Inside the Kingdom (11 page)

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.

It seemed appropriate, when long-distance telephone dialing was introduced to the Kingdom, that Riyadh should be allotted the code 01 and Jeddah and Mecca 02, while the east, the source of the country’s wealth, had to make do with 03. A cartoon of the time showed a cow straddling the map of Saudi Arabia: it was grazing in the east and being milked in the west by a merchant who handed the bowl to a princely individual doing nothing at all in the middle.

For many years the Saudi Shia had endured this situation with passivity. Like Judaism and other persecuted faiths, Shia Islam had developed a tradition of quietism as a survival mechanism, along with
taqiya
—literally, discretion or “cautionary dissimulation.” Shia were authorized to pretend, in self-defense, that they were not Shia—which gave Sunnis another reason to denounce them as deceptive and unreliable.

Then, in the mid-1970s, an eloquent young Shia preacher, Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar, started raising consciousness in Qateef. He was a quiet, modest character with downcast eyes, very much the cleric with his neat beard and round white turban, but with a subtle determination. Drawing inspiration from Karbala, Al-Saffar (pronounced As-Saffar) praised the bravery of Husayn’s determined resistance to discrimination and the unfair distribution of wealth. Where, he asked pointedly, might one see such injustices today? While in the pulpit, he was careful not to mention the Saudi regime directly—he kept his specifics firmly in the days of Husayn. But his listeners got the point.

Behind the scenes, Al-Saffar talked more frankly to the young Shia activists that he had organized into a secret discussion group, the Islamic Revolution Organization (IRO), whose pamphlets listed their complaints aggressively: “When the people look at the squandering of the national wealth, while every area in which they live is deprived, miserable and suffering, is it not natural for them to behave in a revolutionary way, and for them to practice violence, and to persist in fighting for their rights and the protection of their wealth from the betrayal of the criminal Al-Saud?”

The gloves were off—and that was just fine by the several thousand hurriedly deployed Wahhabi National Guardsmen on the streets of Qateef. They happily adopted the solution of their Ikhwan forebears to the raucous challenge posed by Ali Al-Marzouq and his overexcited Shia friends. The rhythmic chest-thumping and the cries of “Islamic Republic!” were all tokens of deviancy. The posters of Khomeini were evidence of loyalty to a foreign power. Suddenly the guardsmen were over the barrier, laying into the crowd with sticks, thrashing about them wildly.

“You could see the blood everywhere,” remembers Ali.

He tried to shield himself, but the guardsmen had them surrounded, and Ali cowered with his companions as the blows rained down. “They shouted out that we were kuffar and broke open the head of the man beside me. The blood went all over my back. When I finally got home that night there was so much blood, my parents thought I had been shot.”

Ali was lucky. A few days later Dr. Jon Parssinen, an American professor in social sciences at the “Oil College,” as the University of Petroleum and Minerals was known, noticed two empty seats in his classroom on the hill beside the Aramco headquarters in Dhahran. The class shifted uneasily when he asked where the students were.

“After the class,” recalls Parssinen, “one of their friends took me aside and quietly told me they had been shot in Qateef. Nobody, but nobody, discussed what had happened. Their places remained empty for the rest of the semester, two bright young men who had been heading for important careers in petroleum engineering. It was very sad, but in those days you just did not talk about it.”

According to official estimates, seventeen people were killed in the riots that consumed the Qateef area for the next five days, with more than a hundred injured. More than two hundred were arrested. Buses were overturned. The offices of Saudia, the national airline, were burned, and the local branch office of the Saudi British Bank was ransacked.

“Qateef was cut off for several days,” recalls Clive Morgan, the bank’s area manager for the Eastern Province, who went to assess the damage. “We had to talk our way through various military checkpoints until we reached the National Guard Headquarters Command Post—which was very reminiscent, to my mind, of television scenes of the Vietnam War.”

Saudi National Guardsmen were attacked and suffered casualties, and several Shia communities barricaded themselves off, defying the authorities for days. From the other side of the Gulf, Radio Tehran incited its fellow Shias with the ayatollahs’ take on the Saudi royal clan: “The ruling regime in Saudi Arabia wears Muslim clothing, but inwardly it represents the U.S. body, mind, and terrorism.”

“Oh Khaled, release your hands from power!” shouted the inhabitants of Sayhat, a Shia community to the southeast of Qateef. “The people do not want you!” It was a humiliating loss of face for a ruling family that prided itself on being habitually in control.

CHAPTER 5

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

S
ince the early 1960s the House of Saud had been on the lookout for trouble—investigating and arresting Communists, socialists, and “godless” radicals of all sorts. Serious opposition, everyone anticipated, would be coming from the left.

But the attacks of 1979 had come from the very opposite direction—from those on the right and from directly behind the royal family. “Godless” was the reproach that was now being thrown at the king and princes of the House of Saud. It might have been expected that the long-suppressed Shia of the Eastern Province would one day rebel, but Juhayman and his radical ilk had been nurtured in the traditional territory of Wahhabi mosques and religious scholars that the Al-Saud considered their heartland. Conservatives, it seemed, could also cause turmoil.

Publicly, Crown Prince Fahd professed himself undismayed. “The reaction of the country was like a national opinion survey,” he declared. “Everyone came to fight against Juhayman.”

But in private the crown prince was less confident. The Shia intifada, or uprising, in the Eastern Province worried him particularly.

“He kept talking about Iran,” remembers his friend Adnan Khashoggi. “He could not get over what had happened to the Shah.”

Revolutions are disruptive by definition, but the Iranian upheaval had had an extra, unanticipated ingredient. In 1776 the American Revolution showed that colonialism could not last forever; thirteen years later the French Revolution marked the end of the road for absolute monarchy; and Russia’s 1917 Revolution came as confirmation of this—the old institutions were on their way out.

But Iran did not fit into this satisfying slide toward secular modernity—quite the contrary. An apparently impregnable, Westernizing autocrat, smiled on by America, with a huge army, an efficient secret police, and burgeoning oil revenues, had been brought down without a serious shot being fired—all the Shah’s modernization had proved helpless against the supposedly outmoded power of religion.

Fahd was not well read, nor had he been conventionally educated. His upbringing in the isolated mud city of Riyadh in the 1920s and ’30s was dominated by Koranic instruction and what were officially described as “traditional desert pursuits”—riding, shooting, hunting, and sitting for long hours in his father’s majlis. But he had learned much through watching how carefully his father handled the religious sheikhs. The Shah had got on the wrong side of the mosque, reckoned Fahd—and that was the side on which the former playboy already feared himself to be. So the crown prince did not argue when his elder brother Khaled came up with a fundamentally religious answer to Juhayman’s unexpected challenge.

The traditional old monarch got the idea from his regular meetings with the ulema. The sheikhs had no doubt as to a solution—photographs of Saudi women, they said, should no longer appear in the newspapers. They had always said this was un-Islamic—Bin Baz had issued many a fatwa on the subject—and the desecration of the Grand Mosque was the proof. In the months following the siege, the blackened and bullet-scarred carcass of the Mosque, with the gaping holes smashed through its marble flooring, made a sight on which many pondered.

“Those old men actually believed that the Mosque disaster was God’s punishment to us because we were publishing women’s photographs in the newspapers,” says a princess, one of Khaled’s nieces. “The worrying thing is that the king probably believed that as well.”

In fact, of course, the proliferation of pictures and photographs
had
been a major element in the grievances of Juhayman and his followers. When King Khaled passed on the sheikhs’ verdict to his advisers he did not go into details about the complaints of the rebels, but his firmness suggested he believed that God had intervened personally in Mecca at the beginning of Muharram in A.H. 1400. Everybody knew, he argued, that photographs of unveiled women were un-Islamic. So why had the government been allowing them?

The younger members of the government were dismayed. The “Ph.D. set” of technocratic ministers recruited by Fahd to turn the oil revenues into modern infrastructure were appalled at the irrelevance of the gesture as much as at its check on the progress of women. But when it came to religion, the old king was operating in one of those areas he considered his own—and he did not even take the matter to the Council of Ministers. Khaled had come to agree with the sheikhs. Foreign influences and bidaa were the problem. The solution to the religious upheaval was simple—more religion.

Crown Prince Fahd had, in fact, already announced a more progressive, secular, and essentially Westernizing strategy. For nearly twenty years the House of Saud had been promising constitutional reform—the establishment of a Majlis Al-Shura, or “Consultative Council” of nominated worthies who would scrutinize legislation. In the long term, it was hinted, the Shura Council might even develop into some sort of elected, representative parliament. King Faisal had first proposed this in 1964, as part of a package of reforms to be known as the “Basic Law” (
constitution
was a taboo word, since the Kingdom already claimed to possess a perfect constitution in the form of the Koran). On succeeding Faisal in 1975, Khaled had renewed his own commitment to the Majlis Al-Shura and the Basic Law, and after the siege of the Mosque, Fahd announced that the reform plan was still on track.