by Robert Lacey
“They really brought in the information,” recalls Qenan Al-Ghamdi, Al-Watan’s founding editor. “Well before the end of the day it was clear that the death of those fifteen girls was the fault of no one but the Directorate of Girls’ Education—so that is what we wrote.”
Other newspapers and TV reported similarly, their spontaneous outrage spiced with resentment at decades of busybodying by the religious police. Here was the ultimate example of how distorted the priorities of the mutawwa could be.
“It was the chance to get revenge,” recalls Dr. Saud Al-Surehi, an editor on Okaz.
For the crown prince it was a chance to institute change. His half brother, the governor of Mecca, Abdul Majeed bin Abdul Aziz, was one of the progressives in the family. He visited the burnt-out school, interviewed the firefighters himself, and confirmed the truth of the story. Within a week Abdullah had summarily removed all Saudi girls’ schools from the care of the religious authorities. The Kingdom’s schools for girls would henceforward be supervised like those for boys, by the Ministry of Education—and as this book went to press in the spring of 2009, Abdullah appointed a woman, Norah Al-Faiz, a long-serving teacher and educational administrator, as deputy minister in charge of girls’ schooling. She is Saudi Arabia’s first woman to hold ministerial rank.
With the tragedy of Mecca coming just six months after 9/11, Crown Prince Abdullah finally took full control of the Saudi government. Removing the girls’ schools from the hands of the clerics was the blunt assertion of a new direction. His other brothers and rivals had never defied the sheikhs so directly. But Abdullah had a long-standing religious and tribe-friendly reputation. His conservative credentials were impeccable.
Another sign of his enhanced power was the appearance in the cabinet of Dr. Ghazi Algosaibi, the outspoken ambassador who had derided “Big George” and “Little George” the previous year. A poet and novelist whose books were regularly banned for their skeptical, “secular” attitudes, the jovially rotund Algosaibi was never afraid to take on the religious establishment. The clerics had been delighted when, after a short spell as minister of health, the liberal technocrat was dispatched by Fahd to foreign service, first to Bahrain and then to London, where he managed to ruffle Jewish sensibilities by publishing an ode of heartfelt mourning for a female Palestinian suicide bomber. In 2002 Algosaibi’s return as head of the newly created Ministry of Water was greeted with a howl of outrage from the conservative websites.
It was a step too far for the ulema, and they mounted a counterattack. They had been complaining for some time about the minister of education, Mohammed Al-Rasheed, who had introduced technology into Saudi schools and had been giving more time in the curriculum to science and math, which had meant a cutdown in the number of religious lessons. Al-Rasheed had also stirred controversy in the past by proposing that girls’ schools should have exercise facilities for sports and physical education. Girls were like boys, he suggested, in their need to develop “a healthy mind in a healthy body.” This was taken as the ultimate proof of the minister’s degeneracy, and a campaign developed to remove him from his job. How could such a dangerous “atheist” be entrusted with the upbringing of Saudi womanhood?
In vain did Al-Rasheed, who had started his education in a religious school in the pious Nejdi town of Majmaa, go on television to reassure people that Islamic traditions would not be changed. When it was discovered that he had traveled to a Beirut conference that was attended by female delegates from Saudi Arabia, lurid website stories depicted the minister as a lothario who had lured innocent Saudi women out of the Kingdom by plane—“May He Be Cursed by God!” ran one headline. Thousands of telegrams addressed to “Crown Prince Abdullah, the Royal Court, Riyadh,” protested against the presidency of Girls’ Education being surrendered to someone who had “no ethics.”
The crown prince gave way.
“It’s time for you to relax,” he told Al-Rasheed at a gathering in which the royal family convened to show their sympathy and support for him—but also their helplessness in the face of the concerted efforts of the country’s fundamentalists. Abdullah handed the education portfolio and its new responsibility for girls’ education to Dr. Abdullah Al-Obaid, a former rector of the Islamic University of Medina.
Al-Obaid’s track record was, in fact, little less “progressive” in Saudi terms than that of his predecessor. He had started his educational career in the 1960s opening up girls’ schools for King Faisal with detachments of armed troops. He can recall supervising one school where there were only two pupils for an entire year—the little daughters of the headmaster and the school caretaker. “Then suddenly,” he remembers, “everyone wanted to get their girls educated.” He was also well qualified to supervise modern curriculum reform, having gained a Ph.D. in the subject from the University of Oklahoma.
Unlike his predecessor, however, Abdullah Al-Obaid sported a long beard and chose not to wear an agal, the double black rope ring of the camel herder, on top of his headdress. Going agal-less is one of the trademark signs of a Salafi, based on the belief that the Prophet never wore the camel-rope rings of the bedouin on his head. It is a generally recognized signal of piety and “Wahhabi-ness.” So the religious community concluded that Dr. Al-Obaid was one of them, and that, for the moment, the education of Saudi womenfolk remained in safe hands. As minister of education for seven years Al-Obaid began a number of new teaching initiatives before being replaced in Abdullah’s cabinet reshuffle of February 2009. His successor was Faisal bin Abdullah bin Mohammed, a sparky and original-minded prince who founded Al-Aghar (“The Forehead”) think tank to investigate ways of making Saudi Arabia a knowledge-based society. The prince happened also to be Abdullah’s direct nephew and son-in-law, the clearest possible sign of the importance the Saudi king placed on the formidable task of modernizing his country’s educational system.
In the months after 9/11 Mansour Al-Nogaidan discovered what the religious establishment could do to someone who incurred their wrath. In his post-Salafi career as a journalist he had been attacking his former mentors with all the bile and bite that he had deployed when he was one of them—and now they bit back. A Salafi website published his mobile phone number, and he was inundated with insults and threats that ranged from beatings to murder. Day after day, by day and by night, the poisonous text messages came flashing up on his screen, till he cracked.
“It was a bad message on a bad day,” he recalls. “I can’t remember exactly what it said—‘You enemy of God. You miserable gay. You homosexual. ’ It was something like that, and I’d had enough. ‘Go to hell!’ I thought. So I texted back, ‘You whore.’ ”
Three days later Mansour found himself summoned to attend an immediate court hearing. Insulting someone is an offense under Islamic law, and his phone correspondent, a religious teacher whom he did not know, had filed a charge that enabled a local religious judge to give effect to all the angry website promises of punishment.
“You are anti-God,” the qadi (judge) declared indignantly, gesturing at a thick file of Mansour’s recent writings.
“I just received a bad text message,” replied Mansour, “and I replied.”
Saudi judges are trained essentially as religious scholars, and Mansour understood the capriciousness with which they feel free to interpret the religious law. The “insult” charge was clearly just a pretext for some angry clerics to get their hands on him. But he was not expecting what came next.
“Seventy-five lashes,” said the judge.
Mansour left the courtroom not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
“I did you a favor,” said the judge. “I usually give eighty.”
In the weeks that followed Mansour wrote letters to the senior princes. One powerful brother was willing to have the sentence wiped, he was told, if Mansour was willing for his part to compose an isterham, a plea for mercy. But the condemned man did not feel inclined to beg. His religious enemies were clearly exploiting a technicality to get their revenge for
his criticisms of them—and if they were exploiting their power, then he could exploit his. Hearing of his plight, the New York Times had offered Mansour the platform of the Opinion page, and late in November 2003 he wrote an article, in Arabic, which the paper translated and presented under the headline “Telling the Truth, Facing the Whip”:
A week ago yesterday I was supposed to appear at the Sahafa police station [in Riyadh] to receive 75 lashes on my back. . . . At the last minute, I decided not to go to the police station and undergo this most humiliating punishment. With the nation at a virtual standstill for the holiday Eid al-Fitr, the sentence remains pending. I will leave this matter to fate.
In the paragraphs that followed Mansour hit out at “our officials and pundits who continue to claim that Saudi society loves other nations and wishes them peace.” How could this be true, he asked, “when state-sponsored preachers in some of our largest mosques continue to curse and call for the destruction of all non-Muslims?” The Kingdom must change course. “To avert disaster we will have to pay the expensive price of reforms.”
For two days Mansour heard nothing, then he was contacted by an official. The wali al-amr, he was told, had a message for him. He had made a very grave mistake in going public, and in a foreign newspaper at that. This was not the Saudi way. Mansour had aggrandized himself, and had also harmed the reputation of the country.
“Well, I have a message for ‘those who govern,’ ” shot back the fiery young reformer. “If they leave the mosques and the law courts of this country in the hands of those religious extremists, then both the country and its reputation will be harmed still more.”
Mansour Al-Nogaidan never received his seventy-five lashes. After a succession of inconclusive meetings—in which one official angrily accused him of writing for “the newspaper of the enemy”—he was finally brought face-to-face with his accuser in the presence of witnesses.
“Do you accept the truth of religion?” he was asked.
“Yes,” Mansour replied—and before the combative ex-jihadi could say another word that might complicate his statement, his case was declared closed. “Those who govern” were desperate that he should not be lashed. By the end of 2003 the main thrust of Mansour’s argument, that “deep-rooted Islamic extremism” had made Saudi Arabia “a nation that spawns terrorists” had come tragically true. The proof was out there to be seen in the streets.
CHAPTER 26
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
May 12, 2003, was a hot night in Riyadh, and the capital’s smokers were out puffing on their hubbly-bubbly pipes, lounging on the raised sofas of the open-air cafés near the camel markets. There seemed nothing unusual about the four vehicles—two cars, a pickup truck, and an SUV—that drove out of town through the warm darkness toward the residential area of Al-Hamra: their drivers were ordinary-looking, bearded young Saudis. But the young men were armed, and their vehicles were packed with weapons and explosives. Their targets were three of the many compounds in the city that housed Westerners—and Americans in particular.
Sometime before midnight one of the cars attempted to gain entry to the back gate area of the Jadawel compound. As the compound’s security guards approached to inspect the vehicle, the terrorists suddenly opened fire, killing one policeman and an unarmed Saudi civilian. The attackers sprayed gunfire wildly as they assaulted the inner gate.
“You infidels!” they screamed. “We’ve come to kill you!”
As they were attempting to fight their way inside the compound, the attackers’ massive explosive charge detonated, killing all of them.
A few miles away at the Oasis Village and the Vinnell Corporation compounds, the terrorist assault teams similarly shot down the security guards from outside the barriers, then opened the gates to admit a second group. As they fired wildly, the gunmen called out to God, then detonated both their bombs, bringing the death toll that night to twelve terrorists and twenty-seven foreigners—nine of them Americans. Later that year eighteen more would be killed when the bombers targeted a compound for expatriates who were largely from Arab countries. The following May terrorists in Yanbu murdered five petrochemical workers, tying their victims’ bodies to the backs of their pickup trucks and dragging them triumphantly through the streets. Foreigners got in the habit of looking under their cars every morning for bombs and checking their license plates for chalk markings—signs that they had been identified and targeted.
The attacks were the work of Saudi jihadis who had been driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S.-UK invasion in the months following 9 /11. The demolition of their Afghan training camps forced several hundred extremists back to the Kingdom, where they regrouped in safe houses as “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” taking orders via coded phone messages from their leaders, who had gone into hiding in the tribal territories along the Afghani border. Osama Bin Laden may have retreated, but he saw the enforced return home of his Saudi followers as a blessed opportunity. He ordered them to take the battle to the Al-Saud on their home territory, and the young zealots went out in the desert to continue their target practice. It was easy for them to find local weaponry, much of it from Yemen and some of it left over from the 1991 Gulf War. After Saddam’s retreat from Kuwait, the local bedouin had wasted no time looting the Kalashnikovs from the corpses of the Iraqi dead and bumping them in for sale on the Riyadh black market. Thus equipped, a mini-army of young extremists had stormed the Oasis Compound in the Eastern Province, killing no less than twenty-two, mainly expatriate, workers.
In June 2004 the BBC’s Arabic-speaking terrorism specialist, Frank Gardner, flew in to cover this dramatic escalation. Sitting on the plane beside his Irish cameraman, Simon Cumbers, Gardner leafed through his research notes on Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin, the thirty-two-year-old leader of the Al-Qaeda campaign on the ground, who had left school at seventeen to fight in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bosnia, and Somalia. Captured and extradited to Riyadh, this hardened jihadi had been jailed for four years, but had taken advantage of the Saudi prison regulation that enables prisoners to halve their sentence by memorizing the Koran.
“Crikey,” thought Gardner, reading of Al-Muqrin’s bloodthirsty exploits as his plane came in to land, “I hope I don’t come across him! ”
A few days later Gardner was finishing a piece-to-camera at the edge of Al-Suwaydi, the fundamentalist Riyadh neighborhood where Mansour Al-Nogaidan had plotted firebomb attacks in his Salafi days. The journalist knew he was close to dangerous territory. As he strolled across a dusty piece of waste ground, he was pointing out the spot where police and militants had traded fire a few months earlier. His Saudi minders from the ministry had authorized the location and were supposed to be protecting him, but they vanished within seconds of what happened next. A car pulled up and a young Saudi got out.
“Assalaamu alaykum [Peace be upon you],” said the young man with a smile, then without warning and with no haste, he reached into the pocket of his white thobe and drew out a gun.
“No! Don’t do this!” shouted Gardner in Arabic, as he turned and sprinted away down the street. He felt a shot sting his shoulder, but he kept on running, and was just thinking that he had outpaced his attacker when he heard a loud bang and fell down on the tarmac, felled by a bullet in his leg. His escape route had been blocked by a minivan whose side door slid open to reveal a group of mean-eyed, wispy-bearded gunmen, each with a pistol in his hand. The BBC’s terrorism correspondent had come face-to-face with his subject—their thin, pale features consumed, he would never forget, “by pure hatred and fanaticism.”
Frank Gardner and Simon Cumbers had had the misfortune to be spotted by Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin himself as he was driving past in a convoy with half a dozen followers. Seeing the camera on its tripod, the Al-Qaeda leader had halted immediately and given orders for a two-winged attack. By the time Gardner was cornered, Cumbers, the cameraman, had already been shot dead.
Gardner pleaded for his life as his assailants in the van chattered briefly about what to do wi
th him. Then they cut short his pleas with a fusillade of shots into his body.
“Bloody hell,” thought Gardner as he lay on the ground, feeling the bullets thump into his abdomen, “I’m really being shot. I’m taking a lot of rounds here.”
In fact, the Saudi shooting was so erratic that only six bullets actually lodged in him. But they smashed bones and cut nerves so severely that the BBC man was left with eleven major wounds that would paralyze his lower body for the rest of his life. It was a miracle—and something of a mystery—why Al-Muqrin’s team did not kill Gardner outright. One more bullet to the head would have finished him. But as the journalist lay on the ground, he heard the firing stop and footsteps approaching. One of the terrorists had stepped down from the van to rummage in the back pockets of his trousers, discovering a radio microphone in one, and a miniature Koran in the other. Gardner had a stock of these small Korans, inscribed with intricate calligraphy, that he gave away as presents.
Did that little Koran save his life? In their last attack Al-Qaeda had hitched their victim’s body to the back of their vehicle. A week later Al-Muqrin would personally behead Paul Johnson, an American helicopter technician, filming his execution and placing his head in the family freezer as a trophy. As it was, the helpless Gardner heard the attackers revving their engine and driving away.
Just over a year later, after months of agonizing and highly skilled surgical repair and reconstruction in Britain, Gardner was invited to New Scotland Yard to meet a group of senior Saudi Mabahith officers who had flown to London to present him with their evidence. They had one of the attackers in custody, they reported; he had been wounded in a recent gun battle, and they believed he was Simon Cumbers’s assassin. As for the other five, they handed Gardner a set of gruesome, almost life-size prints of bloodstained faces, bruised and puffed-up, their eyes closed in death. DNA tests, said the detectives, had confirmed the identity of all the corpses, including that of Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin, killed in a shootout just a week or so after he drove through Al-Suwaydi and happened on his two infidel victims in the street.