Tragedy at Mecca

Little-Known Events of 1979 and Their Background                                   

 

by Jim Megivern

 

In 1979 an event of great significance occurred in Saudi Arabia, but news of it was so successfully blacked out by Saudi authorities that the details of the story never got fully published until a few months ago, twenty-eight years after the fact. Such a cover-up could never be pulled off today. It was the luck of the Saudis that it happened just before the advent of cell phones, the Internet, and live satellite TV news, which have opened up global communications so that dictatorial efforts at censorship today quickly prove to be embarrassingly unsuccessful.

A Ukrainian-born journalist, Yaroslav Trofimov, living in Italy and working as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, only gradually, in covering the Middle East, began to realize how great a “veil of secrecy” had been thrown over the incident. He tells in his notes that “it took a lot of sleuthing” to piece together the details from a wide variety of sources to uncover the story of what really happened. The resulting book, The Siege of Mecca  (NY: Doubleday 2007), is mesmerizing, to say the least. Its sub-title sums up nicely: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam’s Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeda.

To appreciate the story, a few of the stranger aspects of the enigmatic country known as Saudi Arabia need to be recalled. Thomas W. Lippman vividly portrayed much of its oddity in his 2004 book, Inside the Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia.

1 – In 1744 Muhammad ibn Saud, the ruler of a small town in Najd (the central Arabian plateau) gave sanctuary to Abdel Wahhab, who married his daughter. The ‘marriage’ between the al Saud and the al Wahhab clans became the defining reality of the area right down to today. Al Wahhab  was a would-be reformer who claimed that most of Islam had lost its soul, and only by listening to him could they ‘purify’ themselves and become true Muslims. Eventually over the next two centuries Al Saud power and ‘puritanical’ Wahhabi ‘theology’ merged and, with great bloodshed, the tribes battled other forms  of Islam, especially Sufis and Shi’ites, as heretics.

In 1803 a terrifying force of al Saud’s camel-riding Wahhabi warriors stormed Karbala, wiping out some 4,000 Shi’ites and their holy places. Soon after that they took Mecca and Medina and formed the first Saudi state, but it did not last long.

2 – In 1813 an Egyptian force recaptured Mecca for the Ottoman Turks, burned down the first Saudi capital (Dirayya), and sent the monarch in a cage to be beheaded with great ceremony in front of Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

In 1824, however, Turki al Saud founded a second Saudi state which lasted till 1891 when his son Rahman was forced into exile in Kuwait. But, in 1902 Rahman’s son, Abdel Aziz (ibn Saud) became head of the al Saud clan and captured Riyadh. With a special corps of Wahhabi soldiers he retook the Najd in 1921; the Hijaz (where the sacred shrines are located) in 1924; and in 1932 united them to found the third Saudi state. In 1933 a new era opened when an Arabian-American Oil company began exploring for oil .

3 - In 1938 oil was discovered but serious drilling could not be done until after World War II; the Saudis were given over $33 million under the U.S. Lend-Lease program.  In 1945 ibn Saud met with FDR and sealed an alliance. In 1948 Aramco geologists found the Ghawar oil field, the largest in the world.

4 - By 1952 Saudi oil revenues hit $212 million. The nation-maker, King Abdel Aziz, died in 1953, and his oldest son Saud became King but proved to be a disaster. He went on massive spending sprees, almost causing bankruptcy. In 1958 he was forced to make his competent brother Faisal prime minister, and in 1964 was actually deposed and Faisal became King.

5 – In 1973 the Arab-Israeli (Yom Kippur) war led to the  OPEC oil embargo. Faisal was furious over U.S. military aid given to Israel; relations with the U.S. were greatly strained. But Faisal was assassinated in 1975 by a deranged nephew and his brother Khalid  became King.

6 – The brewing Mideast revolution first boiled over in Iran, where the Shah was ousted in January 1979 and the fire-breathing Ayatollah Khomeini took over on February 1. On November 4, he had more than 60 hostages seized at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

Two weeks later, a new Islamic century began. It was New Year’s Day, 1400, on the Muslim calendar (November 20, 1979 A.D.), the date deliberately chosen to set a bizarre  Wahhabi plan in motion. The key figure at the heart of this story was JUHAYMAN AL UTEYBI, a Saudi Sunni Wahhabi militant would-be reformer. Trofimov traces the steps in Juhayman’s escalating anger and alienation over the previous decade. By the logic of Wahhabi puritanism, he concluded that the ruling Al Saud dynasty had lost its legitimacy, become corrupt, and had destroyed Saudi culture by its acceptance of demonic Westernization.

Juhayman had been a corporal in the Saudi National Guard and had studied some under the conservative blind cleric Bin Baz. He felt called to work for the purification of Islam, and his soft-spoken but increasingly hard-edged message was attractive especially to the rural youth who were poorly educated and had no share in the wealth from the prodigious al Saud oil boom.

At least four features converged to give Juhayman a very  distinctive version of Wahhabi ideology and its application:

1 – Relying on a few passages in the hadith and interpreting them on his own, he ended up justifying the use of violence, deception and great bloodshed as tools to take over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest place in the Muslim world, to initiate God’s purgative plan.

2 – His strange turn to violent conduct in the mosque, which pious Muslims would ordinarily see as horrendously sinful, came from his burrowing more deeply into the hadith.  He adopted a version of the belief (more common among Shi’ites) in the imminent “coming of the MAHDI.” As he explained in one of his “Seven Epistles” (which he had published clandestinely in Kuwait), God was about to send a descendent of Muhammad as the perfect Ruler. This Mahdi would appear among the Sunnis and would rally all true Muslims and spark the great showdown climaxing history. Even the scenario of that battle he found foretold.

3 – The world’s Christian empires will launch an army of a  million Christian soldiers with fearsome weapons to try to desecrate the Muslim shrines and defeat God’s servants. But the Christians will be wiped out, and then the devil will send Dajjal (Antichrist) with an army of 70,000 Jews who will drive the Mahdi into the city of Damascus, where, nearly defeated, he will kneel in prayer. Thereupon Jesus Christ will return to earth, comfort the Mahdi, rejoice in the elimination of the Christians, and slay Dajjal with a lance borrowed from a Muslim. Then all the Jews will be slaughtered and the hour of redemption will sound. “Not a single infidel will survive the breath of Jesus’ air,” enthused Juhayman.

4 – This apocalyptic vision of Juhayman, which he had been preaching to his followers for a couple of years, suddenly became much more urgent when two more tidbits from the hadith were added: first, a physical description of the Mahdi, including a birthmark on one cheek, which made Juhayman realize that his 25-year-old brother-in-law, Muhammad Abdullah Qatahni, was actually the Mahdi-to-be! And second, the predicted day of his glorious appearance was soon to dawn -- the first day of the first year of the new Muslim century, 1400 a.h. (November 20, 1979 A.D.)

On that morning Juhayman and his band of rebels had made full reparations to seize the Grand Mosque of Mecca from within. They had smuggled weapons and provisions galore into hiding places inside, then quickly set up machine-guns on the seven minarets (292 ft. high). They chained all 51 gates shut, trapping thousands of pilgrims inside, and barricaded them well. Juhayman grabbed the microphone as the dawn chanting began and barked orders to his co-conspirators.  Then the PA system was given over to telling the world about the extraordinary event that was under way with the divinely sent Mahdi actually present in their midst.

The surprised Saudi authorities were paralyzed from the start. Juhayman’s snipers in the towers were desert sharp-shooters and picked off National Guardsmen as they tried to storm the gates. The government-imposed media blackout and its subsequent wall of silence effectively obscured the nature and significance of the event from the outside world. Invariably it was blamed on Iranian Shi’ites or on the U.S. and Israel intent on destroying Islam (Khomeini had no doubt, declaring that "this is the work of criminal American imperialism and international Zionism.").  It was simply unthinkable that a band of native Saudis (pious Sunni Wahhabis) could possibly be responsible for such sacrilegious desecration of the Grand Mosque and would dare to bring such shame on its protector, the Saudi monarch. The disinformation campaign has gone on for years, blotting out Juhayman’s name from the textbooks and minimizing the incident.

One factor that allowed the rebels to hold the mosque for two whole weeks was that in 1973 the bin Laden construction company had renovated and modernized the mosque. They transformed the extensive cellar into an intricate and elaborate labyrinth with all kinds of secret chambers and bunkers. Desperate for help in figuring out how to root out the rebels from this maze, the King finally called in French commandos whose expertise he was aware of who drew up an attack strategy using the bin Laden blue-prints.

The French brought them the equipment: flak jackets, gas masks, etc., and trained the Saudi military on how to proceed, but the carnage was unavoidably horrific. They drilled holes through the thick mosque courtyard floor, dropped grenades down and also fired canisters of a powerful chemical (known as CB, much  stronger than tear gas). They learned later what the fate of the Mahdi had been – he had picked up one of the grenades to throw it back and it exploded in his hand.

After ferocious inch-by-inch fighting, they finally reached the metal door of the last bunker and blew it open. A dozen rebels remained hunched against the back wall. When asked their names at gun point, one softly replied “Juhayman.” He was unrepentant and continued to say “This was God’s will.”

It was December 4, 1979. The official line was that “255 pilgrims, troops, and fanatics” were killed and 560 wounded while “military casualties were 127 dead and 451 injured.” The real count of deaths was probably over a thousand.

On December 25 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and on January 10, 1980, the Saudi press announced the execution of “63 renegades” involved in the seizure. Juhayman’s beheading took place in the central square of the Grand Mosque.

Trofimov maintains that the Saudi reaction to the uprising “set free the forces that produced the attacks of 9/11 and the harrowing circumstances that surround us today.” He notes that three of the ‘pilots’ of 9/11 came from Juhayman’s neighborhood, and shared much of his mindset. And yet most Americans have never even heard his name, let alone been told anything about his bizarre fundamentalist beliefs and their surprising similarity to those of other apocalyptic sects. As the saying goes, Read it and weep.