Inside the Kingdom

Inside the Kingdom Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Inside the Kingdom Read Online Free PDF
Author: Robert Lacey
Tags: General, History, 20th Century, Political Science, Modern, World
command the good while forbidding evil.

    These last two commandments, known together as hisbah, were the only elements that Abdul Aziz Bin Baz considered lacking in the proposal that Medina’s Salafi Group brought to him in 1965 after the breaking of the pictures. He suggested they should add hisbah (adjectival form, muhtasiba ) to their name, and so was born Al-Jamaa Al-Salafiya Al-Muhtasiba, the Salafi Group That Commands Right and Forbids Wrong. The blind sheikh became their murshid (spiritual mentor), and the group set off eagerly to spread the good word around the Kingdom.
    Ali Saad Al-Mosa, an academic and columnist from the southern province of Asir, was sixteen when the missionaries of the Salafi Group arrived in the south in the mid-1970s. They were touring Ali’s green and mountainous neighborhood on the border with Yemen.
    “They seemed like ancient disciples,” he remembers, “wandering all over the countryside. They camped together in our mosque for a week or so, and lived quite simply on whatever we could provide. I remember the gathering of beards.”
    Luxuriant beards were (and are) the most famous badge of Salafi conviction, based on a traditional belief, which some scholars dispute, that the Prophet never trimmed his beard. 3 Ali was especially impressed with the wild black beard of Juhayman, who had by then become one of the leaders of the group and was a powerfully effective preacher. As a lecturer in linguistics, Dr. Al-Mosa can today analyze the components of Juhayman’s technique: “He started with some easy enemies,” he remembers, “America, the West, and the wicked ways of the non-Muslim world. Then he made people feel guilty and scared, playing on their insecurities. ‘You are a corrupt society,’ he said. ‘You must turn back to God.’ He knew how to frighten simple folk. It was all about fear. He also criticized the media—too secular, with women’s pictures in the papers; and the education syllabus—not enough religion. He was careful not to say anything directly about the royal family, but his whole attitude had an antigovernment drift.”
    Everywhere Juhayman looked he could detect bidaa—dangerous and regrettable innovations. The Salafi Group That Commands Right and Forbids Wrong was originally intended to focus on moral improvement, not on political grievances or reform. But religion is politics and vice versa in a society that chooses to regulate itself by the Koran.
    “He disagreed with the government making it easier for women to work,” remembers Juhayman’s follower Nasser Al-Huzaymi, “and he thought it was immoral of the government to permit soccer matches, because of the very short shorts that the players wore in those days. He would use only coins, not banknotes, because of the pictures of the kings that were printed on the money. He thought that the coming of the rulers’ pictures onto the banknotes was really bad bidaa. It was like television, a dreadful sin that had entered every home.”
    Juhayman’s rejectionist thinking was shared by many occupants of the Bayt Al-Ikhwan hostel, particularly the newer recruits. Some opposed passports and identity cards on the grounds they showed loyalty to an entity that was not God. Others studied the scriptures to develop their own variations on traditional rituals—devising new rules, for example, on the theology of whether or not to take off your sandals while praying. As news of these unorthodoxies filtered upward, the group’s mentors became alarmed, and in the absence of Bin Baz, who had left for Riyadh in 1975 to take up grander religious responsibilities, a group of local sheikhs traveled out to the unwelcoming black lunar landscape of eastern Medina to try to reason Juhayman and his young zealots back onto the correct path.
    “It was late in the summer of 1977,” remembers Nasser Al-Huzaymi. “It was a hot night, so we all went up on the roof.”
    Built of rough cinder blocks, the House of the Brothers had
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