by Robert Lacey
Bin Baz, for his part, was seeking to enter the twentieth century. The blind sheikh had become notorious among liberals for a fatwa he had issued a dozen years earlier when American astronauts were landing on the moon—“On the Possibility of Going into Orbit.” His judgment had cast such doubt on the American achievement and on the proven facts of the moon landing that people accused Bin Baz of doubting the roundness of the earth. This was not totally fair. There are Western websites to this day that assert that the U.S. moon landings were staged in a TV studio, and the sheikh’s main point in his fatwa was to be skeptical: “We cannot believe anyone who comes and says ‘I was on the moon’ without offering solid scientific evidence.” In fact, wrote Bin Baz, “we see nothing in the Koran against the possibility that men may reach the moon. . . . We know there are spaces between earth and sky. There is nothing to say that the rockets cannot fly in them.”
The sheikh’s ruling—in response, he said, to numerous queries he had received from “the Muslims”—was a detailed and touchingly open-minded attempt to square the dry facts of modern science with the mystic teachings of the Koran and its talk of genies flying between the planets. But Bin Baz’s suspicions of the Americans weighed heavy: “We must make careful checks whenever the kuffar [infidels] or faseqoon [immoral folk] tell us something: we cannot believe or disbelieve them until we get sufficient proof on which the Muslims can depend.”
At a superficial reading it was possible to assume that Bin Baz had gone beyond questioning the moon landing to denying it, and soon afterward the sheikh gave an interview in which he mused on how we operate day to day on the basis that the ground beneath us is flat, even though science asserts, against our physical experience, that the world is spherical.
“As I remember from when I could see,” he said, “it seemed to be flat.”
It was an honest expression of paradox, particularly moving from a man who had been blind most of his life, and it led him to the belief that he was not afraid to voice and for which he became notorious—Bin Baz believed that the earth was flat.10
At least one senior member of the ulema reproved Bin Baz for his embarrassing assertion, which radicals had seized on to satirize the Wahhabi establishment as “members of the Flat Earth Society.” But the sheikh was unrepentant. If Muslims chose to believe the world was round, that was their business, he said, and he would not quarrel with them religiously. But he was inclined to trust what he felt beneath his feet rather than the statements of scientists he did not know: he would go on believing the earth to be flat until he was presented with convincing evidence to the contrary.
In 1985 the evidence presented itself. Prince Sultan bin Salman, the thirty-eight-year-old son of the governor of Riyadh, was selected by NASA to serve as payload engineer on one of its Discovery space shuttle flights, and the prince went to Bin Baz for advice. Much of the training, and the first few days of the flight, would fall in Ramadan, so what should he do about fasting?
“You can apply the Prophet’s rules about traveling,” replied the scholar without hesitation. These rules made clear that Mohammed permitted the traveler, if he wished, to postpone his fast until his journey’s end: then he could make up the lost days in his own time.
Prince Sultan, however, was not so keen. He had tried making up fasting days in the past, and he had not enjoyed doing his penance when everyone else had gone back to eating normally. He preferred to fast as he went along—and NASA was, in fact, delighted at the chance to monitor the impact of daytime food and drink deprivation on the young Muslim. It proved minimal.
The prince called Bin Baz from the Kennedy Space Center every day or so.
“ ‘Look,’ ” Sultan remembers telling him, “ ‘we’re going to be traveling at eighteen thousand miles per hour. I’m going to see sixteen sunrises and sunsets every twenty-four hours. So does that mean I’ll get Ramadan finished in two days?’ The sheikh loved that one—he laughed out loud.”
After some discussion, the two men agreed that everything should be reckoned in normal, earth time, from the time and place of launch in Cape Canaveral. This would also apply to the five daily prayer times, which, because of weightlessness, would have to be carried out in an upright position, with the prince strapped into his seat and wearing his space boots.
“It would be no good trying to face Mecca,” remembers the prince. “By the time I’d lined up on it, it would be behind me.”
Sultan bin Salman would be the first Muslim ever to fly in space and Bin Baz was eager for his firsthand observations.
“Keep your eyes open,” were his parting words on the day before blast-off. “I want to hear about everything you see.”
“I shall never forget it,” says Prince Sultan today, “the sight of the earth, so small and round and bright in the blackness. Everything was very clear and sharp. We have a saying in the Koran, ‘Verily, we have mansions of stars in the heavens.’ That summed it up for me. Twenty years later it remains woven into everything that I believe.”
Back in Taif, the young prince received a hero’s welcome. His uncle Fahd was there to greet him on the tarmac, along with his proud father, Salman, and a multitude of admiring brothers and cousins. Later that evening the young prince escaped to the home of Bin Baz, where the sheikh had gathered a reception committee of the Kingdom’s most learned religious figures. They wanted to hear the firsthand facts about what was revolving around what in the universe.
“The sheikh was so excited,” remembers the prince. “He met me by the front door and embraced me and led me in to meet all the sheikhs, keeping hold of my hand the whole way. ‘Allahu akbar! ’ he kept repeating. He kept asking me questions. How was it that we didn’t fall out of the sky? How could the shuttle fly that fast without using its engines?
“ ‘Let this not be the last time!’ he said. ‘Who’s going to go next?’ ”
In the light of the prince’s clear testimony that he had looked down on a spherical globe, Sheikh Bin Baz ceased his assertions that the earth was flat. It was important for the Muslims, he always said, to be open-minded and to accept the clear evidence that God put before them. But the blind sheikh knew what he knew, and he never formally recanted what he had said. Many doubted whether, in his heart, Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, who would rise to be the most senior religious figure in Saudi Arabia, ever truly abandoned his belief in the evidence of what he felt beneath his feet and had gazed on before his sight was taken from him.
By 1985 the Kingdom’s greatest asset was becoming its major problem—oil had plummeted from spectacular boom to disastrous slump. Around forty dollars per barrel when the decade opened, the price started to slip in 1981, with production dropping by a third in Fahd’s first year as king. The world economy was being flooded with new supplies from Canada, Alaska, and the multiplying North Sea oil platforms, while demand was decreasing as a result of economic recession, more fuel-efficient cars, and the conservation measures prompted by the high prices of the boom years. Virtually all of America’s power-generating industry switched back in these years from oil to coal. “Oceans of Oil,” bemoaned Texas Monthly magazine in a 1984 special issue devoted to the world glut of energy.
In 1981 Saudi oil income had stood at a healthy SR 328 billion per year. Over the next four years it would decline steadily to a quarter of that. The fall had a disastrous impact on Fahd’s government spending plans, and he took out his frustrations on his world-famous oil minister, the handsome, dark-eyed Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani.
“Why haven’t you been round to see me recently?” he would complain over the phone.
The king resented the minister’s high profile abroad and the fact that the articulate Yamani—who, unlike Fahd, could speak fluent English—delivered his opinions to the world not just on questions of oil, but on Israel-Palestine and U.S.-Saudi relations as well. Scarcely a month went by in the early 1980s without Sheikh Yamani giving an interview or a prestigious lecture to an admiring—usually Western—gathering. He was on the cover of every new
s and business magazine.
Many in the royal family shared Fahd’s unhappiness that a commoner should be treated as the voice and face of Saudi Arabia. Yamani had been Faisal’s protégé in the 1960s, and his successors came to feel that Zaki had grown too big for his boots. The Al-Saud particularly disliked the way that the outside world referred to him as “Sheikh.”
“Yamani was plain ustaz—Mister Yamani,” says an adviser to the royal court. “Sheikh is an honorific reserved for tribal chieftains and for religious scholars.”
For his part, the oil minister resented being roused at two in the morning to attend the impromptu cabinet meetings called by Fahd, and for being blamed for events that, in his opinion, were the nature of the market. Many of the new fields coming on line around the world had been made economically feasible by OPEC’s price rises, and the West had “got religion” on energy conservation under the same pressure of price. There had never been great affection between Fahd and Yamani, and over the years their relationship grew openly hostile. In October 1986 Fahd sent Yamani a cable at an OPEC meeting instructing him to push for a price of eighteen dollars a barrel. The king had agreed to this strategy after long discussions with the rulers of Kuwait and other Gulf states, and was furious to hear afterward, as they told it, that Yamani had treated the agreed policy with ill-concealed disdain.
“I don’t know how I can work with this guy any longer,” Yamani had declared impatiently to a ministerial colleague who telephoned him during the meeting on Fahd’s behalf to confirm the king’s instructions. Later, he had a direct and acrimonious confrontation with Fahd on the phone.
The oil minister had gone several steps too far, and he seemed to know it. On his return from the OPEC meeting Yamani flew briefly to Jeddah, then headed for Riyadh, where he waited, as if expecting the end—which came within a matter of days. A brief official statement made no pretence of “resignation,” but stated baldly that the oil minister had been dismissed. Yamani was playing cards with his family when the news was announced on television. He was a fan of baloot, Saudi Arabia’s most popular card game, a version of the French game belote. “Turn up the volume,” he said without looking up from the table—and went on playing cards.
In later years a myth developed that King Fahd deliberately kept the price of Saudi oil low through the 1980s in a devious scheme devised with Ronald Reagan to diminish Russia’s income from its own oil and gas sales and eventually bankrupt the USSR, thus securing Cold War victory.
“That was simply impossible,” says the oil economist Dr. Ibrahim Al-Muhanna of the Saudi Ministry of Petroleum. “No single producer could then or now ‘control’ the price of oil. In 1986 Ronald Reagan actually sent [Vice President George H. W.] Bush to Riyadh begging us to push the price up, and we would certainly have pushed the price up if we had had the power to do so. The national budget was in desperate need of the revenues. No one liked or wanted the low oil prices of the mid-late 1980s. Everyone suffered, Saudi Arabia most of all. It was a very bad time.”
Between 1981 and 1986 Saudi oil production would fall from nearly ten million barrels per day to less than four, with a catastrophic impact on government revenues. To start with, the Finance Ministry could draw on its investment reserves, put aside for just such a day as this. For a dozen years the Saudi government had been cautiously piling its surpluses into foreign bonds and currencies, mainly the dollar. But in 1985 the budget tipped from surplus into deficit and the government started to borrow and to draw down still more heavily on the surpluses accumulated in the boom years.
“The money just dried up,” recalls one of Fahd’s associates. “Things got so tough that ministries had to struggle to pay the salaries at the end of the month.”
The once mighty Kingdom was on its way to being a debtor state, and in a government-dominated economy, that meant widespread unemployment and hardship.
The young suffered most. High birthrates and the excellence of the expensive new medical system were producing tens of thousands of young male Saudis with little prospect of suitable or steady work. Thanks to the post-Juhayman “reforms” to the education syllabus, Islamist teaching did less than ever to prepare young minds for the realities of the modern world—and the products of the rote-learning religious colleges were particularly lacking in the practical skills that their society needed. Young Saudis were being taught to scorn what the West was giving them, while also being encouraged to blame the West for their ills.
It was a prescription for trouble. Frustrated in their search for the support and self-respect of a decent living—which would also have enabled them to pay the high Saudi bride price to get married—these young men became easy targets for radicalization, sublimating sexual frustration into religious extremes. As part of the program to make the country more pious, thousands of Koranic study groups had been set up in the early 1980s in mosques and, during the holidays, inside government schools. Koranic recitation competitions featured regularly in the newspapers. Boys who memorized some or all of the Koran were rewarded by the Ministry of Education with awards of one thousand to two thousand riyals ($250 to $500)—money prizes that were especially attractive to children from poor backgrounds. Religious extremists had a field day in these apparently innocent Koranic classes and quizzes, the Saudi equivalent of American spelling bees. They were fertile recruiting grounds for the fundamentalist campaign that was coming to be known as the sahwah—“the awakening.”
Discontent was not eased by a widespread understanding of how much of the oil boom’s revenues had gone into the pockets of those around the king. People could live with royal extravagance in the good times—any self-respecting Saudi family was expected to enrich itself, starting with the family at the top. But with less gravy to go around, resentments were more deeply felt, particularly as Fahd made little apparent effort to check his personal spending. Rumors started to circulate about the favor the king lavished on his latest, prettiest young wife, Al-Johara (“the Jewel”) and her son Abdul Aziz, on whom Fahd doted. The boy became known in common gossip as “Azouz” or “Azouzi.” A soothsayer was said to have warned the king that he risked being assassinated like his brother Faisal if he did not keep Azouzi beside him wherever he went—which resulted in the eleven-year-old turning up at the White House for the state dinner in honor of his father’s visit to Washington in February 1985. The bemused Reagans gave the teenager a model of the U.S. Space Shuttle and sat him beside Sigourney Weaver.
Soothsayers are not uncommon in Saudi Arabia. Newspapers regularly report the arrest of witches and fortune-tellers. As the slump continued and people looked back nostalgically to the boom years of King Khaled, the superstitious started to award Fahd that most damning of titles—an unlucky king.
MODERN SAUDI HISTORY IN FIVE EASY LESSONS
If you did not go hungry in the reign of King Abdul Aziz, you would never go hungry.
If you did not have fun in the reign of King Saud, you would never have fun.
If you did not go to prison in the reign of King Faisal, you would never go to prison.
If you did not make money in the reign of King Khaled, you would never make money.
If you did not go bankrupt in the reign of King Fahd . . .
. . .
What could be done? Some of the younger princes dared to suggest that the time had come to enact the long-promised Basic Law with its Majlis Al-Shura (Consultative Council). This would be one step at least, they argued, toward change and reform. But Fahd would only smile at them.
“I used to say that very same thing to my brother Faisal,” he would recall. “I would urge him to sign the Basic Law and enact the Shura Council. But now that I’m in the same position that he was, with the document in front of me, I feel the same doubts. What did my brother know, I wonder, that made him hold back?”
Fahd had, in fact, set in train the construction of a grandly domed building that could house the Consultative Council at some time in the future. Actually to fill the building with arg
umentative councillors, however, was a step too far. The reluctant reformer decided instead to curry more favor with the religious establishment. In 1984 the presses of Medina’s massive $130 million King Fahd Holy Koran Printing Complex rolled into action. That year, and every year thereafter, a free Koran was presented to each of the two million or so pilgrims who came to Mecca to perform their hajj, evidence of Wahhabi generosity that was borne back to every corner of the Muslim community. The Kingdom’s seventy or so embassies around the world already featured cultural, educational, and military attachés, along with consular officers who organized visas for the hajj. Now they were joined by religious attachés, whose job was to get new mosques built in their countries and to persuade existing mosques to propagate the dawah wahhabiya.
“No limit,” announced a royal directive, “should be put on expenditures for the propagation of Islam.” The government allocated more than $27 billion over the years to this missionary fund, while Fahd devoted millions more from his personal fortune to improve the structures of the two holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Vast white marble halls and decorative arches were raised by the Bin Laden company at the king’s personal expense to provide covered worshipping space for several hundred thousand more pilgrims.
To set the seal on this campaign, Fahd decided to award himself a new title. King Faisal had liked to be known informally by the ancient style of khadem, or servant, of the two holy places—Al-Haramain Al-Sharifain, the mosques of Mecca and Medina. The much-venerated title went back to the time of the caliphs, and in 1986, while opening the new television station in Medina, Fahd announced that he no longer wished to be known as king, but wanted people to address him in future by “this title that is closest to my heart.”
