Inside the Kingdom Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  PART ONE - KINGDOM OF GOD

  CHAPTER 1 - Angry Face

  CHAPTER 2 - The Brothers

  CHAPTER 3 - Siege

  CHAPTER 4 - No Sunni, No Shia

  CHAPTER 5 - Vox Populi, Vox Dei

  CHAPTER 6 - Salafi Soccer

  CHAPTER 7 - Jihad in Afghanistan

  CHAPTER 8 - Special Relationship

  CHAPTER 9 - Dawn Visitors

  CHAPTER 10 - Stars in the Heavens

  CHAPTER 11 - Into Exile

  CHAPTER 12 - The Dove and the East Wind

  CHAPTER 13 - Vacationing Jihadi

  PART TWO - KINGDOM AT WAR

  CHAPTER 14 - Desert Storm

  CHAPTER 15 - Battle for Al-Khafji

  CHAPTER 16 - Awakening

  CHAPTER 17 - Stopping the Sins

  CHAPTER 18 - In from the Cold

  CHAPTER 19 - Change of Heart

  CHAPTER 20 - Enter the Crown Prince

  CHAPTER 21 - The Students

  CHAPTER 22 - Infinite Reach

  CHAPTER 23 - New Century

  PART THREE - AL-QAEDA COMES HOME

  CHAPTER 24 - Fifteen Flying Saudis

  CHAPTER 25 - Fire

  CHAPTER 26 - Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

  CHAPTER 27 - Prodigal Sons

  CHAPTER 28 - King Abdullah

  CHAPTER 29 - Girls of Saudi

  CHAPTER 30 - Illegitimate Occupation

  CHAPTER 31 - End of the Affair

  CHAPTER 32 - Condition of the People

  TIME LINE

  GLOSSARY OF NAMES AND ARABIC TERMS

  NOTES

  SUGGESTED READING

  Acknowledgements

  INDEX

  House of Saud Index

  PHOTOGRAPHIC SOURCES

  ALSO BY ROBERT LACEY

  Robert, Earl of Essex

  Henry VIII

  The Queens of the North Atlantic

  Sir Walter Ralegh

  Majesty

  The Kingdom

  Princess

  Aristocrats

  Ford

  God Bless Her!

  Little Man

  Grace

  Sotheby’s

  The Year 1000

  The Queen Mother’s Century

  Monarch: The Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth II

  Great Tales from English History: Cheddar Man to the Peasants’ Revolt

  Great Tales from English History: Chaucer to the Glorious Revolution

  Great Tales from English History: The Battle of the Boyne to DNA

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Robert Lacey, 2009

  All rights reserved

  Photograph credits appear on page 403.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Lacey, Robert.

  Inside the Kingdom : kings, clerics, modernists, terrorists, and the struggle for Saudi Arabia / Robert Lacey.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: The Kingdom. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, c1981.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14073-4

  1. Saudi Arabia—History—1932- 2. Saudi Arabia—Politics and government—1982- 3. Saudi Arabia—Social

  conditions. 4. Saudi Arabia—Description and travel. 5. Lacey, Robert—Travel—Saudi Arabia. I. Lacey, Robert. The

  Kingdom. II. Title.

  DS244.63.L33 2009

  953.805’3—dc22 2009008367

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  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)

  PREFACE

  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 are closed for prayer five times a day, executions take place 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 some, 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 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 it 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 stopgap 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 more than a dozen brothers and half brothers, not to mention their sons, still waiting in the wings—see the family tree on page xxiv.)

  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 the papers of the earliest British travelers 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 plates and portable darkrooms so they could develop and print their negatives in their tents.

  I made up an album of these images, which were then comparatively unknown, wrote out long captions and had them 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 out of the desert to sit with their king. Inside the manicured
palace grounds were dusty Toyota pickup trucks parked higgledy-piggledy on the marble among the burnished Rolls-Royces and BMWs 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 theater 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 that bypassed and undermined the fragile processes of proper government. So I was 50 percent skeptical as I entered the majlis—then 100 percent bowled over as I found myself treated to some direct royal contact of my own.

  In front of the king was standing an old bedu, his bare toes scratching nervously at the rich silken carpet as he declaimed singsong lines of poetry, which he seemed to be making up as he went along:

  Oh love of the people,

  Oh Khaled, our king,

  Oh lion of the desert,

  Your promises 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 honor. 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 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 brocade overstuffed sofa beside him—“Louis Farouk” is the decorative style favored in most Saudi palaces, a mixed allusion to the excesses of Versailles and the last, gaudy king of Egypt.

  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, Abdul Aziz, “Slave of the Mighty”—the mighty one being God, whom Abdul Aziz served devotedly through the creed that outsiders call 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-Mamlaka Al-Arabiyya 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. It showed Abdul Aziz standing smiling and self-assured in a headdress and winter cloak, 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. (See photo insert facing page .)

  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 khawajah (Western gentleman) 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—“Wallah!” (“By God,” the most common and benevolent oath in Saudi Arabia).

  The king happily slapped the album shut and ordered a servant to take it back to show the family that night. Meanwhile I was dismissed with a fatherly beam and was walked back to my place to sit through another hour of wafting incense 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 had started his 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 answered that question 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. 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 twentieth century, the world’s largest oil reserves were joined, sea to sea, to the largest center of annual religious pilgrimage in the world—and to 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 overly 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 toward the West was a brew that only Saudi Arabia could have concocted. His attack on the twin towers was a maneuver in an essentially Saudi quarrel—played out with American victims.

  That is the theme of the pages that follow: the story of the conflicts that made Saudi Arabia’s paradoxes lethal for nearly three thousand people in New York’s World Trade Center, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and in a field in Pennsylvania on the morning of September 11, 2001—how an ancient religion came to define a modern state, fueling violence that spiraled far beyond the boundaries of Saudi Arabia. Think of the new words that we have had to learn in the past thirty years: wahhabi, jihadi, Arab-Afghan, Desert Storm, fatwa, Al-Qaeda. What do they all have in common? Which nation supplied fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11? One of the largest groups of foreign fighters captured in Afghanistan? The second largest contingent at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp? Plus several hundred terrorists and suicide bombers in Iraq?

  Saudi problems have transformed the modern world. Saudi conflicts and growing pains got the twenty-first century off t
o 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 reexamine everything that went before.

  In 1982, a year after its publication in the United Kingdom and the United States, 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 willing to accommodate only 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 long historical passages, particularly my accounts of the disputes between Abdul Aziz’s sons Saud and Faisal, which resulted in the dethroning of King Saud in 1964. As a result, the book was banned from distribution or sale inside Saudi Arabia (its Internet translation remains blocked by Saudi servers)—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.

  Then in 2006, the same Saudi friend who had secured me a visa in 1979 and weathered the minitempest of The Kingdom’s banning, suggested I return in the changed climate that followed the events of 9/11. I am grateful for his trust, as I am grateful to the many Saudis who have opened their hearts to recount their moving and sometimes painful personal experiences—this is their story. Several characters whom you meet at the beginning will pop up again in the narrative to carry their personal tales through to the end.