Prince Nayef, the interior minister, presented perhaps the greatest obstacle to trust and cooperation after Fahd’s stroke. Nayef was particularly hostile toward the CIA. During the 1970s, the CIA had presented him with a new desk for his office as a gift. Afterward, Nayef discovered a listening device on the desk. He had a long memory.8
32. THE AESTHETICS OF WORSHIP
CITIZENS OF SAUDI ARABIA made up a tiny percentage of the world’s Muslim population—less than 2 percent by the mid-1990s. The kingdom’s influence on Islamic thought, however, had become pervasive. Oil wealth and its missionary purchases—mosques built in poorer Muslim countries, salaried imams of the Wahhabi school to oversee those mosques, pamphlets and textbooks to instruct the young—explained some of its reach. Yet the number of Muslims individually touched even by this expansive proselytizing remained relatively small. Far more important to the lived experience of Islam by its faithful was the annual Hajj. When King Abdulaziz founded Saudi Arabia early in the twentieth century, a busy Hajj season might see fifty thousand pilgrims visiting the kingdom. The jet age, the oil boom, and the growth of middle-class Muslim populations in Asia and elsewhere meant that by the end of the 1990s, a typical number annually was about 2 million. The pilgrims all arrived at the same time of year and all went to the same places, Medina and Mecca, more or less simultaneously. They arrived, too, in a heightened state of spiritual awareness, if not longing or near-rapture. On this heavily preconceived yet richly emotional journey, millions of Muslims discovered and judged modern Saudi Arabia. It was a process about as reliable as the one by which Saudis discovered America through vacations in Disney World and west Los Angeles. But it was no less true or powerful, in either case, for being incomplete.
Well-educated, globally conscious Hajj pilgrims from poorer Muslim countries such as Egypt or India sometimes resented Saudi Arabia for two reasons: its garish, wasteful nouveau wealth, and its intolerant religious orthodoxy. To encounter for the first time the kingdom’s pre-stressed concrete modernity and its designer-label greed, all integrated with its insistent theological doctrines, could be unsettling. A pilgrim might approach Saudi Arabia aspiring to inner purity; what he found there could be polluted by banality.
“Through the window, I had my first glimpse of Medina—buses parked in rows and rows as far as the horizon,” recalled the Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi, who arrived on Hajj in the late 1990s. He made his way to the center of the city, where he encountered King Fahd’s “spectacular renovations” to the Prophet’s Mosque, carried out by the Bin Ladens. The floodlights and shiny brass fixtures awed him: “There it was in its immensity, with its minarets like giant chandeliers charging the sky. It seemed for a moment to be floating in the firmament.” And yet, when Hammoudi walked through the surrounding streets, in neighborhoods remade by Saudi modernization drives, he saw nothing of Medina’s rich architectural or religious history, only “shop windows and consumer displays”:
Carpets, caps, sheets, turbans, sandals, belts, watches, compasses, radios, tea sets, coffee sets, shirts, dresses, blankets, shoes, televisions, VCRs, computers, calculators, perfumes, incense, aromatic plants…elevators, air-conditioning, restaurants, cafeterias, ice-cream vendors, all American-style: self-service, cardboard plates and cups, plastic forks and knives, menus and prices displayed on neon-lit boards…“Modernity” ravaged everything.1
Inside the mosque, jostling in crowds for a glimpse of the Prophet Mohamed’s tomb, which lay in an unadorned chamber, Hammoudi spied the omnipresent Saudi religious police, who patrolled Medina with sticks so they could beat worshippers who dallied too long at the tomb or displayed excessive emotion there—signs of shirk, or forbidden worship of idols. Elsewhere in the city, these police patrolled cemeteries, historical battlefields, and Shiite shrines to prevent unauthorized prayers or other displays of fervor by the deviant or the nostalgic. For centuries, under previous dynastic rulers, culminating in the Ottomans, Medina had tolerated and, indeed, cultivated Islam’s global diversity of belief and practice; in Saudi Arabia, Hammoudi concluded, the dominant creed was propagated with all the subtlety of a bulldozer:
They have brought the Koran and the Prophet’s example down to the level of a recipe book and consigned its implementations to militias…This was actually a form of modern totalitarianism, far closer to the defunct Soviet system than the constitution of Medina or to Bedouin informality. A merciless formula managed by technocrats with sophisticated means of communication and espionage, technique for daily intimidation, and a propaganda force that could recycle traditions and social pressures to its own benefit. In Medina, as elsewhere, it served us its exclusive version of the holy city. Its version and no other.2
Whose version, exactly? The theological framework belonged to the semi-independent Saudi religious establishment, subsidized by the royal family. Saudi Islamic scholars controlled much—but not all—of the religious rule making around the Hajj. (Left to their own devices, for example, Saudi Arabia’s ardently sectarian Sunni scholars would probably ban Shia from attending altogether, but the royal family, wishing to avoid a global confrontation, managed a compromise, under which Shia could come if they accepted certain quotas and constraints.) King Fahd shaped the Hajj’s physical environment. The architectural ambition of the two renovated holy cities—bigger, better, shinier, ringed by condominium towers and shopping malls, and under surveillance by security cameras—reflected the same spirit Fahd had brought during the early 1980s to the refurbishment of his Boeing 747. Among other things, his ideas about urban planning seemed to express a “deliberate desire to erase the past,” as Hammoudi put it. This was partly another bow to his religious establishment, who tended to view all of the schools of Islamic art and architecture between the Prophet’s death and their arrival in the Hejaz in the 1920s as illegitimate. There was also a more general disinterest among the Saudi royal family about historical preservation and archaeology. The design sensibility that evolved during the Mecca and Medina projects of the late 1980s and mid-1990s—one that evoked Disney, Mall of the Americas, and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel chain—originated with Fahd but also came in substantial part from the Bin Ladens, and particularly from Bakr, who looked after the Fahd account in Riyadh and took a close personal interest in the holy city work. Among other compulsions, these renovation projects had become, by 1995, the largest single source of revenue for the Mohamed Bin Laden Company: Fahd’s total spending in Mecca and Medina during this period has been estimated at $25 billion. That may have been an exaggeration designed to impress Muslim publics, but the contracting work—all handled on a sole-source, no-bid basis by the Bin Ladens—certainly ran into many billions of dollars.3
Before his stroke, when King Fahd visited the construction sites in Mecca and Medina, Bakr steered him around at the wheel of a white golf cart, a form of transport that only reinforced the Florida-derived vision they seemed to share. At the University of Miami during the early 1970s, Bakr had studied basic architecture on a campus full of mid-century white concrete boxes, in a state where the cutting edge of the spectacular tourist destination built for international crowds was Disney’s Epcot Center—a place, like renovated Mecca, that advertised itself as a microcosm of global diversity, lit up in floodlights and neon. It was also America, and particularly humid Florida, that pressed upon Saudi elites the apparent correlation between national progress and the spread of air-conditioning, an imperative that Fahd and the Bin Ladens carried at considerable expense to Mecca and Medina.