The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [91]
At this awkward moment in Saudi Arabia’s history, with the world peering through the windows, Saudi progressives were sufficiently emboldened to press their modest agenda. In November, forty-seven women decided it was time to challenge the Kingdom’s informal ban on female driving. As it turned out, there was no actual law forbidding it. The women met in front of the Safeway in Riyadh and ordered their drivers out of their cars, then took a defiant fifteen-minute spin through the capital city. A policeman stopped them, but he had no legal reason to hold them. Prince Naif instantly banned the practice, however, and Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the chief cleric, helpfully added a fatwa, calling female driving a source of depravity. The women lost their passports, and several of them, who had been professors in the women’s college of King Saud University, were fired after their own female students protested that they did not want to be taught by “infidels.”
In December, reformers circulated a petition requesting an end to discrimination based on tribal affiliation, the establishment of a traditional council of advisors to the king (called a shura), more press freedom, the introduction of certain basic laws of governance, and some kind of oversight on the proliferation of religious fatwas.
A few months later, the religious establishment fired back with its own vehement “Letter of Demands.” It was an open bid for Islamic control of the Kingdom, containing a barely disguised attack on the predominance of the royal family. The four hundred religious scholars, judges, and professors who signed the letter called for strict conformity with the Sharia throughout society, including a ban on the payment of interest, the creation of an Islamic army through universal military training, and “purifying” the media in order to better serve Islam. The royal family was more shocked by this letter than by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Many of the demands of the religious dissidents echoed those of the leaders of the 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque. They became the basis of bin Laden’s political agenda for the Kingdom.
The American mission quickly grew from protecting Saudi Arabia to repelling the Iraqis from Kuwait. The war began on January 16,1991. By then, most Saudis were resigned to the presence of the Americans and the troops of thirty-four other countries that formed the coalition against Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Kuwaiti citizens had taken refuge in the Kingdom, and they told affecting stories about the looting of their country; the kidnapping, torture, and murder of civilians; and the rape of Kuwaiti women by the Iraqi troops. When Iraqi Scud missiles began raining down, however fecklessly, on Riyadh, even the Islamists held their tongues. But to many Saudis, the presence of the foreign “crusaders,” as bin Laden characterized the coalition troops, in the sanctuary of Islam posed a greater calamity than the one that Saddam was already inflicting on Kuwait.
“Tonight in Iraq, Saddam walks amidst ruin,” President George H.W. Bush was able to boast on March 6. “His war machine is crushed. His ability to threaten mass destruction is itself destroyed.” Although Saddam remained in power, that seemed to be a footnote to the awesome display of American military force and the international coalition that rallied behind U.S. leadership. The president was exultant. With the fall of the Soviet Union followed by this lightning victory, American hegemony