by Robert Lacey
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 1
975 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.
CHAPTER 2
The Brothers
In most Arab countries in the 1970s, the word ikhwan denoted the Muslim Brotherhood, the powerful network of Islamic activists, usually working underground, whose ideas influenced the young Osama Bin Laden. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt, and from its steely roots came the extremists who would murder Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, in 1981. But if you said “ikhwan” to most Saudis in the 1970s, especially to those of an older generation, their eyes would light up at the memory of another, earlier brotherhood that was particularly Saudi.
ABDUL AZIZ AND THE BROTHERS
The warriors from the bedouin tribes who supported Abdul Aziz, “Ibn Saud,” in the early decades of the twentieth century called themselves Al-Ikhwan, the Brothers, and their ferociousness in battle was the key to his military success. Their imams had told them, in the historic tradition of Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab, that to support the Saudi cause was to engage in jihad (holy war), so they burned with the conviction that those who opposed them were kuffar (infidels), and thus deserving of death. They also believed that any mujahid (holy warrior) who died in battle would go straight to heaven. This imbued the Ikhwan with such a lethal indifference to death that most towns would surrender at their approach, rather than risk being put to the sword.
In the course of the early 1920s the warriors of the Ikhwan helped extend Saudi power to the Red Sea coast. Abdul Aziz raised levies of hadhar (townsmen), but the Ikhwan were his ferocious vanguard, taking the fight to Mecca and Medina, and finally to the rich port city of Jeddah, which surrendered to the Al-Saud in 1925. The empire building was done, and Abdul Aziz packed his holy warriors back to their rural settlements with as much gold as he could muster. There were no more enemies left to fight, he told them. The time had come for his fierce, bearded warriors to go home to enjoy their wives and family making, and to practice the arts of peace.
But the Ikhwan were disinclined to settle. They were bedouin, after all. Their very lifeblood was to raid, and there were more battles left to fight, in their opinion notably against the impious Muslims of Transjordan and Iraq, their new neighbor nations to the northwest and northeast. Britain had created these pseudocolonies in the post-World War I carve-up of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and for the Brothers, an age-old principle was at stake: to mark their new boundaries, the ingleez (English) had set up frontier posts in the desert, seeking to limit freedom of movement where the bedu had traditionally wandered as they wished.
So in the late 1920s the more militant brethren, especially some members of the Mutayr and Otayba tribes, continued to go out riding and raiding as they had always done. They suspected their former leader had struck a deal to live in peace with the British, and, more seriously, that he had forgotten how to fight. Abdul Aziz had no real army, sneered the Ikhwan leader Faisal Al-Dawish to his counterpart, the Otayba chieftain, Sultan ibn Bijad. The Saudis were nothing but flabby cooks and soft men who slept on mattresses—“as much use as camel bags without handles.”
The Ikhwan were correct about the British. Abdul Aziz had decided he had no choice but to live in harmony with the region’s great colonial power. International frontiers had to be respected, particularly when it came to the British-protected states that now fringed his northern boundaries. That was why he instructed the Ikhwan to stand down from their raids and declared them rebels when they ignored his commands.
But the Brothers were quite wrong about the great man going soft. Abdul Aziz spent more than a year trying to conciliate with Al-Dawish before the showdown came. Early in March 1929 the Saudi king drove north from Riyadh with a convoy of open motorcars that had been mounted with machine guns and confronted the camel-riding mutineers on the windswept, open plain of Sibillah. He offered them one last chance to surrender, and when they ignored him and attacked, he gave the order to start firing. Hundreds of the Brethren and their camels were slaughtered.
The Al-Saud have always argued that Sibillah was a fair fight—that the balance of the battle and indeed the fate of the entire Saudi project hung in the balance. Their critics regard Sibillah as a cold-blooded massacre—and worse: In the context of the previous fifteen years it was a coldhearted desertion of the warriors whose fanaticism the Al-Saud had been happy to exploit when it suited their game.
“Saudi Arabia had virtually assumed its final shape as the result of constant war upon the infidel,” wrote Harry St. John Philby, the first English chronicler of the country. “Henceforth the infidel would be a valued ally in the common cause of progress.” The fanatics of the Ikhwan, on the other hand, must be discarded—they “could now serve no further useful purpose.”
Among the Brothers who survived the machine guns of Sibillah was Mohammed bin Sayf Al-Otaybi, who had ridden to the battle with his leader, Sultan ibn Bijad, a renowned warrior and stubborn critic of Abdul Aziz. The Otaybi leader would end his days in a Riyadh jail—according to legend his final words were “Never give up.” His follower Mohammed Al-Otaybi, meanwhile, went home to his Ikhwan settlement of Sajir, a spare collection of mud houses on the gravelly flatlands that mark the border of Qaseem, where, sometime in the early 1930s, he fathered the son to whom he gave the forbidding name of Juhayman.
Growing up in Sajir, Juhayman Al-Otaybi was immersed from the start in the ambivalent legacy of the Ikhwan. He loved to recount tales of their bravery, fighting for the Al-Saud and also against them. Around the age of twenty he joined the National Guard, the tribal territorial army that the Saudi state had formed from the Brothers who had stayed loyal to Abdul Aziz (the vast majority). The National Guard was known as the “White Army,” since its members wore no uniform and reported for duty, rather haphazardly in those days, in their white thobes. Juhayman had left primary school unable to write with any fluency. But somewhere he had developed a prodigious appetite for religious reading and he began to collect the books that would fill his padlocked steel trunk.
The National Guard encouraged its members to pursue religious activities. All the units had imams and sheikhs who were dedicated to the Wahhabi mission—though as agents now of the modern Saudi government, they no longer talked of jihad. Perhaps this was why Juhayman left the National Guard in the early 1970s to participate in the more stimulating activities of Medina’s Salafi Group, supporting himself, according to Nasser Al-Huzaymi, through the shrewd buying, repairing, and reselling of vehicles in the car auctions of Jeddah. So long as the group was smiled upon by Bin Baz and the religious establishment, they received donations from pious local benefactors and from charitable funds.
“At one stage,” remembers Al-Huzaymi, “Bin Baz was providing most of the money for Bayt al-Ikhwan.”
But all this changed in 1977, following the fateful disagreement that occured amid the unfinished pipework on the roof. Until then Juhayman’s subversive thou
ghts about banknotes and soccer players had been protected.
“When someone official got upset with us,” recalls Al-Huzaymi, “Bin Baz would pick up the phone or go to see them. He would explain that we were only spreading the true faith, trying to make the country more pious. Quite a large group of the Brothers were arrested in Riyadh on one occasion, and the sheikh called up the Interior Ministry. He got them all released.”
After the rooftop confrontation, however, and faced with the hostility of the sheikhs whom Juhayman had so brusquely rejected, the Brothers soon found themselves under pressure. Late in 1977 Juhayman got a tip-off from a friend in the local security forces, warning that he was due to be picked up for questioning.
“We packed up and drove away that very night,” remembers Nasser Al-Huzaymi, who accompanied Juhayman. “We were escaping from the back door even as the police were arriving at the front.”
From that moment forward, Juhayman was on the run. Thirty of the Brothers were soon taken in for more interrogation, detained for periods that ranged from a week to several months, and the whole dynamic of the movement shifted. Juhayman’s own adventures set the tone, as he skulked in the northern deserts, experiencing the escapades of a Robin Hood. He had one narrow escape when he went to see his mother in Sajir, only to discover at the last minute that the police had the family home staked out. Suffering from a toothache on another occasion, he had to be smuggled to a friendly dentist who would not betray his identity. Being on the run created an atmosphere of paranoia and confrontation, and marked a new stage in the latter-day Ikhwan’s campaign of reform—from alternative to radicalized, and now, increasingly, dedicated to subversive activities that were aggressive and underground. Terrorist, in fact.
