud from the throne. He left Saudi Arabia for exile in Beirut, then Cairo and finally Athens.
Faisal was elevated to King.
The mark he was about to make on Saudi Arabia - and especially on his country’s history - would be indelible. He would also change the course of Yamani’s life.
*****
Ahmed Zaki Yamani was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on 30 June 1930.
In those days Mecca was a city with camels in unpaved streets and almost no electricity. It wasn’t until 1939 or 1940 that the Yamani family connected an electric generator to their house. Before that, the young Zaki either read by oil lamp or went to the nearby Grand Mosque where electric lights were still very much a local novelty.
His father was a "qadi," a chief justice of the supreme court in the Hijaz. But he didn’t really get to know his father until he was nearly eight years old. Not long after Zaki was born, Yamani Senior left for Indonesia where he spent eight years as a grand mufti of the Shafei school of Islamic thought. He returned for a year, then left again for Malaysia where, as grand mufti, he was the nation’s premier interpreter of Moslem law.
Yamani’s grandfather was also a grand mufti of the Shafei school, but under the Turkish regime.
The youngest of three children - Yamani has a brother and a sister - it was his mother who strongly influenced his formative years, insisting that he get a formal education. Although here he adds that his grandfather helped to raise him and there were always uncles around too.
“The Yamani clan is a large, well-known one in Saudi Arabia,” he explains. “There are so many cousins, aunts and uncles. Each year during Ramadan we have an open house for the Yamani side of the family and some years as many as 300-400 people come for dinner.”
The Yamani clan is also one where longevity counts. “My mother is now in her 90s. My father died at the age of 86. My grandfather passed away only four months short of his 100th birthday. And I can assure you I had an aunt who lived to be 112.”
The name Yamani originally derives from Yemen and he says that he’s traced his ancestors back more than 40 generations, one of his great-great-grandfathers having gone there from Mecca. He is a Hashemite Moslem, which is a branch of the Koraish tribe from which the Prophet Muhammad came.
Raised in a very religious home, Yamani remains strictly observant. On nights when he simply can't sleep, he’s been known to drive to Mecca to pray at the Grand Mosque.
He does the Haj whenever he can, but celebrates Ramadan each year, without fail.
“It is the holiest time of the year for Moslems. It’s a special time, with fasting during the day and large suppers at night to break the fast. But every year, during the last 10 days of Ramadan I go on retreat to Mecca.”
Tens of millions of the faithful pray at the Grand Mosque during the month-long feast of atonement. Day and night, as one great seething mass of humanity, they file through the prayer hall to the Ka’ba, the sacred black rock, the most revered place in all of Islam.
Yamani prays there too.
But he’s fortunate enough to have a private room on the second floor of the Grand Mosque.
It’s a small, simple, now air-conditioned, 6’x18’ bare-walled cell, given to him as a special privilege for being the grandson of a man of great scholarship and devotion.
There are two windows that look out at the Ka’ba, a lot of cushions to sit on and a small refrigerator in the corner for cold water. Copies of the Koran are piled neatly on a cushion waiting to be studied.
“I spend from afternoon till sunrise meditating and praying in my room and at the Ka’ba. When Ramadan is over I am physically exhausted. But it is a special type of exhaustion. I think it would be difficult for someone who is not devoutly religious to understand how very cleansed it makes you feel.”
Another childhood passion is his love of music. He adores opera, especially Wagner, although his first love is the ancient music of Mecca.
“The society in Mecca is one that is so naturally concerned with music. I have always collected recordings of ancient Meccan folksongs. And although I don’t play any musical instruments, I know all the various melodies.”
During the mid-1950s, when he was living in New York, Yamani discovered a small club where a young black singer sat at a piano and played it like it was. Yamani found himself going there almost weekly. As a regular, he got to know the singer and after a while, every time Yamani walked into the place, Nat King Cole would do his rendition of “Haji Baba.”
Schooled in Mecca, Yamani says he was always top of his class and actually skipped three years. At one point when the king came to visit, he was the student selected to shake Ibn Saud’s hand. “I still remember how big he was and how big his hands were.”
At the ceremony where Yamani graduated first in his class, Prince Faisal presented him with a small gift. “Years later I reminded Faisal of that. I remembered it very well.” But now he pauses, shrugs and grins. “I’m sorry to say that he didn’t.”
Encouraged to continue his education, Yamani was sent at the age of 17 to the University of Cairo to study law.
“I was always fascinated by my grandfather. He was a very famous scholar and when I was growing up I wanted to be like him. I always imagined that I would become an academic. By the time I was in university, my father had come home and we began spending a great deal of time together. I remember that he had students. They would come to our house in Mecca. Many of them were famous jurists and they would discuss the law with my father and argue cases. I started to join them and often after they left, my father and I would stay up for hours and he would teach me and he would criticize my arguments.”
Cairo was Yamani’s first trip abroad. He’d travelled a little bit inside the country when he was a boy scout, riding on a donkey up in the mountains. But he didn’t see anything of the outside world until he left for Egypt.
A fellow student there was Yassir Arafat.
“I must have seen him at Cairo but I didn’t know him there. He was an engineering student, just the other side of the fence. He used to go on strikes. I wasn’t involved in any of that. But I did get to know him many years later. He was introduced to me through an Egyptian friend who happened to have been a professor at Cairo. I then introduced him to King Faisal in 1968. The first sum of money given to Al Fatah was done through me. It was 100,000 Saudi rials. ($33,000)”
Having completed his law degree at the age of 20, Yamani returned to Saudi Arabia to take a job in the head office of the Ministry of Finance in Mecca.
“I always intended to teach but I was convinced that taking this job was a good idea. So I made a compromise. I taught Islamic law courses mornings and evenings without payment, and went to the office during the day.”
Again singled out as being exceptionally bright, within a few years the government offered Yamani the opportunity to attend New York University’s Comparative Law Institute for non-American lawyers. The curriculum consisted of the essentials of the common law approach and of American law.
It was Yamani’s first trip to the States. It was also his first opportunity to live outside the Middle East.
“I was very excited about it. And I don’t think I suffered much from culture shock. You know, by nature I’m very adaptable to any new environment.”
He took a studio apartment up town on 73rd Street, which was, admittedly, a long way from NYU in Greenwich Village, where all of the other students were housed on campus. The way the program was designed, each of the foreign students was assigned an American roommate. But he preferred to live alone.
Yamani says simply, “It was better for me that way.”
One of his NYU law professors, Bernard Schwartz, explains why. “Zaki was very shy. I think he was overwhelmed by New York. Overwhelmed by everything. Then again, it was understandably difficult for him. His English was fine and he gave me the impression of being very bright and very serious. But I don’t recall that he socialized very much. If I remember correctly, he was slightly isolated. However, he got along very well, all things considered. He was slow in the beginning and it might have taken him a little time to adjust, but he caught on quickly and became one of the program’s better students. In the second semester he even got very good grades.”
NYU classmate, New York attorney Don Fox, also remembers Yamani well. “Zaki was considerably less worldly then. And he had a strong religious orientation. He kept his faith and prayed whenever he was required to. I remember he did most of his own cooking. You know, to keep to the dietary laws of Islam. He always had a number of friends because he was a very likeable guy. But he was not a hail-fellow-well-met type. I don’t think anybody could say that he was a social gadabout.”
While at NYU, Yamani met a young Iraqi girl named Laila, the daughter of Sulaiman Faidhi, a well-known author and lawyer. She was there to get her PhD in education. Both a long way from home, they were naturally drawn together and at the end of the school year they were married, in Brooklyn, in the home of a Moroccan who had converted part of his living room into a mosque.
Now, with a Masters of Comparative Jurisprudence and the helpful intervention of a favorite NYU professor, Yamani moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year at Harvard Law School where he studied the problems of capital investment and international disputes.
Dr. Erwin Griswald, dean at the law school in those days, recalls that Yamani was a very impressive young man. “He was the only Saudi student enrolled at the time and I can still see him sitting in my office. Apparently he was a little nervous or apprehensive about being in the dean’s office. He was never called there or summoned there, because he was a good student. But I can remember him coming in to see me about something or other and sitting there fingering his worry beads. He was forever fidgeting with them between his fingers and frankly I had some trouble to keep from saying, put them in your pocket they annoy me.”
Later, when he was world famous, Yamani would use the worry beads as a prop when he did after-dinner speeches or spoke at seminars in the States. He’d hold them up, explain briefly what they are, and then joke that each bead represented one of his wives.
“I still get Christmas cards from him,” Griswald goes on. “He’s the kind of person who stays in touch. It’s interesting because he sends very Christian cards. They’re pictures of Mary and Joseph carrying the infant Jesus on a donkey’s back. Things like that. But that never really surprised me because he’s very thoughtful that way. You could see that he adjusted very well to the West early on. He always seemed to me to be in full control of the situation at all times. Frankly, I never got the impression that anything was difficult for Zaki.”
Someone else who knew him at Harvard was Kingman Brewster.
“It’s a long time ago but I seem to think he was in the course I taught on the legal problems of doing business abroad. I do remember that once when I was Ambassador to the Court of St James’s and he was the star of OPEC I reminded him, everything you know about cartels you learned from me. And he gave me that enigmatic smile of his and said, but I don’t know anything about cartels because I learned it from you.”
According to Ambassador Brewster, and in spite of Dean Griswald’s story about the worry beads, Yamani was pretty well Americanized by the time he left Harvard. “He was never a typical Saudi. He’s the kind of fellow who makes an intuitive decision about trust. You know, once a friend, always a friend. He’s always been very aware of personal relationships and he’s maintained them. That’s important, particularly when you’re dealing with a society built on distrust. When they accept you it’s a tremendous advantage. And I always thought we were lucky to have Saudi Arabia’s oil might in his hands. He was never one to upset the applecart.”
Then, too, Dr. Brewster thinks that one of Yamani’s great strengths is that he probably never panics. “It might not bear any relation to what he felt, but he would stay calm. And that is very special.”
Returning to Saudi Arabia in 1956, now with a Master’s of Law from Harvard to add to his NYU degree, he joined the newly formed Department of Zakah (religious tax) and Income Tax under the Ministry of Finance.
He soon divided his job between that office and the Office of Petroleum and Minerals under Abdullah Tariki, where he was entrusted to write such highly technical and complicated contracts as the Japanese Off Shore Concession agreements in late 1957.
A friend of his father’s offered Yamani a good salary to work three hours every morning as the manager of a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Ever ambitious, Yamani accepted. But after eight months of coming to work at 5 a.m. he finally had to admit that he’d taken on too much, and his soda pop career ended.
That’s about the time he took a leave of absence from the government to establish his own law practice in Jeddah.
As it happened, it was the first real law office in Saudi Arabia.
“Before that we didn’t have lawyers in the western sense. We had people who would help represent you in court. We had advocates. But we didn’t have law firms where you could go to someone who’d write a contract for you or give you legal advice. I knew there were many banks and foreign companies being started and that there was a need for these services. There had been a lot of new statutes passed but no one was around who could interpret them for foreign companies.”
His first office comprised three people. A secretary. A typist. And himself.
“I admit that I wasn’t very busy in the beginning.”
But he set his mind to finding clients and before too long he signed up a few foreign banks and foreign companies on a retainer basis. These days - employing a very large staff in several offices, including women attorneys, which is still just about unheard of in Saudi Arabia - Yamani’s law firm is considered the most successful in the country.
By 1957, he and Laila had started a family. Their first daughter Mai was born. Their second daughter Maha came along two years later, in 1959. Their son Hani was born in 1961.
As his client list built up he pleaded regularly in the Shariah Court, earning a reputation as an expert in Islamic law.
In those early days, he was also a part-time journalist. At the end of his normal working day he’d write and edit stories until bedtime.
“I was writing for several newspapers in Saudi Arabia. One in particular was a weekly tabloid called Arafat. Well, Crown Prince Faisal had just introduced a new law for the Council of Ministers which gave the Prime Minister and the cabinet a real status vis-a-vis the king. So I wrote a bunch of articles trying to explain the various legal points and interpret this new law. I must have written three different series of articles in all. I didn’t know it then but Faisal was reading my articles very carefully. I later discovered that he used to read everything I wrote.”
*****