In theory Saudi Arabia should not exist—its survival defies the laws of logic and history. Look at its princely rulers, dressed in funny clothes, trusting in God rather than man, and running their oil-rich country on principles that most of the world has abandoned with relief. Shops are closed for prayer five times a day, executions take place in the street—and let us not even get started on the status of women. Saudi Arabia is one of the planet’s enduring—and, for some, quite offensive—enigmas: which is why, three decades ago, I went to live there for a bit.
It was 1979. I had just published Majesty, my biography of Elizabeth II, which recounted the paradoxical flourishing of an ancient monarchy in an increasingly populist world. Now I was in search of more paradox, and it was not hard to find in Riyadh. After many a morning sipping glasses of sweet tea in the office of the chief of protocol, I finally secured an audience with King Khaled, the shy and fragile old monarch who had become the Kingdom’s stopgap ruler following the assassination of his half brother Faisal in 1975. (The five Saudi monarchs who have ruled the Kingdom since 1953 have all been half brothers, with more than a dozen brothers and half brothers, not to mention their sons, still waiting in the wings—see the family tree on page xxiv.)
In the weeks of tea sipping I had given much thought to the important question of what I might give the king. What could I offer to the man who had—or could have—just about anything? I had decided on photographs. Before coming to the Kingdom, I had read the papers of the earliest British travelers to Arabia, intrepid servants of His Majesty’s imperial government who had trekked across the desert sands in the early decades of the twentieth century in their solar helmets and khaki puttees. A surprising number had loaded their camels with the heavy wood-and-brass cameras of the time, complete with fragile glass plates and portable darkrooms so they could develop and print their negatives in their tents.
I made up an album of these images, which were then comparatively unknown, wrote out long captions and had them translated into classical Arabic, and bore my gift into the royal presence. It was majlis day—majlis meaning “the place of sitting”—and the bedouin had come out of the desert to sit with their king. Inside the manicured palace grounds were dusty Toyota pickup trucks parked higgledy-piggledy on the marble among the burnished Rolls-Royces and BMWs of princes and ministers. The trucks did not have sheep or goats in the back at that moment, but from their smell it was clear they had recently contained some woolly passengers.
I was already prepared for the theater that followed. The nose rubbing and hand kissing as the king met his people was a tableau unrolled for every visiting film crew and journalist—“our desert democracy,” the minders from the Ministry of Information would proudly explain. Till that date I had managed to avoid a ministry minder (thirty years later I still proudly roam free), and I was developing my own rather cynical view of desert “democracy.” It seemed to me to involve little more than the passing thrill of royal contact, the handing out of money, and the dispensing of favors that bypassed and undermined the fragile processes of proper government. So I was 50 percent skeptical as I entered the majlis—then 100 percent bowled over as I found myself treated to some direct royal contact of my own.
In front of the king was standing an old bedu, his bare toes scratching nervously at the rich silken carpet as he declaimed singsong lines of poetry, which he seemed to be making up as he went along:
Oh love of the people,
Oh Khaled, our king,
Oh lion of the desert,
Your promises we sing . . .
Listening to poetry is one of the occupational hazards of being king of Saudi Arabia. Elizabeth II shakes hands with a lot of district nurses. Saudi kings must nod appreciatively through the repetitive and often lengthy odes composed in their honor. In the meantime, there was a flurry of robed and shuffling hospitality, as thimblefuls of thin coffee got poured and trays of clear, sweet tea were circulated. The Riyadh equivalent of Buckingham Palace flunkeys were stern-looking, cross-belted retainers, wearing revolver holsters and swords.
Suddenly it was my turn to entertain the king, and I found myself ushered with my gift to the green brocade overstuffed sofa beside him—“Louis Farouk” is the decorative style favored in most Saudi palaces, a mixed allusion to the excesses of Versailles and the last, gaudy king of Egypt.
It was sticky to start with. How many times had this shy, long-suffering man had to accept the homage of stumbling foreigners? But as he turned the pages of the album, King Khaled started to “get it.” He recognized uncles and cousins and places from long ago, and, above all, the pictures of his extraordinary, charismatic father, Abdul Aziz, “Slave of the Mighty”—the mighty one being God, whom Abdul Aziz served devotedly through the creed that outsiders call Wahhabism, central Arabia’s harsh and fiercely puritannical interpretation of the Islamic faith.1 Usually known in the west as Ibn Saud, or “Son of Saud,” this warrior king had subdued and pulled together the tribes of Arabia between 1901 and 1925, then proudly (some said arrogantly) slapped his family name on the whole bundled-up conglomerate: Al-Mamlaka Al-Arabiyya Al-Saudiyya, the Saudi Arab Kingdom—Arabia as belonging to the House of Saud.
The great man’s son Khaled was now turning the pages of my album with real interest, calling over cronies to look at such and such a face or to question whether such and such a caption was correct about the date or place—until he came to a photo dated 1918. It showed Abdul Aziz standing smiling and self-assured in a headdress and winter cloak, almost a head taller than a line of rather less confident relatives and companions, while a group of ragged little children in the front row squinted quizzically at the first European that most of them had ever seen. (See photo insert facing page .)
It was the children that attracted King Khaled’s attention.
“One of those is me!” he exclaimed excitedly, recounting through a translator how he could remember this khawajah (Western gentleman) coming to meet his father, then taking them all outside to line up in the courtyard. The stranger had vanished under his blanket to peer at them through his curious machine, and the children had been told very strictly not to move. But little Khaled had not then understood why, nor had ever been shown the result. Six decades later, here it was—“Wallah!” (“By God,” the most common and benevolent oath in Saudi Arabia).
The king happily slapped the album shut and ordered a servant to take it back to show the family that night. Meanwhile I was dismissed with a fatherly beam and was walked back to my place to sit through another hour of wafting incense and poetry, reflecting on the nature of this curious land. I had found my paradox—if not two. Blessed by geology with infinite riches, Saudi Arabia was ruled by a man who had started his life as a barefoot urchin in the sand. And while King Khaled was an absolute ruler of theoretically infinite power and wealth, he had lined up with his guests that morning after the last poem had been declaimed and, with no special precedence, had prostrated himself with them all in prayer.
So that became the theme of my book The Kingdom, published in 1981—the dazzling rocketing to modernity of a society that still insisted on tradition, and the delicate balancing act of the ruling family, whose fierce ambition had assembled the entire, scarcely credible creation.
“How,” as one of my American editors impolitely put it, “did a bunch of camel jockeys manage to pull it all together?”
The Kingdom answered that question in 631 pages including index and notes. But life is short, and the book is out of print. So here, in just one paragraph, is why the House of Saud matters. Think of central Arabia as being in three parts—the oil fields in the east, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the west, and the largely barren desert in the middle. At the beginning of the twentieth century, and for most of the previous centuries of Arabian history, those three geographical units were separate countries and, to some degree, cultures. It was the modern achievement of the House of Saud, through skilled and ruthless warfare, a highly refined gift for conciliation, and, most particularly, the potent glue of their Wahhabi mission, to pull those three areas together so that, by the end of the twentieth century, the world’s largest oil reserves were joined, sea to sea, to the largest center of annual religious pilgrimage in the world—and to their capital in the Wahhabi heartland of Riyadh.
That is the historical significance of the Saudi camel jockeys. If it were not for Ibn Saud and his sons, the oil fields now called Saudi would probably be another overly affluent, futuristic emirate like Kuwait or Dubai along the Persian Gulf coast, all lagoon estates and Russian hookers. The oil fields, along with their incredible wealth and international influence, would be totally separate from the holy places of Mecca and Medina—and both those hypothetical countries would, almost certainly, be following a softer, more tolerant branch of Islam than the strict Wahhabism emanating from Riyadh.
“What if?” is a dubious game to play with the past. But, on the basis of the evidence, it seems reasonable to suggest that without the historic achievement of the House of Saud, the horrors of 9 /11 would never have been inflicted on the United States, since Osama Bin Laden’s poisonous hostility toward the West was a brew that only Saudi Arabia could have concocted. His attack on the twin towers was a maneuver in an essentially Saudi quarrel—played out with American victims.
That is the theme of the pages that follow: the story of the conflicts that made Saudi Arabia’s paradoxes lethal for nearly three thousand people in New York’s World Trade Center, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and in a field in Pennsylvania on the morning of September 11, 2001—how an ancient religion came to define a modern state, fueling violence that spiraled far beyond the boundaries of Saudi Arabia. Think of the new words that we have had to learn in the past thirty years: wahhabi, jihadi, Arab-Afghan, Desert Storm, fatwa, Al-Qaeda. What do they all have in common? Which nation supplied fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11? One of the largest groups of foreign fighters captured in Afghanistan? The second largest contingent at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp? Plus several hundred terrorists and suicide bombers in Iraq?
Saudi problems have transformed the modern world. Saudi conflicts and growing pains got the twenty-first century off to a start that no one had anticipated, and we are still trying to work out what it means. I certainly did not begin to guess, when I brought my family to live in Jeddah three decades ago, at the world-shaking climax to which the contradictions and hypocrisies around me would lead. That is why I have written this book: to go back to 1979 and try to work out how it happened. It is a sequel to The Kingdom,but a sequel that must upend and reexamine everything that went before.
In 1982, a year after its publication in the United Kingdom and the United States, The Kingdom was banned by the Saudi government. The censorship office of the Ministry of Information listed ninety-seven objections to the text, and I was willing to accommodate only twenty-four of them. These all related to Islam, where I was happy to concede that a committee of Muslims knew more than I did about their religion. But I firmly declined to alter several long historical passages, particularly my accounts of the disputes between Abdul Aziz’s sons Saud and Faisal, which resulted in the dethroning of King Saud in 1964. As a result, the book was banned from distribution or sale inside Saudi Arabia (its Internet translation remains blocked by Saudi servers)—and sales soared gratifyingly, especially in the Middle East. I had other books to write, and I did not go back to Saudi Arabia for a quarter of a century.
Then in 2006, the same Saudi friend who had secured me a visa in 1979 and weathered the minitempest of The Kingdom’s banning, suggested I return in the changed climate that followed the events of 9/11. I am grateful for his trust, as I am grateful to the many Saudis who have opened their hearts to recount their moving and sometimes painful personal experiences—this is their story. Several characters whom you meet at the beginning will pop up again in the narrative to carry their personal tales through to the end.
Like The Kingdom, this book is based on a stay in Saudi Arabia of some three years, as I have sought to experience the texture of life as much as a foreigner can, without losing the perspective that makes me a foreigner. Every word in the main narrative is as true as I can make it, checked and double-checked, wherever possible, against its original source. Then, set throughout the text, are some of the jokes and folktales that Saudis recount when they try to explain how things have come to be the strange way they are. It is a device I adopted in The Kingdom to reflect the rhythm and complexity of local narratives, recruiting fable to help explain the facts.
. . .
I am writing these words in a plane flying from the Saudi coastal oil fields to Riyadh. Comfortably ensconced by a window with my laptop, I am looking down on the arid, orange expanse of desert below me, and I cannot help thinking of the British adventurers who plodded across this same territory less than a century ago, taking more than a week to make the same journey. I am doing some time traveling of my own. The modern Saudi experience may seem remote, but it was not so long ago in the West—certainly in our parents’ and grandparents’ memory—that most people were devout and rather intolerant believers, scared and suspicious of other races and faiths: the “weaker sex” did not vote; capital punishment was considered a necessity; books and plays were censored (our movies still are); father knew best, and “nice” girls kept themselves pure until marriage. For centuries Western life was lived within the comfort of those structures and strictures, and it is only recently that we have started to look for new values—which we sometimes seek to define by criticizing those who are reluctant to abandon the proven security of the old ones.
As I look down on the desert, I can sense the trajectory of the plane make a shift. We will be landing in Riyadh shortly, after less than an hour in the air. So here we are, all of us, rushing into the future—with the Saudis, these days, starting to step out just a little faster than they did before. Their progress in the past three decades has been uplifting in some respects, but really quite shocking and destructive in others. It is a dramatic and important story, and as I set out to tell it, I cannot help wondering: Will they ban this book like the last one?
Robert Lacey
Riyadh, 2009
This family tree is based upon a list of the surviving sons of Abdul Aziz in undated order of precedence kindly supplied by Dr. Fahd Al-Semari of the Darat Al-Malik Abdul Aziz (the King Abdul Aziz Study Center) in Riyadh. Dates of birth have been estimated from this and from the family trees compiled by Michael Field and by Brian Lees, author of A Handbook of the Al-Saud Ruling Family of Saudi Arabia (Royal Genealogies, London, 1980). See Lees and also The Kingdom for details of all thirty-seven or so of Abdul Aziz’s sons. The old king fathered a similar number of daughters, but the precise number of his children has never been publicly quantified.
Drawings by Laura Maestro.
NOTE ON THE ISLAMIC CALENDAR
Muslim months begin and end with the phases of the moon. People scan the sky in every corner of Saudi Arabia, and only when the hilal—the new crescent moon—has actually been seen and attested is the month certified in court to have officially begun.
Twelve lunar months add up to some 354 days—eleven or so days short of the Western, Gregorian year. So a Muslim centenarian is not yet ninety-seven in terms of 365-day Gregorian years, and the shorter Muslim year is constantly creeping forward in relation to its Western equivalent. Celebrations like the end of hajj (the pilgrimage) and Ramadan (the holy month of fasting) arrive eleven days or so earlier in Western terms every year.
The calendar also has its own start date—the hijrah, or migration—the turning point in the birth of Islam, when the Prophet Mohammed forsook the hostility of unreformed Mecca (in the Christian year A.D. 622) and migrated to the community that would become known as Medina (see page 7). Islamic years are accordingly known as migration, or hijrah, years and will be denoted as A.H. (anno hegirae) in the pages that follow.