The Secret Soldier

combining the glory of Islam with the might of the state. Wisely, Saud never demanded religious leadership for himself, leaving that role to Wahhab.

With the Wahhabis as his soldiers, Saud conquered the central Arabian peninsula. After he died, his sons followed. By 1810, the Sauds controlled most of Arabia. Then the Turkish army used modern weapons to roll them back. In 1818, the Turks captured Riyadh and brought Abdallah, Saud’s great-grandson, to Istanbul, where he was executed. For the rest of the nineteenth century, the House of Saud remained in oblivion.

Then it roared back.

In 1902, Abdul-Aziz, Saud’s great-great-great-great-grandson, took Riyadh in a surprise attack. At the time, Abdul-Aziz had only a few dozen soldiers. But over the next two decades, he followed the same playbook as his eighteenth-century ancestors, harnessing religious zeal to conquer Arabia. The Ikhwan— Arabic for “brothers”—formed the core of his army. The Ikhwan were Bedouin so religious that they disliked even looking at non-Muslims, and they massacred their enemies without remorse. Abdul-Aziz could barely control them, but their brutal reputation helped him. Opposing cities surrendered to him without fighting on the condition that he keep the Ikhwan away.

In 1924, Abdul-Aziz’s forces took Mecca. The following year, he reached Jeddah and the Red Sea, completing his conquest of the Arabian peninsula. For the second time in two centuries, the House of Saud ruled Arabia. But the Ikhwan were not ready to quit fighting. Their leaders turned against Abdul-Aziz, saying that he had allied with the British and was insufficiently religious. But Abdul-Aziz no longer needed the Ikhwan. He built a new army from more loyal tribes. Using machine guns and cars from the British, he put down the rebellion. And in September 1932, he officially created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Its flag was the same green banner that Sauds had fought under since the eighteenth century.

ABDUL-AZIZ DIED IN 1953. His sons had ruled ever since, inheriting the world’s biggest fortune. As oil prices soared in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia became one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The princes’ wasteful ways became legendary in Europe, but plenty of money stayed inside the Kingdom. A Saudi saying held, “If you didn’t become rich during the days of King Khalid”—who ruled from 1975 to 1982—“you will never be rich.” By 1979, the average income in Saudi Arabia was higher than in the United States.

The windfall didn’t last. In 1982, a glut of oil caused the price of crude to plunge. For most of the next two decades, it stayed below twenty dollars. The Saudi economy cratered. The princes still lived richly, but by 2000 the average Saudi made just one-fifth as much as the average American.

Then another oil boom began, as demand for oil soared in China and India. Prices rose and rose, topping a hundred forty dollars a barrel in 2008. Even after the recession of 2009, a barrel of crude traded around eighty dollars. At that price, Saudi Arabia earned almost a billion dollars a day selling oil. Every two months, the House of Saud raked in as much cash as Bill Gates had earned in his entire life. Of course, most of that money went to keep the government running. All Saudis received free education and health care. Gasoline was heavily subsidized. And the Kingdom had no income taxes.

Even so, at least fifty billion dollars remained every year for the family to divide. Every prince received a stipend. Third- and fourthgeneration princelings got $20,000 to $100,000 a month. Senior princes received millions of dollars a year. At the top, Abdullah and the other sons of Abdul-Aziz had essentially unlimited budgets. Abdullah’s Red Sea palace complex in Jeddah had cost more than a billion dollars.

While the princes prospered, the new boom didn’t help average Saudis as much as the original one had. The Kingdom’s population had quadrupled since 1980 to twenty-five million. The economy had not created enough jobs to keep pace. Even though almost no women worked, millions of Saudi men were unemployed. Making matters worse, Saudi men considered blue-collar work to be beneath them. Despite the chronic unemployment, five million Indians, Egyptians, and other immigrants worked in the Kingdom as drivers, janitors, and laborers, jobs that Saudis wouldn’t take.

The frustration among ordinary Saudis flowed into the only channel that the government allowed — militant Islam. The centuries-old pact between Wahhabi clerics and the House of Saud remained essential to the family’s claim to rule. Saudi kings called themselves Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques because control of Mecca and Medina provided their ultimate legitimacy. Without Islam, Saudi Arabia was just another dictatorship.

To keep religious leaders satisfied, the Sauds spent tens of billions of dollars supporting Islam. The princes rebuilt the giant mosques at Mecca and Medina, subsidized the hajj, and paid for religious schools around the world. But the clerics wanted more than money. They wanted women in burqas, and strict penalties for anyone caught drinking alcohol or having illicit sex. Like Abdul Wahhab, their spiritual father, they wanted to govern Saudi Arabia as though they were still in the seventh century. They were the most fundamental of fundamentalists.

During the 1970s, the Saudi government had moved away from this vision of Islam. Cigarettes were sold openly. Even alcohol was quietly tolerated. State-run television broadcasts featured female newscasters. Girls’ schools were created. Then, in 1979, a Bedouin named Juhayman — Arabic for “the scowler”—led hundreds of rebels in a takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Ironically, the rebels had defied an important Quranic decree that forbade fighting in Mecca. Juhayman believed that he could ignore the decree because he had found the Mahdi, the true successor to Muhammad. Juhayman promised the Mahdi would establish a new Muslim empire and defeat armies of Christians and Jews.

The takeover staggered the Saudi government. Police and National Guard units tried to retake the mosque, but the rebels repelled them. A siege began. The government imposed a news blackout, but it could not prevent reports of the attack from spreading worldwide.

Besides tactical incompetence, the government had a serious problem: the prohibition on fighting near the mosque. Before the army could attack in force, the Sauds needed approval from a council of Wahhabi clerics. To win them all, the princes pledged that they would roll back the liberalizations of the 1970s. Finally, four days after the siege began, the clerics issued a fatwa, a religious ruling, ordering the rebels to surrender. With that approval, the Saudi army attacked with thousands of men. The mosque caught fire during the ensuing battle — the equivalent of open war inside St. Peter’s or at the Wailing Wall. Only the Kaaba, the sacred stone at the center of the shrine, remained undamaged.

The rebels retreated into rooms and corridors beneath the mosque. For a week, soldiers struggled to clear them. On December 3, advised by French special forces soldiers, they dumped potent tear gas into the basement. After a final day of fighting, they captured the last rebels. Two weeks after it began, the siege ended. Witnesses estimated that more than one thousand soldiers, rebels, and civilians died, though an accurate death toll was never released.

Outside of Saudi Arabia, the siege was quickly forgotten. But inside, its effects were profound. The implicit support it had received from senior clerics pushed the House of Saud sharply right. As it had promised, the government restricted women’s education, gave new powers to the religious police, and promoted jihad in Afghanistan.

A GENERATION AFTER THE siege of the Grand Mosque, Saudi Arabia ran like a medium-security prison. Sex outside marriage was forbidden and dangerous. Questioning the monarchy’s right to rule was a crime. Culture and the arts hardly existed. Women couldn’t drive, or even have identity cards, unless their husbands agreed.

Since becoming king in 2005, Abdullah had taken small steps to rein in the religious police. But the changes were mostly cosmetic. Political parties were still outlawed, women still couldn’t drive, and state-funded clerics still preached war against Israel and the West. Saudi Arabia was among the most repressed places on earth. Its main public spaces were malls, mosques — and the squares where drug dealers and murderers were beheaded.

These rules didn’t bother the princes, of course. The Kingdom’s laws applied only loosely to them. As for average Saudis, since they couldn’t legally protest, no one knew if they were happy with the strictures they faced. The satellite dishes that speckled nearly every house suggested otherwise. So did the angry discussions in Internet chat rooms.

On the other hand, nearly half of Saudis married their cousins, closing ranks against outsiders in the most basic way. Many believed devoutly that the Quran was the word of Allah and that non-Muslims would spend eternity in hell. Even now, the loudest protests in the Kingdom came not from reformers but from fundamentalists.

WHEN HE FINISHED READING, Wells could see the Kingdom much more clearly.