Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  Like The Kingdom, this book is based on a stay in Saudi Arabia of some three years, as I have sought to experience the texture of life as much as a foreigner can, without losing the perspective that makes me a foreigner. Every word in the main narrative is as true as I can make it, checked and double-checked, wherever possible, against its original source. Then, set throughout the text, are some of the jokes and folktales that Saudis recount when they try to explain how things have come to be the strange way they are. It is a device I adopted in The Kingdom to reflect the rhythm and complexity of local narratives, recruiting fable to help explain the facts.

  . . .

  I am writing these words in a plane flying from the Saudi coastal oil fields to Riyadh. Comfortably ensconced by a window with my laptop, I am looking down on the arid, orange expanse of desert below me, and I cannot help thinking of the British adventurers who plodded across this same territory less than a century ago, taking more than a week to make the same journey. I am doing some time traveling of my own. The modern Saudi experience may seem remote, but it was not so long ago in the West—certainly in our parents’ and grandparents’ memory—that most people were devout and rather intolerant believers, scared and suspicious of other races and faiths: the “weaker sex” did not vote; capital punishment was considered a necessity; books and plays were censored (our movies still are); father knew best, and “nice” girls kept themselves pure until marriage. For centuries Western life was lived within the comfort of those structures and strictures, and it is only recently that we have started to look for new values—which we sometimes seek to define by criticizing those who are reluctant to abandon the proven security of the old ones.

  As I look down on the desert, I can sense the trajectory of the plane make a shift. We will be landing in Riyadh shortly, after less than an hour in the air. So here we are, all of us, rushing into the future—with the Saudis, these days, starting to step out just a little faster than they did before. Their progress in the past three decades has been uplifting in some respects, but really quite shocking and destructive in others. It is a dramatic and important story, and as I set out to tell it, I cannot help wondering: Will they ban this book like the last one?

  Robert Lacey

  Riyadh, 2009

  This family tree is based upon a list of the surviving sons of Abdul Aziz in undated order of precedence kindly supplied by Dr. Fahd Al-Semari of the Darat Al-Malik Abdul Aziz (the King Abdul Aziz Study Center) in Riyadh. Dates of birth have been estimated from this and from the family trees compiled by Michael Field and by Brian Lees, author of A Handbook of the Al-Saud Ruling Family of Saudi Arabia (Royal Genealogies, London, 1980). See Lees and also The Kingdom for details of all thirty-seven or so of Abdul Aziz’s sons. The old king fathered a similar number of daughters, but the precise number of his children has never been publicly quantified.

  Drawings by Laura Maestro.

  NOTE ON THE ISLAMIC CALENDAR

  Muslim months begin and end with the phases of the moon. People scan the sky in every corner of Saudi Arabia, and only when the hilal—the new crescent moon—has actually been seen and attested is the month certified in court to have officially begun.

  Twelve lunar months add up to some 354 days—eleven or so days short of the Western, Gregorian year. So a Muslim centenarian is not yet ninety-seven in terms of 365-day Gregorian years, and the shorter Muslim year is constantly creeping forward in relation to its Western equivalent. Celebrations like the end of hajj (the pilgrimage) and Ramadan (the holy month of fasting) arrive eleven days or so earlier in Western terms every year.

  The calendar also has its own start date—the hijrah, or migration—the turning point in the birth of Islam, when the Prophet Mohammed forsook the hostility of unreformed Mecca (in the Christian year A.D. 622) and migrated to the community that would become known as Medina (see page 7). Islamic years are accordingly known as migration, or hijrah, years and will be denoted as A.H. (anno hegirae) in the pages that follow.

  PART ONE

  KINGDOM OF GOD

  A.D. 1979-1990 (A.H. 1400-1411)

  Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer. Nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

  —Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed

  CHAPTER 1

  Angry Face

  Juhayman means “Angry Face,” deriving from jahama, the past tense of yatajaham, meaning to set your features grimly. Arabia’s bedouin have a tradition of bestowing ugly, tough-guy names on their children. They believe it keeps trouble at bay in a troublesome world—though in the case of Juhayman Al-Otaybi, “Angry Face” of the Otayba tribe, the name came to stand for incredible trouble. With his wild beard and wild eyes, Juhayman had the look of Che Guevara about him, perhaps even Charles Man-son. In November and December 1979, Angry Face horrified the entire Muslim world when he led hundreds of young men to their deaths in Mecca. It was a gesture of demented religious fanaticism, and the House of Saud did its best to disown him. This mingling of violence with religion was an un-Saudi aberration, explained government apologists—Juhayman was not typical in the slightest. Which was what they would say again, twenty years later, about Osama Bin Laden.

  It went back to 1973, when King Faisal of Saudi Arabia announced a boycott on his kingdom’s oil sales to the United States. Enraged by President Richard Nixon’s military support for Israel in the October War against Egypt and Syria, the Saudi king had hoped to compel some dramatic change in U.S. policy. Yet as the Arab oil boycott caused the price of oil on the world market to multiply nearly five times, it was back home, inside the Kingdom, that the truly dramatic changes would occur.

  “For about eighteen months nothing seemed to happen,” remembers Dr. Horst Ertl, who was teaching chemical engineering at the College of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. “Then, around the spring of 1975, just before the death of King Faisal, I drove across via Riyadh to the Red Sea coast. Suddenly everyone seemed to have money in their pockets. It was incredible. One moment just a few of the richer students had cars. Next moment, the university parking lot was filling.”

  After centuries of hibernation and a few recent decades of only gradual change, Saudi Arabia was suddenly turned on its head. Foreign money brought foreign ways—the good, the bad, and, in the eyes of many Saudis, the very definitely ugly. Women started appearing on TV and, even more offensively for many traditionalists, half-undressed beside hotel swimming pools. The Kingdom’s cities became chaotic building sites, where blank-faced laborers in hard hats toiled in the dust like ants. The construction crane, it was said, was the new national symbol of the Kingdom, throwing up schools, universities, palaces, hospitals, mosques, office blocks, highways, more hotels—and shops, shops, shops.

  “You’d go away for the summer,” remembers Prince Amr Mohammed Al-Faisal, a grandson of the late king, “and come back to discover yourself surrounded by whole new neighborhoods. You got lost in your own town.”

  Petrodollars were the death of Jeddah’s charming old Souq Al-Nada (the “Dew” marketplace), which derived its poetic name from the morning scent of moisture that wafted up from the beaten earth. In short order the soft earthen floor was cemented over with garish, trattoria-style ceramic tiles, and the scent of dew was replaced by petrol from the traders’ noisy generators.

  Faisal’s successor, his half brother Khaled, who became king in 1975, looked on these changes with kindly bemusement. “Can you tell me, my sons,” he would inquire of his nephews, bright young princes back from California with their degrees in business and engineering and political science, “what I should do with this fish that is opening its mouth, swallowing my money, and giving me back iron and cement? Are these riches a blessing to the Muslims, or a curse?”

  The pious had no doubt. A society that had been safely closed for centuries was now ripped open to danger. Their pure world was under threat. Cocky children knew better than their parents. The English language counted for more than Arabic, God’s own language in which He had re
vealed the Koran. Traditionalists could not glory in this jackpot moment, which was sullying their beautiful past. They felt scared and unprotected. They were outraged by these helter-skelter changes they were helpless to prevent, and they had a word for them—bidaa, innovations.

  “Every bidah is a going-astray, and every going-astray leads to Hell-fire,” went a saying attributed to the Prophet—though his condemnation, in the eyes of most modern Islamic scholars, referred to changes in the field of religious practice and ritual, not to technical innovations like the motorcar and television.

  “Life before the oil boom had a sweetness and a closeness that we can now see was very precious—and very fragile,” remembers Dr. Khaled Bahaziq, who was twenty-three years old in 1973 and studying in America. “When I was a child, we lived in one another’s houses. We cooked food and shared it when we broke the fast at Ramadan. If the neighbors saw me misbehaving, they would tell me off, and my parents would say thank you. We were all family and friends, so we didn’t need rules about the girls wearing veils. We were a community. Then the money came. Everybody bought cars, drove out of town and built themselves villas behind high walls—you were reckoned a failure if you didn’t. And suddenly we found we were separate. We felt somehow empty inside. If we had a wedding to celebrate, we didn’t get together like we used to, stringing out the lights round the neighbors’ houses and yards. We’d hire a ballroom in some modern hotel.”

  Studying in America, Bahaziq filled the emptiness by seeking to become a better Muslim, forswearing the American temptations of alcohol and women. Back home in Jeddah for a vacation in 1975, he asked his family to find him a devout Saudi wife, in part to “innoculate” him against life in the States.

  “My family made the choice. I had the right to meet her before the wedding—to ‘inspect’ her, if you like. But I felt that that was insulting to her. I trusted my family. I trusted her. I was happy not to be doing things in the modern and materialistic Western way. So the first time we saw each other was on our wedding day. Allah has blessed us ever since.”

  Bahaziq took his wife back to America, where he threw himself into Muslim activities, helping to organize the Islamic center at his university. As oil wealth increased in the late 1970s, Western newspapers gleefully reported the excesses of nouveau rich Arabs flaunting their fortunes in Europe. But these Muslims who adopted Western delinquencies were not, it turned out, the Muslims who really mattered. The oil boom had produced a religion boom, and behind the headlines, the future was being seized by driven, pious men like Khaled Bahaziq, who would later wield a Kalashnikov in Afghanistan—and, even more dramatically, by a man called “Angry Face.”

  Juhayman Al-Otaybi overflowed with nervous energy.

  “I never saw him sleeping,” remembers Nasser Al-Huzaymi, who lived and traveled with Juhayman for four years in the mid-1970s. “He was like a father or brother to everyone, always ready to take care of you. When we went to sleep, he would make sure our blankets were pulled over us. People loved him. When he drove us in his GMC [truck] to recruit people in the villages, he would chant ‘Allahu akbar! ’ [God is great!] all the way. He was a leader. To use a Western word, he had ‘charisma.’ ”

  To a Western eye, Juhayman also had the air of an Old Testament prophet. In his short thobe and bared ankles, the straggle-haired fanatic seemed to be living in a different century from the “Gucci bedouin” of Jeddah, kitted out in their loafers and Porsches—and, in a sense, he was. Juhayman was repelled by bidaa, the innovations of the twentieth century. As the Westernizing affluence of the oil boom spread across the Kingdom, he sought refuge in the past, finding himself drawn backward in history, as is often the case with those who seek a fresh future in religion, to an earlier, simpler world, when the faith was fresh and new—so new, in fact, it was in the process of being created.

  WHAT GOD REVEALED TO MOHAMMED

  “Iqra!” “Recite!”

  God started speaking to Mohammed when the Prophet was in his late thirties—forty years old in lunar years. “Recite in the name of your Lord who created humanity!” were the first words that came to the confused and earnest young merchant as he was meditating in a cave in one of the craggy hills surrounding Mecca. He felt, he later said, as if an angel had wrapped around him physically and was squeezing him tight.

  God’s fundamental instruction to his Messenger was to make the world a better place: the rich should provide money for the poor; women should be entitled to a portion of their parents’ legacy; polygamy should be limited to four wives; retribution should be restricted to just one eye for an eye.

  But this vision of moderated inequality—a model, for its time, of social reform—was not well received by the wealthy merchants of Mecca, whose fortunes were swelled by the pilgrims who came to worship the 360 gods of the city. Mohammed’s insistence that there was only one God, in the tradition proclaimed by Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic), seemed a mortal threat to the Meccans’ income stream, and they did all they could to stifle the new movement, torturing the Prophet’s followers and even devising a plot to murder him in his bed.

  So Mohammed eventually gave his followers orders to leave this city where men were refusing to live as God intended. He told them to head north to the oases of Yathrib—a five-day camel ride away—and when the last of them was safely out of Mecca, he followed with his dear friend and ally Abu Bakr.

  The two men’s safe arrival in Yathrib provoked a riotous welcome. The followers had been waiting anxiously for days, scanning the southern horizon from the edge of the palm groves, and when they spotted the two distant figures late one evening, coming out of the sunset, they broke into cheers and celebration. “The Messenger is here! The Messenger has come!”

  The hijrah (migration) of the Prophet from Mecca marks the beginning of Islamic history, since the members of the little community that now formed around Mohammed in Yathrib were able to live for the first time freely and openly as proper Muslims. In the weeks that followed, they built the first mosque, a low, brick-walled building around a courtyard, partially shaded with palm fronds; they listened to the first call to prayer (sung out proudly by Bilal, Abu Bakr’s freed slave); and, following the Prophet’s instructions, they instituted the first Islamic fast, the first Islamic laws, and a multitude of the practical traditions and regulations that came to define what it means to be a Muslim. Mohammed’s social reform movement had become a real religion, built around the 6,236 verses of his recited revelation (the Arabic for recitation is qur’an, Koran).2

  Yathrib was renamed. It became Al-Medina, “the City” of the Prophet, and since then every detail of the Prophet’s life in Medina has been studied by Muslims with fierce intensity, for Mohammed did not preach a theoretical utopia somewhere in the future. Under the palm trees of Yathrib, he created life precisely as God wanted it. So at moments when Muslims have sensed that their world was going wrong, and that their lives might be taking on the wayward character of unreformed Mecca, many have tried to measure themselves—and to remold themselves—against the shape of the original template. Back to Medina!

  In the mid 1970s Juhayman Al-Otaybi was already living in Medina, glorying in the chance to model his life on how Mohammed had lived in that very corner of the planet fourteen centuries previously. He had a home about half an hour’s walk from the Prophet’s Mosque, in Al-Harra Al-Sharqiyya, “the Eastern Terrain,” a dry and infertile landscape of black volcanic rocks where he lived in a makeshift compound with his family. The devotees that he was starting to gather lived five minutes away in an even more makeshift hostel—Bayt Al-Ikhwan, the “House of the Brothers.”

  “We all slept on a mud floor,” remembers Nasser Al-Huzaymi, who had dropped out of school and come to Medina seeking purpose in his life through religious devotion. “We had no telephone, and no plaster on the walls. We wanted to live as simply as possible, just like the Prophet’s Companions. But we needed to read and study the Koran, so after some discussion, we considered that a single electric lightb
ulb was acceptable.”

  There were many such discussions.

  “Did the Prophet eat chicken?” asked someone in the middle of a meal. “A good question,” said Juhayman.

  So the eating stopped, and the brothers pored over their copies of the Koran and the Hadith (the traditions and sayings of the Prophet). Juhayman kept his books in a huge, locked tin box that was welded into the back of his pickup truck, and at moments like this he undid the padlock to share the contents of his traveling library. It did not take much time to track down the authority for chicken consumption: one verse from the Koran envisioned the Companions relaxing in heaven, consuming “fruits, any that they may select, and the flesh of fowls, any that they may desire.”

  Chicken was OK, then—the meal could resume. Here was fundamentalism of the most basic sort. In a time of confusion, few things are more comforting than dogma. “The people of my own generation are the best,” said the Prophet, according to one popular hadith, “then those who come after them, and then those of the next generation.” This seemed a clear instruction to look backward. On this basis, every detail of life needed some sort of precedent from these three first and “best” generations.

  It was a process that was going on all over the Arab world in the 1970s as Muslims worked out their different responses to the material and spiritual inroads of the West. Those who opted for back-to-basics called themselves Salafi, because they sought to behave as salaf, literally the pious ancestors of one of those three early generations that were mentioned with such approval by the Prophet. A group calling itself Al-Jamaa Al-Salafiya Al-Muhtasiba, “the Salafi Group That Commands Right and Forbids Wrong,” had been active in Medina for some time, and Juhayman joined it when he came to town, plugging himself into some of the Kingdom’s strongest and most ancient traditions of piety.