Inside the Kingdom Read Online Free PDF Page B

cooks and soft men who slept on mattresses—“as much use as camel bags without handles.”
    The Ikhwan were correct about the British. Abdul Aziz had decided he had no choice but to live in harmony with the region’s great colonial power. International frontiers had to be respected, particularly when it came to the British-protected states that now fringed his northern boundaries. That was why he instructed the Ikhwan to stand down from their raids and declared them rebels when they ignored his commands.
    But the Brothers were quite wrong about the great man going soft. Abdul Aziz spent more than a year trying to conciliate with Al-Dawish before the showdown came. Early in March 1929 the Saudi king drove north from Riyadh with a convoy of open motorcars that had been mounted with machine guns and confronted the camel-riding mutineers on the windswept, open plain of Sibillah. He offered them one last chance to surrender, and when they ignored him and attacked, he gave the order to start firing. Hundreds of the Brethren and their camels were slaughtered.
    The Al-Saud have always argued that Sibillah was a fair fight—that the balance of the battle and indeed the fate of the entire Saudi project hung in the balance. Their critics regard Sibillah as a cold-blooded massacre—and worse: In the context of the previous fifteen years it was a coldhearted desertion of the warriors whose fanaticism the Al-Saud had been happy to exploit when it suited their game.
    “Saudi Arabia had virtually assumed its final shape as the result of constant war upon the infidel,” wrote Harry St. John Philby, the first English chronicler of the country. “Henceforth the infidel would be a valued ally in the common cause of progress.” The fanatics of the Ikhwan, on the other hand, must be discarded—they “could now serve no further useful purpose.”

    Among the Brothers who survived the machine guns of Sibillah was Mohammed bin Sayf Al-Otaybi, who had ridden to the battle with his leader, Sultan ibn Bijad, a renowned warrior and stubborn critic of Abdul Aziz. The Otaybi leader would end his days in a Riyadh jail—according to legend his final words were “Never give up.” His follower Mohammed Al-Otaybi, meanwhile, went home to his Ikhwan settlement of Sajir, a spare collection of mud houses on the gravelly flatlands that mark the border of Qaseem, where, sometime in the early 1930s, he fathered the son to whom he gave the forbidding name of Juhayman.
    Growing up in Sajir, Juhayman Al-Otaybi was immersed from the start in the ambivalent legacy of the Ikhwan. He loved to recount tales of their bravery, fighting for the Al-Saud and also against them. Around the age of twenty he joined the National Guard, the tribal territorial army that the Saudi state had formed from the Brothers who had stayed loyal to Abdul Aziz (the vast majority). The National Guard was known as the “White Army,” since its members wore no uniform and reported for duty, rather haphazardly in those days, in their white thobes. Juhayman had left primary school unable to write with any fluency. But somewhere he had developed a prodigious appetite for religious reading and he began to collect the books that would fill his padlocked steel trunk.
    The National Guard encouraged its members to pursue religious activities. All the units had imams and sheikhs who were dedicated to the Wahhabi mission—though as agents now of the modern Saudi government, they no longer talked of jihad. Perhaps this was why Juhayman left the National Guard in the early 1970s to participate in the more stimulating activities of Medina’s Salafi Group, supporting himself, according to Nasser Al-Huzaymi, through the shrewd buying, repairing, and reselling of vehicles in the car auctions of Jeddah. So long as the group was smiled upon by Bin Baz and the religious establishment, they received donations from pious local benefactors and from charitable funds.
    “At one stage,” remembers