PART ONE
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer. Nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed
CHAPTER 1
Juhayman means “Angry Face,” deriving from jahama, the past tense of yatajaham, meaning to set your features grimly. Arabia’s bedouin have a tradition of bestowing ugly, tough-guy names on their children. They believe it keeps trouble at bay in a troublesome world—though in the case of Juhayman Al-Otaybi, “Angry Face” of the Otayba tribe, the name came to stand for incredible trouble. With his wild beard and wild eyes, Juhayman had the look of Che Guevara about him, perhaps even Charles Man-son. In November and December 1979, Angry Face horrified the entire Muslim world when he led hundreds of young men to their deaths in Mecca. It was a gesture of demented religious fanaticism, and the House of Saud did its best to disown him. This mingling of violence with religion was an un-Saudi aberration, explained government apologists—Juhayman was not typical in the slightest. Which was what they would say again, twenty years later, about Osama Bin Laden.
It went back to 1973, when King Faisal of Saudi Arabia announced a boycott on his kingdom’s oil sales to the United States. Enraged by President Richard Nixon’s military support for Israel in the October War against Egypt and Syria, the Saudi king had hoped to compel some dramatic change in U.S. policy. Yet as the Arab oil boycott caused the price of oil on the world market to multiply nearly five times, it was back home, inside the Kingdom, that the truly dramatic changes would occur.
“For about eighteen months nothing seemed to happen,” remembers Dr. Horst Ertl, who was teaching chemical engineering at the College of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. “Then, around the spring of 1975, just before the death of King Faisal, I drove across via Riyadh to the Red Sea coast. Suddenly everyone seemed to have money in their pockets. It was incredible. One moment just a few of the richer students had cars. Next moment, the university parking lot was filling.”
After centuries of hibernation and a few recent decades of only gradual change, Saudi Arabia was suddenly turned on its head. Foreign money brought foreign ways—the good, the bad, and, in the eyes of many Saudis, the very definitely ugly. Women started appearing on TV and, even more offensively for many traditionalists, half-undressed beside hotel swimming pools. The Kingdom’s cities became chaotic building sites, where blank-faced laborers in hard hats toiled in the dust like ants. The construction crane, it was said, was the new national symbol of the Kingdom, throwing up schools, universities, palaces, hospitals, mosques, office blocks, highways, more hotels—and shops, shops, shops.
“You’d go away for the summer,” remembers Prince Amr Mohammed Al-Faisal, a grandson of the late king, “and come back to discover yourself surrounded by whole new neighborhoods. You got lost in your own town.”
Petrodollars were the death of Jeddah’s charming old Souq Al-Nada (the “Dew” marketplace), which derived its poetic name from the morning scent of moisture that wafted up from the beaten earth. In short order the soft earthen floor was cemented over with garish, trattoria-style ceramic tiles, and the scent of dew was replaced by petrol from the traders’ noisy generators.
Faisal’s successor, his half brother Khaled, who became king in 1975, looked on these changes with kindly bemusement. “Can you tell me, my sons,” he would inquire of his nephews, bright young princes back from California with their degrees in business and engineering and political science, “what I should do with this fish that is opening its mouth, swallowing my money, and giving me back iron and cement? Are these riches a blessing to the Muslims, or a curse?”
The pious had no doubt. A society that had been safely closed for centuries was now ripped open to danger. Their pure world was under threat. Cocky children knew better than their parents. The English language counted for more than Arabic, God’s own language in which He had revealed the Koran. Traditionalists could not glory in this jackpot moment, which was sullying their beautiful past. They felt scared and unprotected. They were outraged by these helter-skelter changes they were helpless to prevent, and they had a word for them—bidaa, innovations.
“Every bidah is a going-astray, and every going-astray leads to Hell-fire,” went a saying attributed to the Prophet—though his condemnation, in the eyes of most modern Islamic scholars, referred to changes in the field of religious practice and ritual, not to technical innovations like the motorcar and television.
“Life before the oil boom had a sweetness and a closeness that we can now see was very precious—and very fragile,” remembers Dr. Khaled Bahaziq, who was twenty-three years old in 1973 and studying in America. “When I was a child, we lived in one another’s houses. We cooked food and shared it when we broke the fast at Ramadan. If the neighbors saw me misbehaving, they would tell me off, and my parents would say thank you. We were all family and friends, so we didn’t need rules about the girls wearing veils. We were a community. Then the money came. Everybody bought cars, drove out of town and built themselves villas behind high walls—you were reckoned a failure if you didn’t. And suddenly we found we were separate. We felt somehow empty inside. If we had a wedding to celebrate, we didn’t get together like we used to, stringing out the lights round the neighbors’ houses and yards. We’d hire a ballroom in some modern hotel.”
Studying in America, Bahaziq filled the emptiness by seeking to become a better Muslim, forswearing the American temptations of alcohol and women. Back home in Jeddah for a vacation in 1975, he asked his family to find him a devout Saudi wife, in part to “innoculate” him against life in the States.
“My family made the choice. I had the right to meet her before the wedding—to ‘inspect’ her, if you like. But I felt that that was insulting to her. I trusted my family. I trusted her. I was happy not to be doing things in the modern and materialistic Western way. So the first time we saw each other was on our wedding day. Allah has blessed us ever since.”
Bahaziq took his wife back to America, where he threw himself into Muslim activities, helping to organize the Islamic center at his university. As oil wealth increased in the late 1970s, Western newspapers gleefully reported the excesses of nouveau rich Arabs flaunting their fortunes in Europe. But these Muslims who adopted Western delinquencies were not, it turned out, the Muslims who really mattered. The oil boom had produced a religion boom, and behind the headlines, the future was being seized by driven, pious men like Khaled Bahaziq, who would later wield a Kalashnikov in Afghanistan—and, even more dramatically, by a man called “Angry Face.”
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.
WHAT GOD REVEALED TO MOHAMMED
“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.
THE FIRST “WAHHABI”
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.
These last two commandments, known together as hisbah, were the only elements that Abdul Aziz Bin Baz considered lacking in the proposal that Medina’s Salafi Group brought to him in 1965 after the breaking of the pictures. He suggested they should add hisbah(adjectival form, muhtasiba) to their name, and so was born Al-Jamaa Al-Salafiya Al-Muhtasiba, the Salafi Group That Commands Right and Forbids Wrong. The blind sheikh became their murshid (spiritual mentor), and the group set off eagerly to spread the good word around the Kingdom.
Ali Saad Al-Mosa, an academic and columnist from the southern province of Asir, was sixteen when the missionaries of the Salafi Group arrived in the south in the mid-1970s. They were touring Ali’s green and mountainous neighborhood on the border with Yemen.
“They seemed like ancient disciples,” he remembers, “wandering all over the countryside. They camped together in our mosque for a week or so, and lived quite simply on whatever we could provide. I remember the gathering of beards.”
Luxuriant beards were (and are) the most famous badge of Salafi conviction, based on a traditional belief, which some scholars dispute, that the Prophet never trimmed his beard.3 Ali was especially impressed with the wild black beard of Juhayman, who had by then become one of the leaders of the group and was a powerfully effective preacher. As a lecturer in linguistics, Dr. Al-Mosa can today analyze the components of Juhayman’s technique: “He started with some easy enemies,” he remembers, “America, the West, and the wicked ways of the non-Muslim world. Then he made people feel guilty and scared, playing on their insecurities. ‘You are a corrupt society,’ he said. ‘You must turn back to God.’ He knew how to frighten simple folk. It was all about fear. He also criticized the media—too secular, with women’s pictures in the papers; and the education syllabus—not enough religion. He was careful not to say anything directly about the royal family, but his whole attitude had an antigovernment drift.”
Everywhere Juhayman looked he could detect bidaa—dangerous and regrettable innovations. The Salafi Group That Commands Right and Forbids Wrong was originally intended to focus on moral improvement, not on political grievances or reform. But religion is politics and vice versa in a society that chooses to regulate itself by the Koran.
“He disagreed with the government making it easier for women to work,” remembers Juhayman’s follower Nasser Al-Huzaymi, “and he thought it was immoral of the government to permit soccer matches, because of the very short shorts that the players wore in those days. He would use only coins, not banknotes, because of the pictures of the kings that were printed on the money. He thought that the coming of the rulers’ pictures onto the banknotes was really bad bidaa. It was like television, a dreadful sin that had entered every home.”
Juhayman’s rejectionist thinking was shared by many occupants of the Bayt Al-Ikhwan hostel, particularly the newer recruits. Some opposed passports and identity cards on the grounds they showed loyalty to an entity that was not God. Others studied the scriptures to develop their own variations on traditional rituals—devising new rules, for example, on the theology of whether or not to take off your sandals while praying. As news of these unorthodoxies filtered upward, the group’s mentors became alarmed, and in the absence of Bin Baz, who had left for Riyadh in 1975 to take up grander religious responsibilities, a group of local sheikhs traveled out to the unwelcoming black lunar landscape of eastern Medina to try to reason Juhayman and his young zealots back onto the correct path.
“It was late in the summer of 1977,” remembers Nasser Al-Huzaymi. “It was a hot night, so we all went up on the roof.”
Built of rough cinder blocks, the House of the Brothers had never been fully finished, so there were bare pipes sticking up from the roof. In this raw setting beneath the stars, Juhayman took the lead aggressively on behalf of the radicals, arguing for “purity” and accusing the sheikhs of selling out to the government. They were not true Salafis, he said—they had not studied their holy books. Later he would even accuse his opponents of being police informers.
It was a bitter, personalized argument, and the rooftop meeting ended with a split. While the sheikhs departed with a minority that included certain founding members of the group, the younger, more hotheaded majority stayed at the hostel, taking their lead from Juhayman. From this moment onward, they started referring to themselves simply as the Brothers, Al-Ikhwan—a word that stirred up dangerous memories in Saudi society.