by Kim Ghattas
In 1996, the Saudi government recognized the Taliban government and its Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They, too, were destroying video and cassette tapes, banning music and sports, and enforcing prayer time. The Saudis supported the growth of the Taliban, seeing kindred spirits in these revolutionaries who embraced an Islamic purity that the House of Saud perhaps aspired to, but could never attain as a kingdom allied to the West. The Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the religious police, helped train and support the Taliban’s version, and Saudi charities provided them with “humanitarian relief.” Though the Taliban were Deobandi, they were as close as possible to Saudi Wahhabi orthodoxy, and the kingdom hoped they would grow into a mature state, just as their own country had done after King Abdelaziz united it by the sword.
The most radical Saudi youths thought that even Hawali and Audah were too soft. They were reading Abu Muhammad al-Maqdissi, the Palestinian scholar and intellectual heir of Juhayman who had published his books while in Peshawar. In a later book in 1989 he had specifically targeted the Saudi kingdom: Al Kawashif al-Jaliyya fi Kufr al-Dawla al-Saudiyya or The Obvious Proofs of the Saudi State’s Impiety. In 1994, he landed in a Jordanian jail. But just before, he had met several times with a twenty-four-year-old Saudi, Abdelaziz Mu’atham—the mastermind of the bombing in Riyadh against the National Guard training facility on that November day in 1995.
Mu’atham confessed to the crime on television with his co-conspirators, describing several meetings with Maqdissi and the influence of his writings. He said he was also inspired by Bin Laden. Saudis were in shock. How could young, devout Muslims, some of whom were covered in the glory of the war against the Soviets, engage in such violence against their own country? There was no ability or willingness to recognize that these young men were a product of their environment, of a youth spent learning about the enemies of Islam and glorifying the mujahedeen. For those who only preached, the anger stopped there. For those who had any propensity for violence, or who had tasted war and witnessed death, the battle continued when they returned home. They were dismissed as deviants, just like Juhayman. Bin Baz said such extremism needed to be fought with preaching the rightful da’wa, the path to salvation for Muslims.
When the Saudi authorities jailed hundreds of extremists in the wake of the 1995 bombing, it was the end of the political sahwa. But the violent streak it had produced would continue and grow into al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Mansour was still full of questions, about God, about religion, even about the Quran—had it really existed since the beginning of time, or had it been written by humans? These had been the questions at the center of Nasr Abu Zeid’s writing in Egypt and the Mu’tazilah before him. But these were not questions that anyone dared ask in Saudi Arabia. In prison, Mansour got his sister to bring him books about Sufism, considered heretical by Wahhabis, then got his hands on books by Western philosophers.
While he was isolated in his cell, alone on his intellectual and spiritual journey, the détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, begun in the wake of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in1990, continued and produced moments that were hard to fathom for some. In 1998, Rafsanjani, no longer president but still a top leader, was in Saudi Arabia for a ten-day visit. He was the highest-ranking Iranian to visit the kingdom since the 1979 Revolution. This was not a quick diplomatic trip by a foreign minister. This was a high-profile, red-carpet affair. Rafsanjani had called for the liberation of Mecca from the Al-Sauds during the 1987 crisis at the hajj. The pragmatic Iranian now posed for pictures with King Fahd and went to Mecca for the umra. How could this be? How could the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques be having a friendly chat with the magi of all magis? This could not pass without denunciation. The clerical establishment would not swallow the royal realpolitik. While Rafsanjani was attending Friday prayers at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Crown Prince Abdallah by his side, the resident preacher sheikh Ali al-Huthaifi angrily denounced the Shias, using the pejorative word rafidha, derived from the Arabic “to refuse”—those who had refused to recognize the first caliph, Abu Bakr, and had followed Ali instead. The episode caused deep embarrassment for the Saudis, and Sheikh Huthaifi was removed as a preacher from the mosque (albeit for only a year).
The détente, which had begun with a low-key meeting between the Saudi and Iranian foreign ministers in New York in 1990, had evolved steadily, thanks to the personalities of both Rafsanjani, the pragmatist, and Crown Prince Abdallah, always a great believer in accommodation and Islamic solidarity. Abdallah was, after all, the one who had praised the Iranian Revolution in April 1979 for its Islamic credentials. After the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, Rafsanjani had gone shopping in the Soviet Union, but he knew it would not be enough to overcome a war that cost the economy $1 trillion and killed an estimated one million Iranians. Iran needed to sell more oil and needed more of a say in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). For that, it needed Saudi Arabia. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, Iran pointedly did not criticize Saudi Arabia’s call for help from America—the Great Satan.
In early March 1991, soon after Kuwait was liberated, Iraq’s Shias in the south and Kurds in the north seized on the momentary weakness of their dictator. They had been encouraged to rise by President Bush, and the uprisings had come close to bringing down Saddam. But America, Saudi Arabia, and even Iran failed to come to their help. Saddam survived. On March 18, the Saudi and Iranian foreign ministers met in Oman for three hours and followed with a startling announcement: their countries had settled their dispute about the hajj and would be resuming diplomatic ties within forty-eight hours. Saudi Arabia pledged to increase the quota for Iranian pilgrims, not quite back to the level preceding 1987’s Bloody Friday, but up from 45,000 to 110,000. The rapid and unbelievable reconciliation was hailed in the Arab world. This was a NORMAL RETURN TO NORMAL RELATIONS, headlined the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Seyassah on March 19. This was proof, the paper wrote, of the civilizational ties between Iran and its Gulf neighbors, which went back centuries. The Kuwait crisis, the editorial added, had shown what Iran was really made of, and Iran had stood up for what was right. Rafsanjani’s efforts to open up to the rest of the world were also paying off: the World Bank had given Iran its first loan since 1979. Britain had renewed diplomatic ties. France and Germany were already doing brisk business with Tehran. A ban on Iranian oil sales was lifted.
Saudi Arabia and Iran both had reasons to want this détente, which was proof, if ever there was one, that their common interests could trump any ideological differences—even to the extent of silencing doctrinal disputes and religious hatreds. Rafsanjani was especially keen to defuse the Sunni-Shia tension that had built up since 1979. He was also determined to find an agreement that would allow more regular Shia visitations to what was left of the cemetery of Jannat al-Baqi. Access to the cemetery, with its rows of unmarked graves, was restricted and open only to men. Rafsanjani believed that keeping it off-limits fueled continued resentment of Shias toward the House of Saud, a festering wound that never healed because the relief of crying over the graves was out of reach. On a later visit by Rafsanjani, Crown Prince Abdallah made sure that Jannat al-Baqi was opened to the Iranian delegation, men and women, for three days.
The rapprochement was so successful that it worried the Americans, who were wary of Abdallah, a more conservative, less pro-Western royal than his half brother Fahd. He had limited education but more vision. Saudi Arabia and Iran were suddenly speaking with one voice on various regional issues, including Iraq and the Middle East peace process. Nothing seemed to get in the way of the honeymoon—not Iran’s missile tests, not even another bomb attack in Saudi Arabia with Iranian fingerprints on it.
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In June 1996, a massive explosion tore the face off an eight-story building housing American Air Force personnel in Al-Khobar Towers, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. Nineteen American servicemen died, and more than four hundred people were injured. The explosives
packed in a sewage tanker truck were the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds of TNT, more powerful than the 1983 marine barracks bombing in Beirut. The first suspect was al-Qaeda. But suspicion quickly turned to a Shia group, Hezbollah al-Hejaz, affiliated with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Saudis were reticent in their cooperation with the FBI. Even after an indictment in June 2001 named several Shia Lebanese and Saudi members of Hezbollah al-Hejaz as having connections to Iran, the Saudis were reluctant to join the chorus of condemnation of Tehran. The priority was preserving their rapprochement with Tehran. The Saudis justified it by insisting there was a difference between the pragmatist moderates they were talking to—like Rafsanjani and his successor president, Khatami, a moderate elected in 1998—and the hardliners who were trying to derail the relationship. No one in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf was naive about Iran. There was clearly no trust, but there was a desire to somehow make it work, a Saudi belief that over time shared interests could moderate revolutionary ardor. In time, the Saudis would come to believe they had been fooled and that the moderates and the hardliners were in fact the same, or at least acting in concert.
But forces beyond Abdallah and Rafsanjani were at work, forces that both sides had been grooming for years. For the Iranians, these forces were the zealous upholders of Khomeini’s revolution, the hardliner believers, and the Revolutionary Guards. In Lebanon, Hezbollah was transforming from a mere militia into a political party with an organized armed wing. For Iran, ideology was a tool of state power and the allies and proxies that Tehran groomed answered to the Supreme Leader. On the Saudi side, the dark forces were the product of Saudi money, both private and from the government, that had made its way to the Afghan mujahedeen, the Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan, even the coffers of Al-Azhar in Egypt and the pockets of hundreds of clerics from around the Muslim world who had trained in Saudi Arabia. From militancy to intellectual terrorism, the forces fed by Saudi Arabia had no return address; they were not state-run, and they could not be controlled. Some moderated themselves but others mutated into even more violent versions.
Mansour al-Nogaidan knew very well the danger they represented to his own country and the world, though he could never have imagined the magnitude of what was about to happen. Out of jail, he had traveled far in his mind and his heart—too far for those who attended the mosque where he preached in Riyadh; too far for the Saudi state. In 1999, Mansour still had questions. He wrote in a Saudi newspaper that he thought everyone should have the right to ask questions, including of religious leaders. He was shunned at the mosque, as people refused to pray with him. He moved to the south of the country, where he continued to write about the need to question clerics and their interpretations. The authorities banned him from writing. He would end up back in a cell for a while. Mansour was now part of a small circle of former jihadis who had discovered critical thinking and consequently found themselves in the crosshairs of the powerful clerical establishment. He was among a handful of Saudi men who had the distinction of having been jailed for being both too radical, then too liberal.
On September 11, 2001, at 4:46 p.m. in Saudi Arabia, Mansour was visiting his parents in his hometown of Buraidah. He was sitting in the living room watching Al-Jazeera, the Arab CNN, beaming out of Qatar since 1996. State-funded but much freer than the stale, state-controlled news on offer in Arab countries, the channel was quickly making a name for itself—it had already broadcast two interviews with Osama bin Laden. Al-Jazeera was reporting that a plane had just crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. Mansour was transfixed by the horror unfolding in front of his eyes on the screen. The second plane crashed into the South Tower three minutes after 5:00 p.m. Like the overwhelming majority of the rest of the world, Mansour tried to make sense of it, his mind racing. As news emerged about a plane crashing into the Pentagon and then another into a field in Pennsylvania, there was no doubt that America was under attack—and he had a sinking feeling that he understood exactly what had happened and what it meant. Within a day, fingers were pointing at al-Qaeda. On September 13, Secretary of State Colin Powell identified Bin Laden as a prime suspect. By September 15, it had become clear that more than a dozen of the attackers were Saudi. On September 27, Robert Mueller, the head of the FBI, made public the faces and names of all the attackers.
The kingdom had a schizophrenic reaction. Silently, many Saudis had come to understand that the repressive culture and closed society they lived in produced men like the hijackers. They knew they had collectively allowed intolerance to grow and flourish around them, and they had done nothing to stop it, not as a society and not as a government. But there was also denial, including at the highest level: this had to be a Western or Zionist plot to frame Saudi Arabia. Even a year later, the interior minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdelaziz, was still stating that it was impossible that fifteen Saudis could have participated in such an attack—he blamed a Zionist conspiracy. “We still ask ourselves, who has benefited from the attacks? I think that they [the Jews] were the protagonists,” he told the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Seyassah.
Again, the hijackers were described as deviants who had lost their way and did not represent either their society or the true Islam. But the Saudi hijackers were not outcasts, they weren’t even living on the far margins, not even the way Mansour had done. They had gone to school and learned the Quran, grown up in mostly middle-class, deeply religious families, and gone to university to study law. Some were school dropouts; only one of them had mental difficulties, for which he found solace at the mosque. They were imams in neighborhood mosques, or hafiz, men who had learned the entire Quran by heart. Most of them had gone briefly to Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya in 1999 or 2000, although few had made it to an actual battlefield. Bosnia and Chechnya were wars deemed righteous by Saudi officialdom, a fight in the name of Islam, a battle to protect Muslims from slaughter. Prince Salman, governor of Riyadh and future king, had fund-raised for Bosnia just as he had done for Afghanistan. In the mid-1990s, dismayed by Western inaction in Bosnia, Saudi Arabia reportedly channeled $300 million worth of weapons to the Muslim-led government of Bosnia, on top of $500 million in humanitarian aid. The jihad against the Soviets may have been over, but the flow of men to Afghanistan had continued. Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries that had recognized the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which was now sheltering Bin Laden. He had been on the wrong side of the Saudi authorities since he called for attacks against the House of Saud, but he was still a folk hero to many Saudis. The 9/11 hijackers did not stand out in their country; they were unremarkable, representing the average Saudi man of that generation, the generation of 1979, the fateful year around which most of them were born. It was as though they had been born and raised for nothing else but death in the fireball of a raging hell, victims and killers at once.
One Saudi who was not in denial or silent contrition was Mansour. He had spent a few weeks deconstructing the path that these men had been on, and he believed that he had been vindicated in his warnings against the closed, oppressive, intolerant system in which young Saudis were being raised with no outlet for the anger being whipped up inside them in mosques across the country. He began to focus his newspaper articles on challenging the current thinking in the kingdom. He “tried to give a new interpretation to the verses that call for enmity between Muslims, and Christians and Jews.” Those verses did not apply to modern times, and he called for friendship among all faiths. He was shunned by friends, labeled blasphemous on Internet forums. Then he was fired from the newspaper. But Mansour wasn’t cowed; he kept writing.
In 2003, two major bombings targeted residential compounds in Riyadh, in May and November. There were fifty-six dead and almost four hundred injured, including children. Among them were Jordanians, Egyptians, Lebanese, and even Saudis. This was not some Zionist plot, a faraway tragedy, or an attack against infidels. The bombers were Saudi members of al-Qaeda and they had killed civilians in the kingdom—including Muslims. More than any
thing, it was this detail that seemed to awaken the Saudis to the threat of terrorism. There was a large crackdown on extremist suspects. The May bombing became known as Saudi Arabia’s 9/11. There had been many predictions over the years about the end of the House of Saud, but this time it was almost palpable; an atmosphere of fin de règne hung over the kingdom.
Mansour thought the authorities were going after the wrong culprit, and he wrote as much in a brazen opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Telling the Truth, Facing the Whip”: “I cannot but wonder at our officials and pundits who continue to claim that Saudi society loves other nations and wishes them peace, when state-sponsored preachers in some of our largest mosques continue to curse and call for the destructions of all non-Muslims.” Mansour ended up in jail for five days. He had committed the unforgivable sin not only of openly attacking the clerical establishment, but of going to a Western paper to do so. By 2004, the mufti of the kingdom had pronounced him an infidel.
