Inside the Kingdom (10 page)

“He was a visionary,” recalls one of the technocrats in Fahd’s inner circle. “Nobody was wild about his project for the two industrial cities. But he dug out the money and he fought them through. He was a man with real guts. Now Yanbu and Jubail are two of Saudi Arabia’s great success stories.”

It was Fahd’s ambition to bring Saudi Arabia the best from the West, and his private life tended in the same direction. In his youth the prince had been the classic example of the Monte Carlo Arab, prowling the baccarat tables in his open-neck black shirt. King Faisal had rebuked his younger brother more than once for his disappearances to Europe on extravagant gambling binges. Fahd’s name meant “desert leopard,” but as the years went by—he was fifty-six in 1979—the crown prince’s generous appetites were making him look less and less leopardlike.

Fahd also served himself generously when it came to business. As he doled out the petrodollars to sweep away sleepy old Saudi Arabia, the crown prince saw no reason to conceal the financial favors that he lavished on his family and his friends.
“Nahhab, wahhab,”
said his critics. “He steals, then he gives.” It was an accusation that could have been leveled at many members of the royal family. They had built the Kingdom. It carried their name. It was hardly surprising if a large number of princes found it difficult to distinguish between what was theirs and what belonged to the still-growing state.

The crown prince’s power base lay among his dynamic group of hardworking Sudayri brothers, but most of the family backed his manifesto to supervise an outward-looking program of national development. Fahd’s confidence in a succession of “five-year plans” was accepted with a reverence that a Soviet commissar might have envied—and he was never afraid to think big. He liked to joke with European friends that he would one day commission the construction of a grand national opera house in Riyadh, in which
Aida
would be performed with not one, but ten elephants.

It was not a joke that he shared with Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Baz. The religious sheikhs had long viewed Fahd with a skeptical eye. So that made it all the more tricky in November 1979, when, as the crown prince wrestled with one bitter religious revolt at Mecca in the west of his kingdom, he found himself confronted by another in the east.

. . .

In the village of Al-Awjam, Ali Al-Marzouq watched his fellow villagers as they beat themselves with chains—a long, snaking line of men dressed in black, their jaws set grimly, swaying from side to side and bringing their metal flails down in unison with a hearty
whack!
across their shoulders. The village lay in eastern Saudi Arabia, home to the world’s very richest concentration of oil fields. Billions of dollars’ worth of “black gold” lay below the earth on which these young devotees were stomping. All of them, like Ali, were Muslims of the Shia persuasion (
Shia
means “followers,” “faction,” or “members of a party”), and they were marking their doleful anniversary of Ashura.

Ashura
is Arabic for “tenth” and refers to the date of the Shias’ defining annual ritual, the tenth of Muharram—which fell on November 30 in 1979. The villagers of Al-Awjam, along with the other five hundred thousand or so Shia Muslims then living in the Eastern Province, were marking the emotional climax of their religious year, even as Juhayman and his followers were battling it out with the Saudi security forces in the Grand Mosque on the other side of the peninsula.

Ali decided to go into town to watch the ceremonies in Al-Qateef, the Shia headquarters of the area. This sprawling, dusty settlement ringed with date palms was home to more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, the vast majority of them Shia. The town’s crumbling Turkish mud fort recalled the days before the Saudis came, when the date groves and trading enterprises of the hardworking population made Al-Hasa (the nineteenth-century name of the whole province) a valuable corner of the Ottoman Empire. Now the area was still more valuable, thanks to its efficient and productive oil fields, whose smooth working owed much to the reliability and industriousness of the local labor force, 60 percent of them Shia, virtually the only native-born Saudis then willing to carry out modern, industrial-style manual work. The growth of Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, was built on American expertise and the stringent Shia work ethic—when meeting for business appointments, the Shia are among the few Saudis who will ring to warn you they are running ten minutes late.

The whole of Al-Qateef was quivering with Ashura fever as Ali Al-Marzouq, then a slightly-built schoolboy of sixteen, made his way toward the Al-Fateh (“Victory”) Mosque on Abdul Aziz Street, not far from the marketplace and the stalls of the fish auction. Hundreds of young men had gathered to listen to a religious lecture over the mosque’s loudspeakers, spilling out onto the street to fill an overflow corral of wooden barriers. Their emotions were roused by the traditionally tearful nature of Ashura lectures, but also by recent events outside Saudi Arabia. The ayatollahs’ revolution in Iran had been a dazzling assertion of Shia power and identity, and it gave extra meaning to this first Ashura of the new Islamic century. “No Sunni! No Shia! All Muslims together!” chanted the crowds outside the mosque, beating their chests and sobbing as the lecture came to an end. Someone had brought along some posters of the Ayatollah Khomeini and had hoisted them high.

“It felt safe and comforting,” remembers Ali Al-Marzouq, “to be with my brothers, shoulder to shoulder.”

But the bedouin soldiers of the National Guard, standing shoulder to shoulder on the other side of the barriers, felt anything but safe. They were not Shia. Quite the contrary. They were proud to be Sunni, like the majority of Saudis—and, indeed, like the large majority of Muslims throughout the world—meaning that they took their directions from the sunna, the words, actions, and example of the Prophet. To them the Shia were a heretical and miserably misguided sect whose loyalties lay with “the Persians”—the Shia in Iran. Unlettered Sunnis (as well as a good few who were educated) spread stories of how the Shia had forked tails hidden beneath their thobes and enjoyed unnatural sexual practices, notably at this time of year, when they would gather in their
husayniyas
(meeting rooms) to switch off the lights, strip off their clothes, and engage in writhing mounds of group sex. The resulting babies, many Sunnis believed, were then venerated by the Shia community and grew up to become their mullahs.

Wahhabi sheikhs regularly denounced the Shia as deviants in another, more theological fashion. They described the Shia as
rafada,
or “rejectionists” of the correct Islamic succession, since they had complicated God’s simple truth, introducing the first and most harmful innovation of all.

One of the very first people to become a Muslim was the Prophet’s bright young cousin Ali, who lived in the Prophet’s household and heard God’s teachings from an early age. Mohammed called him “brother.” When the clans of Mecca prepared their devilish plot to kill Mohammed, sending one assassin from each clan with a dagger, it was Ali who bravely rolled up in the Prophet’s blanket as a decoy, risking his own life to save Mohammed’s. When, eventually, the Muslims returned to Mecca in triumph, it was Ali who helped Mohammed open the door to the Kaaba to bring out the idols and smash them to smithereens.

Since the Prophet could neither read nor write, Ali wrote his letters for him. Mohammed gave Ali his favorite daughter, Fatima, in marriage, and at least one hadith suggests that the Prophet may have viewed his popular son-in-law as his successor. “Whoever recognizes me as his master,” Mohammed was heard to declare as he rested on his way back from his final pilgrimage, “will recognize Ali as his master.” When the Prophet died shortly afterward, in A.H. 10 (A.D. 632), Ali was entrusted with the job of washing his body and preparing it for burial.

But even as he was carrying out this sacred family duty, Ali was being marginalized by a hurriedly summoned conclave of Companions, who decided that Abu Bakr should become the first successor, or caliph, of the Prophet. Venerable and pious, Abu Bakr had been greatly loved by Mohammed, and he came from outside the Prophet’s family. Many of the Companions felt strongly that leadership of the faith should not become the property of one clan.

So young Ali lost out—he was still only in his early thirties—and he accepted the decision. One of this remarkable man’s remarkable qualities was acceptance. If anyone embodied submission, which is the literal meaning of the word
Islam,
it was Ali. He served Abu Bakr with loyalty, as he served the next two caliphs, Omar and Othman, even though his supporters maintained that he had been repeatedly excluded from the succession by sharp practice. For the Shiat Ali, the party or followers of Ali, it became a defining idea that the tradition of the Prophet could only be passed down adequately through the bloodline of Mohammed.

When Ali was eventually chosen as the fourth caliph, early in A.H. 36 (A.D. 656), he certainly manifested some of the Prophet’s charisma. He proved an inspiring leader of the
umma,
the Islamic community of believers, while also exhibiting bravery on the battlefield as he wielded his legendary fork-tongued sword, Zulfiqar.

“There is no hero but Ali,” became a Shia cry, “and no sword but his Zulfiqar!”

But this hero worship proved fatal. The multiple strands of the early Muslim world had already produced the earliest movement of Islamic dissent, the khawarij, literally “those who come out and depart.” It was less than thirty years since the Prophet had died, but already the Kharijites were complaining that the
umma
had departed from his ways. True Muslims, they believed, were confined to those who adhered strictly to the example of Mohammed, and they introduced a deadly new idea to Islam—
tak feer
(condemnation or excommunication): those who did not follow God’s word precisely were kuffar, infidels deserving of death. When Ali was killed by a Kharijite wielding a poisoned sword during Ramadan in A.H. 40 (A.D. 661), he became one of the earliest victims of Islamic terrorism.

“There is no authority except God, oh Ali,” cried his assassin, “not you!”

So, in the fortieth year after the Hijrah, Ali became the first martyr of the Shia, starting them down their emotion-laden path of sorrow and faith. This was infused with the sense of life being stacked against them—of having, somehow, been robbed—and it would reach its fulfillment twenty years later at the battle of Karbala in Iraq, to the south of Baghdad. Fought on Ashura, the tenth of Muharram, in A.H. 61 (A.D. 680), Karbala would be commemorated ever afterward at the Shias’ annual religious ritual of “the Tenth,” their tear-stained Good Friday with no Easter Resurrection to follow.

From their earliest years, young Shias imbibe every detail of Karbala, as surely as Christian children know the story of the three crosses on the hilltop. How Husayn bin Ali, Ali’s son by his marriage to Mohammed’s daughter Fatima, and hence the Prophet’s grandson, stood with just a few brave companions against the massive army of the caliph Yazid; how the enemy cut off their water; how Husayn implored their mercy, carrying out his infant son, dying of thirst, to be greeted by a hail of arrows that killed the boy; and how, finally, Husayn himself, sorely wounded and by now the sole survivor, mounted his horse, taking a Koran in one hand and a sword in the other, to ride into the merciless barricade of death, striking down dozens before he himself was eventually subdued.

The story of Karbala epitomized bravery, martyrdom, hopelessness, injustice—all the causes to which the Shia would relate their own bitter experience over the years. They were a persecuted religious minority, and in few corners of the Muslim world had they been persecuted as systematically as by the followers of Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab, who reserved special condemnation for the Shia. For Ibn Abdul Wahhab, the Shia adoration of Ali and Husayn, which went along with the veneration of tombs and shrines, represented the ultimate in
shirk
(polytheism) and called for takfeer—the sentence of death. Inspired by his teachings, the first Saudi army raided Al-Hasa in A.H. 1216 (A.D. 1802) to purge it of idols and shrines, then headed north to the ultimate Shia shrine, built on the battlefield of Karbala. They were responding to an Iraqi attack, and when they got to Karbala they made sure that they destroyed the tomb of Husayn.