Inside the Kingdom (7 page)

Saudi coffins are not wooden boxes: they are more like stretchers—open litters on which the dead are transported to their resting place beneath a shroud. One of the perks of being a Meccan is that your relatives can shuttle your corpse into the holy of holies for a farewell prayer at the very heart of Islam. So twenty or so such “coffins” provided the ideal cover for Juhayman and his followers to smuggle their final consignments of weapons into Mecca’s Grand Mosque in the small hours of November 20, 1979—the first day of Muharram, the first Islamic month of the year 1400. Beneath the shrouds were dozens of firearms: pistols, rifles, Kalashnikovs, and magazines of ammunition.

Fajr, the predawn prayer, would be called that day at 5:18 A.M.—it is timed to the moment before sunrise when the first glimmer of brightness shows along the horizon—and the “mourners” aroused no special interest as they filed through the ghostly light. The shrouded cargoes were coming and going all the time, and on this particular morning the light was more ghostly than usual. As Juhayman and his followers fanned out quietly with their weapons around the coolness of the Grand Mosque’s massive tiled courtyard, the
hilal,
the thinnest of crescent moons, could be discerned in the sky above them: new moon, new month, new year, new century—though, as Riyadh’s governor, the sardonic Prince Salman, would later point out, the old century would not be truly complete until the
end
of 1400, with the new, fifteenth century beginning on the first day of 1401.

As the first prayer call of A.H. 1400 sounded, the slight, barefoot figure of Juhayman went scampering up the steps to the public address system to jostle aside the imam and commandeer his microphone. Celebratory shots rang out. Men were firing rifles into the air while the Brothers were clustering around Mohammed Al-Qahtani, the Dreamed-of One, shaking his hand and offering him homage.

“Behold the Mahdi!” they were shouting. “Behold the Right-Guided One!”

Now was the time for Juhayman’s prepared proclamation to be read out by one of his followers.

“The Mahdi will bring justice to the earth!” rattled the message from the loudspeakers, providing the small number of confused and sleepy policemen around the Mosque with the first explanation of what was amiss. “Juhayman is the Mahdi’s brother! He calls on you to recognize his brother! Recognize the Mahdi who will cleanse this world of its corruptions!”

From beneath their robes several dozen more men produced rifles, joined in the shouts and fanned out purposefully toward the Mosque’s twenty-five double gateways. At this cue a couple of hundred men leaped up from among the worshippers. Policemen and a young assistant imam who tried to resist were shot dead. The gunmen reached the gates. The doors were shut, and the shrine revered by Muslims as the holiest place on earth was sealed off. The House of God had been hijacked.

CHAPTER 3

Siege

T
he extraordinary news that the Grand Mosque had been kidnapped was received in Riyadh with consternation and something approaching panic.

“I wish they had done that to my palace, not to the Mosque,” exclaimed the pious old King Khaled with horror.

The sixty-seven-year-old Khaled had come to the throne four years earlier in the aftermath of a family compromise. In terms of seniority, the brother in line after Faisal was Khaled’s forceful elder brother Mohammed. But age has never been the sole criterion for authority in Arabia. The tribe searches for the candidate who can best bring consensus, and the inner councils of the Al-Saud had long been wary of Mohammed as
too
forceful. Known as Abu Sharrain, “the Father of Twin Evils,” the elderly prince had a vile temper that would be revealed to the outside world in 1977 when he ordered the deaths of his granddaughter and her lover, who had tried to elope. This tragic scandal was later depicted in the British TV film
Death of a Princess,
⁴
and might have caused the Al-Saud even more embarrassment had Mohammed not agreed to step aside from the succession in the 1960s. Sidelined from public office, paid off with land grants and endless deference, his prickly pride was salved by the knowledge that the prince who replaced him was his full blood brother.

Khaled’s mild and conciliatory style made him an altogether better guardian of the clan’s equilibrium. He was generally assumed to be a cypher whose function was to rubber-stamp the executive decisions of his westernized younger half brother Fahd, the crown prince. But Khaled had bedouin shrewdness and two very relevant strengths—his links with the tribes, who embraced him as they never embraced Fahd, and his similarly warm relationship with the council of the
ulema
(“those who possess learning”—the religious sheikhs). These traditional connections were exactly what the crisis of the Grand Mosque called for, and on the first day of the new century Fahd happened, in any case, to be far from Riyadh—the crown prince was representing the Kingdom at an Arab League summit in Tunis.

“We were awoken by phone calls very early that morning,” remembers Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the young director of Saudi foreign intelligence who was also attending the conference. “The crown prince told me to go back at once. There were important issues in Tunis, so he was going to stay at the summit.”

The soft-spoken Turki was one of the rising stars of the family. Educated at the Lawrenceville prep school in New Jersey, Georgetown, Princ eton,
and
Cambridge, he had the gravitas of his father, Faisal, and the insouciance to spend four months in his twenties driving a new Lamborghini home from London to Arabia. When he got back to Mecca on the night of Tuesday, November 20, 1979, he rapidly discovered the nature of the foe the Al-Saud was up against. As he reached out for the handle of the door at the Shoubra Hotel, where his uncles had set up their headquarters, a bullet shattered the glass in front of him. Juhayman had stationed snipers in the soaring minarets of the Grand Mosque, and they had already claimed victims.

The task of recapturing the Mosque had been assigned to Fahd’s full brothers, Sultan, the defense minister, and Nayef, the interior minister, assisted by Nayef ’s deputy and younger brother, Ahmad. With Salman, the governor of Riyadh, they made up the core of the so-called Sudayri Seven, Abdul Aziz’s seven sons by his cleverest wife, Hissa Al-Sudayri.
⁵
The Sudayris were the powerhouse at the heart of the Al-Saud, owing their influence partly to their numbers (no other grouping of blood brothers numbered more than three), but mainly to their mutual loyalty, ambition, and extraordinary appetite for work—qualities instilled in them by their mother. To her dying day, the formidable Hissa insisted that all seven of her boys, no matter how grand they had become, should gather in her home once a week for lunch.

Sultan and Nayef had reached Mecca by nine that morning and started deploying their forces—some local army regiments and a couple of companies of the Special Security Force, a unit of Nayef ’s Interior Ministry. The Mecca regiments of the National Guard also moved into the town. Their commander, Abdullah, would shortly fly back from a holiday in Morocco.

A respectable military grouping had been put in place within hours. But its princely commanders had no authority to assault the Grand Mosque—that permission would have to come from the grand council of the ulema, who were being hastily assembled in Riyadh. Nor at this stage did the princes know much about who or what they were supposed to be fighting: rumors ran the gamut from Iranians to the CIA or Israeli agents. It turned out that the grand ulema could help with that as well.

The religious sheikhs held a regular meeting with their monarch every Tuesday. It was broadcast on the TV news, with Bin Baz, blind-eyed and head cocked heavenward, seated in the place of honor beside the king. In theory, the ulema disapproved of television. But since it existed, they judged themselves a better subject for the screen than more trivial fare such as cartoons. Now, as they shuffled hurriedly over the plush carpeting of the Maazar palace in Riyadh, they had more unpleasant realities to confront.

They already knew exactly who had taken the Grand Mosque. The cleric whom Juhayman had jostled aside that morning to seize the microphone had been the respected Sheikh Mohammed ibn Subayl, principal imam of the Mosque and one of the teachers at whose feet Juhayman and his followers once sat in earlier, more submissive days. Ibn Subayl had recognized his former pupils with dismay, and knew all about the Salafi cause they had served. He had taken refuge in his office to telephone the news to his colleagues. Later, jettisoning his gold-trimmed cloak and wrapping his headdress around his shoulders in the fashion of foreigners, he had managed to escape from the Mosque in a group of Indonesian pilgrims. Juhayman was keeping Arabs inside the Mosque as conscripts for the Mahdi’s army, but he had given orders to release non-Arabic speakers, who would not understand what he or the Mahdi were saying.

King Khaled wanted guidance from the sheikhs. What should his soldiers be doing? Every Muslim knew the rules against violence in God’s house—that was what made the action of these violators so shocking. So was it permissible for Saudi troops to attack the kidnappers with guns and bombs inside the
haram
(holy place), with all that implied for damage to the Mosque?

The religious sheikhs, who included Bin Baz, played for time. Neither then, nor ever since, has any Saudi cleric admitted the slightest responsibility for the monster that, Frankenstein-like, they had nurtured in Juhayman. But their long delay in condemning him and his latter-day Ikhwan suggested deep embarrassment. The ulema granted the king an emergency fatwa (judgment) to take “all necessary measures” to “protect the lives of Muslims inside the mosque.” Then they sat down for three full days to ponder the detailed measures to be taken against the pious young men they had once blessed as their missionaries.

Mahdi Zawawi saw two women sauntering in the deserted Mosque courtyard with rifles. He could not believe his eyes. He was one of the helicopter pilots flying patrols over the haram, peering down on the rebels from a thousand feet. The women were dressed in black and totally veiled—with bandoliers crisscrossed over their robes, and automatic weapons in their hands.