Inside the Kingdom (4 page)

Juhayman Al-Otaybi overflowed with nervous energy.

“I never saw him sleeping,” remembers Nasser Al-Huzaymi, who lived and traveled with Juhayman for four years in the mid-1970s. “He was like a father or brother to everyone, always ready to take care of you. When we went to sleep, he would make sure our blankets were pulled over us. People loved him. When he drove us in his GMC [truck] to recruit people in the villages, he would chant
‘Allahu akbar! ’
[God is great!] all the way. He was a leader. To use a Western word, he had ‘charisma.’ ”

To a Western eye, Juhayman also had the air of an Old Testament prophet. In his short
thobe
and bared ankles, the straggle-haired fanatic seemed to be living in a different century from the “Gucci bedouin” of Jeddah, kitted out in their loafers and Porsches—and, in a sense, he was. Juhayman was repelled by bidaa, the innovations of the twentieth century. As the Westernizing affluence of the oil boom spread across the Kingdom, he sought refuge in the past, finding himself drawn backward in history, as is often the case with those who seek a fresh future in religion, to an earlier, simpler world, when the faith was fresh and new—so new, in fact, it was in the process of being created.

“Iqra!”
“Recite!”

God started speaking to Mohammed when the Prophet was in his late thirties—forty years old in lunar years. “Recite in the name of your Lord who created humanity!” were the first words that came to the confused and earnest young merchant as he was meditating in a cave in one of the craggy hills surrounding Mecca. He felt, he later said, as if an angel had wrapped around him physically and was squeezing him tight.

God’s fundamental instruction to his Messenger was to make the world a better place: the rich should provide money for the poor; women should be entitled to a portion of their parents’ legacy; polygamy should be limited to four wives; retribution should be restricted to just one eye for an eye.

But this vision of moderated inequality—a model, for its time, of social reform—was not well received by the wealthy merchants of Mecca, whose fortunes were swelled by the pilgrims who came to worship the 360 gods of the city. Mohammed’s insistence that there was only
one
God, in the tradition proclaimed by Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic), seemed a mortal threat to the Meccans’ income stream, and they did all they could to stifle the new movement, torturing the Prophet’s followers and even devising a plot to murder him in his bed.

So Mohammed eventually gave his followers orders to leave this city where men were refusing to live as God intended. He told them to head north to the oases of Yathrib—a five-day camel ride away—and when the last of them was safely out of Mecca, he followed with his dear friend and ally Abu Bakr.

The two men’s safe arrival in Yathrib provoked a riotous welcome. The followers had been waiting anxiously for days, scanning the southern horizon from the edge of the palm groves, and when they spotted the two distant figures late one evening, coming out of the sunset, they broke into cheers and celebration. “The Messenger is here! The Messenger has come!”

The hijrah (migration) of the Prophet from Mecca marks the beginning of Islamic history, since the members of the little community that now formed around Mohammed in Yathrib were able to live for the first time freely and openly as proper Muslims. In the weeks that followed, they built the first mosque, a low, brick-walled building around a courtyard, partially shaded with palm fronds; they listened to the first call to prayer (sung out proudly by Bilal, Abu Bakr’s freed slave); and, following the Prophet’s instructions, they instituted the first Islamic fast, the first Islamic laws, and a multitude of the practical traditions and regulations that came to define what it means to be a Muslim. Mohammed’s social reform movement had become a real religion, built around the 6,236 verses of his recited revelation (the Arabic for recitation is
qur’an,
Koran).
²

Yathrib was renamed. It became
Al-Medina,
“the City” of the Prophet, and since then every detail of the Prophet’s life in Medina has been studied by Muslims with fierce intensity, for Mohammed did not preach a theoretical utopia somewhere in the future. Under the palm trees of Yathrib, he created life precisely as God wanted it. So at moments when Muslims have sensed that their world was going wrong, and that their lives might be taking on the wayward character of unreformed Mecca, many have tried to measure themselves—and to remold themselves—against the shape of the original template. Back to Medina!

In the mid 1970s Juhayman Al-Otaybi was already living in Medina, glorying in the chance to model his life on how Mohammed had lived in that very corner of the planet fourteen centuries previously. He had a home about half an hour’s walk from the Prophet’s Mosque, in Al-Harra Al-Sharqiyya, “the Eastern Terrain,” a dry and infertile landscape of black volcanic rocks where he lived in a makeshift compound with his family. The devotees that he was starting to gather lived five minutes away in an even more makeshift hostel—Bayt Al-Ikhwan, the “House of the Brothers.”

“We all slept on a mud floor,” remembers Nasser Al-Huzaymi, who had dropped out of school and come to Medina seeking purpose in his life through religious devotion. “We had no telephone, and no plaster on the walls. We wanted to live as simply as possible, just like the Prophet’s Companions. But we needed to read and study the Koran, so after some discussion, we considered that a single electric lightbulb was acceptable.”

There were many such discussions.

“Did the Prophet eat chicken?” asked someone in the middle of a meal. “A good question,” said Juhayman.

So the eating stopped, and the brothers pored over their copies of the Koran and the Hadith (the traditions and sayings of the Prophet). Juhayman kept his books in a huge, locked tin box that was welded into the back of his pickup truck, and at moments like this he undid the padlock to share the contents of his traveling library. It did not take much time to track down the authority for chicken consumption: one verse from the Koran envisioned the Companions relaxing in heaven, consuming “fruits, any that they may select, and the flesh of fowls, any that they may desire.”

Chicken was OK, then—the meal could resume. Here was fundamentalism of the most basic sort. In a time of confusion, few things are more comforting than dogma. “The people of my own generation are the best,” said the Prophet, according to one popular hadith, “then those who come after them, and then those of the next generation.” This seemed a clear instruction to look backward. On this basis, every detail of life needed some sort of precedent from these three first and “best” generations.

It was a process that was going on all over the Arab world in the 1970s as Muslims worked out their different responses to the material and spiritual inroads of the West. Those who opted for back-to-basics called themselves
Salafi,
because they sought to behave as
salaf,
literally the pious ancestors of one of those three early generations that were mentioned with such approval by the Prophet. A group calling itself Al-Jamaa Al-Salafiya Al-Muhtasiba, “the Salafi Group That Commands Right and Forbids Wrong,” had been active in Medina for some time, and Juhayman joined it when he came to town, plugging himself into some of the Kingdom’s strongest and most ancient traditions of piety.

Medina’s Salafi Group had been created around 1965 following a series of local disturbances known as “the breaking of the pictures” (
taksir al-suwar
) when zealous young vigilantes had taken it upon themselves to destroy pictures and photographs in public places, including portraits of the king.

“Hanging a picture on a wall may lead to exalting or worshipping it,” ruled Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, the austere president of Medina’s Islamic University, “particularly if the picture is that of a King.” After serving short terms in prison, the demonstrators decided to organize as a Salafi missionary group, and turned for approval to Bin Baz.

Blind from around the age of eight, Abdul Aziz Bin Baz was famous throughout the Kingdom as a holy man. With his eyes permanently closed, he seemed to be constantly in listening mode, his beard and strong-featured face cocked upward toward heaven, as if straining to catch God’s least whisper. As his decree on royal pictures showed, Bin Baz was no respecter of earthly authority. According to U.S. documents, he was bold enough to confront Abdul Aziz himself in 1944 when he went to Riyadh to complain about the activities of American agricultural engineers in Al-Kharj, a town in the central region of Nejd. Thirty-two years old and
qadi
(judge) in the town, Bin Baz protested that the king was surrendering Muslim land to infidels in contradiction of his duties as a Muslim ruler. The young qadi was particularly incensed that the engineers’ wives had been mixing with local women and infecting them with liberated, Western ideas.

In the confrontation that followed, Abdul Aziz flew into a rage, imprisoning the young scholar and threatening to have him executed if he did not repent. But Bin Baz stood his ground. He had registered the unhappiness that many were coming to feel at the changes wrought by modernization, and as the years went by he came to be seen in Saudi Arabia as the modern repository of what the West called Wahhabism.

Born in the Islamic, or Hijrah, year of 1115 (1703-4 in the Western, Gregorian calendar), Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab learned the Koran at an early age. Traveling to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina as a teenager, he went on to Basra, in Iraq, to continue his religious studies. By the time he came to the dry and austere area of Qaseem, north of Riyadh, in A.H. 1153 (A.D. 1740), the thirty-seven-year-old preacher had come to feel that the Muslims of his time had gone grievously astray. People gave superstitious reverence to domes and tombs, even to rocks, caves, and trees that were associated with holy men; they dressed luxuriously, smoked tobacco, and indulged in singing and dancing that did not accord with his own austere reading of the Koran.

Ibn Abdul Wahhab (“Son of the Worshipper of the Giver”) condemned these practices as
shirk
(polytheism). Calling on true Muslims to return to the central message of Islam, “There is no god but God,” he led campaigns to stop music and to smash domes and gravestones in the name of God’s Oneness. He and his followers liked to call themselves
muwahhidoon,
monotheists. They did not consider themselves a separate school of Islamic thought—they felt they were simply going back to the basics. But their critics derisively called them Wahhabis, and many of Nejd’s settlements rejected the preacher’s puritannical attacks on their pleasures.

Then the first Wahhabi encountered Mohammed Ibn Saud, the ambitious ruler of Dariyah, a small oasis town near the even smaller oasis of Riyadh. History was made. In A.H. 1157 (A.D. 1733) the two Mohammeds concluded a pact. Ibn Saud would protect and propagate the stern doctrines of the Wahhabi mission, which made the Koran the basis of government. In return, Abdul Wahhab would support the ruler, supplying him with “glory and power.” Whoever championed his message, he promised, “will, by means of it, rule lands and men.”

So it proved. In the following year the preacher proclaimed
jihad,
holy war, to purify Arabia, and after a series of bloodthirsty military campaigns, the Wahhabi armies swept into Mecca in April 1803 (A.H. 1218), extending Saudi authority from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. For a moment the House of Saud controlled more territory than the fledgling United States.

The empire did not last. Egyptian and Turkish troops marched into Nejd in the name of the Ottoman emperor to punish the Wahhabis for their presumption. In A.H. 1233 (A.D. 1818) the invaders brought cannons to Dariyah and bombarded its mud walls into rubble. But the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance proved strong enough to survive both this humiliation and the nineteenth-century family infighting that followed, to make its modern comeback under Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud (the great-great-great-grandson of Mohammed Ibn Saud). In his new Saudi Arabia the Koran ruled as it had ruled in Dariyah, and the tenets of Wahhabism remained the same—to revere God alone; to shun idols and man-made God substitutes; to pursue the original Muslim way of life with simplicity; and to command the good while forbidding evil.