Free Inside the Kingdom by Robert Lacey

that he shared with Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Baz. The religious sheikhs had long viewed Fahd with a skeptical eye. So that made it all the more tricky in November 1979, when, as the crown prince wrestled with one bitter religious revolt at Mecca in the west of his kingdom, he found himself confronted by another in the east.
    . . .
    In the village of Al-Awjam, Ali Al-Marzouq watched his fellow villagers as they beat themselves with chains—a long, snaking line of men dressed in black, their jaws set grimly, swaying from side to side and bringing their metal flails down in unison with a hearty whack! across their shoulders. The village lay in eastern Saudi Arabia, home to the world’s very richest concentration of oil fields. Billions of dollars’ worth of “black gold” lay below the earth on which these young devotees were stomping. All of them, like Ali, were Muslims of the Shia persuasion ( Shia means “followers,” “faction,” or “members of a party”), and they were marking their doleful anniversary of Ashura.
    Ashura is Arabic for “tenth” and refers to the date of the Shias’ defining annual ritual, the tenth of Muharram—which fell on November 30 in 1979. The villagers of Al-Awjam, along with the other five hundred thousand or so Shia Muslims then living in the Eastern Province, were marking the emotional climax of their religious year, even as Juhayman and his followers were battling it out with the Saudi security forces in the Grand Mosque on the other side of the peninsula.
    Ali decided to go into town to watch the ceremonies in Al-Qateef, the Shia headquarters of the area. This sprawling, dusty settlement ringed with date palms was home to more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, the vast majority of them Shia. The town’s crumbling Turkish mud fort recalled the days before the Saudis came, when the date groves and trading enterprises of the hardworking population made Al-Hasa (the nineteenth-century name of the whole province) a valuable corner of the Ottoman Empire. Now the area was still more valuable, thanks to its efficient and productive oil fields, whose smooth working owed much to the reliability and industriousness of the local labor force, 60 percent of them Shia, virtually the only native-born Saudis then willing to carry out modern, industrial-style manual work. The growth of Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, was built on American expertise and the stringent Shia work ethic—when meeting for business appointments, the Shia are among the few Saudis who will ring to warn you they are running ten minutes late.
    The whole of Al-Qateef was quivering with Ashura fever as Ali Al-Marzouq, then a slightly-built schoolboy of sixteen, made his way toward the Al-Fateh (“Victory”) Mosque on Abdul Aziz Street, not far from the marketplace and the stalls of the fish auction. Hundreds of young men had gathered to listen to a religious lecture over the mosque’s loudspeakers, spilling out onto the street to fill an overflow corral of wooden barriers. Their emotions were roused by the traditionally tearful nature of Ashura lectures, but also by recent events outside Saudi Arabia. The ayatollahs’ revolution in Iran had been a dazzling assertion of Shia power and identity, and it gave extra meaning to this first Ashura of the new Islamic century. “No Sunni! No Shia! All Muslims together!” chanted the crowds outside the mosque, beating their chests and sobbing as the lecture came to an end. Someone had brought along some posters of the Ayatollah Khomeini and had hoisted them high.
    “It felt safe and comforting,” remembers Ali Al-Marzouq, “to be with my brothers, shoulder to shoulder.”
    But the bedouin soldiers of the National Guard, standing shoulder to shoulder on the other side of the barriers, felt anything but safe. They were not Shia. Quite the contrary. They were proud to be Sunni, like the majority of Saudis—and, indeed, like the large majority of Muslims throughout the