On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (30 page)

The government monitors mosques, schools and universities, Internet chat rooms, religious lectures, and all phone communication in Saudi Arabia. Still, with Internet usage by young Saudis growing at a rapid rate (from half a million to nearly 10 million users between 2000 and 2010), along with the number of radical Web sites, from roughly fifteen in 1998 to thousands now, the opportunity for the young to become seduced by terrorist recruiters expands exponentially. Al Hadlag says most of the radical Web sites are hosted in the West and cannot be shut down by the Saudi government, so the government tries to block them. Roughly 35 percent of Saudis’ requests for Internet sites are blocked, he says, but most of those blocked requests, he adds, are for pornography; only 2 percent are for radical Web sites. Extremists, he says, have new ways to get around Web site blocks. Furthermore, the extremist theoreticians have issued fatwas allowing radical recruiters to do whatever it takes to appear “normal” and thus avoid detection. For instance, he says, fatwas endorse extremists trimming their beards, wearing Western clothes, and even carrying pornographic magazines in their luggage to avoid appearing religious and arousing suspicion.

Terrorism requires men, money, and mind-set, Al Hadlag says, so the government is focusing on all three. On the first, the government approach is ruthlessly to kill the leaders and to treat the foot soldiers and their families as victims, offering these young Saudi terrorists cars, education, jobs, and wives. Obviously, money is plentiful in Saudi Arabia, where cash is as ubiquitous as credit cards are in the West. “It is common for men to have seven thousand Saudi riyals [roughly $1,800] in their
thobe
pocket at any given time,” says Al Hadlag, “so it is hard to control who gives donations to whom when three million people pass through Mecca for Hajj every year and return around the world.” But he insists that despite America’s continued criticism of Saudi Arabia for insufficient efforts to control terrorist financing, the kingdom is doing all it can. “Please tell us what else we can do,” he says.

Mind-set is the hardest issue to tackle. “A mind isn’t a building you can destroy,” he says. “Nor can you see what is inside the mind.” To understand and reprogram the minds
of terrorists, the government created the rehabilitation center. It is a thirty-minute drive from Riyadh and largely hidden from public view. A right turn off the highway at a Lebanese restaurant takes one down a poorly lit road that soon ends at a large complex of buildings, surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire. Inside are dormitories where the “beneficiaries” live and then three public buildings: a large tent for receiving visitors, an adjacent house for dining, and a tent used for art therapy.
The men, who live here for four to six months, also have a library and sports facilities and meet regularly with religious sheikhs and psychologists. Ironically, such facilities are unavailable in the wider society, where the young lament the dearth of anything to occupy their time.

That isn’t the only irony. Here the “beneficiaries” are encouraged to talk openly and discuss candidly their religious, social, and family issues. But, in the larger Saudi society, individuals—especially the young—are trained to hide their feelings, to act and think in harmony with the social norm, to listen and obey. Here the young beneficiaries are taught not to trust that a religious appearance signifies a righteously religious man. Yet, ironically, Saudi society is built around the concept that appearance is reality. What is unacceptable isn’t what you do in private but how you appear in public. Furthermore, beneficiaries are encouraged to take responsibility for their decisions, actions, and lives, which is at odds with the larger societal stricture of just-do-as-the-religious-say and subsume individual responsibility to social conformity.

Nowhere is the irony more pronounced than in the art course that is part of the rehabilitation program. Awad al Yami, who is head of art therapy, was educated at Purdue University and received his Ph.D. in art therapy in 1995 from Penn State. “
Art in Saudi Arabia is typically devoid of human beings or living things,” says Dr. Al Yami. “The idea isn’t expression but appreciation of the perfection of Allah’s creation.” Here, however, the idea of art
is
expression—to find out what is in the minds of those undergoing rehabilitation. Even the bearded religious sheikh who works with the so-called beneficiaries waxes positive about art. “It is expression
that helps vent feelings and discover the beauty in life through imitation of beautiful things,” he says.

Al Yami points to a painting of a brown road with a black sky; in between are telephone poles with lines strung to connect them. “Those poles and lines are like bars showing this man’s mind is still in prison,” he says. He points to another drawing of a blue sky with a sun in the left corner and in the center a brown tent with a fire in front of it. “This man is ready to welcome me in for a talk,” he explains.

Al Yami tells the story of a group of prisoners who painted a mural on the wall of the rehabilitation center. It depicted a man squatting on a black-and-white cell floor with his knees drawn to his chest and his feet shackled. Above him outside the cell was a flame with the words “Make your imprisonment a candle that lights your life.” The prisoners went home to see their families, as they are allowed to do regularly during their stay in the rehabilitation center. When they returned, they wanted to destroy the painting by tearing down the wall, he says, a sign of their hostility to prison. Finally they agreed to whitewash it. First they blotted the shackles, then the admonition to use their prison time wisely, and finally they whitewashed the entire mural. Dr. Al Yami insists this was a sign they wanted to erase their prison lives and rejoin society. What the West has to hope is that the rehabilitation process is more than a whitewash. Only Allah, of course, truly knows what is in the minds of rehabilitated young terrorists.

The idea of individual expression—through art or anything else—is truly foreign to Saudis. So this intense effort to listen to young Saudis who chose terrorism and to encourage their honest expression is one that might pay far greater dividends in prevention if applied to the society as a whole. That thought, however, is not on the minds of the Al Saud.

As government efforts to monitor and eliminate terrorism have gained ground, terrorist recruitment has simply gone underground. “
When radicalism goes underground, it becomes ever more difficult to study,” says Thomas Hegghammer, author of the thoroughly researched book
Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism Since 1979.
Fluent in
Arabic, this senior fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment studied almost eight hundred Saudi militants and their paths to terrorism. Unlike in the 1980s and 1990s, when Islamic leaders like Bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri (the Egyptian medical doctor who is one of the leading architects of contemporary radical Sunni Islam) could recruit followers openly, Hegghammer writes, recent recruitment is more private and subtle, leading many recruits to believe the decision was their own.

“
No one recruited me in Mecca,” one young detainee told his captors. “I met a man who told me about the idea of
Jihad
 … He gave me money and put me on a plane to the Arab Emirates first going to Pakistan. He didn’t train me or anything like that. He just gave me the idea about fighting,” Hegghammer quotes him as saying.

Because mosque sermons now are monitored, radical sheikhs and other religious zealots engage individuals in Mecca during Hajj or Ramadan, or during semi-informal religious group meetings, such as religious camps or evening assemblies of young men in
istirahat
, rented guest houses, where the young (and sometimes Saudi families) can gather in privacy.

While the regime has expended enormous resources to eliminate or convert terrorists inside the kingdom—both because security in exchange for loyalty is the implicit pact between the Al Saud and Saudis and because the regime feels directly threatened by terrorists—the government has been far less forceful in combating terrorism against Western infidels, which for now is the primary focus of Al Qaeda. In the past, Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri and other leaders have argued over how much to focus on the “
near enemy” (corrupt Arab regimes) and how much to focus on the “distant enemy” (the West’s infidel regimes). Al Zawahiri favored the former and Bin Laden the latter.

Al Zawahiri, who went to Saudi Arabia in 1984 after he was freed from an Egyptian prison for playing a supporting role in the murder of Anwar Sadat, often is called the “brains” of Al Qaeda. A jihadist from age fifteen, he is dedicated to
reestablishing an Islamic caliphate by eliminating both the corrupt Islamic leaders and the Western infidels who preserve their leadership.

“
Liberating the Muslim community, attacking the enemies of Islam and waging a
jihad
against them require a Muslim authority, established on Muslim territory, that raises the banner of
jihad
and rallies Muslims around it,” he wrote in one of his many exhortations to the faithful, this one entitled
Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner.
“If we do not achieve this goal, our actions will be nothing more than small-scale harassment and will not bear fruit—the restoration of the caliphate and the departure of the invaders from the land of Islam.”

Islam’s enemies, as defined by Al Zawahiri, are Jews, Christians, and Muslims who associate with them, especially the Saudi royal family. Relying on the Koran’s words “
Take not for friends unbelievers rather than believers,” Al Zawahiri builds the case for separation from Jews and Christians. “God said: ‘O you who believe! Take not into your intimacy those outside your ranks.’ ” In this verse, according to Al Zawahiri, “
God prohibited believers taking unbelievers, Jews, and heretics as advisers or from trusting them with money. It is said that you must not speak to anyone whose creed or religion is different from yours.”

Because the Al Saud regime ultimately depends on the United States for its protection and preservation while presiding over Islam’s two holiest sites, the Saudi regime is a key target of international jihadists. “
We saw the noblest of dynasties placing itself in the service of American interests while claiming to defend monotheism; we saw impious imams imposing secular constitutions, judging on the basis of positive law and rushing to normalize relations with Israel, while supervising
Quran
memorization competitions,” Al Zawahiri writes, in a clear reference to the Al Saud family.

As for the United States, its sin is not only supporting the Al Saud regime but believing in and promoting democracy. “
Democracy is a new religion,” he writes. “In Islam, legislation comes from God; in a democracy this capacity is given
to the people. Therefore, this is a new religion based on making the people into gods and giving them God’s rights and attributes. This is tantamount to associating idols with God … Sovereignty in Islam is God’s alone; in a democracy, it belongs to the people.”

The Saudi regime walks a fine line between discouraging extremism—to assuage its American protectors and to protect itself—and openly attacking this radical reading of Islam, since the regime’s legitimacy rests on protecting and propagating puritanical Islam. Small wonder then that only in 2010, some seven years after bloody attacks by terrorists began inside the kingdom, did the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia issue a fatwa condemning terrorism and declaring “any act of terrorism, including providing financial support to terrorists, is a crime.” Even then his focus seemed as much on protecting the reputation of Islam as on protecting innocent victims from terrorism. “
Terrorism is criminal and spills the blood of innocents,” Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al Ashaikh acknowledged, according to the Saudi Press Agency. “It attacks security, spreads terror among people and creates problems for society.” He went on, however, to deplore its damage not so much to the victims of terrorism as to Islam’s reputation: “It is necessary to fight the attempts of some to attach terrorism to Islam and Muslims with the goal of distorting the religion and assailing its leadership role in the world.” But what of the victims?

Efforts to plot terrorist attacks continue inside Saudi Arabia and around the world, though in recent years most have been disrupted before their successful execution. While Bin Laden is now dead, Al Zawahiri remains at large, presumably along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Anwar al Awlaki, a young English-speaking imam and terrorist leader born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and residing in Yemen, skillfully used the Internet to recruit and radicalize young Muslim men in the West to murder their fellow citizens, until a U.S. drone attack killed him in 2011. But the deaths of Bin Laden and Al Awlaki have not ended the threat level—or tension—between Islam and the West.

While many in the Islamic world and in the United States perceive a clash of civilizations, Islam is and historically has been far too divided to support this simple analysis—unless the West were to do something seen as so hostile to Islam that radicals could rally the wider Islamic world into a convulsive backlash against it. Terrorist leaders like Bin Laden and Al Awlaki surely sought to incite such an act. Dr. Al Hadlag, the Saudi official monitoring the ideological strategies of terrorist groups, says Al Qaeda would like to do something inside Saudi Arabia that would prompt the U.S. military to return to the kingdom. (All U.S. forces withdrew to other Gulf countries in August 2003.) He believes one target is Abquiq, the site in eastern Saudi Arabia through which Saudi oil passes for processing en route to the coast for loading on ships for export to the world. The destruction of Abquiq would cripple Saudi oil exports and thus, terrorists calculate, could trigger massive U.S. intervention—with or without Al Saud invitation—to protect vital Saudi oil facilities from further terrorist attacks. In 2006, terrorists drove two explosive-laden cars through a side gate at the facility, but both were blown up by security guards at the gate, according to Dr. Al Hadlag.
More terrorist cells, picked up inside Saudi Arabia since, also have targeted oil facilities.