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Confidential:
Robert Lacey
Inside the Kingdom
Saudi Arabia 1979-2009
What produced 9/11 – and what 9/11 produced
(Provisional title, fourth draft – October 2008)
Email:
Phone: 00966 509 240 640
0044 7922 244 398
Dedication page
To Faiza, Fawzia, Ghada, Hala, Hatoon, Maha, Najat and all the mothers of Saudi Arabia
And to the memory of my own mother, Vida Lacey (1913 - 2008)
. . . In the Second Month of Dry Weather
The Islamic calendar follows the phases of the moon. People scan the sky in Mecca at the start of every month, and only when the hilal – the new crescent moon – has actually been seen and attested is the month certified in court to have officially begun.
Twelve lunar months add up to some 354 days – eleven or so days short of the western, Gregorian year. So a Muslim centenarian is not yet 97 in terms of 365-day Gregorian years, and the shorter Muslim year is constantly creeping forward in relation to its Western equivalent. Celebrations like hajj (the pilgrimage) and Ramadan (the holy month of fasting) arrive eleven days or so earlier in western terms every year.
The calendar also has its own start date – the hijirah, or migration – the turning point in the birth of Islam when the Prophet Mohammed forsook the hostility of unreformed Mecca (in the Christian year AD 622) and migrated to the community that would become known as Medina. Islamic years are accordingly known as ‘hijirah’ (migration) years, and will be denoted as AH (Anno Hegirae) in the pages that follow.
Some of the names of the hijirah months can be traced back to pre-Islamic times, when the calendar followed the seasons. Thus there are two months of grazing, and two months of drought. September 11th 2001 fell in the 15th Islamic century, 1422 AH, on the 22nd of Jumada al’Thani – the second month of dry weather – though in 2009 AD, as this book goes to press, September 11th falls in Ramadan, the holy month of fasting.
Welcome to the Kingdom
In theory Saudi Arabia should not exist – its survival defies the laws of logic and history. Look at its princely rulers, dressed in funny clothes, trusting in God rather than man, and running their oil-rich country on principles that most of the world has abandoned with relief. Shops closed for prayer, executions in the street – and let us not even get started on the status of women. Saudi Arabia is one of the planet’s enduring – and, for many, quite offensive – enigmas: which is why, three decades ago, I went to live there for a bit.
It was 1979. I had just published Majesty, my biography of Queen Elizabeth II which recounted the paradoxical flourishing of an ancient monarchy in an increasingly populist world. Now I was in search of more paradox, and that was not hard to find in Riyadh. After many a morning sipping glasses of sweet tea in the office of the chief of protocol, I finally secured an audience with King Khaled, the shy and fragile old monarch who had become the Kingdom’s stop-gap ruler following the assassination of his half-brother Faisal in 1975. (The five Saudi monarchs who have ruled the Kingdom since 1953 have all been half-brothers, with over a dozen more brothers and half-brothers currently waiting in the wings – see family tree p. 8).
In the weeks of tea-sipping I had given much thought to the important question of what I might give the king. What could I offer to the man who had – or could have – just about anything? I had decided on photographs. Before coming to the Kingdom, I had read through the papers of the earliest British travellers to Arabia, intrepid servants of His Majesty’s imperial government who had trekked across the desert sands in the early decades of the twentieth century in their solar helmets and khaki puttees. A surprising number had loaded their camels with the heavy wood and brass cameras of the time, complete with fragile glass negatives and portable dark rooms so they could develop and print their negatives in their tents.[1]
I made up an album of these images, which were then comparatively unknown, wrote out long captions which were translated into classical Arabic, and bore my gift into the royal presence. It was majlis day – majlis meaning ‘the place of sitting’ – and the bedouin had come off the desert to sit with their king. Inside the manicured palace grounds were dusty Toyota pick-up trucks parked higgledy-piggledy on the marble among the burnished Rolls Royces and BMW’s of princes and ministers. The trucks did not have sheep or goats in the back at that moment, but from their smell it was clear they had recently contained some woolly passengers.
I was already prepared for the theatre that followed. The nose-rubbing and hand-kissing as the king met his people was a tableau unrolled for every visiting film crew and journalist – ‘our desert democracy,’ the minders from the Ministry of Information would proudly explain. Till that date I had managed to avoid a Ministry minder (thirty years later I still proudly roam free), and I was developing my own rather cynical view of desert ‘democracy’. It seemed to me to involve little more than the passing thrill of royal contact, the handing out of money, and the dispensing of favors which by-passed and undermined the fragile processes of proper government. So I was 50% sceptical as I entered the majlis – then 100% bowled over as I found myself treated to some direct royal contact of my own.
In front of the king was standing an old bedouin, his bare toes scratching nervously at the rich silken carpet as he declaimed the sing-song lines of poetry which he seemed to be making up as he went along:
Welcome oh Khaled, Welcome dear King!
Welcome oh Khaled, Your praises we sing!
Listening to poetry is one of the occupational hazards of being king of Saudi Arabia. Elizabeth II shakes hands with a lot of district nurses. Saudi kings must nod appreciatively through the repetitive and often lengthy odes composed in their honour. In the meantime, there was a flurry of robed and shuffling hospitality, as thimblefuls of thin coffee got poured and trays of clear, sweet tea were circulated. The Riyadh equivalent of Buckingham Palace flunkeys were stern-looking, cross-belted tribal retainers, wearing revolver holsters and swords.
Suddenly it was my turn to entertain the king, and I found myself ushered with my gift to the green, brocaded, over-stuffed sofa beside him – ‘Louis Farouq’ is the decorative style favored in most Saudi palaces.
It was sticky to start with. How many times had this shy, long-suffering man had to accept the homage of stumbling foreigners? But as he turned the pages of the album, King Khaled started to ‘get it’. He recognized uncles and cousins and places from long ago, and above all the pictures of his extraordinary, charismatic father, Abd’al-Aziz, Worshipper of the Mighty – the mighty one being God, whom Abd’al-Aziz served devotedly through the creed that outsiders entitle Wahhabism, central Arabia’s harsh and fiercely puritannical interpretation of the Islamic faith.[1] Usually known in the west as Ibn Saud, or ‘Son of Saud’, this warrior king had subdued and pulled together the tribes of Arabia between 1901 and 1925, then proudly (some said arrogantly) slapped his family name on the whole bundled-up conglomerate: Al-Mamlakka Al-Arabbia Al-Saudiyya, the Saudi Arab Kingdom – Arabia as belonging to the house of Saud.
The great man’s son Khaled was now turning the pages of my album with real interest, calling over cronies to look at such-and-such a face or to question whether such-and-such a caption was correct about the date or place – until he came to a photo dated 1918. [INSERT THE PHOTO HERE OR ON FACING PAGE]. It showed Abd’al-Aziz standing smiling and self-assured in a headdress and winter coat, almost a head taller than a line of rather less confident relatives and companions, while a group of ragged little children in the front row squinted quizzically at the first European that most of them had ever seen.
It was the children that attracted King Khaled’s attention.
‘One of those is me!’ he exclaimed excitedly, recounting through a translator how he could remember this khawaja (foreigner) coming to meet his father, then taking them all outside to line up in the courtyard. The stranger had vanished under his blanket to peer at them through his curious machine, and the children had been told very strictly not to move. But little Khaled had not then understood why, nor had ever been shown the result. Six decades later, here it was – ‘Wallahi’ (‘By God’, the most common and benevolent oath in Saudi Arabia).
The king happily slapped the album shut, ordering a servant to take it back to show the family that night. Meanwhile I was dismissed with a fatherly beam and walked back to my place to sit through another hour of wafting smoke and poetry, reflecting on the nature of this curious land. I had found my paradox – if not two. Blessed by geology with infinite riches, Saudi Arabia was ruled by a man who started life as a barefoot urchin in the sand. And while King Khaled was an absolute ruler of theoretically infinite power and wealth, he had lined up with his guests that morning after the last poem had been declaimed, and, with no special precedence, had prostrated himself with them all in prayer.
So that became the theme of my book The Kingdom, published in 1981 – the dazzling rocketing to modernity of a society that still insisted on tradition, and the delicate balancing act of the ruling family whose fierce ambition had assembled the entire, scarcely credible creation.
‘How,’ as one of my American editors impolitely put it, ‘did a bunch of camel jockeys manage to pull it all together?’
The Kingdom explained that in 631 pages including index and notes. But life is short, and the book is out of print. So here, in just one paragraph, is why the house of Saud matters. Think of central Arabia as being in three parts – the oil fields in the east, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the west, and the largely barren desert in the middle. [MAP SOMEWHERE HERE] At the beginning of the twentieth century, and for most of the previous centuries of Arabian history, those three geographical units were separate countries and, to some degree, cultures. It was the modern achievement of the house of Saud, through skilled and ruthless warfare, a highly refined gift for conciliation, and, most particularly, the potent glue of their Wahhabi mission, to pull those three areas together so that, by the end of the 20th century, the world’s largest oil reserves were joined, sea-to-sea, to the largest center of annual religious pilgrimage in the world – with their capital in the Wahhabi heartland of Riyadh.
That is the historical significance of the Saudi camel jockeys. If it were not for Ibn Saud and his sons, the oil fields now called Saudi would probably be another over-affluent, futuristic emirate like Kuwait or Dubai along the Persian Gulf coast – all lagoon estates and Russian hookers. The oil fields, along with their incredible wealth and international influence, would be totally separate from the holy places of Mecca and Medina – and both those hypothetical countries would, almost certainly, be following a softer, more tolerant branch of Islam than the strict Wahhabism emanating from Riyadh.
‘What if?’ is a dubious game to play with the past. But, on the basis of the evidence, it seems reasonable to suggest that without the historic achievement of the house of Saud, the horrors of 9/11 would never have been inflicted on the United States, since Osama Bin Laden’s poisonous hostility to the west was a brew that only Saudi Arabia could have concocted. His attack on the Twin Towers was a Saudi quarrel played out on American soil.
That is the theme of the pages that follow: the story of the conflicts that made Saudi Arabia’s paradoxes lethal for nearly 3,000 people in New York’s World Trade Center, in Washington DC, and in a field in Pennsylvania on the morning of September 11th 2001 – how an ancient religion came to define a modern state, fuelling violence that spiralled far beyond the boundaries of Saudi Arabia. Think of the new words that we have had to learn in the last thirty years: wahhabi, jihadi, Arab-Afghan, Desert Storm, fatwa, Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden. What have they all got in common? Which nation supplied fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11? The largest group of foreign fighters captured in Afghanistan? The second largest contingent in Guantanamo Bay? And, most recently, the greatest number of foreign suicide bombers in Iraq?
Saudi problems have transformed the modern world. Saudi conflicts and growing pains got the 21st century off to a start that no one had anticipated, and we are still trying to work out what it means. I certainly did not begin to guess, when I brought my family to live in Jeddah three decades ago, at the world-shaking climax to which the contradictions and hypocrisies around me would lead. That is why I have written this book: to go back to 1979 and try to work out how it happened. It is a sequel to The Kingdom, but a sequel that must upend and re-examine everything that went before.
In 1982, a year after its publication in the UK and the US, The Kingdom was banned by the Saudi government. The censorship office of the Ministry of Information listed ninety-seven objections to the text, and I was only willing to accommodate twenty-four of them. These all related to Islam, where I was happy to concede that a committee of Muslims knew more than I did about their religion. But I firmly declined to alter several lengthy historical passages, particularly my accounts of the disputes between Abd’al-Aziz’s sons, Saud and Faisal, which resulted in the deposition of King Saud in 1962. As a result, the book was banned from distribution or sale inside Saudi Arabia (its internet translation remains blocked via Saudi servers)[2] – and sales soared gratifyingly, especially in the Middle East. I had other books to write, and I did not go back to Saudi Arabia for a quarter of a century.