King Faisal, who reigned from 1964 to 1975, wasn’t a feckaround playboy like his predecessor or many of his successors. He understood the leverage Saudi Arabia’s oil gave him, and once the state started buying more ownership of Aramco, Saudi Arabia became richer and more powerful than ever before. He became a hero in the Arab world for bringing the West to its knees during the 1973 oil embargo, and as the money flowed in he built skyscrapers, hospitals, TV stations, and, most importantly, schools.
The rapid development upset some members of Saudi Arabia’s religious elite, who thought that the modern world Faisal was bringing to the kingdom would cause the masses to forget the fundamentals of their very strict form of Islam. Faisal made them a deal: Development would continue, but the schools he was building would be staffed by teachers from the most conservative of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Though the Brotherhood’s interpretation of Salafism differed from that of the Saudis’ Wahhabism, Faisal needed teachers, and this was the only arrangement that would satisfy those who feared popular abandonment of conservative values.
Not even a king can please everyone. One day in late March, 1975, Faisal was conducting majils, an Arab custom where one opens one’s home to guests—in this case, citizens petitioning the king on the types of things constituents might ask their members of Congress. Unfortunately for Faisal, one of those citizens was his nephew Prince Faisal bin Musaid. Prince Faisal’s brother, Prince Khaled, had been killed by a cop during an anti-secularism protest a month prior. When the king rose to embrace his nephew, Prince Faisal shot him through the chin and the ear. The king died that night.
Four years after Prince and King Faisal were put in their unadorned graves, King Faisal’s half brother Khalid was king, and another grand humiliation occurred.
For the two weeks between November 20 and December 4, 1979, Mecca’s Grand Mosque, which surrounds Kaaba (the holiest site in Islam where pilgrims venture to during the Hajj), was seized by an armed group who, not for the first or last time in the history of armed groups in the Gulf, believed they were following the Mahdi (the prophesied “Redeemer” in the Koran who arrives to govern earth for a few short years before the Day of Judgement).
Like many violent would-be religious rulers, this was mostly a group of rich kids. Juhayman al-Otaybi, the ringleader (but not the declared Mahdi—that would be his brother-in-law Mohammad), came from one of the city of Najd’s most powerful families. His grandfather was one of Ibn Saud’s riders, and probably saw T.E. Lawrence commit some act of sexual psychosis.
Juhayman, like so many who have been handed everything in life, believed there was a point where his country had gone down the wrong path—secularism—and that he knew how to make things great again, through some combination of his brother-in-law’s status as the Mahdi and more brutal repression of women.
Juhayman and his hundreds of followers beguiled Saudi forces. Even after scores of their ranks had been killed, the survivors used a system of tunnels underneath the Grand Mosque to hide from Saudi Army and National Guard troops. Flustered, King Khalid called in special forces operators from France’s elite GIGN and Pakistan’s SSG.
There’s some disagreement over who actually went in and got the last holdouts to surrender, as an indiscriminate volley of tear gas and explosive grenades killed several of Juhayman’s hostages, but it was ultimately foreign forces who won back the Grand Mosque for the Saudis.
It was mortifying in every aspect. Saudi monarchs felt they had allowed pilgrims to be killed, and had to resort to foreign troops, some of them not even Muslim, to do their dirty work. The religious hardliners had brought them to their knees, and made them look foolish in front of a world that just six years prior buckled under the strength of their oil embargo. So even while surviving members of the raiding party were swiftly beheaded, those in the kingdom that shared their views (aside from the specific belief that some minor rich kid was the Mahdi) were rewarded. The upper management of the royal family, from King Khalid on down, decided that reifying religious authority and social conservatism was the only way to maintain their grip on power.
This could be read as chickens coming home to roost. In the 18th century, the Saud clan adopted Muhammad al-Wahhab’s fundamentalist strand of Sunni Islam in return for his troops’ loyalty in their conquest of the peninsula. After consolidating their power, the Sauds turned machine guns on their own most fervent holy warriors. In the 20th century, the Sauds gave them a blank check.
Remember the ‘80s? As Americans alternately vacuumed up cocaine and purchased indulgences from huckster televangelists, Saudi Arabia experienced its own money-soaked religious revival, all thanks to al-Saud’s embrace of precisely the sort of people who’d killed their king and took their mosque. If you were a preacher in 1980s Saudi Arabia, there’s nothing you could say that was too out there, so long as you respected management. Rallies were held against the concept of photographs, television, anything, really. Meanwhile, with domestic piety at historic highs, the General Intelligence Directorate, the nation’s chief intelligence body, was burning through hundreds of millions of dollars funding armed groups abroad, buying them weapons and bringing them to the light of Wahhabism.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of the agency at the time, was one of the higher-ups who decided that they needed to feed the hand that bit them in 1979. During his tenure, Turki made insurgents out of Afghans, Pakistanis, Chechens, Dagestanis, and anyone else who could be of some use against a regional enemy. He also discovered that wealthy radical Saudis, the kind who could rally groups of armed men to strike against his family but were too important to be disappeared without charges, could be put to similar use. The most notorious of these types was Osama bin Laden, but there were several others. To this day, there are rich Saudis dicking around in Syria, living out their twisted sense of noblesse oblige by locking Alawite women in cages, beheading children, and occasionally killing soldiers loyal to the Syrian Ba’ath Party, one of Saudi Arabia’s current enemies. For wealthy Saudi families, potential problem sons are best seen abroad starring in hostage videos, not heard at home protesting your opulence, hypocrisy, and inability to follow every single tenet of Muhammad Ibn al-Wahhab.
