Inside the Kingdom (24 page)

“It was quite clear talking to him,” said Fisk, “that this was a very important moment in his life—he had conquered fear and the fear of death. And once you do that, you start discovering that perhaps you love death . . .”

The Soviet attacks on Jaji were Osama’s baptism of fire, launching his career as a holy warrior. The Saudi press took up the story, glorifying “Abu Abdullah” (“Father of Abdullah,” Osama’s jihadi name) and also the role of the young Saudis who fought beside him—as many as ten thousand according to an Interior Ministry survey of exit-stamp destinations in the 1980s. This scarcely compared to the 175,000 to 250,000 native Afghans estimated to have been fighting the Soviets, but the Saudis had given lavishly (with America) to support the war, and some of the payment was in blood. The bodies of the Arab dead were dispatched home in cold storage, embalmed in sweet-smelling fluid whose scent consoled grieving parents, convincing them that their sons had died martyrs.

It was a new and very pleasant sensation for Arabs to feel they had played their part in a military victory. “Progressive” Arab leaders like Nasser and Sadat had flung well-armed Arab armies against Israel, and had delivered humiliation. They had not included religion in their strategy. But now victory was going to those who grounded themselves in Islam. Small and simple groups of holy warriors were humbling one of the world’s two superpowers. God was smiling on the faithful in the mountains—as He was also smiling on the domestic jihad that was restoring godliness to Saudi society.

The Sahwah—the Awakening—was coming good. As the 1980s progressed, the tone of Saudi preachers grew sharper in the Friday pulpits, and their sermons circulated through a jazzy new medium—compact recording cassettes. Once condemned as vehicles for decadent Western music, cassette tapes were now welcomed as a way of spreading the word of God. Popular sermons sold in the thousands through stalls in the souk, along with stories of the Prophet and early Islam. Young devotees collected and swapped these cassettes the way their Western contemporaries collected Michael Jackson tapes. There was an exciting sense of momentum—and some of these preachers were extremely young men.

Mansour Al-Nogaidan, aged eighteen, was an eloquent young preacher from the town of Buraydah in Qaseem, the Wahhabi heartland two hundred miles north of Riyadh. To this day the sheikhs of Qaseem consider themselves the true keepers of the Wahhabi flame, proudly showing visitors the small, conical mosque, an oversize beehive made of mud where, they say, Abdul Wahhab stayed at least once when he came to Qaseem to carry out his mission. In all the Arabian Peninsula, they believe, they remain the most faithful to the monotheistic, reforming truth of the Wahhabi mission.

Not surprisingly, in 1979 Qaseem had contributed a generous number of supporters to the cause of Juhayman. Mansour Al-Nogaidan can remember his classmates bunking off school in the early days of 1980 to watch their execution. Age eleven at the time, he was too nervous to join them.

“The beheading platform was only four hundred yards from our school,” he recalls “But my knees would not allow me to go.”

Juhayman’s movement had been explained to Mansour and his friends in terms of black magic.

“His hands were tied behind his back, according to our teachers, because if he were let loose he could fly. He was the bogeyman. Mothers told their children that Juhayman would come and get them if they did not behave and go to bed.”

From his early teens, Mansour was proud to consider himself a Salafi, memorizing the Koran, attending extra lectures at the mosque, and drifting into the orbit of the local fundamentalist preachers who called for the destruction of television as the machine of the Devil. Inspired, the boy would secretly pour water through the holes in the back of the family television set. The antihierarchical nature of Salafism made the movement deeply appealing to the teenage rebel in search of a cause.

Salafism also played on the fears of a scared inner child. At the religious summer camps that Mansour attended, adult teachers deliberately cultivated their charges’ fantasies about heaven and hell.

“After listening to the teachings, my mind would dwell on the scorpions and spiders in hell, and the two blue angels who would be coming to my grave to take me to the fire. I would go to bed crying and scared.”

Abdullah Thabit, a young Salafi recruited in Asir in these years, remembers actually being taken to his grave.

“I had this mentor—each new recruit had one. After dark he would drive me to the cemetery and instruct me to lie down in one of the freshly dug graves. I would shiver there in the darkness looking up at the stars, while he terrified me with tales of hellfire and the tortures that awaited me if I did not find the way to God.”

The mentor also, however, offered his young charge a personalized, fatherly protection against these ultimate fears—a crucial element in Islamist recruitment tactics. While ostensibly anti-Western, the recruiters deployed Western parenting techniques, extending to vulnerable youngsters a one-on-one warmth, interest, and support that contrasted sharply with the authoritarian style of traditional Saudi fathers, who doled out whatever personal affection they had to offer among numerous wives and a large brood of children. Mansour Al-Nogaidan found his own way to God revealed when he was coming down the steps of the mosque and felt his shoulders being held warmly by a venerable and kindly old sheikh.

“He had a ‘white face,’ ” Mansour remembers. “That’s an expression we use for someone whose faith is shining out of their features.”

This man, Sheikh Mohammed Al-Saqaabi, was famous in Buraydah for following the ways of the Prophet in the most literal possible fashion, living in a mud hut without electricity and shunning the motorcar to travel by horse and buggy.

“ ‘Look, my son,’ he said to me. ‘I’m sure you’re attending the public education [the local state school], and I am here to tell you that is the worst thing that can happen to you. You must leave, and attend more of these lectures at the mosque. Your family will get angry with you, but you are here on this earth to satisfy God.’ ”

Mansour’s family was, indeed, as angry as the sheikh predicted. His mother wept, and his brothers threatened to beat him and drag him back from the madmen into whose hands he had fallen. Many ordinary Saudis did not sign on to the extremism of the Sahwah. But the “awakening” was smiled upon by the religious establishment, and—like the jihad in Afghanistan—its agencies received easy support from the rich and vicariously pious: there was no shortage of funds to print pamphlets and circulate cassettes. The government gave no sign that it discouraged the development of this mystical and rather wild strand in national life. On the contrary, King Fahd had denounced the “lost” youth of the West: he could only approve, surely, of young Saudi men becoming
more
religious—while for the young men themselves, the confident certainties of fundamentalism offered comforting solutions and a clear way ahead through the confusions that afflict any teenager.

“It now seems to me,” says Mansour, “that I struck a sort of deal with God—that He would take away my personal fears and worries if I gave up everything to devote myself to Him, following the Salafi way. That was the bargain: if I lived like the Prophet, I would find peace of mind. And in due course, after several years, I myself could become a ‘sheikh.’ ”

Mansour left home to go and live with the local Salafis, the “Brothers of Buraydah,” a community of fundamentalists who occupied their own particular corner of town—three hundred families or so, with their own school and mosques. In front of the family his father had sternly warned Mansour that he would be on his own if he left. But he clearly sympathized with his son’s religious direction: he secretly bought the boy books and helped him out financially for a year, until he died. For SR 1,500 ($400) a year Mansour was able to rent a semiderelict old house among the Brothers. “It was a mud hut,” he remembers. He grew his beard long and cut his thobe short. As he studied at the feet of the local Salafis, his mentors encouraged him to start teaching and preaching in his own right—and, after a year or so, even to start issuing fatwas.

Mansour’s first fatwa, published when he was eighteen, was that there should be no ceremonies of congratulation for boys who had completed their Koranic memorization or for men who were starting on the religious life. There was no record in the Koran or the Hadith, he argued, of Mohammed conducting such rituals.

Appalled at his youthful presumption, the local “government” sheikhs reported Mansour to the royal court in Riyadh. Within days the teenage preacher was arrested by the Mabahith and taken to their notorious Al-Haier prison south of Riyadh.

“I sobbed—I was just terrified,” he recalls. “I thought I was going to get hanged.”

But when the eighteen-year-old found himself released after little more than two weeks, he continued his crusade against what he saw as the hypocrisy of the Wahhabi establishment. A year later, in 1989, he issued a fatwa condemning the World Youth Soccer Cup, which was being held in Saudi Arabia. Soccer was haram (forbidden), in his view, like many sports, and there should be no infidels competing in the holy land. Back Mansour went behind bars, this time to Riyadh’s Alaysha prison. After fifty-five days he signed the Mabahith’s standard “get out of jail” card, a promise that he would, in future, be a good Saudi citizen and do nothing to annoy the
wali al-amr
—the country’s authorized leadership. When he got back to Buraydah, he discovered that his congregation was larger than ever.

As the 1980s drew to a close, the Saudi Sahwah (Islamic Awakening) was going from strength to strength. It caught a widespread mood of dissatisfaction, while providing activity and a sense of purpose for the Kingdom’s many unemployed young men. It was also boosted by the spectacular triumph of its fighting arm in Afghanistan. In 1988 the Russians started withdrawing, and on February 15, 1989, the Soviet Union announced that the last of its soldiers had left the country.