As Osama careened toward violence in 1996, his family moved to strengthen its ties to America, and to hedge their bets. The Al-Saud, on the other hand, allowed their alliance with Washington to deteriorate. A shared antipathy to communism no longer bound Saudi Arabia to America. The rise of potent transnational Islamist ideology and jihadi violence, some of it supported by Saudi fundraising, presented a new divide. There were also more particular factors. Fahd’s sudden incapacitation was one—he had been the most pro-American king in Saudi history, by a considerable margin. At the Saudi embassy in Washington, Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime ambassador, had failed to strike up a successful relationship with Clinton; they were similar personalities, and they seemed to annoy each other. Bandar drifted into diplomatic irrelevancy, and his embassy, filled with Saudi bureaucrats from the religious and education ministries who did not speak much English, became an impediment to day-to-day communication between the two governments. In an astonishingly short time, the confident, risk-taking, back-of-the-envelope relationship that had prevailed between Washington and Riyadh during the Cold War and the Gulf war came to an end. In its place rose a muddled, mutually resentful engagement in which the top leaders of the two countries rarely spoke, while midlevel and cabinet-level officials fumed at one another over perceived slights and failures to cooperate.
Early in 1996, alarmed by Osama’s support for violent attacks against American and Arab targets, the CIA formed a new unit to track him. Michael Scheuer, its leader, as one of his first tasks, submitted a request to the Saudi government for basic information about Osama Bin Laden—his medical records, his birth certificate, if one existed, and copies of the residence permit and passport the government claimed it had previously seized from him. Scheuer never heard a word in reply. He soon concluded that the Saudi government should be regarded as “hostile” to the United States on the subject of Osama and his Islamist militia. That was the same terminology used at the CIA to describe the intelligence services of Cuba and Iran. “They refused to do anything to help us, or even to provide us the minimal information,” Scheuer said later. He and other CIA officers also thought it was possible that Osama had recruited sympathizers or followers inside the Saudi intelligence or security services. Equally, the Saudi services themselves, in Scheuer’s analysis, wanted from the very beginning of the violence Bin Laden inspired to protect themselves from American investigations into Saudi Arabia’s private collaborations with Osama in the past, dating back to the anti-Soviet Afghan war. “Bin Laden knows so much about who the Saudis dealt with during the Afghan war, how the mechanisms for moving money work,” Scheuer concluded. “They were protecting the royal family, they were protecting the skeletons in the closet from the Afghan war.” Scheuer also believed, as did Clinton’s counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke, that the Saudi government had authorized some of Osama’s adventures in South Yemen—that they were not the rogue jihadi operations later depicted by Prince Turki. This history, too, had to be shielded from the Americans, in Scheuer’s analysis.7
Scheuer did not want to share sensitive CIA information with the Saudis, for fear it would leak through to Osama. For their part, some of the Saudis felt the same way about the CIA. When they passed on information they regarded as sensitive, they, too, often read it in the American papers or heard it on CNN.
Prince Nayef, the interior minister, presented perhaps the greatest obstacle to trust and cooperation after Fahd’s stroke. Nayef was particularly hostile toward the CIA. During the 1970s, the CIA had presented him with a new desk for his office as a gift. Afterward, Nayef discovered a listening device on the desk. He had a long memory.8
32. THE AESTHETICS OF WORSHIP
CITIZENS OF SAUDI ARABIA made up a tiny percentage of the world’s Muslim population—less than 2 percent by the mid-1990s. The kingdom’s influence on Islamic thought, however, had become pervasive. Oil wealth and its missionary purchases—mosques built in poorer Muslim countries, salaried imams of the Wahhabi school to oversee those mosques, pamphlets and textbooks to instruct the young—explained some of its reach. Yet the number of Muslims individually touched even by this expansive proselytizing remained relatively small. Far more important to the lived experience of Islam by its faithful was the annual Hajj. When King Abdulaziz founded Saudi Arabia early in the twentieth century, a busy Hajj season might see fifty thousand pilgrims visiting the kingdom. The jet age, the oil boom, and the growth of middle-class Muslim populations in Asia and elsewhere meant that by the end of the 1990s, a typical number annually was about 2 million. The pilgrims all arrived at the same time of year and all went to the same places, Medina and Mecca, more or less simultaneously. They arrived, too, in a heightened state of spiritual awareness, if not longing or near-rapture. On this heavily preconceived yet richly emotional journey, millions of Muslims discovered and judged modern Saudi Arabia. It was a process about as reliable as the one by which Saudis discovered America through vacations in Disney World and west Los Angeles. But it was no less true or powerful, in either case, for being incomplete.
Well-educated, globally conscious Hajj pilgrims from poorer Muslim countries such as Egypt or India sometimes resented Saudi Arabia for two reasons: its garish, wasteful nouveau wealth, and its intolerant religious orthodoxy. To encounter for the first time the kingdom’s pre-stressed concrete modernity and its designer-label greed, all integrated with its insistent theological doctrines, could be unsettling. A pilgrim might approach Saudi Arabia aspiring to inner purity; what he found there could be polluted by banality.
“Through the window, I had my first glimpse of Medina—buses parked in rows and rows as far as the horizon,” recalled the Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi, who arrived on Hajj in the late 1990s. He made his way to the center of the city, where he encountered King Fahd’s “spectacular renovations” to the Prophet’s Mosque, carried out by the Bin Ladens. The floodlights and shiny brass fixtures awed him: “There it was in its immensity, with its minarets like giant chandeliers charging the sky. It seemed for a moment to be floating in the firmament.” And yet, when Hammoudi walked through the surrounding streets, in neighborhoods remade by Saudi modernization drives, he saw nothing of Medina’s rich architectural or religious history, only “shop windows and consumer displays”:
Carpets, caps, sheets, turbans, sandals, belts, watches, compasses, radios, tea sets, coffee sets, shirts, dresses, blankets, shoes, televisions, VCRs, computers, calculators, perfumes, incense, aromatic plants…elevators, air-conditioning, restaurants, cafeterias, ice-cream vendors, all American-style: self-service, cardboard plates and cups, plastic forks and knives, menus and prices displayed on neon-lit boards…“Modernity” ravaged everything.1
Inside the mosque, jostling in crowds for a glimpse of the Prophet Mohamed’s tomb, which lay in an unadorned chamber, Hammoudi spied the omnipresent Saudi religious police, who patrolled Medina with sticks so they could beat worshippers who dallied too long at the tomb or displayed excessive emotion there—signs of
They have brought the Koran and the Prophet’s example down to the level of a recipe book and consigned its implementations to militias…This was actually a form of modern totalitarianism, far closer to the defunct Soviet system than the constitution of Medina or to Bedouin informality. A merciless formula managed by technocrats with sophisticated means of communication and espionage, technique for daily intimidation, and a propaganda force that could recycle traditions and social pressures to its own benefit. In Medina, as elsewhere, it served us its exclusive version of the holy city. Its version and no other.2
Whose version, exactly? The theological framework belonged to the semi-independent Saudi religious establishment, subsidized by the royal family. Saudi Islamic scholars controlled much—but not all—of the religious rule making around the Hajj. (Left to their own devices, for example, Saudi Arabia’s ardently sectarian Sunni scholars would probably ban Shia from attending altogether, but the royal family, wishing to avoid a global confrontation, managed a compromise, under which Shia could come if they accepted certain quotas and constraints.) King Fahd shaped the Hajj’s physical environment. The architectural ambition of the two renovated
