As with the interest accumulating in his Swiss bank account, there is no evidence that he was burdened by pangs of conscience over the profits he earned from his family’s wartime work for the Americans, even as he lectured in the Bin Laden mosque near Kilo 7 and denounced American foreign policy. He was flirting with rebellion but was unable yet to embrace it fully. He postured as a dissenter but he avoided the most serious risks. His views were nuanced, changeable, and laced with contradictions.
THE ARRIVAL OF American soldiers in the kingdom in late 1990, at a time when democratic revolutions were erupting worldwide, provoked the most vigorous and open debate about political freedom and identity in Saudi Arabia since the Nasser period. Urban liberals, particularly women, seized upon this seeming Riyadh Spring. In November, forty-seven women attracted worldwide attention—and shocked many Saudis—by staging a protest in which they climbed into automobiles in Riyadh and drove through the city in open violation of the kingdom’s ban on female drivers. In early 1991, forty-three liberal-leaning businessmen, journalists, university professors, and former government officials signed a petition to King Fahd asking for ten political reforms. It was a relatively timid list and stopped far short of demands for a democratic order, but in Saudi terms, it was bold: the petition sought new councils to widen political participation, reform of the religious police, and “greater participation of women in public life, within the scope of the sharia.”15
This modest liberal uprising confirmed the deep-seated fears of Saudi Islamists that the royal family’s alliance with America, and particularly its decision to invite American troops into the kingdom, would become a lever for a top-down push by the Al-Saud toward a more secular society. Widely circulated underground tape-recorded sermons and lectures voiced these hysterical warnings throughout that autumn and winter. Two conservative university professors, Safar Al-Hawali and Salman Al-Awda, issued particularly fiery speeches arguing that the kingdom’s real enemy was not Iraq, but the West. Another influential voice belonged to Awad Al-Qarni, author of a 1987 book titled Modernity on the Scale of Islam, which insisted the royal family and its secular allies were promoting alternative forms of national identity that undermined the Koran. The conservative ferment intensified after the women’s driving protest; Islamist leaflets listed the female drivers by name, as well as the names of their husbands, and denounced the women as “communist whores.”16
The Islamists also gathered signatures for their own petition to King Fahd demanding political reforms. They shared the liberals’ desire for greater participation but crafted an agenda to direct reforms toward even stricter adherence to Islamic law.
Abdulaziz Al-Gasim, a conservative judge in the sharia courts and a leader of the Islamist petition drive, who would later go to prison, sought out Osama Bin Laden in Jeddah in early 1991 to persuade him to add his signature to the cause. As the son of a Hadhrami immigrant with no formal education in Islam, Osama was not a significant figure in the Saudi world of dissident Islamist scholarship, but his martial reputation as a mujaheddin leader in Afghanistan and his membership in a prominent merchant family made him a potentially attractive fellow traveler. “He apologized and refused to sign,” Al-Gasim recalled. “He said he was very busy with Afghanistan and Yemen. He was supporting the ideas [in the petition draft] but he didn’t want any conflict with the Saudi government and lose support for his activities. He didn’t want to start another war. He was not convinced that these goals could be achieved in a peaceful way.”17 Some Islamists in Saudi Arabia, justifying their meek resistance to corrupt governance by the royal family, had long cited their desire to avoid fomenting fitna, or Koranically undesirable internal division within the Islamic community; Osama relied upon the same rationale that winter.
One night, Osama joined a rooftop dinner meeting in Jeddah where exiled Kuwaiti guests talked about their travails and asked for support, recalled Jamal Khashoggi, who attended. When his turn came to speak, Osama voiced a fear that America had a secret plan to use its presence in Saudi Arabia to “secularize Saudi Arabia, and to make a dramatic change in its regime or the way it ruled by imposing a president and ministers who are secular,” as Khashoggi recalled it. Osama specifically named Ghazi Al-Ghosaibi, the suit-and-tie-clad Saudi ambassador to Great Britain, as a candidate for this imposed leadership. Al-Ghosaibi, Osama predicted, would reform curriculums in school to spread secular ideas, “encourage women to take off their hejab,” and “spread corruption through arts and opening up society.” By Khashoggi’s account, Osama concluded his remarks with a warning:
Be aware. Be careful. We have to be united and rally around the Saudi leadership in order not to be weak against this determined secular campaign, that is no doubt coming with American support, that already has some people and some agents—a fifth column in Saudi Arabia. There are a lot of Saudis who are ready to serve the American alienation project, which will alienate Saudis from their religion.18
In one sense, Osama’s views remained as they had been since he was fourteen: where Muslims live, they should aspire to a pure society based upon Islamic principles. He remained deeply unsettled, however, about how to chase this ideal within Saudi Arabia. The presence of American troops and presumed secular conspiracies worried him, but his faith in the Al-Saud and his own family restrained him. In communist-influenced lands, such as Syria, South Yemen, and Afghanistan, violent jihad could be embraced because it seemed the only alternative. In Saudi Arabia, the situation looked more complicated. Among other things, Osama continued to accept the essential claim of the Al-Saud that they were righteous and legitimate guardians of Islam’s birthplace—the claim from which the Bin Laden fortune was derived.
THE SWIFT and overwhelming rout of Iraqi forces from Kuwait by American-led coalition troops infused King Fahd and the royal family with pride, relief, and confidence. Fahd exacted immediate revenge against those Arab governments and entities that had supported Saddam—particularly Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Yemen. Tens of thousands of Palestinian and Yemeni workers were expelled from the kingdom. On the domestic front, amid the general sense of relief that accompanied the war’s end, Fahd seemed to have a divided mind; he thought some mild political reforms might assuage his subjects, but he and his brothers also sought to ensure that wartime ferment did not lead to postwar revolution. As the weeks passed after Iraq’s surrender, petitioners on both the left and right were fired from their jobs, and some were imprisoned. To all of those who had doubted or needled Saudi Arabia in its season of crisis, the royal family offered an unmistakable message: we are back with a vengeance.
Osama Bin Laden left the kingdom on May 1, 1991, by his own account, less than two months after the end of the war. The circumstances surrounding his departure remain somewhat unclear. He was not forced out, according to Bakr Bin Laden. Through one of his half-brothers—apparently not Bakr—Osama pleaded to the interior ministry that he needed a one-time exit visa to travel to Pakistan to liquidate investments there. The best evidence suggests that he was genuinely uncertain of his plans—that he wanted to reunite with the Al Qaeda followers he had left in Afghanistan but was ambivalent about returning to the Afghan civil war. While in Jeddah during the war, Bin Laden had dispatched followers from Afghanistan to Sudan to rent farms and guesthouses there. Later, using a donation from an Egyptian lawyer, he bought a farm north of Khartoum for $250,000, according to a Sudanese aide. During the same period, according to Khalil A. Khalil, who tracked Islamists for the Saudi government, Osama “spent some time trying to find a tribe” in Yemen “where he could marry a daughter and win the tribe’s allegiance. He worked on this for about eighteen months to establish himself—first in a social context, then to bring his fighters to the south of Yemen…There was speculation that he had weapons in the United Arab Emirates and also investments and businesses there. The framework he was exploring was Yemen first, for the jihad army, and UAE as a base for media and economic activities.”19