by Kim Ghattas
Juhayman’s next step was to write and dictate a series of pamphlets explaining his religious views and denouncing the Saudi state. One of the pamphlets was signed by Qahtani himself. Abdellatif al-Derbas, a Kuwaiti companion of Juhayman, found a leftist publisher in Kuwait willing to print the pamphlets at cost, barely one Saudi riyal. With protests engulfing Iran at the time, the publishers believed they were aiding another working-class uprising against a monarch. Although Juhayman’s group had broken away from the establishment clerics, Bin Baz added approving remarks to the pamphlets.
This aggressive rhetoric and ensuing agitation began to attract the attention of the state, resulting in the arrest of some of the zealots, in the spring of 1978. Yet again, Bin Baz stepped in to support his former protégés—hotheads perhaps, but disciples of a sort, whose fervor he had played a role in feeding. Maybe Bin Baz wished he still had their youth and eyesight, or perhaps he felt they were taking action where he could only theorize. He called the minister of the interior, Prince Nayef bin Abdelaziz, and demanded the men be released. And so they were. To avoid arrest himself, Juhayman had fled into the desert, where he spent his time preparing for his takeover of the Holy Mosque and the appearance of the Mahdi.
Bin Baz would never apologize for, nor even acknowledge, his role in the growth of Juhayman’s movement. Instead, he would use the moment to force the royal family to live up to the Islamic ideals that he felt they had let slip. With other clerics, he drove a hard bargain that would haunt the kingdom and the whole region for decades, a bargain that would make Saudis feel that time had stopped in its tracks. To get what they wanted, the clerics even agreed to the arrival of a team of infidels, French commandos, to help put an end to the ongoing siege—a detail that would surface only years later. They came with three hundred kilograms of a concentrated tear gas to snuff out the rebels, who had by now mostly retreated into the cellars of the mosque. Unable to go to Mecca as non-Muslims, the French stayed in a nearby city to train and equip Saudi teams to launch the assault to retake the mosque.
Just before dawn on Tuesday, December 4, 1979, exactly two weeks after Juhayman and his men had hijacked the Holy Mosque, the Saudis could finally declare the siege truly over. The victory had been costly and bloody: 270 people had died, according to their official numbers. The Saudi government admitted to 127 troops killed and 450 injured, with 117 rebels dead, in addition to 26 pilgrims. Western diplomats were skeptical, putting the numbers much higher. The Holy Mosque looked like a battlefield: gates blown out, a military jeep burned and riddled with bullets, staircases collapsed, minarets bombed. Crushed marble, twisted metal, and bloodstains were everywhere. The Ka’aba itself was intact. But the stench from decomposing bodies and the gas used to force the surrender of the rebels hung over the mosque and the surrounding area. The desecration of the holiest site was an excruciating sight, but one that the authorities were able to mostly keep out of the wider public’s view: no foreign journalists were allowed into the country; no non-Muslims were allowed in Mecca; and Saudi journalists in the tightly controlled state media knew better than to report on the literal stains on the kingdom’s reputation. The repairs took months. But by the afternoon of December 6, the mosque had been scrubbed clean enough to welcome back King Khaled himself. Prayers, in the presence of the monarch, were broadcast live on television. For the first time in over two weeks the world could see proof that the House of God was still standing. The king circled the Ka’aba seven times, prostrated himself twice, and took a sip from the holy Zamzam spring.
Before the siege, there had been underground construction work to expand the well of the spring, with pumps emptying the water. The power cut during the fighting meant the water levels had risen, and Sami was called to Mecca to enter the well and check whether the water had been contaminated by the toxic mix of gases, liquids, and bodily fluids that had soiled the underground of the mosque. Miraculously, the water was clear and clean. But as Sami surveyed the site and tested the water, he was beset with anguish. The violence was a warning. Something had gone terribly wrong. Whatever happens in Mecca, he thought, reverberates around the world, and whatever happens around the world comes back here, in an infinite spiritual loop. Mecca, the beating heart of the Muslim world, was deeply wounded. In fact, harmony had long been disrupted, ever since the Al-Sauds and their Wahhabi clerics had imposed their singular vision of religion on the Holy Mosque.
For centuries, scholars from the four different schools of Islam had taught in the Holy Mosque and crowds of students had traveled from near and far to gather in halaqas, circles of study, around their preferred teachers. The faithful prayed, at slightly different times, behind their imams; there was a prayer station for each school: Shafi’i, Maliki, Hanafi, and Hanbali. When King Abdelaziz took control of Mecca in 1924, the Wahhabi clerics objected to the arrangement that had prevailed so far in the Holy Mosque. If the community of Muslims was one, and the call to prayer was one, why not pray behind one imam? The Wahhabi clerics won the debate, thereby dealing themselves all the power. But there was no rotation or compromise: the sole imam who would lead all five daily prayers in the Holy Mosque came from Wahhabi circles, with all that that entailed in puritanical intolerance. The number of halaqas dwindled rapidly, from several hundred to around thirty-five in the late 1970s. The Sufi sheikh that Sami had consulted that first day of the Mecca attack, Mohammad Alawi al-Maliki, was still drawing crowds, lecturing in his corner of the courtyard of the Holy Mosque, on the chair he had inherited from his father in 1971, the chair that been passed through generations. But few others were able to resist the onslaught of Wahhabi zeal. Harmony could be brought back, Sami thought, only if diversity was allowed to thrive again in the House of God. But this was not how the Al-Sauds would proceed. That was not the deal they had cut with Bin Baz to save their throne.
4
DARKNESS
SAUDI ARABIA, IRAN, IRAQ, SYRIA, AFGHANISTAN
1979–80
Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children.
—Jacques Mallet du Pan, Considérations sur la Nature de la Révolution en France (1793)
There were two Islamic revolutions in 1979—one that made world headlines and was scrutinized down to its smallest details, and one that unfurled almost unnoticed. Both were misunderstood. One was a sudden, dramatic reversal of progress and rejection of centuries of history, the other was a slow but forceful expansion of Salafist puritanism. Both of them would transform their country of origin and then ripple across the Arab and Muslim world for decades to come, bringing with them darkness and oppression.
On the morning of January 9, 1980, Saudi Arabia carried out the largest execution in its history. Sixty-three captives were brought out to face the steel swords of Saudi justice in public, as was the custom in the kingdom. Sixty-three heads rolled in the sand. There would be no pardon for Juhayman and his acolytes. The women who had helped with food and supplies were jailed for two years. The underage boys among them were sent to orphanages. The beheadings took place in eight cities across the country, simultaneously. The Al-Sauds wanted to demonstrate they were in control of the whole country, for they had faced another serious challenge at the same time as they were trying to quell the rebellion in the Holy Mosque: this one coming from the oil-rich Eastern Province.
Beginning on November 25, five days into the siege of Mecca, hundreds of men had taken to the streets in the coastal areas of Qatif, Saihat, and Safwa. They chanted “Death to Al-Saud”; they ransacked a foreign bank and blocked the highway to a key oil installation. Oil and religion were the Al-Sauds’ two levers of power and sources of legitimacy, and they seemed on the verge of losing both. The province was sealed off and telephone lines were cut. The government pulled away some of the National Guard from the Mecca area and sent them to the East. Reports talked of twenty thousand troops moving into the region to quell the protests. There were clashes, then battles. Military vehicles were set on fire and live ammunition used against the crowds. By Novembe
r 30, the disturbances had been mostly quelled, but twenty protesters were dead.
There was a little-known history of protest in the Eastern Province, going back to the early days of the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO), when hundreds of workers started rioting over poor working conditions. The 1950s and 1960s were the era of left-wing nationalist politics across the Arab world, and even the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was not immune. In 1953, thirteen thousand of ARAMCO’s fifteen thousand Saudi laborers went on strike for two weeks, protesting the arrest of colleagues who had been trying to organize a union. The library in Qatif stocked the classics of the global left, including Karl Marx. Communist pamphlets with the hammer and sickle insignia circulated, denouncing the royals. With help from ARAMCO, the Saudi government crushed the movement, imprisoning the agitators and sending its leaders into exile. One of them was Nasser al-Sa’id, the leader of the Arabian Peninsula People’s Union, who fled to Beirut after 1956. When Juhayman and his men took over the mosque, al-Sa’id described it as a people’s revolt. A few weeks later, he disappeared mysteriously in Beirut, reportedly abducted and killed by the Saudi authorities.
When the towns of the Eastern Province rose up in 1979, it was still to protest exploitation and discrimination, but while the tiny Saudi Communist Party and remnants of leftist groups participated, this was no longer a mere labor movement: in tune with the mood sweeping the whole region, this uprising now had clear religious overtones. The province was dominantly Shia, and though the community sat on top of the country’s black gold and provided the majority of the workforce for the oil extraction, they had been mostly left out of the rapid modernization of the kingdom, toiling in poverty. If Juhayman and the Shias had one thing in common, it was their anger about corrupt royals. But as hardcore Wahhabis, Juhayman and his men also hated their Shia countrymen. In the absolute monotheism of Ibn Abdelwahhab, the Shias were considered heretics who had rejected the leadership of the caliphs, the companions of the prophet. With their veneration of imams and visitation of graves, they were also seen as idolaters. Wahhabism remained deeply anti-Shia; the clerics of the kingdom continued to issue religious edicts condemning them as heretics, some even calling to kill Shias who did not embrace Sunni Islam. The community faced multiple levels of discrimination: their towns were the least developed in the kingdom; they were excluded from the royal court, sensitive ministries, and the diplomatic corps; they did not rise in the ranks of government bureaucracy or even ARAMCO; they could not build new mosques and were banned from holding any public rituals. But the Shias of Saudi Arabia had seen what people’s power had achieved in Iran and, with both inspiration and some instigation from Tehran, had taken to the streets to demand more rights. After quashing the protests, the Saudi government tried to address the grievances and announced electricity projects, plans for new streets and schools, a better sewage system. But Saudi Shias would continue to be seen as “the other,” the unbelievers.
* * *
The House of Saud had barely survived this double challenge to its legitimacy. To maintain their grip on power, they knew it was time to deliver on the deal they had struck with the clerics during the Juhayman crisis. When the minister of interior Prince Nayef was asked during a press conference in January 1980 whether the kingdom would now clamp down on men who appeared zealous because they sported a beard, for example, he scoffed. “If we did this most Saudis would be in prison by now,” he said. Even before the attack in Mecca, Prince Nayef had been amenable to the blind sheikh’s implorations on trivial matters. Bin Baz had complained about “violations of Islamic morality” in Riyadh, like foreign women eating in public, Christians wearing visible crosses, Western music being played in stores, and the apparently corrupting game of foosball, idolatrous because of the little statuettes. Directives were promptly sent to address Bin Baz’s complaints—but only in Riyadh and the province of Najd.
Despite the religious strictures the House of Saud had imposed on the country since the kingdom was founded, many of their subjects still felt that every year brought more modernity, more freedoms, however small. The push and pull between the royals and the clerics had been a constant in the relationship, determined by the personality of each king and his standing with the clerics. The king who had succeeded most in plying the religious establishment to his will was King Faisal, who ruled from 1964 until he was assassinated in 1975. He introduced television and education for girls despite the clerics’ protestations, and he sent emissaries well versed in matters of religion to reason with them. These were often members of the Muslim Brotherhood from Syria or Egypt who had fled repression in their countries and been embraced in the kingdom for their skills at building a modern state—they were often engineers but also educators, and they fanned across schools and universities in the kingdom.
Austere and devout, a direct descendant of Ibn Abdelwahhab through his mother, King Faisal spent time in his maternal grandfather’s house participating in theological debates, and he “embraced the fundamentals of religion and norms of the shari’a according to the formulations of Ibn Abdel Wahhab.” His own father, King Abdelaziz, referred to Faisal as “the boy from the Al-ash-Sheikh family.” Above moral reproach, King Faisal could afford to push for those aspects of modernization he felt would benefit his country. The events of 1979 had frozen that courage in his successors, and the kings now kowtowed to religious forces. Juhayman had died, but his mission lived on. The impact was immediate and deeply felt in the provinces outside Najd, which Bin Baz had been trying so hard to discipline in the proper Wahhabi ways.
Women presenters were yanked off television. Newspapers had to blot out the faces of women in any pictures they published. The authorities also cracked down on the employment of women, which had always been theoretically forbidden but tacitly approved. Even Saudi branches of foreign companies had to lay off female employees. The handful of small makeshift cinemas in Jeddah were closed. Beach clubs patronized by Saudis and foreigners alike on the coast outside Jeddah were mostly shut down. Gone were the television and radio broadcasts of Fairuz concerts. The religious police started to strictly enforce prayer times, wielding their whips and righteousness. Known as the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, they were now receiving massive sums of money, payment to feed the egos of small men who were otherwise failures but could now lord their supposed moral superiority over others. They drove their brand-new big GMC cars around, laying down their law and terrorizing people wherever they went. They felt so empowered they would force their way into people’s homes, climbing over high garden fences, if they heard music coming from a house.
In Mecca, men from the religious police almost came to blows with the students of Sami’s friend the Sufi Sheikh al-Maliki. He was still leading one of the only halaqas teaching something other than the Hanbali school of thought. The zealots from the committee wanted him gone, so the king quietly asked him to retreat home with his students.
When Jamal Khashoggi returned to Jeddah in 1982, after six years in the United States studying at Indiana State University, he noticed his country had changed. The tall young man with a jovial round face was originally from Medina. He had become devout in high school, reading magazines printed in Egypt about Islam. While Iranians were smuggling cassette tapes of Khomeini into their country, Jamal was buying cassette tapes of fiery Egyptian preachers in the shops in Jeddah for two or three Saudi riyals. He was an idealist in a country with no civil society and no politics, and he felt like a minority. Going to the mosque regularly was still considered uncouth for young men, especially in cities like Jeddah. Friday prayers at the mosque were something your father dragged you to. But when he returned, married and with a child, Jamal noticed there were more mosques, and all of them were fuller. Segregation, already strictly enforced in public life, had made its way into private homes, within families. Before he had left for the United States, no one thought twice about sitting together with female cousins and aunts around the dinner table, the women
unveiled. By the time he returned, extended family gatherings were segregated. Within each home, there was at least one person spreading the gospel about the sahwa, the Islamic awakening. In 1981, King Khaled would praise the sahwa as the reaction to the cultural, economic, and military invasions that had befallen the Muslim nation. The “blessed sahwa,” in the words of the royals, was the path forward, and the Muslim nation’s problems could be resolved only with Islamic solutions. Jamal started hanging out with members of the Muslim Brotherhood. He stopped listening to music. But he didn’t have the heart to break his old LPs, so he gave them away.
* * *
If the cultural changes in Saudi Arabia were a case of arrested progress, in Iran it felt like whiplash, the violent and dramatic undoing of decades of social, political, and cultural advancement. Throughout 1979, the edicts fell, one after the other. Khomeini banned music from radio and television, declaring it “no different from opium.” Googoosh, Iran’s beloved pop diva, retreated home. Those selling music cassettes in their shop were told to change trades altogether. Alcohol was banned. Revolutionary Guards hauled crates of vintage champagne and fine European wines and 250,000 cans of imported beer from the cellar of the Intercontinental Hotel and poured more than a million dollars’ worth of forbidden liquid down the gutter by the hotel’s rear staff entrance. Mixed bathing in swimming pools was banned. In the summer of 1980, Iran witnessed its first executions by stoning in modern memory: two women accused of prostitution and two men accused of homosexuality and adultery. Other offenders were lashed or sent to the firing squad. There were no beheadings, as there had been in Saudi Arabia. But Iran now had its own religious police, just like Saudi Arabia: the Gasht-e Ershad, or Guidance Patrol. They harassed women who weren’t covering their hair properly, because in the new Iran of Khomeini women who were not veiled were sinners.
