by Kim Ghattas
But Washington had begun to worry about the erratic ways of MbS and signaled its support for Hariri, while the French president traveled to Riyadh to extricate the Lebanese leader. Jamal was now writing a regular column for the Washington Post, and in his next piece he compared MbS to Russian president Vladimir Putin. Jamal kept undermining the crown prince’s narrative as a reformer, criticizing him from the one perch that mattered most to the House of Saud: America.
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In Jeddah, Sofana Dahlan wanted to believe that Mohammad bin Salman was the hero that her generation had long been waiting for. The descendant of Mufti Dahlan, who as a schoolgirl had been made to draw black lines through people’s faces in art class, was now a grown woman—and a trailblazer. She had relentlessly pursued the impossible dream of being a lawyer in a country with no law schools for women and no female lawyers. She had studied law in Cairo and then Islamic studies at Al-Azhar in the hope that her degree would be recognized in the kingdom. She graduated in 2003, but not until ten years later, in 2013, did the king finally declare that women would be allowed to practice law. She applied for a license. At the ministry of justice in Riyadh, they dismissed her: “You won’t get your license, not for a thousand years.” For weeks on end, Sofana traveled to Riyadh once a week and sat for hours on a chair staring at the bureaucrat who had the power to issue her a license. Eventually she wore him down—he even bought her a cake to celebrate her achievement.
Sofana wanted to believe that a new era was opening up in the kingdom, but again she felt excluded. She had felt excluded growing up, in the 1980s and 1990s, on the margins of a religious revival promoted by the House of Saud. The intense, exclusionary Islam she was taught at school did not mesh with her understanding of her religion or what her parents were teaching her. As descendants of the mufti, her family still followed the Shafi’i school of thought in Islam, as did many people in the Hejaz and in neighboring Yemen. Sofana was devout and embraced her religion with love; she found peace in prayer.
She could still barely listen to music, even though she knew, on an intellectual level, that nothing would happen to her if she did. The image of molten lead being poured into her ears on Judgment Day was difficult to forget. As a young girl, she had been expelled from school for three days for challenging a teacher at school who told her that the family portraits her parents kept at home were idolatrous. “Fine, then take the pictures of the king off the walls,” the ten-year-old had retorted. As a teenager in the early 1990s, she and a friend had gone to the Hallmark shop in a mall looking for a card. The religious police walked in and began to scream at the vendors, tearing up all the cards. Though terrified, Sofana and her friend could not escape from the shop—the religious police had walked in just as prayer time began and the doors of the shop were locked. She could not forget the image of strange men with whips, destroying private property in the name of righteousness—and the contradiction of a shop operating legally but facing the ire of a religious police that was an arm of the state. Her desire to fight injustice stemmed partly from such episodes. She felt like a victim on the inside but never acted like one. She overcame the challenges with the systematic approach of critical thinking, dogged learning, and guts. And she loved a challenge.
But the limitations and restrictions placed on her for years were not something she could easily forgive. And that’s what Saudis of her generation were now being asked to do—to forget and forgive the sahwa, the Islamic awakening, the one that the royals themselves had encouraged in the 1980s before denouncing its political activism in the 1990s. MbS wanted to erase the past by injecting fun into the lives of Saudis. Fun was much needed, but the entertainment plans of Vision 2030 were catering to Westernized millennials; they were the product of American consultants working for big companies like McKinsey who were adding a layer of Western lifestyle to a conservative kingdom. The events were all sold out and generated coverage in the Western media. But they left behind large swaths of the population who could not relate to the entertainment on offer. The future felt just as exclusionary as the past. For Saudis who had never had the means to travel or live abroad, the conservative context of the kingdom was all they knew. The sudden arrival of John Travolta, Cirque du Soleil, and American wrestlers was not what they’d had in mind when they had wished for more social freedoms. The most conservative Saudis and the ultra-orthodox clerics were incensed by the debauchery on display: women in cat suits dancing, men and women mixing freely on the seaside promenade in Jeddah watching the fireworks, rappers dancing in front of a mixed crowd. An ominous video circulated on social media warning that those who embraced Western ways were forsaking their religion. The warning seemed to be addressed as much to the man at the top who was making it all possible as to his subjects.
What bothered Sofana wasn’t that jazz concerts and operas were now on offer; she welcomed those. But when she looked at the crowds attending such events, she was full of questions. Where were women who wear the full-face veil? They were a product of the system—what were they being offered in this new Saudi Arabia? Why was there talk of graffiti art on the walls of the old city of Jeddah, a UNESCO heritage site, instead of a project to restore the buildings and their intricate architecture and woodwork? And why was the kingdom building a national ballet theater when there wasn’t even a ballet school? The country was going from one extreme to another. At the turn of the century, the House of Saud had vacuumed inclusive values and diversity out of the peninsula to impose Wahhabism; now it was vacuuming out the religion to impose fun. What was haram yesterday was permissible today, and Sofana’s generation was confused. They were the product of the era of 1979, and their past was being rewritten with no acknowledgment of the suffering they had endured.
In his quest to transform aspects of life in the kingdom, MbS was the first royal to acknowledge that 1979 had been a turning point, but he described it as a reaction only to events in Iran, ignoring the kingdom’s own history. “What happened in the last 30 years is not Saudi Arabia … After the Iranian revolution in 1979, people wanted to copy this model in different countries, one of them is Saudi Arabia. We didn’t know how to deal with it. And the problem spread all over the world. Now is the time to get rid of it,” he claimed in an interview with the Guardian newspaper. “We are simply reverting to what we followed—a moderate Islam open to the world and all religions … 70% of the Saudis are younger than 30, honestly we won’t waste 30 years of our life combating extremist thoughts, we will destroy them now and immediately.”
But when he vowed to return the kingdom to moderate Islam, people in the Hejaz province scoffed. Which Islam was that? The unforgiving puritanism that the House of Saud had imposed on everyone when it founded the kingdom and then exported to the world? Or was it the Islam from the Hejaz built on centuries of inclusive interactions with the world, a choice of halaqas (study circles) in the Holy Mosque, and an embrace of the mysticism of Sufism? None of this diversity was being brought back to the holiest places of Islam, the beating heart of the religion. Even worse, when MbS was asked about Wahhabism, he feigned ignorance: “First of all, what is this Wahhabism—please define it for us. We’re not familiar with it. We don’t know about it,” he told one American journalist.
It was true that strict adherents hated the term. They still considered it a derogatory way of referring to the creed practiced in the kingdom, a disrespectful way to refer to a man whose only fault, in their eyes, was to have tried to return Islam to its purest form. And he was still being celebrated in the kingdom: the desert settlement of Dir’iyah, birthplace of the alliance between Ibn Abdelwahhab and the founder of the first Saudi state, was being turned into a tourist attraction with a sleek glass, metal, and stone structure housing a foundation dedicated to the sheikh, his life and his mission. And when MbS decried the sahwa, he reduced it only to the political movement of the 1990s and placed the blame squarely on the Muslim Brotherhood for any extremism in Saudi Arabia. There was no mention of the blind sheikh Bin Baz
’s own efforts at a religious revival before 1979, no reference to Juhayman, no word about King Khaled himself publicly praising the sahwa in 1981 in Mecca.
Sofana oscillated between resentment, disbelief, and joy. She was excited when women were allowed into a football stadium for the first time ever—they were seated in a separate section for families and mixed groups, but they were there. In Iran, women had been banned from public stadiums since 1979, and they watched with some envy as Saudi women scored a win. Iran had just barred women from attending a World Cup qualifying match in Tehran between Iran and Syria, though, bizarrely, Syrian women had been allowed into the stadium. Although the abaya, the ankle-length cloak, was mandatory in Saudi Arabia, women could walk around without covering their hair, unlike in Iran. When the religious police in Iran suddenly declared that women who were not properly veiled would simply get a warning, it suddenly looked as though Iran and Saudi Arabia were competing to improve women’s rights.
On June 24, 2018, the stroke of midnight signaled another victory for Saudi women. Thousands of them sat behind the wheel and drove off in cities across the country. This was not a protest but a celebration. In 2017, the king promised that women would be allowed to drive, and now he had delivered—women were on the roads, legally, with driver’s licenses issued in Saudi Arabia in the previous days. Sofana was elated. This was something she could celebrate, not a luxury but a necessity. She posted a picture of herself holding her brand-new Saudi driver’s license on Facebook, issued in her hometown of Medina. And on Twitter. And again, from a different angle, on Facebook. And then a picture of herself getting behind the wheel of a car outside her office in Jeddah. The world’s media had descended on the kingdom to cover the moment when the only country in the world where women were not allowed to drive finally lifted the ban. Automakers rolled out stunning television ads celebrating the moment, ready to market their latest models to new, eager drivers. Vogue magazine produced a striking cover showing Princess Hayfa bint Abdallah, daughter of the late king, leaning out of the driver’s seat of a red convertible in the desert, dressed all in white and wearing stiletto-heeled leather boots.
The women who had campaigned for years for this moment, such as Lujain al-Hathloul and Aziza al-Youssef, and others who had taken the wheel in protest back in 1991, like academic Aisha al-Mane’a, now a feisty seventy-year-old grandmother, should have been celebrating the fruit of their relentless efforts to overturn the retrograde ban. Instead, they were in jail. Eleven activists had been picked up two weeks earlier, a way to ensure they could not claim credit for this moment (four of the detained were men, some of whom were known to have supported the women’s campaign). This moment could not be their victory, nor the result of activism—in the absolute monarchy, everything good was the result of the king’s munificence. And to erase their decades of activism and their standing in society, they were being branded as traitors in a vicious smear campaign online and in newspapers.
When MbS had declared that the era of 1979 was over, he was right in one sense: religion was no longer enough to motivate society and mobilize the masses. Across the Middle East, a majority of young people were declaring that religion played too big a role in daily life. Even in a conservative society like Saudi Arabia, national cohesion could no longer rely on religious ideology. MbS had understood this when he went to war in Yemen in 2015—nationalism could be the new ideology to rally young Saudis, and “traitor” could replace kafir as a rallying cry.
Around the same time, in the United States, Jamal tried to look up one of his old articles in Okaz, a local Saudi newspaper. What came up instead was “ERROR: 404 Page Not Found.” He searched for other pieces he had written for the paper; there was nothing. He checked other publications he had written for, including the website of Al-Arabiyya television station. There was nothing. Although he had been officially banned from Al-Hayat, his columns were still online, perhaps because the paper was headquartered in London. But within the kingdom, he had been erased online.
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In the early afternoon of October 2, 2018, just over a year into his life in exile, Jamal was chatting with his fiancée in a taxi in Istanbul, heading for the Saudi consulate. On the shores of the Bosporus, he had found love again and wanted to believe in the future. He had met Hatice Cengiz, a thirty-six-year-old Turkish doctoral student, at a conference in May. She knew his work and had asked a question after he spoke onstage. They talked more afterward. She spoke Arabic; his family had ancient Turkish roots. They stayed in touch and met again during his next visit to Istanbul. The emotional connection developed rapidly. As fearless as he appeared to those around him, Jamal was a teddy bear of a man, and he had been lonely in his big house in Virginia. Jamal could not speak of exile without tears in his eyes. He had tried to reconcile with his wife but had failed. On his bedside table was a picture of his children and grandchildren; they were the last thing he saw every night when he went to sleep; they greeted him when he opened his eyes in the morning. But the relationship was strained. One of Jamal’s sons had been banned from leaving the kingdom and refused to speak to him. Jamal missed his family and the smell of home, the hustle of cities like his hometown of Medina; he dreamed of walking its streets again—Istanbul was the closest approximation. Washington had begun to feel too far from the world he knew, and he was working to launch an organization to promote democracy in the Arab world: Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). He was on a mission to teach younger generations about pluralism and democracy—democracy was the solution, he kept telling his friends.
Hatice watched from behind the protective metal police barricades that surrounded the Saudi consulate as Jamal walked away from her, toward the two-story building. She was excited about their upcoming wedding. All that was missing was one piece of paper that Jamal was going to get inside the consulate. She held on to her fiancé’s two phones. Security measures at the consulate meant he couldn’t take them inside. He had told her to call a friend of his in the Turkish government if anything went wrong. He had been a bit hesitant about walking into the consulate. The Saudi embassy in Washington had directed him to the consulate in Istanbul for the legal document he was seeking. There was no clear reason why: this was a Saudi document certifying he was single so he could officially marry his fiancée. He should have been able to obtain it at any Saudi embassy. He had gone to the consulate in Istanbul the first time unannounced, just five days earlier, on September 28. He told Hatice the consular staff had been friendly and welcoming, but the paperwork required a few days and they had given him a return appointment. He had weighed the risks. There was no arrest warrant against him, he was not a wanted man. Though in exile, he still didn’t consider himself a dissident; he had never called for the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy. He had nothing to hide if they wanted to interrogate him. He had been to the embassy in Washington, DC, plenty of times, and had even sat down a few times with the ambassador, Khaled bin Salman, MbS’s younger brother. And he laughed at friends who worried and asked him to let them know before he walked into the austere, monumental marble-clad building by the Potomac River. “You are ridiculous,” he had told one of his American friends. But he was in fact taking precautions. He had stopped going to prayers at a Saudi-affiliated mosque in Washington. He had resisted offers to return to the kingdom for a government job. But he had concluded that the Saudi authorities would not dare do anything to him in a foreign country, in their own diplomatic mission. Hatice still worried that it was a trap. She had skipped classes to accompany him back to the consulate.
She told Jamal she would be waiting for him, right there, in the same spot where he left her. “Fine, my darling,” he had said with a smile. He walked past a black Mercedes-Benz Vito van and smiled to the Saudi consular employee in a light blue blazer standing by the door. The entrance door opened, a heavy metal door embossed in gold with the crossed swords and palm tree of the Saudi emblem. At exactly 13:14:37, Khashoggi walked past the threshold and into the Saudi consulate. Hom
e soil. The metal door shut behind him.
Outside, Hatice waited, pacing. They had already furnished the apartment they would live in. “The house is beautiful, like its owner,” he’d written to her in a message a few days ago. At three in the afternoon, Hatice was still waiting. Could the paperwork really be taking this long? Perhaps Jamal was chatting with Saudi officials inside. After all, he was well known and had worked in embassies himself. She asked the guards outside about her fiancé. The consulate was now closed, they told her. There was no one inside. Hatice panicked and dialed the number Jamal had given her in case of emergency. Yasin Aktay, the senior adviser to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, answered the phone and then made some calls. Hatice stayed outside the consulate until one in the morning. She returned later in the day. Still no sign of Jamal. The news began to spread that Jamal had vanished, perhaps abducted by his own government. Alarm bells rang from Istanbul to Ankara, all the way to the newsroom of the Washington Post and the Oval Office at the White House. The next day, his editor Karen Attiah wrote: “Jamal, if you have a chance to read this, please know that we at The Post are actively seeking to ensure your safety and freedom. I won’t be able to rest easy until you appear safe and sound.” On October 5, the Washington Post published a blank space where his column should have been—a poignant move that sent shock waves around the world. That same day, in Riyadh, MbS was sitting down for an interview with a team from Bloomberg News and was asked about Jamal.