Inside the Kingdom (44 page)

As someone who had himself committed terrorist acts, Mansour Al-Nogaidan knew the perils of takfeer. He had been speaking out against it for months. After his latest release from jail, his friends had found him a mosque in Riyadh where he was well looked after. It was a cushy billet. But Mansour had a new gospel to propagate. While reflecting in jail on the rigidity of the Wahhabi religious establishment, he had come to be offended by their refusal to accept any questioning—and that was not a criticism that the elders of his local community wanted to hear. They forced him out. Moving on to a career in journalism, the ex-imam was similarly outspoken. Not content with reading outside the red lines, he insisted on writing outside them and started to make a name for himself as an outpoken columnist.

When it came to 9 /11, however, Mansour had to confess that he was nonplussed. He was visiting his family in Buraydah when he saw the strike against the second tower live on television, and he found himself lost for words. He just stared blankly at the horror on the screen, appalled and silenced by the biblical smoke and destruction.

“I was shocked to my core. I didn’t know what I thought for three days. Where had it come from? It just defied human thinking.”

The demon center forward had scored a goal the crowd would never forget. Like Juhayman Al-Otaybi, Osama Bin Laden astonished his enemies with a coup for which no one was seriously prepared. Twenty years earlier Juhayman’s anger had transformed the Kingdom. Now Osama Bin Laden’s astonishing assault on America’s sovereignty and sense of security would transform the world—and America in particular.

“When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world,” George W. Bush had declared to the voters of Iowa the previous year. “It was Us versus Them, and it was clear who ‘them’ was. Today, we are not so sure who the ‘they’ are.”

Clarity was restored by 9 /11. Once more there was something of which America, the greatest power in the history of the world, could feel com fortingly afraid. As Gore Vidal remarked, “We desperately want a huge, dangerous enemy.”

Bin Laden attacked America for playing two ends against the middle. By financing Islamic extremism in Afghanistan in the 1980s and allying with the House of Saud while also supporting the Israeli cause at the expense of the Arabs, Washington had sent a conflicted foreign policy message that managed to provoke more death and destruction in the mainland United States than forty-five years of Cold War. America was the “far Satan,” in Osama’s eyes, because it was the patron and supporter of the Al-Saud, the “near Satan” that was his ultimate target. Understandably wounded and angry as they surveyed the smoking ruins of downtown Manhattan, few Americans could see that it was through the selection of contradictory friends that their successive governments had picked themselves this lethal foe.

Riyadh was suffering from an equivalent denial, as Robert Jordan, George W. Bush’s Texas lawyer, discovered when he arrived a few weeks after 9/11 to take up his post as U.S. ambassador.

“Many senior princes believed it was a Jewish plot. Nayef [the interior minister] actually
said
it was a Zionist conspiracy in a public statement. Even Abdullah was suspicious. They had latched onto this report that three thousand Jewish employees had not gone into work that day. It was an urban myth that has since been discredited, but at the time it was the only way they could make sense of it.”

“Ana ma talabtah, bas Allah jabha”
—“I didn’t ask for it, but God brought it,” was the attitude of many Saudis.

“To accept that Saudis were major players in 9/11,” remembers the
Arab News
editor Khaled Al-Maeena, “was like accepting that your son was a serial killer. You had to refuse to believe it.”

The irony of the Jewish conspiracy theories was that a group of Arabs—and no one but Arabs—had finally hit the enemy in a way that was quite extraordinary. In terms of organization, surprise, and daring, 9 /11 was an aggressive and murderous stroke of sheer brilliance. Why, if you were a proud and upstanding Arab, would you want to hand the credit to the Zionists?

“That was typical Arab victim talk,” says the Jeddah journalist Somaya Jabarti. “When we engage in conspiracy theories we are disempowering ourselves. We are guilty of passive thinking, saying that someone else is always responsible.”

“Bin Laden was evil and murderous,” says Prince Amr Al-Faisal. “As a Muslim I fiercely and totally condemn what he did. But the Saudis are daring people, and it is not surprising that one of the most daring terrorists in the world should be a Saudi. As many Muslims saw it, the falling of the twin towers was a lesson to the pride and complacency of the Americans. It gave them just a little taste of what the Muslims have been going through.”

Out in the Saudi heartland most people agreed. When Mohammed Al-Harbi, then a twenty-five-year-old chemistry teacher, went into school in Buraydah on the day after 9/11, there was a happy buzz in the staff room.

“ ‘The jihad has started,’ they were saying. ‘There is more to come.’ They were all very supportive and content with the attack on New York, and were clearly very happy that it had been done by Saudi hands—or so they assumed. It was like their football team had won.”

Mohammed, a small, neat-bearded man, rather enjoyed tweaking his colleagues and provoking arguments with them, particularly on religious matters.

“They used to tell me that I was not qualified to discuss religion. ‘You have no marks of a religious person,’ they’d say—meaning that I trimmed my beard instead of letting it grow long and bushy, Salafi-style. They were all quite nice and friendly about it in those early days. They gave me books and tapes to educate me.”

But now the argument grew more pointed.

“Let’s put religion on the side, for the moment,” Mohammed would argue. “Let’s agree that an educated nation like America should be respected. Think how much money it took to build those towers. It is haram [shameful] to wreak such destruction.”

His colleagues shrugged their shoulders.

“That is the money of kuffar [infidels],” they replied.

“Don’t three thousand lives count for anything?” Mohammed asked.

“They’re not Muslims.”

“But don’t you feel sorry for all those people?” the chemistry teacher persisted. “I feel very sorry for them.”

“Why don’t you ever express sorrow for the Palestinians?” came the reply.

“Because the Palestinians have had a hand in their own destiny,” replied the chemistry teacher. “Those people in the towers were helpless.”

When he got into the classroom, Mohammed continued the discussion with his pupils and found them apparently accepting of his arguments. But in the weeks that followed, he discovered that his teaching colleagues were going behind his back to cross-examine his students, taking notes of what he had said.

“ ‘What did he tell you?’ they’d ask my pupils. ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s not in the correct path.’ ”

A little less than a month after 9/11, U.S. and UK forces invaded Afghanistan. At once feelings in the Buraydah staff room grew more strained. As news reports came in, Mohammed openly celebrated the defeat of the Taliban, whose intolerance he had always deplored.

“I am getting worried about you,” said one of his bearded colleagues with feeling. “I am getting very worried about the secular thoughts in your head.”

Mohammed understood the coded message.

“He was trying to sound friendly and concerned. But I knew that he was issuing a warning—a very serious warning. If an Islamic court finds that your thoughts are ‘secular,’ they take that to mean that you’re a Muslim who has renounced the faith, that you’re an ‘apostate.’ And the penalty for apostasy is death.”

Robert Jordan, meanwhile, was trying to get established as America’s ambassador to Riyadh—which included the presentation of his credentials in a bizarre ceremony at King Fahd’s palace beside the Red Sea.

“I had three hours’ notice to get to the airport with my documents. When I got there, I discovered sixty or seventy other ambassadors, the majority of the diplomatic corps, none of whom had been officially presented. We all flew down to Jeddah on the plane together—what a target
that
would have made for Al-Qaeda.

“King Fahd was pushed out in a wheelchair with a great deal of pomp and ceremony. It was a cool winter’s afternoon. The ceremony was out of doors, and we each went up to meet him, one by one, to present our papers. It was very sad to think that at this critical moment, Saudi Arabia should be looking to an invalid as its king.”

March 2002 was the twenty-year anniversary of Fahd’s accession, and all Saudi schoolchildren were instructed to compose a letter of thanks to him. Ahmad Sabri, fifteen years old, sat in his Jeddah classroom, determined not to be a puppet. Suddenly he knew what to write: “Thank you, oh great and kind King Fahd, for the Kingdom’s many wonderful things that improve the quality of our life—for the beautiful roads without pot-holes or repair sites, for the good schools, for the planes that always arrive on time . . .”

His teacher picked up the sheet of paper and studied his bright young pupil’s list of sarcasms.

“Ahmad,” he asked, “do you want to get into trouble?”

Ahmad pulled back his paper hurriedly and started to scribble the flattery that was required.