Inside the Kingdom (3 page)

 

This family tree is based upon a list of the surviving sons of Abdul Aziz in undated order of precedence kindly supplied by Dr. Fahd Al-Semari of the Darat Al-Malik Abdul Aziz (the King Abdul Aziz Study Center) in Riyadh. Dates of birth have been estimated from this and from the family trees compiled by Michael Field and by Brian Lees, author of
A Handbook of the Al-Saud Ruling Family of Saudi Arabia
(Royal Genealogies, London, 1980). See Lees and also
The Kingdom
for details of all thirty-seven or so of Abdul Aziz’s sons. The old king fathered a similar number of daughters, but the precise number of his children has never been publicly quantified.

NOTE ON THE ISLAMIC CALENDAR

Muslim months begin and end with the phases of the moon. People scan the sky in every corner of Saudi Arabia, and only when the
hilal
—the new crescent moon—has actually been seen and attested is the month certified in court to have officially begun.

Twelve lunar months add up to some 354 days—eleven or so days short of the Western, Gregorian year. So a Muslim centenarian is not yet ninety-seven in terms of 365-day Gregorian years, and the shorter Muslim year is constantly creeping forward in relation to its Western equivalent. Celebrations like the end of hajj (the pilgrimage) and Ramadan (the holy month of fasting) arrive eleven days or so earlier in Western terms every year.

The calendar also has its own start date—the
hijrah,
or migration—the turning point in the birth of Islam, when the Prophet Mohammed forsook the hostility of unreformed Mecca (in the Christian year A.D. 622) and migrated to the community that would become known as Medina (see page 7). Islamic years are accordingly known as migration, or hijrah, years and will be denoted as A.H. (
anno hegirae
) in the pages that follow.

PART ONE

KINGDOM OF GOD

A.D. 1979-1990 (A.H. 1400-1411)

—Fyodor Dostoevsky,
The Possessed

CHAPTER 1

Angry Face

J
uhayman means “Angry Face,” deriving from
jahama,
the past tense of
yatajaham
, meaning to set your features grimly. Arabia’s bedouin have a tradition of bestowing ugly, tough-guy names on their children. They believe it keeps trouble at bay in a troublesome world—though in the case of Juhayman Al-Otaybi, “Angry Face” of the Otayba tribe, the name came to stand for incredible trouble. With his wild beard and wild eyes, Juhayman had the look of Che Guevara about him, perhaps even Charles Man-son. In November and December 1979, Angry Face horrified the entire Muslim world when he led hundreds of young men to their deaths in Mecca. It was a gesture of demented religious fanaticism, and the House of Saud did its best to disown him. This mingling of violence with religion was an un-Saudi aberration, explained government apologists—Juhayman was not typical in the slightest. Which was what they would say again, twenty years later, about Osama Bin Laden.

It went back to 1973, when King Faisal of Saudi Arabia announced a boycott on his kingdom’s oil sales to the United States. Enraged by President Richard Nixon’s military support for Israel in the October War against Egypt and Syria, the Saudi king had hoped to compel some dramatic change in U.S. policy. Yet as the Arab oil boycott caused the price of oil on the world market to multiply nearly five times, it was back home, inside the Kingdom, that the truly dramatic changes would occur.

“For about eighteen months nothing seemed to happen,” remembers Dr. Horst Ertl, who was teaching chemical engineering at the College of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. “Then, around the spring of 1975, just before the death of King Faisal, I drove across via Riyadh to the Red Sea coast. Suddenly everyone seemed to have money in their pockets. It was incredible. One moment just a few of the richer students had cars. Next moment, the university parking lot was filling.”

After centuries of hibernation and a few recent decades of only gradual change, Saudi Arabia was suddenly turned on its head. Foreign money brought foreign ways—the good, the bad, and, in the eyes of many Saudis, the very definitely ugly. Women started appearing on TV and, even more offensively for many traditionalists, half-undressed beside hotel swimming pools. The Kingdom’s cities became chaotic building sites, where blank-faced laborers in hard hats toiled in the dust like ants. The construction crane, it was said, was the new national symbol of the Kingdom, throwing up schools, universities, palaces, hospitals, mosques, office blocks, highways, more hotels—and shops, shops, shops.

“You’d go away for the summer,” remembers Prince Amr Mohammed Al-Faisal, a grandson of the late king, “and come back to discover yourself surrounded by whole new neighborhoods. You got lost in your own town.”

Petrodollars were the death of Jeddah’s charming old Souq Al-Nada (the “Dew” marketplace), which derived its poetic name from the morning scent of moisture that wafted up from the beaten earth. In short order the soft earthen floor was cemented over with garish, trattoria-style ceramic tiles, and the scent of dew was replaced by petrol from the traders’ noisy generators.

Faisal’s successor, his half brother Khaled, who became king in 1975, looked on these changes with kindly bemusement. “Can you tell me, my sons,” he would inquire of his nephews, bright young princes back from California with their degrees in business and engineering and political science, “what I should do with this fish that is opening its mouth, swallowing my money, and giving me back iron and cement? Are these riches a blessing to the Muslims, or a curse?”

The pious had no doubt. A society that had been safely closed for centuries was now ripped open to danger. Their pure world was under threat. Cocky children knew better than their parents. The English language counted for more than Arabic, God’s own language in which He had revealed the Koran. Traditionalists could not glory in this jackpot moment, which was sullying their beautiful past. They felt scared and unprotected. They were outraged by these helter-skelter changes they were helpless to prevent, and they had a word for them—
bidaa,
innovations.

“Every
bidah
is a going-astray, and every going-astray leads to Hell-fire,” went a saying attributed to the Prophet—though his condemnation, in the eyes of most modern Islamic scholars, referred to changes in the field of religious practice and ritual, not to technical innovations like the motorcar and television.

“Life before the oil boom had a sweetness and a closeness that we can now see was very precious—and very fragile,” remembers Dr. Khaled Bahaziq, who was twenty-three years old in 1973 and studying in America. “When I was a child, we lived in one another’s houses. We cooked food and shared it when we broke the fast at Ramadan. If the neighbors saw me misbehaving, they would tell me off, and my parents would say thank you. We were all family and friends, so we didn’t need rules about the girls wearing veils. We were a community. Then the money came. Everybody bought cars, drove out of town and built themselves villas behind high walls—you were reckoned a failure if you didn’t. And suddenly we found we were separate. We felt somehow empty inside. If we had a wedding to celebrate, we didn’t get together like we used to, stringing out the lights round the neighbors’ houses and yards. We’d hire a ballroom in some modern hotel.”

Studying in America, Bahaziq filled the emptiness by seeking to become a better Muslim, forswearing the American temptations of alcohol and women. Back home in Jeddah for a vacation in 1975, he asked his family to find him a devout Saudi wife, in part to “innoculate” him against life in the States.

“My family made the choice. I had the right to meet her before the wedding—to ‘inspect’ her, if you like. But I felt that that was insulting to her. I trusted my family. I trusted her. I was happy
not
to be doing things in the modern and materialistic Western way. So the first time we saw each other was on our wedding day. Allah has blessed us ever since.”

Bahaziq took his wife back to America, where he threw himself into Muslim activities, helping to organize the Islamic center at his university. As oil wealth increased in the late 1970s, Western newspapers gleefully reported the excesses of nouveau rich Arabs flaunting their fortunes in Europe. But these Muslims who adopted Western delinquencies were not, it turned out, the Muslims who really mattered. The oil boom had produced a religion boom, and behind the headlines, the future was being seized by driven, pious men like Khaled Bahaziq, who would later wield a Kalashnikov in Afghanistan—and, even more dramatically, by a man called “Angry Face.”