The Looming Tower (27 page)

The prince laughed in disbelief. For the first time, he was alarmed by the “radical changes” he saw in bin Laden’s personality. He had gone from being “a calm, peaceful and gentle man” whose only goal was to help Muslims, to being “a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army to liberate Kuwait. It revealed his arrogance and his haughtiness.”

S
PURNED BY THE GOVERNMENT,
bin Laden turned to the clergy for support. His case against American assistance rested on the Prophet’s remark, as he lay dying, “Let there be no two religions in Arabia.” The meaning of this remark has been disputed ever since it was uttered. Prince Turki argued that the Prophet meant only that no other religion should dominate the peninsula. Even during the Prophet’s lifetime, he pointed out, Jews and Christians were traveling through Arabia. It was not until 641
C
.
E
., the twentieth year of the Muslim calendar, that Caliph Omar began removing the indigenous Christians and Jews from some parts of Arabia. They were resettled in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Since then, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina have been off-limits for non-Muslims. To bin Laden and many other Islamists, that wasn’t enough. They believed that the Prophet’s deathbed injunction is clear: All non-Muslims should be expelled from the entire peninsula.

Nonetheless, recognizing the danger that the foreign troops posed to their legitimacy, the Saudi government pressured the clergy to issue a fatwa endorsing the invitation of non-Muslim armies into the Kingdom on the excuse that they were defending Islam. This would give the government the religious cover it needed. Bin Laden furiously confronted the senior clerics. “This is inadmissible,” he told them.

“My son Osama, we cannot discuss this issue because we are afraid,” one of the sheikhs replied, pointing to his neck and indicating that his head would be cut off if he talked about the matter.

Within weeks, half a million American GIs streamed into the Kingdom, creating what many Saudis feared would be a permanent occupation. Although the Americans—and other coalition forces—were stationed mainly outside the cities in order to stay out of view, Saudis were mortified by the need to turn to Christians and Jews to defend the holy land of Islam. That many of these foreign soldiers were women only added to their embarrassment. The weakness of the Saudi state and its abject dependence on the West for protection were paraded before the world, thanks to the
1,500
foreign journalists who descended on the Kingdom to report on the buildup to the war. For such a private and intensely religious people, with a press that had been entirely under government control, the scrutiny was disorienting—at times both shameful and exhilarating. There was a combustible atmosphere of fear, outrage, humiliation, and xenophobia, but instead of rallying behind their imperiled government, many Saudis saw this as a one-time-only opportunity to change it.

At this awkward moment in Saudi Arabia’s history, with the world peering through the windows, Saudi progressives were sufficiently emboldened to press their modest agenda. In November, forty-seven women decided it was time to challenge the Kingdom’s informal ban on female driving. As it turned out, there was no actual law forbidding it. The women met in front of the Safeway in Riyadh and ordered their drivers out of their cars, then took a defiant fifteen-minute spin through the capital city. A policeman stopped them, but he had no legal reason to hold them. Prince Naif instantly banned the practice, however, and Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the chief cleric, helpfully added a fatwa, calling female driving a source of depravity. The women lost their passports, and several of them, who had been professors in the women’s college of King Saud University, were fired after their own female students protested that they did not want to be taught by “infidels.”

In December, reformers circulated a petition requesting an end to discrimination based on tribal affiliation, the establishment of a traditional council of advisors to the king (called a
shura
), more press freedom, the introduction of certain basic laws of governance, and some kind of oversight on the proliferation of religious fatwas.

A few months later, the religious establishment fired back with its own vehement “Letter of Demands.” It was an open bid for Islamic control of the Kingdom, containing a barely disguised attack on the predominance of the royal family. The four hundred religious scholars, judges, and professors who signed the letter called for strict conformity with the Sharia throughout society, including a ban on the payment of interest, the creation of an Islamic army through universal military training, and “purifying” the media in order to better serve Islam. The royal family was more shocked by this letter than by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Many of the demands of the religious dissidents echoed those of the leaders of the 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque. They became the basis of bin Laden’s political agenda for the Kingdom.

The American mission quickly grew from protecting Saudi Arabia to repelling the Iraqis from Kuwait. The war began on January
16,1991.
By then, most Saudis were resigned to the presence of the Americans and the troops of thirty-four other countries that formed the coalition against Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Kuwaiti citizens had taken refuge in the Kingdom, and they told affecting stories about the looting of their country; the kidnapping, torture, and murder of civilians; and the rape of Kuwaiti women by the Iraqi troops. When Iraqi Scud missiles began raining down, however fecklessly, on Riyadh, even the Islamists held their tongues. But to many Saudis, the presence of the foreign “crusaders,” as bin Laden characterized the coalition troops, in the sanctuary of Islam posed a greater calamity than the one that Saddam was already inflicting on Kuwait.

“Tonight in Iraq, Saddam walks amidst ruin,” President George H.W. Bush was able to boast on March 6. “His war machine is crushed. His ability to threaten mass destruction is itself destroyed.” Although Saddam remained in power, that seemed to be a footnote to the awesome display of American military force and the international coalition that rallied behind U.S. leadership. The president was exultant. With the fall of the Soviet Union followed by this lightning victory, American hegemony was undisputed. “We can see a new world coming into view,” Bush told Congress, “in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order…. A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.”

These words, uttered so hopefully, found a bitter audience in Osama bin Laden. He also wanted to create a new world order, one that was ruled by Muslims, not dictated by America and enforced by the UN. The scale of his ambition was beginning to reveal itself. In his fantasy he would enter history as the savior of Islam.

B
IN
L
ADEN WAGED
a high-level campaign to retrieve his passport. He argued that he needed to return to Pakistan in order to help mediate the civil war among the mujahideen, which the Saudi government was keenly interested in resolving. “There’s a role I can play,” bin Laden pleaded. Many prominent princes and sheikhs interceded on his behalf. Eventually, Prince Naif backed down and returned bin Laden’s travel documents, but only after making the nettlesome warrior sign a pledge that he would not interfere with the politics of Saudi Arabia or any Arab country.

In March
1992,
bin Laden arrived in Peshawar. In the three years since his departure, the communist government in Afghanistan had managed to hang on to power, but it was on the verge of being overrun. Rival mujahideen forces, led by Ahmed Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, were already engaged in a bloody struggle to determine who was going to seize power. The great powers that had chosen to use Afghanistan as a venue for the existential battle between communism and capitalism were notably absent in the chaotic aftermath of the war. Prince Turki hoped to establish a provisional government in Afghanistan that would unite the warring commanders and stabilize the country. He led the negotiations in Peshawar, along with Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

Worried about the influence of Iran on Afghanistan’s western border, Turki was inclined to support the more intransigent and fundamentalist Sunni elements, led by Hekmatyar. Bin Laden, on the other hand, attempted to play the role of the honest broker. He arranged a telephone conference call between Massoud and Hekmatyar, in which he begged Hekmatyar to come to the bargaining table. Hekmatyar was unyielding—knowing, no doubt, that he had Turki’s blessing. But, in the middle of the night, Massoud’s forces slipped into the city. The next morning, the surprised Hekmatyar furiously lobbed rockets into Kabul and began the siege of the capital. The Afghan civil war had begun.

By opposing Turki in the negotiations, bin Laden believed that he had crossed a line. He told some of his companions that Saudi Arabia had recruited Pakistani intelligence to kill him. The old alliances formed by the jihad were falling apart. He and Prince Turki were now deadly antagonists.

Before he left Afghanistan, bin Laden put on a disguise and checked into a clinic in Karachi for some unknown ailment. His doctor, Zawahiri, was in Yemen, but they would soon be reunited.

8

Paradise

A
LTHOUGH THE FIGHTING
never paused after the fall of Kabul, the curtain came down on the Afghan jihad. Some Arabs remained, caught up in the civil war, but most of them moved on. They were largely unwelcome in their home countries, which had perceived them as misfits and extremists even before they went to Afghanistan. These same governments had advertised for young men to go to jihad, and subsidized their travel, hoping that the troublemakers would bleed away in a doomed cause. Little thought was given to the prospect of thousands of these young men returning, now trained in guerrilla-warfare tactics and empowered by the myth of their victory. Like any returning warriors, they brought home psychological problems and memories that were difficult to live with. Even those who had little actual experience of combat were indoctrinated with the culture of martyrdom and
takfir.
They strutted around the mosque, often wearing Afghan garb to signal their special status.

Saudi intelligence guessed that between fifteen and twenty-five thousand Saudi youths trained in Afghanistan, although other estimates are far lower. Those who came back to the Kingdom were taken directly to jail for two or three days of interrogation. Some countries simply refused to let the fighters return. They became a stateless, vagrant mob of religious mercenaries. Many of them took root in Pakistan, marrying local women and learning to speak Urdu. Some went to fight in Kashmir, Kosovo, Bosnia, or Chechnya. The cinders of the Afghan conflagration were drifting across the globe, and soon much of the Muslim world would be aflame.

For those free-floating but ideologically charged veterans, a new home awaited them. In June
1989,
at the same time that the jihad was ending in Afghanistan, Islamists staged a military coup d’état against the civilian, democratic government of Sudan. The leader of the coup was Brigadier General Omar Hasan al-Bashir, but the prime mover was Hasan al-Turabi, one of Africa’s most complex, original, charismatic, and devious characters.

Like bin Laden and Zawahiri, Turabi attributed the failures of the Arab world to the fact that its governments were insufficiently Islamic and too dependent on the West. But unlike those other men, Turabi was a Quranic scholar who was well acquainted with Europe and the United States. A Sudanese student in
1960,
he wandered across America, staying with ordinary families—“even with Red Indians and farmers”—an adventure that would inform his piercing critique of secularism and capitalism. He had gained his master’s degree in law from the London School of Economics in 1961 and a doctorate in law from the Sorbonne in Paris three years later.

Turabi envisioned the creation of an international Muslim community—the
ummah
—headquartered in Sudan, which would then spill into other countries, carrying the Islamist revolution in an ever-widening circle. Sudan, until then a cultural backwater in the Muslim world, would be the intellectual center of this reformation and Turabi its spiritual guide. In order to carry out this plan, he opened the doors of his country to any Muslim, regardless of nationality, no questions asked. Naturally, the people who responded to his invitation tended to be those who were welcome nowhere else.

The government of Sudan began its courtship of bin Laden by sending him a letter of invitation in
1990,
and followed it up by dispatching several members of the Sudanese intelligence service to meet with him. Essentially, he was being offered an entire country in which to operate freely. At the end of that year, bin Laden sent four trusted associates to investigate the business opportunities that the Sudanese government had promised. Turabi dazzled these representatives with his erudition, and they brought back an enthusiastic report. “What you are trying to do, it is Sudan!” they told bin Laden. “There are people with minds, with professions! You’re not mixing with the goats.”

Soon, another bin Laden emissary appeared in Khartoum with a bundle of cash. Jamal al-Fadl, a Sudanese member of al-Qaeda, rented a number of houses and bought several large parcels of land that would be used for training. Al-Jihad was already in Sudan, and Zawahiri personally gave Fadl $
250,000
to buy a farm north of the capital. The neighbors began complaining about the sound of explosions coming from the untilled fields.

As an additional inducement, the Saudi Binladin Group got the contract to build an airport in Port Sudan, which brought Osama frequently into the country to oversee the construction. He finally moved to Khartoum in
1992,
flying from Afghanistan with his four wives and—at that point—seventeen children. He also brought bulldozers and other heavy equipment, announcing his intention to build a three-hundred-kilometer road in eastern Sudan as a gift to the nation. The leader of Sudan greeted him with garlands of flowers.