The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [85]
LIFE IN SAUDI ARABIA had always been marked by abstinence, submissiveness, and religious fervor, but the reign of the muttawa stifled social interaction and imposed a dangerous new orthodoxy. For centuries, the four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence—Hanafi, Maliki, Shafei, and Hanbali—were taught and studied in Mecca. The Wahhabis ostensibly held themselves above such doctrinal divisions, but in practice they ruled out other interpretations of the faith. The government forbade the Shia, who form a substantial minority in Saudi Arabia, from building new mosques or expanding existing ones. Only Wahhabis worshipped freely.
Not content to cleanse its own country of the least degree of religious freedom, the Saudi government set out to evangelize the Islamic world, using the billions of riyals at its disposal through the religious tax—zakat—to construct hundreds of mosques and colleges and thousands of religious schools around the globe, staffed with Wahhabi imams and teachers. Eventually, Saudi Arabia, which constitutes only 1 percent of the world Muslim population, would support 90 percent of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam.
Music disappeared in the Kingdom. Shortly after the 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Umm Kalthoum and Fayrouz, the songbirds of the Arab world, were banished from the Kingdom’s television stations, which were already dominated by bearded men debating fine points of religious law. There had been a few movie theaters in Saudi Arabia before the mosque attack, but they were quickly shut down. A magnificent concert hall was completed in Riyadh in 1989, but it never hosted a single performance. Censorship smothered art and literature, and intellectual life, which had scarcely had the chance to blossom in the young country, withered. Paranoia and fanaticism naturally occupy minds that are closed and fearful.
For the young, the future in this already joyless environment promised even less than the present. Only a few years earlier, Saudi Arabia had been on its way to becoming the wealthiest country, per capita, in the world, thanks to the bounty of its oil wealth. Now the declining price of oil crushed such expectations. The government, which had promised jobs to university graduates, withdrew its guarantees, creating the previously unknown phenomenon of unemployment. Despair and idleness are dangerous companions in any culture, and it was inevitable that the young would search for a hero who could voice their longing for change and provide a focus for their rage.
Neither a cleric nor a prince, Osama bin Laden assumed this new role, even though there was no precedent for such an independent agent in the Kingdom. He offered a conventional, Muslim Brothers critique of the plight of the Arab world: The West, particularly the United States, was responsible for the humiliating failure of the Arabs to succeed. “They have attacked our brothers in Palestine as they have attacked Muslims and Arabs elsewhere,” he said one spring night in the bin Laden family mosque in Jeddah, just after evening prayers. “The blood of Muslims is shed. It has become too much…. We areonly looked upon as sheep, and we are very humiliated.”
Bin Laden wore a white robe with a gauzy camel-colored cloak draped over his shoulders. He spoke in a sleepy monotone, sometimes wagging his long, bony index finger to make a point, but his manner was relaxed and his gestures were limp and wan. Already, the messianic stare into the middle distance that would characterize his later pronouncements was on display. Before him hundreds of men sat cross-legged on the carpet. Many of them had fought with him in Afghanistan, and they sought a new direction in their lives. Their old enemy, the Soviet Union, was falling to pieces, but America did not seem to offer such an obvious substitute.
At first, it was difficult to grasp the basis of bin Laden’s complaint. The United States had never been a colonial power, nor for that matter had Saudi