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never been fully finished, so there were bare pipes sticking up from the roof. In this raw setting beneath the stars, Juhayman took the lead aggressively on behalf of the radicals, arguing for “purity” and accusing the sheikhs of selling out to the government. They were not true Salafis, he said—they had not studied their holy books. Later he would even accuse his opponents of being police informers.
    It was a bitter, personalized argument, and the rooftop meeting ended with a split. While the sheikhs departed with a minority that included certain founding members of the group, the younger, more hotheaded majority stayed at the hostel, taking their lead from Juhayman. From this moment onward, they started referring to themselves simply as the Brothers, Al-Ikhwan—a word that stirred up dangerous memories in Saudi society.

CHAPTER 2

    The Brothers
    I n most Arab countries in the 1970s, the word ikhwan denoted the Muslim Brotherhood, the powerful network of Islamic activists, usually working underground, whose ideas influenced the young Osama Bin Laden. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt, and from its steely roots came the extremists who would murder Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, in 1981. But if you said “ikhwan” to most Saudis in the 1970s, especially to those of an older generation, their eyes would light up at the memory of another, earlier brotherhood that was particularly Saudi.

ABDUL AZIZ AND THE BROTHERS
    The warriors from the bedouin tribes who supported Abdul Aziz, “Ibn Saud,” in the early decades of the twentieth century called themselves Al-Ikhwan, the Brothers, and their ferociousness in battle was the key to his military success. Their imams had told them, in the historic tradition of Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab, that to support the Saudi cause was to engage in jihad (holy war), so they burned with the conviction that those who opposed them were kuffar (infidels), and thus deserving of death. They also believed that any mujahid (holy warrior) who died in battle would go straight to heaven. This imbued the Ikhwan with such a lethal indifference to death that most towns would surrender at their approach, rather than risk being put to the sword.
    In the course of the early 1920s the warriors of the Ikhwan helped extend Saudi power to the Red Sea coast. Abdul Aziz raised levies of hadhar (townsmen), but the Ikhwan were his ferocious vanguard, taking the fight to Mecca and Medina, and finally to the rich port city of Jeddah, which surrendered to the Al-Saud in 1925. The empire building was done, and Abdul Aziz packed his holy warriors back to their rural settlements with as much gold as he could muster. There were no more enemies left to fight, he told them. The time had come for his fierce, bearded warriors to go home to enjoy their wives and family making, and to practice the arts of peace.
    But the Ikhwan were disinclined to settle. They were bedouin, after all. Their very lifeblood was to raid, and there were more battles left to fight, in their opinion notably against the impious Muslims of Transjordan and Iraq, their new neighbor nations to the northwest and northeast. Britain had created these pseudocolonies in the post-World War I carve-up of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and for the Brothers, an age-old principle was at stake: to mark their new boundaries, the ingleez (English) had set up frontier posts in the desert, seeking to limit freedom of movement where the bedu had traditionally wandered as they wished.
    So in the late 1920s the more militant brethren, especially some members of the Mutayr and Otayba tribes, continued to go out riding and raiding as they had always done. They suspected their former leader had struck a deal to live in peace with the British, and, more seriously, that he had forgotten how to fight. Abdul Aziz had no real army, sneered the Ikhwan leader Faisal Al-Dawish to his counterpart, the Otayba chieftain, Sultan ibn Bijad. The Saudis were nothing but flabby