Inside the Kingdom (13 page)

Salafi Soccer

T
he faculty blocks of King Abdul Aziz University rise from the eastern outskirts of Jeddah like so many huge white shoe boxes—plain, workaday structures that are thoroughly in keeping with the noncontro versial teachings that the students are expected to absorb. You go to a Saudi university to imbibe the canon of received knowledge without question, not to learn how to think, critically or otherwise, and certainly not how to reorder the world. But in the late 1970s and early ’80s the university’s lecture rooms were buzzing with some of the most radical and potentially subversive ideas to be heard in the Middle East.

For nearly twenty years, starting in the days of pro-Soviet President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, the Saudi government had been giving refuge to the God-fearing opponents of the Arab world’s secular regimes—and particularly to members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the underground soldiers of Allah who were at risk of torture and death in Nasser’s political prisons. It was a matter of policy, part of King Faisal’s strategy of combating godlessness at home and abroad. Sober, purposeful, and above all devout, the exiled members of the Muslim Brotherhood provided the Kingdom with a disciplined cadre of teachers, doctors, and administrators at this formative moment in the country’s development. Thousands arrived to stiffen and staff the expanding Saudi infrastructure, particularly the ministries, universities, and schools, where they inculcated children with the need to be virtuous young Muslims. Female members of the Brotherhood, many of them from Syria, were particularly successful at persuading their teenage pupils to shun degenerate Western culture and to wear the full veil, the
niqab.

The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood was himself a schoolteacher, Hassan Al-Banna, an Egyptian who blamed the weakness of the Arabs on their failure to follow the “straight path” as commanded by God at the beginning of the Koran. The key to gaining strength, Al-Banna believed, was not to become more Western. Muslims should do quite the opposite, searching for their answer in the pure and original message that God delivered to the Prophet—though that did not stop Al-Banna from adopting some of the West’s political techniques. As he studied the success of the Communist and Fascist parties in 1930s Europe, he built the Brotherhood around a structure of self-contained cells (he called them
usar—
“families”), while using sport and physical fitness, Hitler Youth-style, to attract young recruits. He developed his own, Islamic form of the Boy Scouts, and he made sure, like Hamas and Hezbollah today, that those who supported the Brotherhood were supported in turn by a grassroots network of social facilities, particularly schools and health clinics. These were often more accessible and efficient than anything provided by the state.

Al-Banna founded the Brotherhood in 1928. The movement’s eloquent modern campaigner was Sayyid Qutub, also from the Egyptian school system, in this case a schools inspector who had been sent on a training course to America in the late 1940s and had returned home horrified at the moral laxity of the West. Qutub was particularly appalled by the sexually explicit style of Western women, which he noted in compulsive detail: “expressive eyes and thirsty lips . . . round breasts, full buttocks . . . shapely thighs, sleek legs.” His views were further soured by some unpleasant encounters in New York and Colorado when his Arab looks became the object of racial prejudice.

Hassan Al-Banna was assassinated in 1949, allegedly by King Farouq’s secret police, after building up his welfare network and a pious membership that came to number millions. Sayyid Qutub was imprisoned and eventually hanged by Nasser in 1966. But his brother Mohammed escaped to Jeddah, to be welcomed at Mecca’s university of
Umm Al-Qura
(“Mother of Villages”—one of the names bestowed on Mecca by the Prophet), where he gave lectures that propagated Sayyid’s call to reject the West:

The Western habit of dispatching parents to retirement “homes” struck Sayyid Qutub as typical of what one Iranian critic would later describe as “Westoxification.”

To counter Westoxification, Sayyid Qutub looked to religion. “Islam,” he proclaimed, “is the answer.” And having been brutalized in Nasser’s prisons, he was no pacifist. Those who would deny jihad’s active and aggressive character, he wrote, “diminish the greatness of the Islamic way of life.”

The ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood were similar to those of the Salafis and also of the
dawah wahhabiya
(Wahhabi mission)—to reestablish the order of Allah and to bring about the perfect Islamic state. But the rhetoric of the Brotherhood dealt in change-promoting concepts like social justice, anticolonialism, and the equal distribution of wealth. Politically they were prepared to challenge the establishment in a style that was unthinkable to mainstream Wahhabis, who were reflexively deferential to their rulers and enablers, the House of Saud.

It was heady stuff for the young students of Jeddah, taking the Wahhabi values they had absorbed in childhood and giving them a radical, but still apparently safe, religious twist. They had learned of jihad at school as a distantly romantic concept—part of history. Now they were hearing of its practical possibility today, and they could even make personal contact with jihad in the barrel-chested shape of Abdullah Azzam, who gave lectures in both Jeddah and Mecca in the early 1980s. A Palestinian, Azzam had taken up arms against the Israeli occupation of his family home in Jenin, on the West Bank, after the Six-Day War of 1967, the humiliating defeat ruefully known throughout the Arab world as “Al-Nakba,” the “Disaster.” But this eloquent warrior sheikh, whose long beard spilled over his chest like a rippling gray waterfall, had no time for Yasser Arafat or his PLO henchmen, whom he considered insufficiently religious.

The Saudi government had welcomed ideologues like Azzam and Mohammed, the surviving Qutub,
⁷
to the Kingdom as pious reinforcement against the atheistic, Marxist-tinged thinking of their Middle Eastern neighborhood. But in the process they were exposing young Saudi hearts and minds to a still more potent virus—hands-on, radical Islam. As the 1980s progressed, hundreds of young men, many of them from outside the university, gathered on Fridays to pray and listen to the booming, inspirational sermons of Abdullah Azzam.

“I went to hear him several times,” remembers Jamal Khashoggi, the young second cousin of Adnan, the business tycoon. Jamal had been studying in America and was just getting his start in journalism. “It was a huge gathering. There were so many listeners that the mosque was full. People had to sit and pray outside in the street.”

Among the throngs who gathered to absorb the ideas of Azzam and Mohammed Qutub in the shade of the dusty neem trees on the Jeddah campus was a tall and thin, rather thoughtful young student with a smooth olive complexion, high cheekbones, and a hawklike nose. As a sign of his Islamic consciousness, the young man had for some time been trying to cultivate a long and wispy beard.

Osama Bin Laden was a demon center forward.

“We used to make up teams and go out to the desert by the Pepsi factory,” recalls Khaled Batarfi, a football enthusiast who was three years’ Osama’s junior. The advantage of having Osama on your team, Batarfi remembers, was his height. Already approaching his adult stature of six feet four, the lanky beanpole would soar effortlessly above his opponents to head the ball into the goal. He was the Peter Crouch of Jeddah pickup games.

Today the Pepsi factory area of Jeddah is occupied by the glittering shops and malls of Tahliah Street. In the late 1970s the
tahliah
(desalination plant) lay beyond the northern limits of the city. Batarfi and Bin Laden would bump out across the scrubby wasteland as the heat of the day wore off, their cars full of chattering friends.

“We’d play a game, then kneel together and pray the
maghreb
(sunset prayer).”

The boys sat side by side in the warm darkness, munching sandwiches and drinking cans of juice and fizzy drinks from the cooler.

“Osama was very quiet and shy,” remembers Batarfi. “He was always soft-spoken. But he had this strange authority about him. He loved football, but he didn’t approve of the very short shorts that players wore in those days. He wore long shorts to the knees, then tracksuit slacks, and we all copied him. He divided us into four groups—Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali, named after the Companions of the Prophet who were the first four caliphs. Then he’d ask us questions: ‘When was the Battle of Uhud?’ ‘Three years after the Hijrah,’ someone would say. ‘Right,’ he’d say, ‘that’s five points to Abu Bakr.’ It was like a TV quiz show, but without the clapping—that, he explained, is not Islamic. When someone got the right answer we’d all sing out
‘Allahu akbar! ’
”

Osama’s religiosity—and his love of soccer—would have given great pleasure to his late father, Mohammed, once one of the most respected and powerful businessmen in Saudi Arabia.

King Abdul Aziz and his friend Mohammed Bin Laden had just two working eyeballs between them—one each. Their handicapped sight was one of the personal bonds that linked the two men. Another connection was that, through multiple marriages, they had both derived great pleasure from the fathering of several dozen children each. Abdul Aziz had lost his eye to trachoma, and legend had it that the Yemeni-born Bin Laden had won royal favor by offering one of his own eyes to the king in an unsuccessful eye transplant.

This myth was respectfully whispered in the ranks of the Bin Laden construction company, but the truth was more prosaic. A fanatical footballer when young, Mohammed Bin Laden had lost his eye in a wild game of pickup soccer when he was a building laborer in the Sudan, a decade before he set foot in the Kingdom, where he built up his own business in the 1940s and ’50s as a construction tycoon.

The one-eyed center forward made his fortune through hard work and by avoiding shortcuts. Mohammed Bin Laden paid his fellow Yemenis fairly and he did not overcharge his clients. His fortune derived less from his customers’ pockets than from his own shrewd investment in bargain-price land around his developments—and when it came to royal projects, he asked for no payment until the palace was finally completed to the prince’s total satisfaction. He served Abdul Aziz as director of public works and played the same role unofficially, after 1953, with his son King Saud.

Mohammed Bin Laden never scuttled from a job on which he was losing money. He was “the Builder”—he always delivered. He was admired across the Kingdom for the solidity of his work, and he was known to be a pious man. He had been the obvious choice for contractor in the 1950s when the House of Saud decided they wished to expand the grand mosques of Mecca and Medina, recasting the old prayer halls with soaring, Alhambra-style arcades, and enlarging the covered area no less than sixfold.

The new buildings featured colorful Maghreb tiles that were plastered over miles of steel-reinforced concrete of extraordinary strength—as the Saudi National Guard and army discovered in Mecca in 1979 when they tried to blast holes in it.

“We should give the Bin Ladens a medal for their workmanship,” said the jaunty young Prince Bandar bin Sultan at the time. “Then behead them.”

It was a common shortcut for Saudi contractors to skimp on materials, so the siege of the Grand Mosque provided an unexpected endorsement to the thoroughness of Mohammed the Builder, who died in a plane crash in 1967.

Mohammed’s son Osama disapproved of Juhayman—he thought the man had been crazy. “How can you seize the holiest place in Islam,” he’d say, “then bring in weapons and kill people?”