Inside the Kingdom (31 page)

“For God’s sake,” Osama scolded them, “don’t discuss this subject. Concentrate on your mission. I don’t permit anyone to discuss this issue here.”

But eighteen months in the Kingdom had transformed Bin Laden’s attitude—he did not appreciate the double rejection by the Saudi government of his offers of help. He had already ignored Prince Turki’s prohibition and was starting to organize armed Al-Qaeda camps in Yemen.

“He introduced me one evening to some friends who were helping him fight the jihad in Yemen,” recalls Jamal Khashoggi. “He was proud of it. I told him, ‘You can’t do that without the government’s permission.’ He just looked at me and smiled.”

Soon barbed wire appeared along the top of the high wall surrounding Osama’s Macarona Street house.

“He must have feared some sort of retaliation from Yemeni agents,” says Jamal Khashoggi. “The government told him to take the wire down and to stop making speeches. His passport was confiscated.”

The liberal reformer and lawyer Mohammed Saeed Tayeb met Bin Laden in these months.

“It was at a weekly gathering in Mecca,” he recalls. “I saw this man, very tall and beautiful, sitting at the end of the majlis. He was wearing a pistol outside his thobe—which seemed normal in those months of the war with Iraq, though no one else was wearing a pistol. That was the only time in my life that I saw Bin Laden, and I was struck by how very quiet he was, and how polite. If anyone else started talking in the salon, he instantly stopped talking himself.”

Saeed Tayeb was a veteran of constitutional jostlings with the Al-Saud. By 1991 he had already been in and out of jail on three occasions for a total, at that date, of seven years behind bars (he has since racked up more). So when Bin Laden had stopped speaking about the need to battle the corruption and false façade of Communism in Afghanistan, Saeed Tayeb tackled him on the need for a battle closer to home.

“Mr. Bin Laden,” he asked. “Why have you been spending all your time and money fighting in a foreign land? The true corruption and the false façade is
here
—to our left and to our right. It is above our heads and below our feet.”

As an old-fashioned Arab nationalist (he named his first son Abdul Nasser in honor of the famous Egyptian leader), Saeed Tayeb had always been against the Afghan enterprise—he felt that Bin Laden and his fellow Islamists had been gulled into an essentially American project to defeat the Soviets. But Bin Laden refused to be drawn.

“Afghanistan,” he replied quietly, “has been a place for training our young men in how to fight and to use weapons.”

Osama declined the chance that he was being offered to engage in criticism of the Al-Saud, and he gave no clue as to his feelings. He was under official warning, after all, and his immediate priority at this moment was to regain his confiscated passport.

Using family connections, he managed to retrieve the passport in the summer of 1991, and instantly left the country for Afghanistan. Sources differ on how long he spent there—possibly more than six months—then he flew with his followers and friends to Africa. Hassan Al-Turabi, the ideologue of the recent Islamist coup in the Sudan, had invited Bin Laden to transfer his headquarters to Khartoum, and Osama had decided to take up the invitation. Here was a wonderful chance to locate his fighting “base” in a country where he was supported by a genuine Islamic government. How very different from Saudi Arabia—where, as events turned out, he would never set foot again.

CHAPTER 17

Stopping the Sins

“I
f the government will not act against the sins, what can we do to stop them?”

By November 1991, a few months after his abortive trip to meet Osama Bin Laden in Jeddah, this question was at the top of Mansour Al-Nogaidan’s agenda.

“Educating and counseling other people was no longer enough for me,” he remembers. “The world had become so polluted, I was coming to feel that I wanted to change reality itself.”

His new jihadi friends provided him with an answer as they sat and talked one evening in the Riyadh suburb of Al-Suwaydi.

“Tonight we have a mission,” they told him. “We’re going to burn down the Bel-Jone video shop, and we want you to join us.”

The Bel-Jone was Riyadh’s largest video store.

“I don’t have the courage,” Mansour told them bluntly. “And it is not correct.”

His friends looked at one another, then looked back at him. They had been to the video store a few days earlier, they explained, and had tried to talk to the owner and “educate” him about the sinfulness of what he was doing. The man had not been receptive. So since their polite request to stop promoting evil had been refused, it was now their duty to promote the good. This could not be a sin. In advancing these arguments, they were observing the protocol of Islamic law on military attacks—the need for advance warning, discrimination in the selection of the target, and care to ensure that the planned punishment should match, and not exceed, the offense. They were inviting Mansour, in other words, to no casual act of violence, but to jihad—a carefully considered godly mission.

Mansour sat and thought. He prayed. He needed no reminding that videotapes were the degenerate channels by which secular, non-Islamic poisons were Westernizing the minds of young Saudis—the government sheikhs were always complaining about them, but doing nothing. His friends, on the other hand, were serious and committed Muslims who were prepared to put their principles into practice: they had already burned down video stores in Unayzah and Buraydah. In planning to stop the sins tonight, they had made sure that they would not be endangering human life; they had checked that there would be no one inside the Bel-Jone once it closed. It was a freestanding building, so no other property would be harmed.

The mixture of theology and human consideration convinced him.

“After two hours,” he remembers, “I said OK. I would do it as an honor: it was a compliment to be invited by my friends.”

The petrol had already been purchased at nine different gas stations, along with three natural-gas canisters that would be stationed to blow open the doors. Arriving at the video store in the darkness of the small hours, his friends worked with experienced speed. Having studied the store’s layout, they poured gasoline over the roof, and through openings in the walls around the air conditioners. When they were sure the fuel was distributed to maximum effect, they laid the final trail—a narrow stream of gasoline across the front step that flowed under the doors and into the store. Mansour lit his match and tossed it. He started to run away even as the petrol exploded with a warm
whoosh.

A few hours later, after the dawn prayer, the conspirators drove back past the scene of their crime. They could hardly contain their delight. The entire, sprawling Bel-Jone video store and its noxious contents had been burned to the ground. The sins had been stopped!
“Al-hamdu lillah!”
they cried out together. “Thanks be to God!”

Buraydah was the next target—a women’s charity for widows and the poor, where, the group was convinced, the females of the community were being taught bad things.

“They felt sure,” recalls Mansour, “that the charity was a front for liberalizing and Westernizing women—teaching them to take off their
hijab
[head covering] and to become very free. I was not so sure and asked them for proof. I said my
istikhara
[the Muslim prayer for guidance] for two hours before I decided to go, and even then I did not feel happy.”

The charity was in a villa behind a high wall, which concealed Mansour and his friends as they broke in and started to search the rooms.

“There had been no fatwa against the charity,” remembers Mansour. “So we had to search for the evidence of sin. We were expecting to find sex videos, but all we found was a hair salon. We found one room that was equipped with exercise machines for the handicapped, so we decided to leave that. Then we found a shelf of religious books—how could we burn those? We decided to take out all the Korans. On the director’s desk I found a file with the names of three hundred poor families. I was astonished to see the names of three families that I knew. They were related to me and they were receiving aid. It made me unhappy, but then one of the friends found a controversial book lying around. It was by the fundamentalist scholar Mohammed Nasser Al-Deen Al-Albani arguing that it was OK for women to show their face.

“ ‘This is as we suspected,’ said the friend in triumph. ‘This book shows the sin that they are truly plotting to accomplish in this building.’ Everyone else agreed. So we started stacking the rooms with petrol and with gas canisters.”

The jobs in the group had been carefully apportioned. The person who poured the petrol did not light it, and this time the job of striking the crucial match had been handed to another newcomer. As with the video store, the results were devastating.

“The building was burnt out,” Mansour recalls. “But this time I did not feel happy as I had the time before.”

He did not have long to contemplate his remorse. In less than ten weeks—early in January 1992—Mansour and his friends were tracked down by the Mabahith and found themselves in the dock facing Sulayman Al-Muhanna, a venerable and sheikhly figure who was the senior judge of all the Riyadh courts.

“My son,” the sheikh inquired with an apparent sympathy that Mansour had not expected, “are you feeling guilty or not guilty for what you have done?”

“I did not do anything wrong,” replied Mansour defiantly. “And if I said I won’t do it again, I would be a liar.”

He then launched into a recitation of all the hadiths and authorities that justified his taking action in the stopping of sins—to be cut short by the judge.

“I am not here to argue with you,” said Sheikh Al-Muhanna, who had suddenly become a great deal less sympathetic. “I am here to sentence you.”

He dispatched Mansour and his fellow fire bombers to prison for sixteen years.