Inside the Kingdom (30 page)

Ahmad’s rejection could not have been more polite, nor more summary. According to some sources, Osama attempted to present his proposals to other senior members of the family and met with the same response—Thanks, but no thanks. According to someone who was present at another meeting to which Osama brought a five-page document setting out his strategy, Bin Laden’s face went “black” with anger when his proposal was dismissed.

When the House of Saud turned down Osama’s mujahideen in favor of the godless Americans, they did not just offend his pride. They offended his religious beliefs—and those of many other pious Saudis. “Let there not be two religions in Arabia,” ran the text thundered out in sermons across Arabia following the arrival of the American troops, in contemptuous defiance of the ulema’s government-supportive fatwa.

“To defend ourselves we have invited the help of our real enemies,” complained Dr. Safar Al-Hawali, a young middle-ranking cleric who was not afraid to take on the establishment. “The point is that we need internal change. The first war should be against the infidels
inside.
Then we will be strong enough to face our external enemy.”

Al-Hawali was the dean of theology at Umm Al-Qura, the Islamic University of Mecca, where he had made his name with his thesis “Al-Ilmaniya” (“Secularism”). This, he argued, was a Western concept insidiously designed to undermine Islam from within—and the arrival of the Americans was proof of it. The Gulf War had been coordinated, as Hawali saw it, first to control and eventually to destroy Islam, and would result in Western military bases being set up around the Gulf. It was a sin, in his opinion, to have allowed “crusader” troops—Christians, Jews, and women—into the land of the two holy mosques.

Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, who had played a leading role in coaxing the ulema to support the government, took issue with Al-Hawali and the other Sahwah (Awakening) preachers. The two holy mosques were on the opposite side of Arabia, he pointed out in press interviews—621 miles distant from the American troops stationed beside Kuwait and the Iraqi border.

“The Americans,” he argued, “have come to protect, not to seize the
haramain
[holy places]. They have come to repel the aggression and to remove injustice.”

He then embarked on a discussion of the Koran’s Al-Maeda sura, in which God listed the foods forbidden to Muslims: “dead meat, blood, the flesh of swine, that which has been killed by strangling, or by a violent blow, or by a headlong fall, or being gored to death.” The sura concludes by telling Muslims that while these foods are forbidden, they
can
be eaten by someone who is starving. So today, on the same basis, argued Bin Baz, “the state has had to use some infidel states to stop this brutal enemy.”

It may have pleased some of the blind sheikh’s listeners to hear America’s troops compared to the flesh of swine, but the devotees of the Awakening were not impressed. Bin Baz, they said scornfully, had become “a government sheikh.”

The fertile farming area of Qaseem, northwest of Riyadh, is famous for its dates, and famous also for its Wahhabism. When it comes to holiday jobs, the date farmers select only the most serious young Muslims as fruit pickers. So during the Gulf War harvests of 1990 and 1991, the date groves of Qaseem were centers of particular Islamic fervor, seething with indignation at the Al-Saud’s embrace of the infidels. In Qaseem the Sahwah’s eloquent mouthpiece was Sheikh Salman Al-Awdah, a black-bearded cleric who had been preaching the Awakening quietly in Buraydah before the war. Now he proclaimed it loudly, and his sermons circulated around the peninsula in best-selling tapes.

“This country is different,” he proclaimed. “It is united under the banner of Islam, not because of this person or that person . . .”

“. . . Or because of that family,” was the additional message readily captured by his listeners. The sheikh was proposing a religiously based, non-Saudi identity for Saudi Arabia. In his best-selling tape “Why Do States Disintegrate?” Al-Awdah talked scornfully of the Egyptian pharaohs, who would hand out money to their subjects but were hated all the more for that. As the sheikh described how the pharaohs showed their contempt for their people’s minds, interfering with their religion and restricting their intellectual freedoms, it was not difficult to work out who his real target was.

All Saudi mosques broadcast their Friday sermons loudly to the neighborhood via their minaret loudspeakers, so it became the weekend chore for junior diplomats in Riyadh to go and sit in their cars outside the capital’s most radical pulpits and make recordings of what the imams were declaiming.

Inside the U.S. embassy, David Rundell spent hours listening to the Sahwah tapes.

“Ninety percent of it was ‘Don’t beat your wife and be a good neighbor, ’ ” he recalls. “But the remaining 10 percent was pretty virulent. The only one with a sense of humor was Safar Al-Hawali. He’d paint these unattractive word pictures of an overweight American, with his shirt unbuttoned, a thick gold chain around his neck, walking his dog while holding hands with his wife. ‘Be careful,’ he’d say, ‘or your daughter will end up working in a shoe store.’ ”

Dogs and shoes are unclean to all Muslims—hence the widespread Arab delight when an Iraqi protestor hurled both his shoes at George W. Bush in 2008—while Wahhabis take a dim view of wearing gold, holding hands in public, or unbuttoning your shirt to reveal chest hair.

For the radical young fatwa-issuing preacher Mansour Al-Nogaidan, America’s military “occupation” of his country in August and September 1990 was the first step on his own personal path to rebellion. Less than two months later came the second—the women’s driving demonstration in Riyadh. Al-Nogaidan had no doubt that the two events were connected.

“I got a phone call that day,” he remembers, “from a friend in Riyadh. ‘The women are driving!’ he told me in a panic. ‘Thank God the mutawwa have stopped them.’ ‘Thank God,’ I echoed. But as we found out more, it seemed very clear that Prince Salman was supporting the women.”

Al-Nogaidan was just twenty, opinionated beyond his years and well respected in his Salafi community. But he was beginning to fret at the passivity of his Buraydah brethren.

“We were always very pleased to hear the news from Afghanistan,” he recalls. “We were obviously happy at the success of our Muslim brothers. But we kept ourselves to ourselves. We were not passionately committed to the jihad—nor, for that matter, to the progress of the Sahwah.”

This reticence troubled him. Salman Al-Awdah was preaching a few mosques away from Mansour’s neighborhood in Buraydah, but the Brothers warned Mansour to keep his distance. “ ‘Those Sahwah sheikhs are accusing the government of infidelity,’ they said. ‘Be very careful.’ ”

Ultimately, the Brothers were conventional, loyal-to-the-emir Wahhabis in the Bin Baz mold, and Mansour was coming to reject this blind obedience that lay at the heart of the traditional Wahhabi mission.

“When I listened to the tapes of Al-Awdah, I got the message immediately. It was embedded in every sentence, and it was so very cutting—his criticism of the Al-Saud.”

Mansour was making new young mujahid friends who had fought in Afghanistan and who excited him with their proactive, vigilante-style approach.

“They laughed and were enthusiastic. They were so different from the passivity of the Brothers who were always saying, ‘We must accept the punishment of God.’ The mujahideen had trained themselves to make a difference. They had fought to change things in Afghanistan, and now they were mobilizing to change things at home.”

Mansour started going down to Riyadh to stay with his radical new friends in the neighborhood of Hay Al-Rabwah, where young Salafis bunked together in communal guesthouses, Afghanistan-style. This was where Juhayman had camped when he was rounding up recruits in support of the Mahdi, and now, a dozen years later, the climate again seemed ready for his fevered style of revivalism. Some young jihadis owned copies of the rebel’s famous Letters, which they read to one another and discussed. At night during the Gulf War they sat up on the roofs to watch Saddam’s Scud missiles fly overhead. Those who could afford a car would shuttle around picking up the others for Koran meetings or morning prayers.

“It was very Boy Scoutish and even cultlike,” recalls a jihadi from those days. “We organized sentries and lookouts, the whole communal thing. You felt like it was you against the world. There was no one who mattered outside your own tight little group.”

The neighborhood was so pious that there were no cigarettes in the shops.

“We watched a lot of videos of the jihad—the death and burial of Abdullah Azzam,” recalls Mansour Al-Nogaidan. “I admired these men who had fought in Afghanistan, and I wanted to go there myself. But when I went to get my passport, I was told I was banned from traveling. Why? I asked. ‘If you want to know,’ they told me, ‘you’ll have to go to the Ministry of the Interior.’ ”

By now Mansour had served three spells in jail—sixteen days for criticizing religious graduation ceremonies in 1987, fifty-five days in 1989 for his Youth World Cup protest, and forty-seven days in 1990 for a lecture he had delivered in Buraydah in which he had attacked the irreli giousness of the Saudi education system, and had encouraged pupils to forsake school as he had done. He was building up his credentials as a champion of the Islamist cause, and in the middle of 1991, only months after the Kuwait war had ended, he received an invitation that seemed the crowning accolade. Sheikh Osama was looking for someone with good religious knowledge who could teach in Jeddah. A house and salary went with the job.

Mansour flew down to Jeddah as soon as he could, going to Bin Laden’s famously austere house in Macarona Street. But by the time he got there, Osama was gone.

In a matter of months Osama Bin Laden had moved from being the applauded colleague and partner of the House of Saud to considering himself their dedicated foe. For many years his reflexive loyalty to his family’s patrons had been a quiet joke among the faithful. When King Fahd paid a state visit to Britain in 1987, the Queen had invested the Saudi ruler with the Royal Victorian Chain, whose elaborate insignia contains a large white enameled Maltese Cross, prompting people in Peshawar, when they saw the photographs, to whisper that the Saudi king must have forsaken Islam.