Inside the Kingdom (6 page)

“At one stage,” remembers Al-Huzaymi, “Bin Baz was providing most of the money for Bayt al-Ikhwan.”

But all this changed in 1977, following the fateful disagreement that occured amid the unfinished pipework on the roof. Until then Juhayman’s subversive thoughts about banknotes and soccer players had been protected.

“When someone official got upset with us,” recalls Al-Huzaymi, “Bin Baz would pick up the phone or go to see them. He would explain that we were only spreading the true faith, trying to make the country more pious. Quite a large group of the Brothers were arrested in Riyadh on one occasion, and the sheikh called up the Interior Ministry. He got them all released.”

After the rooftop confrontation, however, and faced with the hostility of the sheikhs whom Juhayman had so brusquely rejected, the Brothers soon found themselves under pressure. Late in 1977 Juhayman got a tip-off from a friend in the local security forces, warning that he was due to be picked up for questioning.

“We packed up and drove away that very night,” remembers Nasser Al-Huzaymi, who accompanied Juhayman. “We were escaping from the back door even as the police were arriving at the front.”

From that moment forward, Juhayman was on the run. Thirty of the Brothers were soon taken in for more interrogation, detained for periods that ranged from a week to several months, and the whole dynamic of the movement shifted. Juhayman’s own adventures set the tone, as he skulked in the northern deserts, experiencing the escapades of a Robin Hood. He had one narrow escape when he went to see his mother in Sajir, only to discover at the last minute that the police had the family home staked out. Suffering from a toothache on another occasion, he had to be smuggled to a friendly dentist who would not betray his identity. Being on the run created an atmosphere of paranoia and confrontation, and marked a new stage in the latter-day Ikhwan’s campaign of reform—from alternative to radicalized, and now, increasingly, dedicated to subversive activities that were aggressive and underground. Terrorist, in fact.

No longer able to meet and talk easily with his followers, Juhayman turned to the written and spoken word. None of the cassettes that he recorded during his months in the wilderness has survived, but we do have his printed words, twelve angry diatribes that have become legendary among Islamic extremists over the years—“The Letters of Juhayman.”

Their message was encapsulated in “The State, Allegiance and Obedience,” the most political of these tracts. The Al-Saud, Juhayman complained, had exploited religion as “a means to guarantee their worldly interests, putting an end to jihad, paying allegiance to the Christians [America], and bringing evil and corruption upon the Muslims.” That neatly summed up the fundamentalist case against the Saudi royal family, then and ever since—in a word, betrayal. It was the grievance of those earlier Brothers who did battle at Sibillah, and the essence of the message that Osama Bin Laden would deliver via his attacks on America on 9/11. The House of Saud were hypocrites; they exploited Islam to entice good Muslims to fight and die on their behalf, but when they had accomplished their worldly ends, they effectively machine-gunned the men who had put their lives on the line for them.

After his opening manifesto, Juhayman rather spoiled his case. He dived into the thickets of Islamic genealogy to demonstrate how the Al-Saud were not blood descendants of Mohammed—a pointless exercise, since they had never made any such claim. Juhayman had never been a disciplined thinker, and now he was caught up in the grandeur of his self-appointed mission. As ideas came into his head he dictated them to obediently scribbling associates. “He recited his thoughts out loud,” remembers Nasser Al-Huzaymi, “just as the Prophet recited his revelations,” so each of his Letters took on the rambling, declarative character of a Friday sermon.

“They all seemed a bit kooky to me,” remembers Nabil Al-Khuwaiter, who, as a student at the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, came across a selection of the pamphlets in October 1979. Crudely printed in green, yellow, and blue, the Letters of Juhayman, secretly published and smuggled across the border from Kuwait, had been scattered among the Korans at the back of the little dormitory mosque where Nabil and his fellow students—the future oil technocrats of Saudi Arabia—went to pray five times a day.

“They were challenging the Islamic legitimacy of the Al-Saud to rule,” Al-Khuwaiter recalls, “which was very shocking in those days. If criticism of the government ever appeared in the local press, it was never more than a mild complaint to a nonroyal minister about some aspect of his ministry’s services. I didn’t dare show the pamphlets to any but my closest friends and relatives—in fact, one relative even warned me that it could be some sort of
Mabahith
[secret police] trick to bait and snare potential dissidents.

“ ‘Whoever heard of a name like Juhayman?’ my relative said. ‘If he is a real man, let him come out and give his real name, instead of trying to deceive impressionable young college students and get them to do his dirty work.’

“As I remember it, Juhayman argued that the use of ID photos proved that the government was
kafir
[infidel]. I couldn’t really cotton on to his argument, but the Letters definitely caught the current of the times. On the one hand was the new wealth—the oil money flooding in with its invitation to go the Western way. On the other hand was the sense of loss as the old ways of doing things got swept away. There was this uncomfortable feeling that things were awry, so it was refreshing to see some alternative options set down on paper, however strange. I supported the idea that we needed more godly people in authority. That was how many young people were thinking at that time. It seemed so obvious—‘Put the pious people in power.’ ”

The final stage in Juhayman Al-Otaybi’s progression from earnest missionary to violent revolutionary occurred somewhere out in the northern deserts late in 1978, as the fugitive lay beneath his blanket looking up at the stars. Juhayman started to have dreams. For many years he had been contemplating the prophecies relating to the Islamic Messiah—the Mahdi, or “Right-Guided One”—who would come down to earth to correct the problems of mankind. The notion had carried some currency among the pious, and now, Juhayman dreamed, there was a need for someone who could correct the ills afflicting Arabia.

“When kings enter a village,” ran a sura in the Koran that is not much repeated in the modern monarchies of the Middle East, “they corrupt it and demean the honor of its people.”

Surely this applied to modern Saudi Arabia. In the very first of his Letters, Juhayman set out the traditions that connected the coming of the Mahdi, in his eyes, to current events in the Arabian Peninsula. “Great discord will occur,” ran one prophecy, “and the Muslims will be drifting away from the religion.” That was certainly coming true as the Al-Saud imported more and more Westerners to the country—and another tradition promised that the Mahdi would appear at the dawn of a new century. Well, it was now 1399 in the Islamic calendar.

This was where Juhayman’s dreams came in, for they revealed to him the identity of the Mahdi—one of his own followers, Mohammed Abdullah Al-Qahtani, a good-looking and pious young man who had dropped out of university and made a small reputation as a poet. He was one of the members of the Salafi Group who had been locked up, then released, in Riyadh.

“The Mahdi will be of my [Qurayshi] stock,” ran a hadith narrated by Abu Saiid Al-Khudri—“he will have a broad forehead and a prominent nose.”

That physically matched the features of the handsome Al-Qahtani, whose first name and father’s name corresponded to those of the Prophet, and whose non-Qurayshi name was explained away by a complicated story of adoption in an earlier generation.

Nasser Al-Huzaymi thought the whole thing was ridiculous.

“Al-Qahtani was a man,” he says, “not a Messiah.”

Al-Huzaymi was not convinced by the far-fetched tale of adoption and of Al-Qahtani’s blood descent from the Prophet, and he grew alarmed by Juhayman’s aggressive interpretations of other hadiths. These involved an army coming down from the north that would find itself swallowed up by the earth. Juhayman told the Brethren to get weapons before the end of the year, and to acquire small portable radios so they could listen for reports of the angels who would fly down from heaven to defeat the northern army. He traveled around the major cities gathering loyal survivors of the original ’60s-era Salafi Group to brief them on the signs of the coming Mahdi. The recent arrests of pious Brothers had shown how the government was blocking the true path. Juhayman encouraged his followers to go out into the desert for target practice.

This all sounded like trouble to Al-Huzaymi, a mild and inoffensive character who was no lover of firearms. Like a number of others, he quietly made his excuses and slipped away from a movement that seemed to be losing touch with reality.

But Juhayman was a believer, and dreams are taken very seriously by Muslims—the angel Gabriel often spoke to the Prophet in his dreams.

“The fact that we dream,” said one of the Brethren to Al-Huzaymi before he quit the group, “proves that we are more religious.”

As Juhayman reported his visions of the Mahdi, his loyal followers responded with more and more dreams of their own, among them Al-Qahtani’s own sister, who dreamed that she saw her brother standing inside the Grand Mosque in Mecca receiving the acclamations of the wor shipers beside the Kaaba (the huge cube covered with black and gold embroidered fabric at the center of the Mosque’s courtyard). Juhayman rapidly divorced his wife and married the woman, so that the Mahdi was his brother-in-law.

With the approach of A.H. 1400, a sense of purposeful hysteria began to permeate the Brotherhood. Coming and going in Mecca as religious insiders, Juhayman and his followers had their eyes on the
khalawi,
the warren of cellars and study rooms that lay beneath the floor of the Grand Mosque. Privileged worshippers were allowed to descend to the khalawi, where long corridors of simply furnished rest areas and cubicles were set aside for private prayer and meditation. These underground rooms would become their headquarters, they decided—an easily defensible bolt-hole where they could hole up and wait for their prophecies to be fulfilled.

Though by now openly critical of the royal family, the rebels do not appear to have had a coherent plan to subvert the Saudi government. They evidently believed that if they put themselves in the right place at the right time, God’s cataclysm would do the rest—and they would have front-row seats. Bribing an official of the Bin Laden company, the building and maintenance contractors in charge of the site, they were able to drive their pickup trucks straight into the basement. As A.H. 1399 drew to a close they came and went openly through the streets of Mecca as they stocked the khalawi with supplies—dates, water, and dried yogurt, but also ammunition and weapons.

They tried to keep their plans secret, but there were several hundred rebels, some of whom were euphoric at the approaching fulfillment of one of Islam’s most famous and fantastic prophecies, so it was not surprising that hints of their scheme leaked. Early in November, Ali Saad Al-Mosa, the bright young student who had heard Juhayman speak a few years earlier, was at a family funeral down in Asir.

“It was a very cold night,” he remembers, “and someone from the village started talking loudly, saying that Al-Khidr [“the Green One,” a shadowy Islamic righter-of-wrongs sometimes confused with the Mahdi] would be arriving with the new century, and that there would be changes. Everyone listened very seriously and nodded their heads. A lot of people, it seemed to me, believed him.”