The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  Before his stroke, when King Fahd visited the construction sites in Mecca and Medina, Bakr steered him around at the wheel of a white golf cart, a form of transport that only reinforced the Florida-derived vision they seemed to share. At the University of Miami during the early 1970s, Bakr had studied basic architecture on a campus full of mid-century white concrete boxes, in a state where the cutting edge of the spectacular tourist destination built for international crowds was Disney’s Epcot Center—a place, like renovated Mecca, that advertised itself as a microcosm of global diversity, lit up in floodlights and neon. It was also America, and particularly humid Florida, that pressed upon Saudi elites the apparent correlation between national progress and the spread of air-conditioning, an imperative that Fahd and the Bin Ladens carried at considerable expense to Mecca and Medina.

  The renovation projects began in 1985 and proceeded in two sequential phases—Medina first, then Mecca. In Medina the needs were greatest. For all the effort Wahhabi scholars made to discourage the veneration of the Prophet’s Mosque and other local historical sites, practicing Muslims simply could not be persuaded to forgo the journey to the city of the Prophet’s storied exile. Hajj spiritual rituals are entirely centered on Mecca, but most pilgrims, having taken the time and expense to travel to Saudi Arabia in the first place, felt compelled to include Medina as a side journey. The trouble was that the worship area in the Prophet’s Mosque was about one-tenth the size of the one in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and as the number of pilgrims swelled during the 1980s, the squeeze in Medina appeared unsustainable. Fahd embraced an expansion plan that would transform Medina into a viable, if still undeclared, companion destination to Mecca. The urban clearance work necessary to extend the mosque’s footprint was completed by 1988; at that point, with Salem gone and Bakr fully in charge, renovation of the sanctuary itself began.4

  For all of its modernity and scale, and despite its disregard for inherited architectural diversity, the Bin Ladens’ work in Medina did produce some beautiful and striking innovations, such as an array of retractable domes and umbrella-like coverings. The modernized mosque’s polish and lighting and soaring minarets, in the clear desert sky, against the silhouettes of barren hills, could produce spectacular visual effects, particularly at night; it could snatch the breath of even a skeptic like Hammoudi. These were achievements in which the Bin Ladens could and did take pride; the truth was, however, that most of their important and impressive work lay hidden from view. The Bin Ladens were not masters of architecture; they were masters of infrastructure.

  The Prophet’s Mosque, across all its centuries as an icon in the desert, had never, of course, enjoyed air-conditioning. The Bin Ladens, however, had formed a partnership during the 1980s with York International Corporation, of York, Pennsylvania, the world’s leading manufacturer and installer of what are known as “large tonnage chillers,” industrial systems for cooling very large buildings. York chillers cooled the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the Kremlin. The systems typically worked by reducing water to a temperature of about forty degrees and then piping the water through the targeted building; this was the only practical way to distribute cool air through such large spaces. Large and mechanically complex machines cooled the water initially and then expelled its heat into the air upon its return from the building. York manufactured these chiller systems in a 1.5-million-square-foot plant in Grantley, Pennsylvania. The Medina chillers ordered by the Bin Ladens posed a number of unusual challenges. Desert temperatures and the project’s enormous size meant that York would have to manufacture a number of its heaviest-duty machine, later dubbed the Titan. Also, because only Muslims are allowed inside the Medina city center, there were questions about how the chillers could be reliably serviced if they occasionally required the attention of a non-Muslim engineer or technician. To address this concern, the Bin Ladens decided to install the principal chiller plant outside the Muslim-only exclusion zone, more than four miles from the Prophet’s Mosque; they dug a wide tunnel, big enough for a sport utility vehicle to drive in, between the chiller plant and the mosque, down which traveled trunk cooling pipes and other utilities. By the time the plant was finished, by 1993, it had given the marketing department at York headquarters something new to boast about: the air-conditioning project in Medina had become the largest heating or air-conditioning project of its type in world history.5

  Anwar Hassan, a York manager who worked on it, was originally from Sudan. On his trips to Jeddah or Medina, the Bin Ladens would invite him to receptions, or to an iftar fast-breaking dinner during Ramadan. They projected “a great sense of pride” about their work in the holy cities. Hassan shared their vision that the Hajj could and should be modernized. He felt it was misleading to romanticize the past. He remembered stories he had heard as a child from one of his great-uncles in Sudan, who recounted how, in the days before Abdulaziz and the birth of Saudi Arabia, if a hundred African-looking Sudanese pilgrims attended Hajj, only sixty or seventy might return—the rest were victims of highway robbers, or disease, or worse. Even during the 1960s, when another of Hassan’s uncles undertook the pilgrimage, “He came back appalled at the poor level of hygiene. People would slaughter sheep in the street.” By the early 1990s, Hassan could ascend an escalator to stand amid the crowds by the Prophet’s tomb, and as he touched his head upon the floor in prayer, he might feel a touch of cool air on the back of his neck. “That’s a fabulous transformation,” he believed. “You have to appreciate that they did it for the comfort. It’s a great thing that they’ve done.”6

  THOSE WHO THOUGHT otherwise did so at their peril.

  Sami Angawi tied his thinning, graying hair behind his head in a ponytail, and he draped himself in undulating Hejazi robes, not the flat white uniform of Saudi national dress. He looked like a Saudi hippie. He adhered to Sufism, a school of Islam that emphasized diversity and individual spiritual experience. He had been born in Mecca to a traditional family of mutawwafs, or “pilgrimage guides,” an ancient vocation in decline in the age of Hajj package air-hotel tours and Saudi nationalization (by the 1990s, a federal ministry administered most aspects of the pilgrimage). At the University of Texas, Angawi studied architecture and urban planning; he wrote a master’s thesis about a possible renovation of Mecca that would emphasize historical preservation, pedestrian zones, and environmental conservation.

  In 1975 he returned to Saudi Arabia to form and supervise a Hajj Research Center at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. Its goal, approved by the Saudi government, was “to preserve the natural environment as created by God and the Islamic environment of the two holy cities.” This was a tricky principle to interpret on Saudi ground, since if Angawi advocated historical conservation per se, he would run afoul of the religious establishment’s opposition to false monuments. Still, he believed that he could see a way forward. Angawi and his staff carried out surveys in Jakarta, Karachi, Cairo, and elsewhere, trying to document the experiences and desires of Muslim pilgrims in all of their heterodoxy. He incorporated this research into his evolving plans for Mecca and Medina. In his vision, influenced by environmentally conscious European urban planning, automobiles and buses would be excluded from the two city centers—vehicles would park on the perimeter, and pilgrims would flood through the worship areas on foot, praying not only at the mosques but also in parks and in traditional, renovated souks.7

  This was not, of course, the image of Mecca and Medina’s future that King Fahd or the Bin Ladens had in mind as they undertook their massive renovations. Angawi was not a radical—he tried to work within the Saudi system, and he earned a lucrative living as an architect, enough to design and construct a stunning traditional Hejazi home in a wealthy neighborhood of Jeddah. Yet he had given much of his professional life to the proposition that Mecca and Medina need not succumb to the same soulless sprawl that was engulfing every other city in Saudi Arabia. He tried to suggest the purchase of Westinghouse fast trains that cou
ld speed large numbers of pilgrims between Mecca and Medina. He produced a film about the worsening traffic problems in the holy cities.

  Angawi emphasized, prudently, that he did not doubt “for a second” King Fahd’s good intentions, but he challenged the basic assumptions of the Bin Laden–managed projects. “We keep the foreigners out, but allow everything else you can think of—shopping malls, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, neon signs,” he said later. “The companies that plan, that construct, that buy the land—you only have one company [the Bin Ladens]. I have nothing against them. But this is the wrong approach. It’s a fantastic conflict of interest. The answer is bulldozers and dynamite. Knock it down, build it up, pour it over with marble and decorate it with things that look Islamic…If you want to accommodate more people praying, that’s one thing. If you want to accommodate more cars, that’s another. We ended up with skyscrapers and buildings.”8

  By 1989, because of his dissent, Angawi had fallen under so much pressure from the Saudi establishment that he resigned from his Hajj center. At that point, the Medina renovation was a lost cause—the new mosque and its supporting infrastructure were under construction, and York International had its orders for multiton chillers. In Mecca, however, where the plans for renovation were not yet fully committed, Angawi saw an opportunity to push for at least some historical preservation of ancient monuments and sites. He and the Hejazi intellectuals around him in Jeddah who joined his quiet agitation felt a connection, often through their family histories, to the pre-Saudi architecture of Mecca. In some respects, Angawi’s circle in Jeddah—lawyers, architects, writers, business executives—constituted a new generation of globally minded Saudi intellectuals, who had been influenced through travel and schooling by preservation movements elsewhere in the Arab world, as well as in Europe. They understood that in Wahhabi-dominated Saudi Arabia, advocating historic conservation was a dangerous political and theological stance, but they also felt protected by the global respectability of their cause. So they pushed back—not enough to end up in prison, but enough, as it happened, to annoy the Bin Ladens.

  The family’s renovation work in Mecca during the 1990s was of a different character than its renovation of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. In Medina a single building had to be expanded and updated. In Mecca the priorities had less to do with the Grand Mosque itself than with surrounding sites visited during the Hajj rituals. Each year, for example, all the pilgrims assembled in tent camps on the plain of Arafat, about nine miles from Mecca city; at a prescribed time, known as the Day of Standing, they stood together in an awesome assembly in the desert, beseeching God. That huge gathering was followed by a mass symbolic stoning of the Devil, carried out by hurling pebbles at certain columns several miles from Arafat. Each pilgrim was also expected to purchase and sacrifice a sheep or other animal, as an offering to God. The logistical and sanitary challenges presented by the occupation of an open desert camp of 2 million people, followed by group rock throwing and animal slaughter, can be readily imagined. Hajj after Hajj, a stampede, fire, collapsing bridge, or other mishap would claim hundreds of pilgrim lives. Even in the absence of such calamities, the heat of a summer Hajj on Arafat could be too much for many elderly pilgrims. Then, too, there was the traffic: “The largest traffic jam I have ever seen,” recalled Mark Caudill, an American pilgrim. It took hours to move just a few miles around Arafat, and even after the day’s rituals were completed, “The sounds and smells of diesel trucks idling through the night were accompanied by occasional screams of sirens, Saudi traffic police barking admonitions through bullhorns, and the roiling murmur of more than two million souls.”9

  King Fahd, with the Bin Ladens as his instrument, tried to alleviate this traffic-induced suffering. His approach, however, was typical of transportation development approaches popular in the United States: more roads, more parking lots, more tunnels, and more bridges. The Mohamed Bin Laden Company built parking lots at Arafat and elsewhere during the mid-1990s, totaling millions of square feet. Above the Arafat plain, to cool off the faithful during the Day of Standing, they installed an overhead water piping system that spewed out thin jets of water above the pilgrims’ heads. They dug new connector roads and flyovers, laid down pedestrian walkways, installed water fountains, and put in 14,200 public toilets. They built a modern slaughterhouse that could accommodate 500,000 goats and sheep, plus another that could handle 10,000 camels and cattle—these facilities supported a new government-run voucher system for the slaughter ritual, whereby pilgrims could purchase a ticket that ensured a Saudi official carried out their sacrifice in a sanitary manner. All this was supported by new security systems in and around Mecca, designed to ensure that the 1979 uprising at the Grand Mosque was never repeated—surveillance cameras were installed copiously, along with command centers, alarm systems, and supporting communications. Here, too, the Bin Ladens were in charge.10

  Sami Angawi consulted for the governor of Mecca following his resignation from the Hajj center. He tried to keep track of the city’s archaeological heritage. There had been a time, he knew, prior to the Saudi kingdom, when pilgrims in Mecca diverted themselves with visits to several hundred historical and mythical sites, much as visitors to Jerusalem and its surrounding areas still do. One semi-mythical site that had been long discussed in Meccan tradition was the Prophet Mohamed’s original home, where he lived during his days as a businessman, prior to receiving divine revelations. Around 1991, as the Bin Ladens began to shift their renovation work from Medina to Mecca, Angawi learned from a local preservationist that a site had been discovered that might be the Prophet’s house. It seemed to be in the right place. An ancient wall of the structure had been exposed by initial bulldozer work undertaken during Mecca’s redevelopment.

  “I was told by one of the elders of the city that this place might be destroyed,” Angawi recalled. “So I moved in and I tried to use every connection and authority I have.” He found a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to advise his preliminary archaeological work at the site. He began to dig and to inventory carefully what he found. He undertook historical research to explore evidence that could confirm or refute the discovery.11

  As he worked, the question became whether it might be possible to accommodate both Angawi’s vision of Mecca and that of Fahd and the Bin Ladens. Angawi and his allies acknowledged that the renovations had eased the experience of visiting pilgrims. Mecca and Medina could now “accommodate more, and it could accommodate them more comfortably,” said a Jeddah professional aligned with Angawi. “But it was done at the expense of other things.

  “This is where they used the Bin Ladens,” Angawi’s ally recalled. “In the Holy Mosque of Mecca, there were columns with engraved inscriptions a thousand years old. And they’d say, ‘Wouldn’t a marble column be nice here?’ And the Bin Ladens would say, ‘Sure, we can give you a polished marble column.’ And they didn’t preserve what they knocked down for a museum, and they did it without any control or supervision…We have all these slick brass lamps, but no accounting of the heritage.”12

  The Bin Ladens, of course, were considerably more influential than the preservationists. Within forty days after he started working at the presumed site of the Prophet’s house, Angawi won the formal attention of the Saudi government: Officials ordered him to stop what he was doing and vacate the place.

  Angawi contacted the Bin Ladens, including Bakr. Couldn’t they find some way to work around this one particular area of the Prophet’s house during their renovation projects? Or could they at least proceed in gradual steps, so he could finish some of his digging and documentation? No, he was told. Either Angawi would get out of the hole or he would be bulldozed over himself, he was told. “We have our orders.”13

  At that point Angawi began to lose some of his equilibrium. “I brought my children out to the site,” and he dared the Bin Ladens to start up their bulldozer engines. “They took that in for a couple of weeks,” he recalled. “I was rea
lly going wild. My mind was fixed.”14

  Gradually the two camps shuffled toward a partial compromise. This was not jihad, after all; it was a struggle over principle and ideology between two wealthy and privileged camps of the Saudi elite, a struggle in which leaders on both sides carried memories of noisy but passive sitins at their Vietnam-era American university campuses overseas. In the end, Angawi was permitted to spend some time making a fuller inventory of his dig site—but he was then ordered to stay away from the site for three months. The Bin Ladens moved in and did their bulldozing.

  Ultimately, the Bin Ladens installed a sparkling new public toilet facility on top of the ruin that Angawi believed had been the Prophet’s home. At times, it seemed, there was something about being a Bin Laden that made it hard to be subtle.

  IN 1996 Bakr published a book to celebrate the family’s work in Mecca and Medina during the previous eight years. It was titled Story of the Great Expansion, and it was intended as a coffee table volume for Bin Laden customers and for the royal family. Bakr dedicated the book, of course, to King Fahd. In the florid and obsequious tones of courtly Arabic, he summarized the history of the alliance between the Bin Ladens and the Al-Saud, from the time of Mohamed Bin Laden until the present: