by Kim Ghattas
12
GENERATION 1979
SAUDI ARABIA
1990–2001
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
—Bertolt Brecht, “Motto to the Svendborg Poems” (1939)
Mansour al-Nogaidan had been guilty of violence before. Barely twenty years old, he’d done a few short stints in jail for spouting radical views, like calling on people to take their children out of public schools—only religious schooling was acceptable, anything else was an infidel model. In 1991, under cover of darkness, he and his friends had firebombed video stores and a women’s support center in his hometown of Buraidah, three and a half hours northwest of Riyadh. For that, he had spent almost two years in jail. The way he saw it, he was being punished for trying to align the world he saw around him with the world as it should be, according to the teachings of the clerics, teachings he imparted to his flock as an imam in a small neighborhood mosque. Those teachings did not stand out in Saudi Arabia; they were very much the mainstream line of thinking. The small, round man with protruding eyes and the beard of a devout Salafist had nothing to do with the bomb that exploded in Riyadh on November 13, 1995. He ended up back in jail anyway. The Saudi authorities were taking no chances.
On that day, just three months after Nasr Abu Zeid and Ebtehal Younes had fled Egypt, the Saudis discovered they were not immune from the wave of rigid intolerance they had cultivated at home and helped promote outside the kingdom. At 11:40 a.m., a car bomb exploded in a parking lot just outside a building that housed the offices of American military trainers. The powerful explosion shook the capital as a fire engulfed the structure. Black smoke billowed across the city. The building was just off a main thoroughfare in the busy district of al-Olaya. Six people were killed and sixty wounded. Most of them were eating an early lunch in the building’s snack bar on the ground floor. Four of the five Americans killed were civilians. Americans had come under attack in Beirut, tourists in Egypt had been killed, Algeria was being ripped apart by a civil war after the army canceled an election in which the Islamic Salvation Front was assured victory, all of this following the Juhayman events of 1979. But in the kingdom, this was the first such act of violence: foreigners targeted with a car bomb.
The Americans were there as part of a long-established mission to train the Saudi National Guard. The attack was a signal to the royals that their alliance with America was still a sin in the eyes of the most conservative of Saudis, just as it had been for Juhayman. There had been threats faxed to the American embassy in the spring demanding that the “crusaders” leave the “land of Islam” by June. The embassy staff said they had taken the faxes seriously but had never heard of the group who made the threat and could not find any further information. “This was not something you think would ever happen here,” said Raymond E. Mabus Jr., the US ambassador to Riyadh.
The alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United States had grown only stronger since the first handshake between President Roosevelt and King Abdelaziz in 1945. None of it was ever very visible to the naked eye or in the heartland: a military base operated by the US Air Force until 1962 was located in Dhahran, far away from the capital, in the oil-rich Eastern Province. ARAMCO also had its headquarters there, its large gated compound housing several thousand foreign employees and their families. That was the kingdom’s first compound for foreigners, a universe unto itself that would be replicated in smaller versions across the country. The kingdom welcomed foreign expertise but kept the foreigners behind walls everywhere, especially in Riyadh.
The compounds were small oases of normality for the foreigners: women could work and drive on the compound; there were mixed swimming pools, club bars, and music. For conservative Saudis, the compounds were cities of sin they didn’t want to know about; for radical Saudis, they would soon become targets. Over time, as the number of foreigners grew into the millions, those enclaves only cemented the divide between Saudis and foreigners, between those who belonged to the pure land of Islam and those who didn’t. Other than in elite circles, there was little social interaction between Saudis and foreigners. Some well-off Saudi families with the right connections, looking to escape the suffocating atmosphere of life in Riyadh, would find a way onto the compounds—but they would end up paying a high price for doing so.
The building that was targeted in November 1995 was not on a compound; it wasn’t even behind a wall. It was (in security parlance) a soft target, the kind that radicals in the country had been looking for to express their ire at the dramatic, in-your-face expansion of the military alliance between Saudi Arabia and America just a few years earlier. In 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, King Fahd had called on America for protection and President George H. W. Bush was quick to respond. On August 8, just six days after Saddam sent his troops across the border into the small emirate, some fifteen thousand American troops headed to Saudi Arabia, along with two aircraft carriers, as the United States began to corral an international coalition to dislodge Iraqi troops from Kuwait. The king had set off a storm: calling on the West for assistance and bringing even more infidels to the birthplace of Islam was both a demonstration of weakness and an affront to the pride of every Muslim. The Al-Sauds were pragmatic when they needed protection. They’d relied on the British to cement their hold on the peninsula in the 1920s, even calling in the Royal Air Force to squash an uprising within the ranks of the king’s warriors. They had enlisted the French to quell the rebellion inside the Holy Mosque in 1979. This time, they needed all the might of the Americans against the man they knew could be their undoing. After all, they had armed him to the teeth for years against Iran.
In 1990, Osama bin Laden was in Jeddah. Following the Soviet withdrawal, he was done for now with Afghanistan. He didn’t want America’s help on the Arabian Peninsula and believed it was possible to defeat Saddam by “organizing battalions of righteous Islamic volunteers.” He wanted to meet the king and put his plan to him: a sixty-page plan outlining his strategy for a guerrilla war. Bin Laden insisted he had some eighty thousand fighters at his disposal, all battled-tested Afghan war veterans. He also claimed he had all the weapons he needed. He never met the king, and the minister of defense who did meet him, Prince Sultan, dismissed his plan: there were no caves in Kuwait like there were in Afghanistan; Bin Laden could not fight a traditional army that would lob missiles at him. But he was unperturbed: “We will fight him with faith.”
The royals did not take him up on his offer, but yet again, their role as defenders of the faith and the holy sites was thrown into doubt. On January 9, 1990, Saddam convened a repeat of the Popular Islamic Conference that had gathered the who’s who of the Islamic world in 1983 and bestowed Islamic legitimacy on his war against Iran in the 1980s. This time, Saddam declared war on the Saudis, those who had “put the Mecca of the Muslims and the tomb of prophet Muhammad under the spears of the foreigner.” He added the words Allahu Akbar to the Iraqi flag.
The Saudis hit back. They convened their own Popular Islamic Conference at the same time in Mecca. Needless to say, it attracted more people, and of course Maarouf Dawalibi was there, not in Baghdad. King Fahd also leaned on the man who never failed to help the Al-Sauds out of a bind: the blind sheikh Bin Baz, the same one who had nurtured Juhayman and his coterie before sanctioning the use of force in the Holy Mosque. Against the advice of some of his Saudi colleagues, Bin Baz issued two fatwas, in 1990 and again in 1991, sanctioning the unsanctionable: he declared that in certain emergencies, a Muslim state could ask for help from a non-Muslim state. He then blessed all those, Muslim and non-Muslim, who were participating in the “holy war” against Saddam, who was now declared an “enemy of God.” By the end of January 1991, half a million American troops had descended on the kingdom to protect the oil fields and use the kingdom as a launching pad to liberate Kuwait. There were female soldiers driving trucks. Foreign correspon
dents, including women, were flocking to the country, staying in hotels, unaccompanied.
Saudi citizens were taken aback by the developments: Why did the kingdom need outside help for its protection? Why didn’t it have its own professional army ready for the job? Saudis had been tolerant of their government’s failings and even the corruption of the royals when they were told that budget cuts in the 1980s were paying to build up the country’s defense as the Iran-Iraq War raged. Where had all the money gone? Two strands of society were pulling in very different directions as the kingdom appeared to be opening to the outside world by the force of war. There were those, educated and progressive, who saw an opportunity to push for social and political reforms that had been shelved after 1979. There was still no constitution, although the king had said in 1980 that it was ready; the shura council (an appointed, consultative, and nonlegislating parliament, first introduced in the 1930s) had been retired years ago and had still not been revived. Whatever modern luxuries and subsidies Saudi citizens enjoyed in the kingdom, they were no longer enough to make up for the social restrictions that had become only harsher, making life even grimmer in the kingdom. Holidays abroad provided an easy escape, but people, especially women, wanted more.
Women had been most affected by the rolling back of the limited social freedoms they’d had before 1979. Hundreds had already graduated from universities abroad and bristled at the closeted life they had to lead in the kingdom, the only country in the world where women were not allowed to drive. On November 6, 1990, seventy Saudi women gathered in the parking lot of the al-Tamimi Safeway supermarket in Riyadh in their cars. They dismissed their drivers, took the wheel, and drove through the city. The convoy of plush automobiles—Buicks, Mercedes, Lincoln Continentals, and the like—broke down into smaller groups at every intersection, until they were all intercepted by the Saudi police about half an hour after the protest began. The women, who all had the support of their husbands and male relatives, were briefly detained and made to sign pledges that they wouldn’t repeat their protest. Those who had government jobs (teaching at the university, for example) were dismissed by order of the king. This was the paternal side to the misogyny of the system, the soft tone with which the king dealt with unruly female subjects. The zealots were not soft.
From their pulpits, clerics denounced the protesters as “dirty American secularists” and “fallen women.” Their names and addresses were printed on leaflets distributed around mosques, one leaflet accusing them of having renounced Islam; inherent in that accusation was the threat of death for apostasy. Bin Baz issued a decree formally forbidding women to drive, but he could not undo the damage of his acquiescence to opening the door to half a million Americans. A war of words had begun; fiery speeches spread around the country on what was still the favorite propaganda tool of the time, the same one that Khomeini had used to spread his revolutionary message: cassette tapes.
Two clerics led the protestations: Safar al-Hawali and Salman al-Audah. Hawali was a forty-year-old, taciturn-looking man, with deep-set eyes and a long, untrimmed, jet-black beard. Audah was younger and more jovial, and he kept his beard short. The two men had opposed the jihad in Afghanistan, disagreeing with Azzam’s call on all Muslims to fight the Soviets. But they could not abide the arrival of the infidels on the peninsula. Their tapes sold like hotcakes, under the table, in the back of shops, passed around after prayers at the mosque. They decried the influence of the West on their country, warning that the war with Iraq and the arrival of infidel troops in Saudi Arabia were part of a larger plan by the West to dominate the Arab and Muslim world. “It is not the world against Iraq,” said Hawali in one speech, “It is the West against Islam. If Iraq has occupied Kuwait, then America has occupied Saudi Arabia. The real enemy is not Iraq. It is the West.”
The speeches became increasingly political and fiery, enraging Saudi youth already discontent and bored, or frustrated after returning from the jihad against the Soviets. Some were now traveling to fight in Bosnia and Chechnya. Hawali and Audah also petitioned the king for reforms in two letters: they demanded the establishment of the long-promised shura council, and they called for domestic and foreign policies that complied fully with the shari’a. There was no outright call for the removal of the royal family or any questioning of the legitimacy of the House of Saud. Instead, theirs was a call to embrace Islamic values more truly, and to reject servitude to the West. This was a reform movement working within the confines of the state, but the king saw it as a betrayal by his subjects. By 1994, Hawali, Audah, and dozens of their followers had been thrown in jail, where they would stay until 1999. But the tapes of their sermons still circulated, others were still preaching, and dissidents spread the word from exile by fax.
The House of Saud felt betrayed for another reason. The two clerics had something in common: they had both been students of prominent figures connected to the Muslim Brothers, the Egyptian Mohammad Qutb, brother of Sayyid, and the Syrian Surur, author of the book about the Shias as magi. The two men had arrived in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. Qutb had supervised Hawali’s dissertation on secularism at the Umm al-Qura University in Mecca in the 1980s. Audah had been deeply influenced by Surur, who taught and preached near his hometown, in the city of Buraidah.
The first wave of teachers from the Arab world had come to the kingdom in the 1930s and 1940s with secular texts: the history of the French Revolution, the poetry of the great Arab masters, the writings of reformers of the Arab renaissance. Then came the Muslim Brothers with their religious teachings, more in tune with the needs of the kingdom, though there were key differences between the Brotherhood and the Wahhabis. Initially, the Brothers worked within the framework of the state, focused on shaping a model, conservative Islamic society. But as Egyptians or Syrians, they had politics in their DNA, and by 1991, their ideas had transformed Wahhabi Salafism, traditionally obedient to the ruler, into a more activist Salafism. Some described it as Qutbist or Sururi Wahhabism, following either Qutb or Surur. Injecting political activism into an absolute monarchy, they had unleashed a protest movement that was challenging the king. The House of Saud would never forgive the Brotherhood, and would conveniently blame the group for all the extremism and violence that was about to be unleashed. But the local grievances were very real. Surur, Qutb, and others had simply given them the tools to protest.
The royals decried this sahwa, this Islamic awakening, which was not what they’d had in mind when they had encouraged a sahwa after 1979, believing it would remain focused on religion and education, on proselytizing and enforcing prayer times. The uncomfortable truth for the House of Saud was that they also had long used the Muslim Brotherhood to their advantage, to lend legitimacy and respectability to institutions like the Islamic University of Medina.
Founded by King Faisal in 1961 as a gift to the Wahhabi establishment, the university had an explicit mission: to train, proselytize, and extend the reach of the kingdom’s religious establishment beyond the country’s borders. Before that, efforts to send Wahhabi scholars from Najd to proselytize in neighboring Iraq and Syria had been met with scorn. Attracting non-Saudi scholars to the university (with the help of big paychecks) would show that it was not a purely Wahhabi establishment, but a legitimate endeavor with broad Islamic appeal. The syllabus was still shaped by the Wahhabi creed, focused on the works of Ibn Abdelwahhab, Ibn Taymiyyah, and the Hanbali school of thought. There were limited comparative studies. The powerful vice rector was none other than Bin Baz. Mawdudi sat on the board. Mohammad Qutb was on the university’s founding advisory council, and the sahwa leader Hawali had been a student. The Brothers had influenced their Wahhabi colleagues, and had themselves absorbed Wahhabi ideas—but the product was still made and facilitated in Saudi Arabia. Until 1979, the kings had bent that product and the clerics to their will, keeping them in check. After 1979, the Wahhabi religious establishment had become king.
Mansour, the young man who had set the video stores on fire, had not gone to Medin
a University, but he had lapped up Surur and the Qutb brothers’ writings, which were widely available in Saudi Arabia, in schools and at universities. What set Mansour apart was that he questioned everything, even the presence of God. This initially led him down the path of extremism. Assailed by doubts, Mansour made a deal with his creator: he would give up everything and live the way the prophet and his companions had lived fourteen centuries earlier if God helped him get rid of his doubts. At the age of sixteen, he joined a hardline Salafist group that tried to re-create the mythical time of the prophet, living with no television, no radio, no newspapers, and barely any modern amenities. The community of three hundred had its own schools, focused solely on religious teachings. Mansour grew his beard and stopped speaking to his family. He later compared it to living like the Amish. He began to outdo his fundamentalist teachers: he issued a religious edict against the 1989 FIFA World Youth championship being held in the kingdom—football was haram. He landed in jail for fifty-five days for daring to oppose the royal family’s games. Mansour and men like him were frustrated by the hypocrisy around them, big and small: Why had the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques invited the infidels into the kingdom? Why did government sheikhs say that Western films were propagating un-Islamic values, yet still allow them to be sold? Why did Mansour end up in jail for firebombing a video store when he was doing exactly what the Taliban were doing in Afghanistan?