by Robert Lacey
No longer able to meet and talk easily with his followers, Juhayman turned to the written and spoken word. None of the cassettes that he recorded during his months in the wilderness has survived, but we do have his printed words, twelve angry diatribes that have become legendary among Islamic extremists over the years—“The Letters of Juhayman.”
Their message was encapsulated in “The State, Allegiance and Obedience,” the most political of these tracts. The Al-Saud, Juhayman complained, had exploited religion as “a means to guarantee their worldly interests, putting an end to jihad, paying allegiance to the Christians [America], and bringing evil and corruption upon the Muslims.” That neatly summed up the fundamentalist case against the Saudi royal family, then and ever since—in a word, betrayal. It was the grievance of those earlier Brothers who did battle at Sibillah, and the essence of the message that Osama Bin Laden would deliver via his attacks on America on 9/11. The House of Saud were hypocrites; they exploited Islam to entice good Muslims to fight and die on their behalf, but when they had accomplished their worldly ends, they effectively machine-gunned the men who had put their lives on the line for them.
After his opening manifesto, Juhayman rather spoiled his case. He dived into the thickets of Islamic genealogy to demonstrate how the Al-Saud were not blood descendants of Mohammed—a pointless exercise, since they had never made any such claim. Juhayman had never been a disciplined thinker, and now he was caught up in the grandeur of his self-appointed mission. As ideas came into his head he dictated them to obediently scribbling associates. “He recited his thoughts out loud,” remembers Nasser Al-Huzaymi, “just as the Prophet recited his revelations,” so each of his Letters took on the rambling, declarative character of a Friday sermon.
“They all seemed a bit kooky to me,” remembers Nabil Al-Khuwaiter, who, as a student at the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, came across a selection of the pamphlets in October 1979. Crudely printed in green, yellow, and blue, the Letters of Juhayman, secretly published and smuggled across the border from Kuwait, had been scattered among the Korans at the back of the little dormitory mosque where Nabil and his fellow students—the future oil technocrats of Saudi Arabia—went to pray five times a day.
“They were challenging the Islamic legitimacy of the Al-Saud to rule,” Al-Khuwaiter recalls, “which was very shocking in those days. If criticism of the government ever appeared in the local press, it was never more than a mild complaint to a nonroyal minister about some aspect of his ministry’s services. I didn’t dare show the pamphlets to any but my closest friends and relatives—in fact, one relative even warned me that it could be some sort of Mabahith [secret police] trick to bait and snare potential dissidents.
“ ‘Whoever heard of a name like Juhayman?’ my relative said. ‘If he is a real man, let him come out and give his real name, instead of trying to deceive impressionable young college students and get them to do his dirty work.’
“As I remember it, Juhayman argued that the use of ID photos proved that the government was kafir [infidel]. I couldn’t really cotton on to his argument, but the Letters definitely caught the current of the times. On the one hand was the new wealth—the oil money flooding in with its invitation to go the Western way. On the other hand was the sense of loss as the old ways of doing things got swept away. There was this uncomfortable feeling that things were awry, so it was refreshing to see some alternative options set down on paper, however strange. I supported the idea that we needed more godly people in authority. That was how many young people were thinking at that time. It seemed so obvious—‘Put the pious people in power.’ ”
The final stage in Juhayman Al-Otaybi’s progression from earnest missionary to violent revolutionary occurred somewhere out in the northern deserts late in 1978, as the fugitive lay beneath his blanket looking up at the stars. Juhayman started to have dreams. For many years he had been contemplating the prophecies relating to the Islamic Messiah—the Mahdi, or “Right-Guided One”—who would come down to earth to correct the problems of mankind. The notion had carried some currency among the pious, and now, Juhayman dreamed, there was a need for someone who could correct the ills afflicting Arabia.
“When kings enter a village,” ran a sura in the Koran that is not much repeated in the modern monarchies of the Middle East, “they corrupt it and demean the honor of its people.”
Surely this applied to modern Saudi Arabia. In the very first of his Letters, Juhayman set out the traditions that connected the coming of the Mahdi, in his eyes, to current events in the Arabian Peninsula. “Great discord will occur,” ran one prophecy, “and the Muslims will be drifting away from the religion.” That was certainly coming true as the Al-Saud imported more and more Westerners to the country—and another tradition promised that the Mahdi would appear at the dawn of a new century. Well, it was now 1399 in the Islamic calendar.
This was where Juhayman’s dreams came in, for they revealed to him the identity of the Mahdi—one of his own followers, Mohammed Abdullah Al-Qahtani, a good-looking and pious young man who had dropped out of university and made a small reputation as a poet. He was one of the members of the Salafi Group who had been locked up, then released, in Riyadh.
“The Mahdi will be of my [Qurayshi] stock,” ran a hadith narrated by Abu Saiid Al-Khudri—“he will have a broad forehead and a prominent nose.”
That physically matched the features of the handsome Al-Qahtani, whose first name and father’s name corresponded to those of the Prophet, and whose non-Qurayshi name was explained away by a complicated story of adoption in an earlier generation.
Nasser Al-Huzaymi thought the whole thing was ridiculous.
“Al-Qahtani was a man,” he says, “not a Messiah.”
Al-Huzaymi was not convinced by the far-fetched tale of adoption and of Al-Qahtani’s blood descent from the Prophet, and he grew alarmed by Juhayman’s aggressive interpretations of other hadiths. These involved an army coming down from the north that would find itself swallowed up by the earth. Juhayman told the Brethren to get weapons before the end of the year, and to acquire small portable radios so they could listen for reports of the angels who would fly down from heaven to defeat the northern army. He traveled around the major cities gathering loyal survivors of the original ’60s-era Salafi Group to brief them on the signs of the coming Mahdi. The recent arrests of pious Brothers had shown how the government was blocking the true path. Juhayman encouraged his followers to go out into the desert for target practice.
This all sounded like trouble to Al-Huzaymi, a mild and inoffensive character who was no lover of firearms. Like a number of others, he quietly made his excuses and slipped away from a movement that seemed to be losing touch with reality.
But Juhayman was a believer, and dreams are taken very seriously by Muslims—the angel Gabriel often spoke to the Prophet in his dreams.
“The fact that we dream,” said one of the Brethren to Al-Huzaymi before he quit the group, “proves that we are more religious.”
As Juhayman reported his visions of the Mahdi, his loyal followers responded with more and more dreams of their own, among them Al-Qahtani’s own sister, who dreamed that she saw her brother standing inside the Grand Mosque in Mecca receiving the acclamations of the wor shipers beside the Kaaba (the huge cube covered with black and gold embroidered fabric at the center of the Mosque’s courtyard). Juhayman rapidly divorced his wife and married the woman, so that the Mahdi was his brother-in-law.
With the approach of A.H. 1400, a sense of purposeful hysteria began to permeate the Brotherhood. Coming and going in Mecca as religious insiders, Juhayman and his followers had their eyes on the khalawi, the warren of cellars and study rooms that lay beneath the floor of the Grand Mosque. Privileged worshippers were allowed to descend to the khalawi, where long corridors of simply furnished rest areas and cubicles were set aside for private prayer and meditation. These underground rooms would become their headquarters, they decided—an easily defensible bo
lt-hole where they could hole up and wait for their prophecies to be fulfilled.
Though by now openly critical of the royal family, the rebels do not appear to have had a coherent plan to subvert the Saudi government. They evidently believed that if they put themselves in the right place at the right time, God’s cataclysm would do the rest—and they would have front-row seats. Bribing an official of the Bin Laden company, the building and maintenance contractors in charge of the site, they were able to drive their pickup trucks straight into the basement. As A.H. 1399 drew to a close they came and went openly through the streets of Mecca as they stocked the khalawi with supplies—dates, water, and dried yogurt, but also ammunition and weapons.
They tried to keep their plans secret, but there were several hundred rebels, some of whom were euphoric at the approaching fulfillment of one of Islam’s most famous and fantastic prophecies, so it was not surprising that hints of their scheme leaked. Early in November, Ali Saad Al-Mosa, the bright young student who had heard Juhayman speak a few years earlier, was at a family funeral down in Asir.
“It was a very cold night,” he remembers, “and someone from the village started talking loudly, saying that Al-Khidr [“the Green One,” a shadowy Islamic righter-of-wrongs sometimes confused with the Mahdi] would be arriving with the new century, and that there would be changes. Everyone listened very seriously and nodded their heads. A lot of people, it seemed to me, believed him.”
Saudi coffins are not wooden boxes: they are more like stretchers—open litters on which the dead are transported to their resting place beneath a shroud. One of the perks of being a Meccan is that your relatives can shuttle your corpse into the holy of holies for a farewell prayer at the very heart of Islam. So twenty or so such “coffins” provided the ideal cover for Juhayman and his followers to smuggle their final consignments of weapons into Mecca’s Grand Mosque in the small hours of November 20, 1979—the first day of Muharram, the first Islamic month of the year 1400. Beneath the shrouds were dozens of firearms: pistols, rifles, Kalashnikovs, and magazines of ammunition.
Fajr, the predawn prayer, would be called that day at 5:18 A.M.—it is timed to the moment before sunrise when the first glimmer of brightness shows along the horizon—and the “mourners” aroused no special interest as they filed through the ghostly light. The shrouded cargoes were coming and going all the time, and on this particular morning the light was more ghostly than usual. As Juhayman and his followers fanned out quietly with their weapons around the coolness of the Grand Mosque’s massive tiled courtyard, the hilal, the thinnest of crescent moons, could be discerned in the sky above them: new moon, new month, new year, new century—though, as Riyadh’s governor, the sardonic Prince Salman, would later point out, the old century would not be truly complete until the end of 1400, with the new, fifteenth century beginning on the first day of 1401.
As the first prayer call of A.H. 1400 sounded, the slight, barefoot figure of Juhayman went scampering up the steps to the public address system to jostle aside the imam and commandeer his microphone. Celebratory shots rang out. Men were firing rifles into the air while the Brothers were clustering around Mohammed Al-Qahtani, the Dreamed-of One, shaking his hand and offering him homage.
“Behold the Mahdi!” they were shouting. “Behold the Right-Guided One!”
Now was the time for Juhayman’s prepared proclamation to be read out by one of his followers.
“The Mahdi will bring justice to the earth!” rattled the message from the loudspeakers, providing the small number of confused and sleepy policemen around the Mosque with the first explanation of what was amiss. “Juhayman is the Mahdi’s brother! He calls on you to recognize his brother! Recognize the Mahdi who will cleanse this world of its corruptions!”
From beneath their robes several dozen more men produced rifles, joined in the shouts and fanned out purposefully toward the Mosque’s twenty-five double gateways. At this cue a couple of hundred men leaped up from among the worshippers. Policemen and a young assistant imam who tried to resist were shot dead. The gunmen reached the gates. The doors were shut, and the shrine revered by Muslims as the holiest place on earth was sealed off. The House of God had been hijacked.
CHAPTER 3
Siege
The extraordinary news that the Grand Mosque had been kidnapped was received in Riyadh with consternation and something approaching panic.
“I wish they had done that to my palace, not to the Mosque,” exclaimed the pious old King Khaled with horror.
The sixty-seven-year-old Khaled had come to the throne four years earlier in the aftermath of a family compromise. In terms of seniority, the brother in line after Faisal was Khaled’s forceful elder brother Mohammed. But age has never been the sole criterion for authority in Arabia. The tribe searches for the candidate who can best bring consensus, and the inner councils of the Al-Saud had long been wary of Mohammed as too forceful. Known as Abu Sharrain, “the Father of Twin Evils,” the elderly prince had a vile temper that would be revealed to the outside world in 1977 when he ordered the deaths of his granddaughter and her lover, who had tried to elope. This tragic scandal was later depicted in the British TV film Death of a Princess,4 and might have caused the Al-Saud even more embarrassment had Mohammed not agreed to step aside from the succession in the 1960s. Sidelined from public office, paid off with land grants and endless deference, his prickly pride was salved by the knowledge that the prince who replaced him was his full blood brother.
Khaled’s mild and conciliatory style made him an altogether better guardian of the clan’s equilibrium. He was generally assumed to be a cypher whose function was to rubber-stamp the executive decisions of his westernized younger half brother Fahd, the crown prince. But Khaled had bedouin shrewdness and two very relevant strengths—his links with the tribes, who embraced him as they never embraced Fahd, and his similarly warm relationship with the council of the ulema (“those who possess learning”—the religious sheikhs). These traditional connections were exactly what the crisis of the Grand Mosque called for, and on the first day of the new century Fahd happened, in any case, to be far from Riyadh—the crown prince was representing the Kingdom at an Arab League summit in Tunis.
“We were awoken by phone calls very early that morning,” remembers Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the young director of Saudi foreign intelligence who was also attending the conference. “The crown prince told me to go back at once. There were important issues in Tunis, so he was going to stay at the summit.”
The soft-spoken Turki was one of the rising stars of the family. Educated at the Lawrenceville prep school in New Jersey, Georgetown, Princ eton, and Cambridge, he had the gravitas of his father, Faisal, and the insouciance to spend four months in his twenties driving a new Lamborghini home from London to Arabia. When he got back to Mecca on the night of Tuesday, November 20, 1979, he rapidly discovered the nature of the foe the Al-Saud was up against. As he reached out for the handle of the door at the Shoubra Hotel, where his uncles had set up their headquarters, a bullet shattered the glass in front of him. Juhayman had stationed snipers in the soaring minarets of the Grand Mosque, and they had already claimed victims.
The task of recapturing the Mosque had been assigned to Fahd’s full brothers, Sultan, the defense minister, and Nayef, the interior minister, assisted by Nayef ’s deputy and younger brother, Ahmad. With Salman, the governor of Riyadh, they made up the core of the so-called Sudayri Seven, Abdul Aziz’s seven sons by his cleverest wife, Hissa Al-Sudayri.5 The Sudayris were the powerhouse at the heart of the Al-Saud, owing their influence partly to their numbers (no other grouping of blood brothers numbered more than three), but mainly to their mutual loyalty, ambition, and extraordinary appetite for work—qualities instilled in them by their mother. To her dying day, the formidable Hissa insisted that all seven of her boys, no matter how grand they had become, should gather in her home once a week for lunch.
Sultan and Nayef had reached Mecca by nine that morning and started deployin
g their forces—some local army regiments and a couple of companies of the Special Security Force, a unit of Nayef ’s Interior Ministry. The Mecca regiments of the National Guard also moved into the town. Their commander, Abdullah, would shortly fly back from a holiday in Morocco.
A respectable military grouping had been put in place within hours. But its princely commanders had no authority to assault the Grand Mosque—that permission would have to come from the grand council of the ulema, who were being hastily assembled in Riyadh. Nor at this stage did the princes know much about who or what they were supposed to be fighting: rumors ran the gamut from Iranians to the CIA or Israeli agents. It turned out that the grand ulema could help with that as well.
The religious sheikhs held a regular meeting with their monarch every Tuesday. It was broadcast on the TV news, with Bin Baz, blind-eyed and head cocked heavenward, seated in the place of honor beside the king. In theory, the ulema disapproved of television. But since it existed, they judged themselves a better subject for the screen than more trivial fare such as cartoons. Now, as they shuffled hurriedly over the plush carpeting of the Maazar palace in Riyadh, they had more unpleasant realities to confront.
They already knew exactly who had taken the Grand Mosque. The cleric whom Juhayman had jostled aside that morning to seize the microphone had been the respected Sheikh Mohammed ibn Subayl, principal imam of the Mosque and one of the teachers at whose feet Juhayman and his followers once sat in earlier, more submissive days. Ibn Subayl had recognized his former pupils with dismay, and knew all about the Salafi cause they had served. He had taken refuge in his office to telephone the news to his colleagues. Later, jettisoning his gold-trimmed cloak and wrapping his headdress around his shoulders in the fashion of foreigners, he had managed to escape from the Mosque in a group of Indonesian pilgrims. Juhayman was keeping Arabs inside the Mosque as conscripts for the Mahdi’s army, but he had given orders to release non-Arabic speakers, who would not understand what he or the Mahdi were saying.