Ahmed was aghast. He put both hands on the table, almost as if to steady himself. “Brother, these were all mistakes of the Sauds. That way leads to stagnation or worse. Surely the people will not support this in the election.”
Abdullah said nothing, then looked into Ahmed’s eyes. “They also do not want to have the election, or perhaps only one election ever, to approve their rule. Only approved Islamic scholars would be allowed to vote after that.”
“One man, one vote, one time,” Ahmed said softly, almost to himself.
“What?” his brother asked.
“It is what the Americans said about the elections in Algeria: only men could vote, and they would only be allowed to vote once — they would give up their right to ever vote again. That cannot happen here!” Ahmed said.
“The Americans!” Abdullah spit. “The Americans think democracy solves everything. It took them over a hundred years to allow all their people to vote, the poor, women, the blacks. Has it solved their problems? They waste so much time and fortune in their elections. It is a game to them and they never stop playing at it. And are their results so different? We overthrew hereditary rule here. They still have it: fathers followed by sons, wives seeking to replace husbands.
“They have three hundred twenty-five million people and how many ruling families?” Abdullah asked, waving his hand. “Do they not have poverty, do they not make their people pay for doctors, for university, in the supposedly richest country in the world?
“Then they think they are so superior that they must reshape the Arab world in their ghastly image. How? By bombing our cities, killing our women and children? Locking up our people forever? Raping them?” Abdullah said, repeating a rant Ahmed had heard before.
“With respect, it is not about our becoming like the Americans,” Ahmed responded. “It is about what was promised to our people: more freedom, more progress, more opportunity, participation, ownership of their country.” Ahmed was using phrases that he had heard his brother use before the revolution. “It is about not being like the Sauds. They held back our people by spending the people’s oil money exporting their Wahhabist view of Islam, which many of our own people do not follow. They spent it buying expensive arms from the Americans, the British, the French, the Chinese. They threw away our sisters’ skills and closed the doors to their secret family meetings.
“Did you, brother, fight, and did you take lives, so that some new Sauds could arise to keep our people as second-class citizens?”
Abdullah was staring at him, but Ahmed could not stop. He had wanted to say things like this to him for so long. “Yes, I have lived in North America, but I have also been to Germany and Singapore, to medical conferences in China and Britain. Things are invented there. Technology and pharmaceuticals. What have we invented in the last thousand years? The world is leaving us behind because we have tied this Wahhabist brick around our ankles. Our scholars study only the Koran, which is good, but we need only so many Koranic scholars in a generation.”
Ahmed pulled a blue book from beneath his robe. “This UN report is by Arabs. It is about how we measure up to the rest of the world. Not well. The winners in the modern world are knowledge societies, countries that put an emphasis on learning, sharing information, doing research.
“Look at these numbers,” he said, paging rapidly. “Two percent of our people have Internet access, compared with ninety-eight percent in Korea. Five books are translated into Arabic a year per million people, compared with nine hundred translated into Spanish. Even in our own language, we publish only one percent of the world’s books. One out of five books published in Arabic is on religion. We spend less than one-third of one percent of our GNP on research. Maybe this explains why one out of four of our university graduates leave the Arab world as soon as they can. We do not create knowledge; we do not import knowledge. We import finished goods. This is not the way of the modern world, which is leaving us in the dust.
“You can be modern and Islamic. The Islamic scientists I met in Canada, Germany, and America are devout. Islam is the fastestgrowing religion in America! No one prevents Muslims there from following the teachings of the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him. Besides, the Prophet never taught that we should convert or kill the Christians and Jews. And if we tried, even if we took centuries, we would only devastate this little planet in the process. Does Allah want that? The nuclears, if we get them, will cause the ruin of our country.
“If you let these people on the council have their way, we will continue to be slaves of our own oil, able to do nothing but watch as what Allah put in the ground comes out of it. And the money we get from it will continue to be wasted in supposedly ‘religious’ follies. We are not a country, we are an oil deposit! And if that is all we are, others will come, the scorpions will come for their food, their precious black liquid. They will keep us enslaved, buying everything we need from them, including weapons which we do not need.
“We could instead use our wealth to join the twenty-first century, to revive the time of greatness when Arabs invented mathematics, astronomy, pharmacy, and the other sciences. You could do that, brother.” Afraid he had gone too far, Ahmed stopped abruptly and hung his head, averting his eyes from the continued silent stare from Abdullah.
Somewhere in the hotel, a television was on. Ahmed could hear a news program and also the roar of the gas flame in the heater above his head.
“Do you think, little brother, that while you were skiing in the snows, dancing in the clubs, that I was risking my life, hiding in basements, killing men I had never met, to create a society in which our people would waste their lives? Do you?” Abdullah’s voice rose with the question, then sank to a whisper. “I did terrible things, for which I pray Allah will forgive me, but when I read the Koran I am not sure he will. Right here in Khobar in 1996, while you were almost still a baby, I was in a cell that helped the Hezbollah and the Iranian Qods attack the U.S. Air Force base here.”
This was the first time Ahmed was hearing this story, the first time that his brother had lifted the curtain on his vague, earlier terrorist life. “Qods,” Ahmed asked, “these are the men who were trying to blow up the American Navy base in Bahrain. You worked with them?”
“No, I worked for Khalid Sheik Muhammad, who was bin Laden’s operations man. Because I thought that he wanted to kick the foreign troops out of our country,” Abdullah admitted, reluctantly. “Khalid was asked by the Qods people to have some of us lend a hand with an operation that they were planning in Khobar, against the foreign base. So I helped them set up at a farm not far from here. Khalid said we owed the Qods a lot, so I helped.”
Ahmed was afraid to say anything that would stop his brother from continuing. Nonetheless, he had to ask, “What did al Qaeda owe Qods?”
Abdullah was quiet, as though he was calling up the memories from a corner of his brain that he had not recently visited. “I met bin Laden, met with his brains, Dr. Zawahiri, and his muscle, Khalid Sheik Muhammad. Osama himself was not as important to operations as those two. They used him as the symbol, the unifier. I went to Afghanistan to see them. Why? Because they were the only ones really opposing the al Saud monarchy. No one else was doing anything to get these leeches off our people. I was not opposed to monarchy. I know England and the small Gulf states have good monarchies, but we did not! The Sauds were stealing, holding our people back. They let foreigners set up their own military bases in the land of the Two Holy Mosques, not to help us but to protect the oil for themselves!”