by Kim Ghattas
Sami was deeply unsettled by how the new oil wealth was leveling the country’s heritage. Sami’s childhood home in Mecca had already disappeared. The old Souq el Layl, the night market with its busy stalls and magic mix of smells and noises, had been torn down in the 1950s to make way for the expansion of the Holy Mosque, ordered by the king. The last expansion before that had taken place in the tenth century. Since then, for over a thousand years, the Holy Mosque had been preserved and renovated with utter devotion; its shape and size, but mostly the history imprinted in its walls and floors, had been left unperturbed—until the arrival of its new moneyed custodians. Unlike the barren, desert interior province of Najd, from which the new rulers of the kingdom hailed, Mecca was in the richer, more vibrant, and cosmopolitan Hejaz province along the Red Sea. The Hejaz, home to both Mecca and Medina, the two holiest sites in Islam, and the nearby port city of Jeddah, had been part of every great Islamic empire, its people open to the world, its architecture delicate and intricate, its practice of Islam rich and diverse. Najd wasn’t poor, but it was sterile and xenophobic, and remained on the periphery of a culturally diverse and rich world religion.
Since returning from the United States, Sami was living in Jeddah, a city that had stood at the crossroads of trade and religion for centuries. In the seventh century, the third caliph after the prophet, Othman ibn Affan, declared the seaport to be the official gate to Mecca for all pilgrims arriving by sea. Others came overland in caravans through Damascus or Baghdad. Since then, Jeddah was flooded every year by thousands of Muslims from all corners of the world. Many would settle in the city, whose connection to the spiritual realm went even further. According to one interpretation of the Quran, after being exiled from paradise, Eve and Adam were reunited on Mount Arafat near Mecca. Legend had it that Eve, the mother of mankind, was later buried in Jeddah, the city whose name means “grandmother” in Arabic. There had even been a tomb in the city that was said to be Eve’s. For centuries, pilgrims would visit the site, especially barren women, with supplications to the divine. Famed travelers wrote about and sketched the tomb, which was approximately five hundred feet long with a carved square stone representing the navel. It had survived the passage of time and the weight of countless pleas, only to be destroyed during the 1926 conquest of the Hejaz by Abdelaziz ibn Saud, who was working to unify the provinces of the Arabian Peninsula under his rule. His son Faisal, the future king, had led the assault on Jeddah after the city had been besieged and starved for over a year. Barely nineteen, Faisal was named viceroy of the province, and he ordered the destruction of the tomb. An ancient cemetery in Medina dating back to the days of the prophet was also razed. The new rulers of Arabia saw the dangers of shirk (idolatry) everywhere. From sultan of Najd to king of Najd and the Hejaz and then king of the whole peninsula, Abdelaziz gave his name to the new kingdom and his new subjects.
Abdelaziz was the descendant of Muhammad ibn (son of) Saud, founder of the Al-Saud dynasty. From the deep interior of Najd, Abdelaziz brought with him two centuries of a particular brand of Islam that his ancestors had espoused in a political and familial alliance with one man: Muhammad ibn Abdelwahhab. Ultra-orthodox and fundamentalist, the eighteenth-century religious preacher led an exclusionary revivalist movement, following in the footsteps of others who had called for a return to the ways of the salaf, the ancestors, the first generation of Muslims. There were those Salafists who believed that following the righteous salaf, al-salaf al-saleh, dictated a return to the exact way of life of the prophet. In the early twentieth century, there would be modernist Salafists, such as the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh, who believed it was important to rid Islam of centuries of acquired traditions and accretions and return to the purity of prophet’s teachings, which actually provided the answers needed to adapt religion to modernity. Only after 9/11 did the term Salafist become known worldwide, used exclusively to denote the stricter outlook with Salafist jihadists resorting to violence to impose their views. In his days, Ibn Abdelwahhab was so extreme in his interpretations that he was regarded as an outcast by his contemporaries. The Ottomans were the first to describe it as Wahhabism, to denote a movement outside the mainstream of Islam, one that seemed intently focused on one man as though he were a kind of prophet. The Wahhabis, with the Al-Sauds as their standard-bearers, tolerated nothing that could come between man and his God: not the intercession of saints, not tombstones in cemeteries or visitation of the graves of loved ones, not even worship of the prophet—all of it was shirk. The dynasty had suffered serious reversals, including almost total annihilation and exile over two centuries, but the alliance between the House of Saud or Al-Sauds and the preacher, sealed in the desert in 1744, had persisted. The tomb of Eve became one of its victims. In 1975, what was left of the tomb was covered with concrete and lost in a large cemetery among hundreds of graves that looked like rows of empty, white concrete planters with paved pathways in between.
This fanatical, uncompromising attitude was at the source of events unfolding that November morning in Mecca as Sami overslept, unaware of the momentous turmoil occurring inside the Holy Mosque itself. As he started his morning, Sami reviewed the verses he had memorized the day before. Only later would he understand how ominous his recitations were.
“And fight not with them at the Sacred Mosque, until they fight you in it: so if they fight you in it, slay them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers.”
Sami wasn’t the only one who had thought that the first day of the new century was auspicious for religious initiatives, small or big.
* * *
Before the break of dawn, Sheikh Muhammad al-Subail, the grand imam, leader of prayers, of the Holy Mosque, performed his ablutions. The bearded fifty-nine-year-old draped his gold-trimmed black cloak around his shoulders. Fajr (dawn) prayers were minutes away. The cool darkness of the November night still enveloped the city, hugging the craggy hills overlooking Mecca with their evocative names—noor, light; rahmah, mercy. But the very heart of the city, the beating heart of Islam, was never dark (certainly not since the arrival of electric power at the turn of the century, followed by the installation of floodlights). The Holy Mosque and its large square courtyard remained dimly lit throughout the night. In the center stood the House of God, the Muslim tabernacle: the Ka’aba, a forty-foot-high granite cube structure covered in black silk cloth embroidered in gold with Quranic verses. Purportedly, it had first been built by the prophet Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic).
The call to prayer echoed through the loudspeakers at 5:18 a.m.
Allahu Akbar—God is the Greatest.
Among the worshippers from Mecca, from around Saudi Arabia and from the four corners of the Muslim world, were three hundred Sunni men on a divine mission—or so they believed. Some had been there for days, reconnoitering the labyrinthine interior and underground of the mosque. Others had arrived overnight, some with their wives and children, to allay the suspicions of guards. Most were Saudis but others were Egyptian, Pakistani, and there were even two African American converts to Islam. The call to prayer continued.
Ashhadu anna la ilaha illa Allah—I bear witness that there is no god except God.
The worshippers had all been roused from their sleep; people living nearby had already filed into the Holy Mosque. They performed their ablutions and started gathering for prayers in concentric circles around the Ka’aba. They knelt in prostration on the white marble floor. Many were wearing the simple unhemmed white ihram cloth that male pilgrims wrap around themselves for the hajj or the umra, the small pilgrimage. The men on a mission were dressed in a traditional white or beige thobe, the customary Saudi garment. Some stood out because of their unkempt appearance, the result of days of preparations and weeks in the desert.
Ashhadu anna Muhammad rasool Allah—I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.
The group of three hundred believed another messenger had come—the Mahdi. Sunni beliefs also allowed for an apocalyptic redeemer whose arrival by the Ka’aba
, alongside Jesus, signaled the end of times before the age of righteousness. But unlike Shias, Sunnis did not hold this as a central tenet, nor did they believe the Mahdi been born centuries ago and gone into occultation. He would instead reveal himself as a man from the people with particular attributes spelled out in the hadiths, the records of prophet Muhammad’s sayings and actions, written after his death. The truth of this Mahdi’s presence had been revealed to the leader of the group in a dream, while he had been out in the desert: the Mahdi was one of his own companions, soon to be his brother-in-law, Mohammad ibn Abdallah al-Qahtani. His name and physical appearance matched what the hadiths had predicted. The Mahdi was meant to be a descendant of the prophet through his daughter Fatima, and a story was concocted to explain how al-Qahtani, who came from a different tribe and area, did in fact have the right ancestry. Soon, many in the group were having dreams confirming that Qahtani was the Mahdi.
Hayya ‘ala as-salah … Hayya ‘ala al falah—Rise up in prayer, rise up for salvation.
The group began to congregate, preparing for their moment. They believed salvation was now, on this new day of the new dawn. Those who were not true believers of the idea of the Mahdi and the impending apocalypse were still devoted to the leader of the group and his message of religious purity, his criticism of the spendthrift royal family bringing the corrupt, immoral ways of the infidel West to the birthplace of Islam. The Al-Sauds may have been puritans in their beliefs but they also bowed to the god of money. The voice of the muezzin, the reciter, echoed.
As-salatu khayrun min al-nawm—Prayer is better than sleep.
For weeks, they had been training. And for days, they had been hoarding weapons in the cellars of the mosque. They had bribed guards and driven three pickup trucks through the access point used by the construction company that was expanding the mosque. The Toyota, Datsun, and GMC were packed with weaponry, ammunitions, and food. The men were preparing for a siege. They had brought in even more weaponry before dawn that morning, wrapped in shrouds and concealed in coffins, pretending they were bringing deceased relatives for the ultimate benediction by the grand imam of the Holy Mosque.
Allahu Akbar, la ilaha illa Allah. God is the greatest, there is no god but God.
Suddenly, gunshots. The sound shattered the peace, echoing across the courtyard. Another shot. Scared pigeons flew away. A man with a rifle was walking toward the Ka’aba. Worshippers were stunned. Why a gun in such a sacred place? Even the guards carried only sticks. Violence was haram, forbidden, in the holy sanctuary. The leader of the group then appeared, flanked by militants armed with rifles, pistols, and daggers. He was tall and slender, with full lips and long black hair that blended with his full black beard. He looked like a messiah himself; there was something magnetic in his eyes. But his name in Arabic signified “angry face,” or “the scowler.” Juhayman al-Otaibi was a forty-three-year-old Bedouin who had served in the Saudi National Guard for some twenty years. He had no formal education, spoke mostly Bedouin dialect, and had little religious training, but he was a pure product of the system—or rather, the extreme expression of its in-built contradictions and ideological excesses. Juhayman shoved Sheikh al-Subail aside and grabbed his microphone. The imam was horrified, not only by the surreal events but because he’d had a sudden flash of recognition: these men had attended his lectures, they had studied at his feet, right here in Mecca. The sun had now risen and all fifty-one gates of the Holy Mosque were chained shut. Juhayman and his men began broadcasting their message to the thousands who were now trapped inside. In simple tribal dialect, Juhayman shouted short military commands to his men: seize the high ground, the rooftops and minarets. “Ahmad al-Luhaybi! Up to the roofs, and if you see anyone rebelling, shoot them.” “Abdallah al-Harbi! To the northern side, the northern side!”
Machine guns were set up in the seven minarets. At nearly 300 feet high, they provided snipers with a perfect vantage point, overlooking the whole city. The takeover had been swift and complete; the men were ready for a siege. Mostly they were preparing the moment when the pilgrims would vow their allegiance to the redeemer. Juhayman handed the microphone to one of his aides who spoke better classical Arabic. He began to explain the mission to the thousands of worshippers who were now hostages. The message was blasted to thousands of others across the city through the loudspeakers, and it would be a message that would soon make waves across the kingdom and the world. An ancient prophecy had been fulfilled, said the speaker, the Mahdi was among them. For the next hour, the spokesperson of the armed men read out selections of ancient hadiths that had predicted the arrival of the Mahdi, describing him and the day of his appearance. The moment to consecrate the Mahdi and declare loyalty to him was approaching, said the speaker. There were many holes in their story—including the dubious ancestry of Qahtani—but for those not versed in the details of theology and ancient texts, the whole event was too confusing to even pick at details. Even more perplexing was the fact that Sunnis gave little thought to the concept of a Mahdi, even though there had been a few Sunnis with messiah complexes. Most of them were fighting a political battle, usually against a colonizer like the British, the French, or even the Ottomans. But Juhayman and Qahtani had their sights set on the House of Saud.
The rebels spelled out their demands: they wanted the country to cut ties with the West, stop all oil exports to the West, expel all foreigners, and remove the House of Saud and their clerics who had failed to uphold the purity of Islam. (Some of these demands were similar to ones that Osama bin Laden would make in a few years.) But crucially, Juhayman also demanded the redistribution of oil wealth among the people. This was the first time that the conduct of the Saudi royal family had been challenged since the official founding of the kingdom. The rebels may have been religious zealots, but theirs was also a rare political, popular protest in this absolute monarchy. The country had seen power struggles between royals, a challenge by one liberal prince demanding a constitutional monarchy, and even the assassination of a king. There had been labor strikes in the 1950s. But this was the first time that people were using violence to protest. They were expressing real grievances shared by many poor and disenfranchised Saudis who had been left behind by rapid, badly planned modernization and rising social tensions and inequalities. Many Saudis were horrified by the corrupt ways of the Al-Sauds, their ostentatious spending, their palaces dripping with gold. The economic aspects of Juhayman’s protest would be conveniently written out in the official Saudi version, and would barely register in the retelling of the events even outside the kingdom. The Saudis would use the more outlandish religious claims of Juhayman and his men to reduce the movement to the work of religious deviants who had lost their way. But the leaders of the “deviants” had been groomed by the top stars of the Saudi clerical establishment. That too would be obscured by the Saudis. In fact, when the siege began, they tried to hide the news from their own citizens and from the rest of the world.
“Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah are now in our hands,” the spokesperson proclaimed through the loudspeakers. The hostages in the courtyard had no way of knowing it wasn’t true. Meanwhile, Sheikh al-Subail had managed to escape to his nearby office and telephone colleagues to alert them to what their former students had wrought in the holiest of sites.
Details of what was unfolding had trickled down to Jeddah before Sami had even set off on the two-hour drive to Mecca. The architect had a meeting with a government official to discuss the maintenance of the Zamzam holy water well in the Holy Mosque. When he walked in, the official exclaimed: “The Mahdi has arrived!” which Sami first took as a joke about his attire. Sami stood out in more ways than one in 1979 Saudi Arabia, and not only because of his height or ponytail. As a proud Meccan and Hejazi, he had stayed loyal to the province’s culture and Mecca’s diverse practice of Islam, which the Al-Sauds had tried their best to eradicate after their conquest. He wore a traditional Hejazi turban—an off-white cloth embroidered in orange hues, double-wrapped around the head.
With this simple gesture, he was defying the state. Turbans were considered haram by the most conservative Muslims and had been hotly debated when the kingdom was founded. The Al-Sauds had also set out to homogenize the patchwork country by erasing local differences and declaring the Najdi headdress obligatory for government officials: the ghutra, a checkered or white square of cloth, folded in half and held in place on the head by the ‘igal, a thick double black cord. Later, the flowing white thobe would also become the unofficial unifier, replacing the more interesting costumes worn in the Hejaz. The Hejazis chafed under this new puritanism; they had enjoyed centuries of semiautonomous rule and both resented and feared their new lords.
Deep in Sami’s DNA and heart was the mysticism of Sufism, a deeply spiritual practice of Islam combining intense, almost transcendental devotion and asceticism, a practice as old as Islam itself, common to Sunnis and Shias and ingrained in the history of Mecca. For Wahhabis, Sufi practices, including melodious incantations and especially prayers to the shrines of saints, were heresy. As an architect and lover of history, Sami was also intent on preserving the country’s past. In 1975, he had set up the Hajj Research Center in an effort to save Mecca from the modernizing rampage of the Al-Sauds. By helping to study the rapidly growing flow of pilgrims to the holy city, he hoped to devise a way to expand and modernize the city while still maintaining Mecca’s Islamic heritage.
The House of Saud had used its custodianship of Mecca and Medina to claim leadership of Muslims everywhere, using the pilgrimage as a conduit for its influence around the Muslim world. Wanting to welcome an ever-increasing number of pilgrims all year long to the hajj, it had embarked on huge expansion projects, bulldozing and paving over ancient, religiously significant sites. Medina—where Islam was born—was already lost to savage modernization. The old roads, once lined with stucco houses, their facades ornamented with delicate wooden latticework, had been replaced with multi-lane streets and modern, soulless buildings. The Prophet’s Mosque, al-Masjid al-Nabawi, Islam’s second-holiest site and the second mosque to be built after the one in Mecca, had also been transformed, with gray stone replacing the delicate rose-red stone and graceful Ottoman style, making way for more grandeur. On that November morning, Sami wondered what new catastrophes Mecca had to be saved from now.
