Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [66]
I first visited Saudi Arabia during the fasting month of Ramadan, prepared for even greater holiday inconvenience than non-Muslims encountered in Egypt—no eating in plain view until after sundown, dry throats, and the gassy stomachs of midnight feasts, everybody jagged and jonesing for nicotine and caffeine. But in pious Saudi Arabia, I learned, Muslims follow the letter of the daylight fast while subverting the spirit. They sleep all day and start work at sundown, when eating is no longer haram. I couldn’t make calls until five in the afternoon, and sources offered appointments at two in the morning.
And so one lost night I slumped limply on a hotel sofa as the clock neared three a.m., screwing my eyes open to interview a lawyer known for his links to Saudi insurgents. He’d brought along a man with a big hammy face and bushy beard frazzled orange with henna. Redbeard, it turned out, was a veteran of the Afghan jihad. He told me about how he’d been sent to Afghanistan, a warrior in the Saudi-American project to fight the USSR with Islamic fundamentalism. Back then, he told me, his government and my government had been on the right track. “The government betrayed herself,” he snarled.
“So what did you think of September 11?” I asked him.
He spread his face into a grin and showed me a thumbs-up.
“I hope it is repeated every second,” he said deliberately. “And I enjoy the picture of the falling Trade Center every time it’s shown on TV.”
Veterans of Afghan jihad had molded Saudi society and made holy war trendy, and their ideologies festered until they eventually helped birth September 11. Now Iraq seethed and boiled next door, and Saudi clerics whispered of jihad in Fallujah and Ramadi, and all that rage turned against the Saudi government itself, the corrupt, filthy, apostate government that had sold its soul to Washington and let Western infidels roam the Land of the Two Holy Shrines. And all the while, the Saudi-American friendship marched forward.
Saudi Arabia was always, to me, the place that most maddeningly displayed the mystery of jihad. People got radicalized in Gaza City, where they lived like rabbits in a squalid little cage while Israeli settlers rolled past on private highways to beachfront homes. They got radicalized in Afghanistan, where war was printed on the landscape, and in Baghdad, where a foreign occupation unleashed deep political fears of disenfranchisement. On a human level, all of that made sense; there was a logical scheme that you could follow.
In Saudi Arabia, it was rich boys and men, nestled in material comfort in a sovereign country, railing about how their brutally Islamic government wasn’t Islamic enough. In Jalalabad or Gaza, people stood in the street and told you how they felt. In Saudi Arabia, radicalism was tamped down behind obfuscations. It was packaged in fancy cars and expensive sunglasses; hidden behind the high walls of mansions. They didn’t spread it out and say, this is what it is, and this is why it is. The heart of jihad looked as smooth and American as anyplace I could ever imagine, full of Saudis who had studied in Kentucky and Wisconsin and Americans enthusing about the wonderful Saudi hospitality. And they didn’t trust each other at all. There was a place where the East and the West joined, and that place was the dark slick rush of oil money. It was in the greed of Americans and the cold calculations of Saudis.
The rules are different in Saudi Arabia. The same U.S. government that drummed up public outrage against the Taliban by decrying the mistreatment of Afghan women goes to Saudi Arabia and keeps its mouth shut. McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks make women stand in separate lines. Hotels like the InterContinental and Sheraton won’t rent a woman a room without a letter from a company vouching for her ability to pay; women checking into hotels alone are regarded as prostitutes. Saudi Arabia is still the place where America colludes, where we have quietly decided