the late spring of 1958. Bin Laden formed a joint venture with two Italian brothers named Roma who gave the impression—incorrectly, as it turned out—that they had financial support from one of Italy’s largest construction companies. Faisal offered a twenty-year barter plan in which Bin Laden would carry out highway construction and other work in exchange for natural gas from the American-run oil fields. At this time, Aramco flared off the gas from its fields because it was difficult to transport and market; the consortium’s priority was oil. The Roma brothers believed they could sell the kingdom’s gas in Europe, generating enough money to profitably finance Faisal’s planned infrastructure projects. These included more than fifteen hundred kilometers of highway construction that would link Riyadh to Jeddah, and Jeddah to the southern port of Jizan, as well as a new university in Riyadh.27
The deal proved to be contentious. Aramco executives believed the natural gas belonged to them; Faisal argued that the kingdom owned it. The Roma brothers feared the dispute would jeopardize Bin Laden’s highway contracts, to which they had pledged $5 million in financing.
In September, Faisal summoned Bin Laden and the Italians to his Taif palace. Bin Laden and Faisal spoke at length in Arabic, after which Bin Laden turned to the Romas to assure them that the crown prince was convinced the natural gas was his, and that “Aramco could not impede [the] completion [of] needed public works, providing jobs [to] many workers,” as would be made possible by Bin Laden’s deal.28
Bin Laden and Faisal needed each other. There were other merchant families in the kingdom who were building up experience in construction and light industry, but if the crown prince were to make a convincing start on a national development program, he needed Bin Laden’s large store of construction equipment, his army of semiskilled and unskilled laborers, and his irrepressible habit of saying Yes, Your Majesty, it can be done. For his part, Bin Laden had no choice but to adapt to Faisal’s priorities and terms. The crown prince’s fiscal austerity drive had ended the palace and housing boom in Jeddah by 1959. Thousands of Yemeni laborers left the city in search of jobs elsewhere as a local recession took hold; local merchants grumbled that Faisal’s reforms might be “good for the country, but not for a merchant class brought up and nourished on the lush profits of ‘the good old days.’” Bin Laden, however, evaded the brunt of this downturn. As before, he had adapted as required to serve the royal family; if highways and infrastructure were now the priority of the day, then they would become his priority, too.29
He was cushioned as well by another patron. By the late 1950s, Mohamed Bin Laden was not only Faisal’s favored contractor. In the three holiest cities of Islam—Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem—he was also blessed, as he put it, by the favor of God.
5. FOR JERUSALEM
THE DECLINE of the Roman Empire produced as much disarray in the deserts of Arabia as it did in the barbarian-ravaged forests of Europe. Rome’s late emperors promoted Christianity as a universal creed, but their decrees proved unconvincing along the camel caravan routes to the east. In the late fifth century A.D., religious faith in Arabia had evolved into a vibrant plurality. There were Jewish and Christian communities, but many Bedouin worshipped portable idols, trees, and stones. A family in an oasis town might rely upon any one of several hundred deities to bless its endeavors; there were moon gods and travel gods and swirling narratives of celestial deities. One organizing force was the entrepreneurialism of religious festival sponsors, particularly those around Mecca, which lay about halfway along one of the great camel routes of the frankincense and myrrh trade. Meccan impresarios divined that a single unified religious fair held once a year, at which all gods would be welcome, might attract more attention—and produce more income—than a looser system of seasonal events. The annual ritual that became the Hajj after the birth of Islam began as a raucous devotional attraction involving hundreds of gods.1
At the time of the Prophet Mohamed’s birth, in 570, the Ka’ba, or “Cube,” then a flat stone structure with no roof, served as a temple for some of the more popular deities. It contained “pictures of trees and pictures of angels,” according to the Meccan historian Al-Azraqi, as well as a drawing of Jesus and his mother, Mary, and an image of Abraham as an old man. At the annual Mecca festival, pilgrims who worshipped diverse gods joined in a ritual walk around the edifice. One of the deities then recognized in the Hejaz—a god of gods, not represented by a fixed idol—was named Allah. Even before he received the Koranic revelations, Mohamed developed a conviction that Allah was the one true God, and that the hundreds of other idols worshipped locally were false.2
In Koranic tradition, Abraham is credited as the Ka’ba’s creator. In this account, while visiting his son Ishmael in Mecca, God ordered Abraham to build a temple devoted to His oneness. As Mohamed received his revelations, he preached for the restoration of Abraham’s plan. His sermons provoked resistance from Meccan tribal leaders and elders, who seemed to view the Prophet, himself an active businessman, as a sort of anti-capitalist spoiler, one whose ideas could, in particular, ruin their lucrative festival. Meccan opposition forced Mohamed into exile, to the town later named Medina, where he found political support. He prevailed in a series of battles and returned to Mecca in triumph. He entered the Ka’ba and, according to Al-Azraqi, “he asked for a cloth which he soaked in water, and ordered all the pictures to be erased.” With this act Mohamed created an Islamic aesthetic rooted in the eradication of the multihued religious images of his Meccan youth. In the last years of his life Mohamed also announced the detailed new rules of the Hajj, one of the five pillars of the religion that Allah had revealed to him; this annual ritual’s crushing crowds, drawn from around the world, would soon belie the earlier skepticism of Mecca’s festival merchants.3
Islam expanded from Spain to Indonesia; a succession of dynasties ruled Mecca. Egyptian and Ottoman princes took the Hejaz and managed the Hajj after the thirteenth century. They often did so in a style that recalled the pre-Islamic festivals—there were marching bands and opulent parties, and a conspicuous emphasis on profiteering, which caused the reputation of Meccan merchants to fall so low that fleeced pilgrims referred to them as “the dogs of the Hejaz.” When the Wahhabi movement first rose in the Nejd desert in the late eighteenth century, its warriors saw themselves as purifiers in Mohamed’s name; as the Prophet had done, they would rescue Mecca from idolaters. Theirs was a desert world of parched deprivation and intense kin unity that had rarely been penetrated by other cultures. They shocked Mecca’s cosmopolitan pilgrims:
You must imagine a crowd of individuals, thronged together, without any covering than a small piece of cloth around their waist…being naked in every other respect, with their matchlocks upon their shoulders, and their khanjears or large knives hung to their girdles. All the people fled at the sight of this torrent of men…They had neither flags, drums nor any other instrument or military trophy during their march. Some uttered cries of holy joy, others recited prayers in a confused and loud voice.4
The Wahhabis destroyed every dome and tomb in the city; their scholars regarded much existing Islamic architecture as heretical, apart from the flat-roofed Ka’ba and mosques constructed in a similar design. Egyptian soldiers eventually drove the Wahhabis away and destroyed their featureless capital in Riyadh, but under the more durable leadership of Abdulaziz, the Islamic militias returned to Mecca in 1924. Again they tore down domes and attacked foreign pilgrims who lingered too long at decorated historical shrines, which the Wahhabis regarded as false temples.
Abdulaziz sought Mecca for its tax receipts and its prestige. He adhered to Wahhabi precepts, but he had no particular interest in the endless scholarly arguments in Riyadh about the status of every last curved roof and revered historical tourist site in his expanding kingdom. As with other aspects of his statecraft, Abdulaziz sought a synthesis: he appeased the Islamic radicals who gave him soldiers and legitimacy, yet he tried not to alienate the Ottoman subjects whom he had inherited. The king’s Wahhabi militias, for instance, wanted to tear down the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, where Mohamed had preached during his exile; they saw it as a kind of heretical tourist trap. Abdulaziz recognized that its destruction would be deeply unpopular and would also crimp the pilgrim trade. He settled on a compromise in which the Wahhabis were allowed to take off the mosque’s dome but were otherwise required to leave it be, and to accommodate its thronging crowds. As a contemporary traveler put it, the king gained credit from the Wahhabis “for having allowed the dome to be demolished, and credit from the foreign Hajjis for protecting the place from complete demolition.”5 This would become a basis for Saudi management of Mecca and Medina in the ensuing decades. The Wahhabi aesthetic would predominate, but it might,
