Inside the Kingdom

As part of the program to make the country more pious, thousands of Koranic study groups had been set up in the early 1980s in mosques and, during the holidays, inside government schools. Koranic recitation competitions featured regularly in the newspapers. Boys who memorized some or all of the Koran were rewarded by the Ministry of Education with awards of one thousand to two thousand riyals ($250 to $500)—money prizes that were especially attractive to children from poor backgrounds.

‘Look,’ ” Sultan remembers telling him, “ ‘we’re going to be traveling at eighteen thousand miles per hour. I’m going to see sixteen sunrises and sunsets every twenty-four hours. So does that mean I’ll get Ramadan finished in two days?’ The sheikh loved that one—he laughed out loud.”

the Wahhabi establishment as “members of the Flat Earth Society.” But the sheikh was unrepentant. If Muslims chose to believe the world was round, that was their business, he said, and he would not quarrel with them religiously. But he was inclined to trust what he felt beneath his feet rather than the statements of scientists he did not know: he would go on believing the earth to be flat until he was presented with convincing evidence to the contrary.

America certainly did its part. But doing the sums, it is now clear that through the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, 1981-89, Saudi Arabia actually provided more material assistance to the world’s varied assortment of anti-Communist “freedom fighters” than did the United States, thus hastening the end of the Cold War and helping accomplish the downfall of the “Evil Empire.

Successive Saudi kings chose to downplay the alliance to the average Saudi man-in-the-mosque, whose Fridays were regularly inflamed by pulpit warnings against the Western shaytan (Satan), laced with unashamed doses of anti-Semitism

“Give them [the Jews] and their descendants,” he said, “the choicest lands and homes of the Germans who oppressed them.” There was no reason why the Arab inhabitants of Palestine should suffer for something the Germans had done. “Make the enemy and the oppressor pay,” he said. “That is how we Arabs wage war.”

When it came to the political machinations that might be hatched by the government of these good-hearted men, the Saudi king took comfort from the fact that, as he candidly put it to one American visitor, “you are very far away!”

The solution to the religious upheaval was simple—more religion

For Ibn Abdul Wahhab, the Shia adoration of Ali and Husayn, which went along with the veneration of tombs and shrines, represented the ultimate in shirk (polytheism) and called for takfeer—the sentence of death. Inspired

The story of Karbala epitomized bravery, martyrdom, hopelessness, injustice—all the causes to which the Shia would relate their own bitter experience over the years