Inside the Kingdom by Robert Lacey Read Free Book Online Page B

they were supposed to be fighting: rumors ran the gamut from Iranians to the CIA or Israeli agents. It turned out that the grand ulema could help with that as well.

    The religious sheikhs held a regular meeting with their monarch every Tuesday. It was broadcast on the TV news, with Bin Baz, blind-eyed and head cocked heavenward, seated in the place of honor beside the king. In theory, the ulema disapproved of television. But since it existed, they judged themselves a better subject for the screen than more trivial fare such as cartoons. Now, as they shuffled hurriedly over the plush carpeting of the Maazar palace in Riyadh, they had more unpleasant realities to confront.
    They already knew exactly who had taken the Grand Mosque. The cleric whom Juhayman had jostled aside that morning to seize the microphone had been the respected Sheikh Mohammed ibn Subayl, principal imam of the Mosque and one of the teachers at whose feet Juhayman and his followers once sat in earlier, more submissive days. Ibn Subayl had recognized his former pupils with dismay, and knew all about the Salafi cause they had served. He had taken refuge in his office to telephone the news to his colleagues. Later, jettisoning his gold-trimmed cloak and wrapping his headdress around his shoulders in the fashion of foreigners, he had managed to escape from the Mosque in a group of Indonesian pilgrims. Juhayman was keeping Arabs inside the Mosque as conscripts for the Mahdi’s army, but he had given orders to release non-Arabic speakers, who would not understand what he or the Mahdi were saying.
    King Khaled wanted guidance from the sheikhs. What should his soldiers be doing? Every Muslim knew the rules against violence in God’s house—that was what made the action of these violators so shocking. So was it permissible for Saudi troops to attack the kidnappers with guns and bombs inside the haram (holy place), with all that implied for damage to the Mosque?
    The religious sheikhs, who included Bin Baz, played for time. Neither then, nor ever since, has any Saudi cleric admitted the slightest responsibility for the monster that, Frankenstein-like, they had nurtured in Juhayman. But their long delay in condemning him and his latter-day Ikhwan suggested deep embarrassment. The ulema granted the king an emergency fatwa (judgment) to take “all necessary measures” to “protect the lives of Muslims inside the mosque.” Then they sat down for three full days to ponder the detailed measures to be taken against the pious young men they had once blessed as their missionaries.

    Mahdi Zawawi saw two women sauntering in the deserted Mosque courtyard with rifles. He could not believe his eyes. He was one of the helicopter pilots flying patrols over the haram, peering down on the rebels from a thousand feet. The women were dressed in black and totally veiled—with bandoliers crisscrossed over their robes, and automatic weapons in their hands.
    “They were very tall,” he remembers. “And they were carrying themselves proudly. It was quite a sight—two women, scarcely anyone else, walking slowly round the Kaaba, talking to each other and wearing pistols in their belts! Those bedouin wives . . .”
    Zawawi was flying at too great an altitude to see any more—or to hear the tak-tak-tak coming from the snipers in the minarets. When he got back to his base in Taif, in the mountains above Mecca, he discovered that a bullet had pierced his fuselage. The hole it made was less than half an inch from the fuel tank.

    Down on the ground, meanwhile, a lull had descended. Events were proceeding in a curiously haphazard fashion.
    “I went over as a spectator,” remembers Khaled Al-Maeena, then working as a sales director for Saudi Airlines in Jeddah. “I could see the snipers up in the minarets taking potshots. Beside me were some Yemenis who’d arrived wearing their white pilgrim towels. They knew nothing about the trouble. The government had blanked out the news for the