by Robert Lacey
Prince Turki Al-Faisal went to get his own firsthand look at the insurgent leader in the hospital, where he was lying shackled to his bed.
“Forgive me,” cried Juhayman beseechingly, his bravado suddenly gone. “Forgive me, tal omrak [May God prolong your life]. Please ask ammi Khaled [my uncle Khaled] to forgive me!”
In saying “ammi Khaled” Juhayman was using the term of endearment traditionally employed by slaves and retainers in princely Saudi households, and the young intelligence chief ignored his plea, furious at the familiarity and also at the loss of life that had stemmed from this man’s delusion that he knew the truth of Islam. The government had lost 127 soldiers dead and 461 injured, along with 117 rebels and a dozen or so of the worshippers who were killed in the first morning’s gunfire. The prince pointed derisively at the captive’s matted beard and electrified, wispy hair.
“So that’s Islamic?” he sneered.
The soldiers led them out just before dawn—a shuffling group of men shackled hand and foot, shivering a little in the cold. There were soldiers on the square and up on the roofs around the old bedouin marketplace in central Riyadh, with a huddle of robed princes and ministers in the darkness, waiting on a balcony to see justice done. Sixty-three men were due to be executed that morning in eight towns around the country,6 starting with Juhayman in Mecca. Here in Riyadh the tall, square-framed governor, Prince Salman—the brother whose looks, say the family, most resemble those of his father, Abdul Aziz—was reading intently down a list.
“He was checking the tribal names of the soldiers,” recalls an eyewit ness, “to make sure that the killing was done by and in front of their own. They are masters, that family, at doing things the tribal way.”
One of the prisoners was screaming and writhing. He was an Afghan, one of the twenty or so foreigners whom Juhayman had swept up in the preceding months and on the day itself. The official roll call listed Yemenis, Pakistanis, Sudanese, and Egyptians.
“I am innocent!” cried the Afghan as they led him in front of the executioner. He was wriggling so much that the blade missed its mark, slicing into his shoulder. His screams got shriller as the uniformed soldiers struggled to keep their hold. An officer stepped forward to finish him off with a revolver shot to the head.
But it was the first of the victims whose death would set the sinister tone of that chilly morning. No one who saw him would ever forget. He was one of the Mahdi’s friends who had helped organize the Riyadh Ikhwan, and he carried himself as a leader, defiantly raising his shackled arms in prayer.
“Bismillah, Al-Rahman, Al-Raheem—In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful!” he called out in a strong and confident voice, quite unafraid. “You know what they have done,” he cried—and here he raised his blindfolded eyes toward heaven. “You have witnessed their sins and their corruption. May their end be most horrible!”
With a proud stiffening of his back and shoulders, he invited the executioner to do his work. He flexed his body and seemed almost to rise into the sword as it descended. The blind, utter belief of the man was breath-taking. He was God’s warrior, and having done God’s work, he had no doubt at all that he was now going to heaven.
CHAPTER 4
No Sunni, No Shia
If there was one member of the House of Saud who most powerfully embodied everything against which Juhayman and his Brethren had protested, it was the complex figure of Crown Prince Fahd bin Abdul Aziz. He was Mr. Modernity, playing the dynamic CEO of Saudi Enterprises Unlimited to King Khaled’s genial chairman of the board. Fahd had been appointed the Kingdom’s very first minister of education by his brother Saud, then served under Faisal as minister of the interior. In both positions he had gained a reputation for shifting Saudi life in a Westerly direction. Now with the oil boom he was taking things further.
The shocking assassination of King Faisal in 1975 had had one upside in the eyes of progressive Saudis—his death had loosened the national purse strings. The old king had been cautious with his own money, and he was still more cautious with that of the country. A tale that his sons admitted was probably apocryphal, but which they liked to relate just the same, described an angry Henry Kissinger threatening Faisal during the 1973 oil embargo with the possibility that America might choose to stop consuming Saudi oil.
“In that case,” replied the hawk-faced monarch, “we shall go back to our tents and live on camels’ milk. But what will you do, Mr. Kissinger, without any gas for your cars?”
Faisal’s parsimonious policy was to save oil profits for the Saudi equivalent of a rainy day, but his Westernized younger half brother was not afraid of spending. Fahd believed with a passion that the national revenues should be invested as soon as possible inside the Kingdom to create more wealth: Within months of Faisal’s death, the crown prince was forming committees and drawing up spending plans in which words like infrastructure and take-off figured prominently. Hospitals, schools, highways, airports; two new industrial cities, one on each coast; more planes for Saudia, the national airline; more weapons for the armed forces; and a set of huge “military cities” to defend each vulnerable corner of the country.
“He was a visionary,” recalls one of the technocrats in Fahd’s inner circle. “Nobody was wild about his project for the two industrial cities. But he dug out the money and he fought them through. He was a man with real guts. Now Yanbu and Jubail are two of Saudi Arabia’s great success stories.”
It was Fahd’s ambition to bring Saudi Arabia the best from the West, and his private life tended in the same direction. In his youth the prince had been the classic example of the Monte Carlo Arab, prowling the baccarat tables in his open-neck black shirt. King Faisal had rebuked his younger brother more than once for his disappearances to Europe on extravagant gambling binges. Fahd’s name meant “desert leopard,” but as the years went by—he was fifty-six in 1979—the crown prince’s generous appetites were making him look less and less leopardlike.
Fahd also served himself generously when it came to business. As he doled out the petrodollars to sweep away sleepy old Saudi Arabia, the crown prince saw no reason to conceal the financial favors that he lavished on his family and his friends. “Nahhab, wahhab,” said his critics. “He steals, then he gives.” It was an accusation that could have been leveled at many members of the royal family. They had built the Kingdom. It carried their name. It was hardly surprising if a large number of princes found it difficult to distinguish between what was theirs and what belonged to the still-growing state.
The crown prince’s power base lay among his dynamic group of hardworking Sudayri brothers, but most of the family backed his manifesto to supervise an outward-looking program of national development. Fahd’s confidence in a succession of “five-year plans” was accepted with a reverence that a Soviet commissar might have envied—and he was never afraid to think big. He liked to joke with European friends that he would one day commission the construction of a grand national opera house in Riyadh, in which Aida would be performed with not one, but ten elephants.
It was not a joke that he shared with Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Baz. The religious sheikhs had long viewed Fahd with a skeptical eye. So that made it all the more tricky in November 1979, when, as the crown prince wrestled with one bitter religious revolt at Mecca in the west of his kingdom, he found himself confronted by another in the east.
. . .
In the village of Al-Awjam, Ali Al-Marzouq watched his fellow villagers as they beat themselves with chains—a long, snaking line of men dressed in black, their jaws set grimly, swaying from side to side and bringing their metal flails down in unison with a hearty whack! across their shoulders. The village lay in eastern Saudi Arabia, home to the world’s very richest concentration of oil fields. Billions of dollars’ worth of “black gold” lay below the earth on which these young devotees were stomping. All of them, like Ali, were Muslims of the Shia persuasion (Shia means “followers,” “faction,” or “members of a party”), and they were
marking their doleful anniversary of Ashura.
Ashura is Arabic for “tenth” and refers to the date of the Shias’ defining annual ritual, the tenth of Muharram—which fell on November 30 in 1979. The villagers of Al-Awjam, along with the other five hundred thousand or so Shia Muslims then living in the Eastern Province, were marking the emotional climax of their religious year, even as Juhayman and his followers were battling it out with the Saudi security forces in the Grand Mosque on the other side of the peninsula.
Ali decided to go into town to watch the ceremonies in Al-Qateef, the Shia headquarters of the area. This sprawling, dusty settlement ringed with date palms was home to more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, the vast majority of them Shia. The town’s crumbling Turkish mud fort recalled the days before the Saudis came, when the date groves and trading enterprises of the hardworking population made Al-Hasa (the nineteenth-century name of the whole province) a valuable corner of the Ottoman Empire. Now the area was still more valuable, thanks to its efficient and productive oil fields, whose smooth working owed much to the reliability and industriousness of the local labor force, 60 percent of them Shia, virtually the only native-born Saudis then willing to carry out modern, industrial-style manual work. The growth of Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, was built on American expertise and the stringent Shia work ethic—when meeting for business appointments, the Shia are among the few Saudis who will ring to warn you they are running ten minutes late.
The whole of Al-Qateef was quivering with Ashura fever as Ali Al-Marzouq, then a slightly-built schoolboy of sixteen, made his way toward the Al-Fateh (“Victory”) Mosque on Abdul Aziz Street, not far from the marketplace and the stalls of the fish auction. Hundreds of young men had gathered to listen to a religious lecture over the mosque’s loudspeakers, spilling out onto the street to fill an overflow corral of wooden barriers. Their emotions were roused by the traditionally tearful nature of Ashura lectures, but also by recent events outside Saudi Arabia. The ayatollahs’ revolution in Iran had been a dazzling assertion of Shia power and identity, and it gave extra meaning to this first Ashura of the new Islamic century. “No Sunni! No Shia! All Muslims together!” chanted the crowds outside the mosque, beating their chests and sobbing as the lecture came to an end. Someone had brought along some posters of the Ayatollah Khomeini and had hoisted them high.
“It felt safe and comforting,” remembers Ali Al-Marzouq, “to be with my brothers, shoulder to shoulder.”
But the bedouin soldiers of the National Guard, standing shoulder to shoulder on the other side of the barriers, felt anything but safe. They were not Shia. Quite the contrary. They were proud to be Sunni, like the majority of Saudis—and, indeed, like the large majority of Muslims throughout the world—meaning that they took their directions from the sunna, the words, actions, and example of the Prophet. To them the Shia were a heretical and miserably misguided sect whose loyalties lay with “the Persians”—the Shia in Iran. Unlettered Sunnis (as well as a good few who were educated) spread stories of how the Shia had forked tails hidden beneath their thobes and enjoyed unnatural sexual practices, notably at this time of year, when they would gather in their husayniyas (meeting rooms) to switch off the lights, strip off their clothes, and engage in writhing mounds of group sex. The resulting babies, many Sunnis believed, were then venerated by the Shia community and grew up to become their mullahs.
Wahhabi sheikhs regularly denounced the Shia as deviants in another, more theological fashion. They described the Shia as rafada, or “rejectionists” of the correct Islamic succession, since they had complicated God’s simple truth, introducing the first and most harmful innovation of all.
WHY THE SHIA ARE DIFFERENT
One of the very first people to become a Muslim was the Prophet’s bright young cousin Ali, who lived in the Prophet’s household and heard God’s teachings from an early age. Mohammed called him “brother.” When the clans of Mecca prepared their devilish plot to kill Mohammed, sending one assassin from each clan with a dagger, it was Ali who bravely rolled up in the Prophet’s blanket as a decoy, risking his own life to save Mohammed’s. When, eventually, the Muslims returned to Mecca in triumph, it was Ali who helped Mohammed open the door to the Kaaba to bring out the idols and smash them to smithereens.
Since the Prophet could neither read nor write, Ali wrote his letters for him. Mohammed gave Ali his favorite daughter, Fatima, in marriage, and at least one hadith suggests that the Prophet may have viewed his popular son-in-law as his successor. “Whoever recognizes me as his master,” Mohammed was heard to declare as he rested on his way back from his final pilgrimage, “will recognize Ali as his master.” When the Prophet died shortly afterward, in A.H. 10 (A.D. 632), Ali was entrusted with the job of washing his body and preparing it for burial.
But even as he was carrying out this sacred family duty, Ali was being marginalized by a hurriedly summoned conclave of Companions, who decided that Abu Bakr should become the first successor, or caliph, of the Prophet. Venerable and pious, Abu Bakr had been greatly loved by Mohammed, and he came from outside the Prophet’s family. Many of the Companions felt strongly that leadership of the faith should not become the property of one clan.
So young Ali lost out—he was still only in his early thirties—and he accepted the decision. One of this remarkable man’s remarkable qualities was acceptance. If anyone embodied submission, which is the literal meaning of the word Islam, it was Ali. He served Abu Bakr with loyalty, as he served the next two caliphs, Omar and Othman, even though his supporters maintained that he had been repeatedly excluded from the succession by sharp practice. For the Shiat Ali, the party or followers of Ali, it became a defining idea that the tradition of the Prophet could only be passed down adequately through the bloodline of Mohammed.
When Ali was eventually chosen as the fourth caliph, early in A.H. 36 (A.D. 656), he certainly manifested some of the Prophet’s charisma. He proved an inspiring leader of the umma, the Islamic community of believers, while also exhibiting bravery on the battlefield as he wielded his legendary fork-tongued sword, Zulfiqar.
“There is no hero but Ali,” became a Shia cry, “and no sword but his Zulfiqar!”
But this hero worship proved fatal. The multiple strands of the early Muslim world had already produced the earliest movement of Islamic dissent, the khawarij, literally “those who come out and depart.” It was less than thirty years since the Prophet had died, but already the Kharijites were complaining that the umma had departed from his ways. True Muslims, they believed, were confined to those who adhered strictly to the example of Mohammed, and they introduced a deadly new idea to Islam—tak feer (condemnation or excommunication): those who did not follow God’s word precisely were kuffar, infidels deserving of death. When Ali was killed by a Kharijite wielding a poisoned sword during Ramadan in A.H. 40 (A.D. 661), he became one of the earliest victims of Islamic terrorism.
“There is no authority except God, oh Ali,” cried his assassin, “not you!”
So, in the fortieth year after the Hijrah, Ali became the first martyr of the Shia, starting them down their emotion-laden path of sorrow and faith. This was infused with the sense of life being stacked against them—of having, somehow, been robbed—and it would reach its fulfillment twenty years later at the battle of Karbala in Iraq, to the south of Baghdad. Fought on Ashura, the tenth of Muharram, in A.H. 61 (A.D. 680), Karbala would be commemorated ever afterward at the Shias’ annual religious ritual of “the Tenth,” their tear-stained Good Friday with no Easter Resurrection to follow.
From their earliest years, young Shias imbibe every detail of Karbala, as surely as Christian children know the story of the three crosses on the hilltop. How Husayn bin Ali, Ali’s son by his marriage to Mohammed’s daughter Fatima, and hence the Prophet’s grandson, stood with just a few brave companions against the massive army of the caliph Yazid; how the enemy cut off their water; how Husayn implored their mercy, carrying out his infant son, dying of thirst,
to be greeted by a hail of arrows that killed the boy; and how, finally, Husayn himself, sorely wounded and by now the sole survivor, mounted his horse, taking a Koran in one hand and a sword in the other, to ride into the merciless barricade of death, striking down dozens before he himself was eventually subdued.
The story of Karbala epitomized bravery, martyrdom, hopelessness, injustice—all the causes to which the Shia would relate their own bitter experience over the years. They were a persecuted religious minority, and in few corners of the Muslim world had they been persecuted as systematically as by the followers of Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab, who reserved special condemnation for the Shia. For Ibn Abdul Wahhab, the Shia adoration of Ali and Husayn, which went along with the veneration of tombs and shrines, represented the ultimate in shirk (polytheism) and called for takfeer—the sentence of death. Inspired by his teachings, the first Saudi army raided Al-Hasa in A.H. 1216 (A.D. 1802) to purge it of idols and shrines, then headed north to the ultimate Shia shrine, built on the battlefield of Karbala. They were responding to an Iraqi attack, and when they got to Karbala they made sure that they destroyed the tomb of Husayn.
As Ali Al-Marzouq and his chest-thumping Shia comrades faced off against the Saudi National Guard in Qateef a century and a half later, there was some potent history between them. While paying lip service to plurality, the modern Saudi state had treated the members of its Shia community as second-class citizens. Out on the oil rigs, Shia made up the drilling gangs, but usually worked to the orders of a Sunni foreman. There were at that time no Shia diplomats in the Saudi foreign service, no Shia pilots in the national airline—and certainly none in the air force. They could not become head teachers or even deputy heads in local schools, where, if they did teach, they were expected to follow a syllabus that scornfully denigrated Shia history and beliefs. Local zoning rules even banned them from building dens or basement areas beneath their homes, for fear that they might use them as secret husayniyas for subversive worship and for their alleged sexual congresses.