The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [50]
IN THE EARLY MORNING of November 20, 1979, Turki received a summons from King Khaled, his father’s successor. Turki was in Tunis with Crown Prince Fahd, attending the Arab Summit. Turki was thirty-four years old, and he was about to face the biggest crisis in the brief history of Saudi Arabia.
That morning at dawn, the aged imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, Sheikh Mohammed al-Subayil, had been preparing to lead the prayers of fifty thousand Muslims gathered for the final day of hajj. As he approached the microphone, he was shoved aside, and a burst of gunfire echoed in the holy sanctuary. A ragged band of insurgents standing among the worshippers suddenly pulled rifles from under their robes. They chained the gates closed, trapping the pilgrims inside, and killed several policemen. “Your attention, O Muslims!” a rough-looking man with an untrimmed beard cried. “Allahu akhbar!”—God is great—“The Mahdi has appeared!”
“The Mahdi! The Mahdi!” the armed men cried.
It was New Year’s Day of the Islamic year 1400—the bloody inauguration of a turbulent new century. In some of the disputed oral traditions of Islam, the Mahdi (“the one who guides”) will appear shortly before the end of time. The concept of the Mahdi is a controversial one, especially in Wahhabi Islam, since this messiah is not mentioned in the Quran. Tradition says that the Mahdi will be a descendant of the Prophet and will carry his name (Mohammed bin Abdullah), and that he will appear during the hajj. Eventually, Jesus will return and ask his people to adhere to Islam. Together, Jesus and the Mahdi will fight the Antichrist and restore justice and peace to the earth.
The man claiming to be the Mahdi was Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani, but the real leader of the revolt was Juhayman al-Oteibi, a fundamentalist preacher and former corporal in the National Guard. The two men had been imprisoned together for sedition, and it was during that time, Oteibi claimed, that God had revealed to him in a dream that Qahtani was the Mahdi.
Qahtani was persuaded by Oteibi’s dream that he must be the chosen one. When the two men got out of prison, he married Oteibi’s sister. Soon they began attracting followers with their messianic message, especially young theology students from the Islamic University in Medina, a center of Muslim Brothers radicalism. Thanks to donations from wealthy adherents, Oteibi’s disciples were well armed and trained. Some, like Oteibi himself, were members of the Saudi National Guard, which is charged with protecting the royal family. Their goal was to seize power and institute theocratic rule, in expectation of the rapidly approaching apocalypse.
Jamal Khalifa, who was living in bin Laden’s house at the time, used to see Oteibi and his followers preaching in different mosques, often making blunders in their recitations of the Quran. Bin Laden would have seen them as well. People were stunned to hear them speaking openly against the government. They even tore riyals in half because the bills bore the picture of the king.
These were unheard-of actions in a country that was so strictly controlled; and yet there was an ingrained reluctance on the part of the government to confront religious extremists. At some point, members of the ulema cross-examined Oteibi and Qahtani to discover any signs of heresy, but they were let go. They were seen as rustic throwbacks to the Ikhwan fanatics, the shock troops of King Abdul Aziz; indeed, Oteibi was the grandchild of one of those men. No one imagined that they posed a real threat to the established order.
Just before