The oil boom made the Saudis rich. They were not only statistically rich as reckoned by dividing oil revenues by the number of people, but also in the sense that the Saudis commanded high disposable incomes and lived in one of the world's most benevolent welfare states. Huge oil revenues coupled with Saudi Arabia's small population enabled the House of Saud to give every Saudi citizen a share of prosperity on a scale few rulers have ever matched. Through careful management, there would have been enough money to make every citizen a ward of the state. King Faisal early rejected this idea, choosing instead to press the Saudis into the work force while cushioning them against serious need with grants, loans, subsidies, and government services. By 1980 this combination was providing a per capita income from employment of almost $2,500 a month, supplemented by a pantheon of government programs that added another 29 percent to personal income.

The wide-ranging benefits of Saudi citizenship began with the tax system. To stay in power, the House of Saud historically has collected taxes from the Saudis themselves only when it was essential for the kingdom to survive. Like any restriction on their freedom as men, the Saudis not only abhor taxes but question any government's right to collect them. The prevailing attitude is summed up in the statement issued by the Ikhwan in its dispute with Abdul Aziz over the tobacco tax in 1927. "Taxes, we have ruled, are completely illegal and it is the king's duty to remit them, but if he refuses to do so we do not feel it permissible to break up Moslem unity and revolt against him solely on this account." * To everyone's delight, oil income after 1973 relieved the government of the need to supplement its income from pilgrims' receipts and limited oil revenues with taxes. The flimsy tax code crumbled. There remained some indirect taxes, such as modest and selective customs duties, a tariff of 20 percent on the few items produced locally, and a poorly administered social security tax on wages. The only direct tax Saudis were asked to pay, which they ignored more often than they remitted, was the religiously mandated zakat, or alms tax. Otherwise Saudi Arabia was tax free. Not only did the citizens pay little or nothing into the government, there were elaborate mechanisms in every sector of the economy for distributing wealth to Saudi nationals. The agricultural sector is representative of how the system of distributing wealth worked.

The government declared increased agricultural production as a major goal of economic development and designated enormous sums of money for farming. Through his long-time ties with the royal family, a local sheikh exerted his influence to gain access to those funds which farmers in his area could use to buy farm equipment. This same sheikh then became the representative of a Saudi company that distributed foreign-manufactured farm machinery. The distributing agent and his foreign partners, accompanied by the sheikh, went into the sheikh's locality and sold each farmer tractors and plows. On signing the con- tract, the local farmer received a document from the equipment company certifying that he had contracted to purchase $100,000 in farm equipment. The farmer, often escorted by the sheikh, took the document to the Ministry of Agriculture to be officially stamped. From there it went to the bank, which paid the equipment manufacturer his full amount. The government reimbursed the bank 50 percent of the price or $50,000 and guaranteed an interest-free loan to the farmer that covered the rest of the purchase price. It was a game in which every- body won, including the foreign manufacturers. The Saudi distributing agent sold his foreign-manufactured product at a handsome profit. The sheikh received his share of the distributor's profits. The farmer had $100,000 worth of farm equipment for no money down and a $50,000 interest-free loan, which he in all probability would never repay. The bank eventually realized its capital plus "service fees." And the Rouse of Saud reaped the political benefits of keeping its citizens happy with out being forced to share political power.

* Quoted in Christine Moss Helms. The Cohesion of Saudi Arabia: Evolution of Political Identity (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p.169.

It was in this interrelationship between government grants and con tracts with Saudi owned or sponsored business that the middle class began to rise. It was a class the House of Saud deliberately created for several reasons. The birth of an entrepreneurial class was a way to bring Saudis, some of whom lacked connections through tribal or village structures, into the new economic system presided over by the House of Saud. The more progressive elements in the royal family also saw it as a way to lessen their domination by the religious fundamentalists. Yet the rise of the middle class was ultimately due to the crucial fact that the skills and services of educated Saudis were essential if Saudi Arabia were to modernize. Unless Saudi Arabia could produce its own managers and technicians, it would be forever dependent on its hated foreign work force.

As young Saudis were drawn into the new economic order and as they moved from their tribal locations into the urban areas, the network of the royal family, the sheikh, and the people, the vital composition of the al-Sauds' political formula, also began to weaken. The centralization of government and the weaning away of people from their tribal identities by growing Saudi nationalism were looked on with favor by the House of Saud. The leadership, with the possible exception of Abdullah, perceived that Saudi Arabia was moving forward in orderly fashion. The task of the royal family was to continue to provide for the economic well-being of its flock to see that progress continued. Saudi citizenship, restricted, with rare exceptions, to those born of a Saudi father, created its own aristocracy. Benefits accruing to these citizens seemed endless. "The council [of ministers] agreed that the state will pay the cost of transport of any Saudi national who dies abroad or will pay his burial cost if his family requests so." * Jobs in the civil service, the army, and the police, as well as jobs driving taxis, were set aside for Saudi nationals. In all other jobs, Saudi nationals had first choice - in fact were implored to take jobs that would otherwise have to be filled by foreigners.

As a way of mitigating the high rates of inflation generated by the oil boom, an elaborate system of subsidies evolved during the mid 1970's. Between fiscal year 1975-76 and the end of fiscal year 1982- 83, the government of Saudi Arabia spent $12.9 billion on a whole range of direct subsidies. Food subsidies alone consumed $3.3 billion, while another $1.9 billion went to reduce the cost of electricity for individuals and businesses. Interest-free loans for real estate, industrial development, agriculture, construction, hotels, hospitals, and bakeries amounted to another $31.6 billion. And while the rest of the world was paying record-high prices for gasoline, those of us in Saudi Arabia paid i8 cents a gallon.

King Khalid's own pet project was to move all Saudis out of tents and hovels into permanent housing. To meet the goal, rush housing projects were instituted in Jeddah, al-Khobar, and Riyadh. Impressive high-rise apartment complexes with open areas, playgrounds for children, schools, retail space, and mosques rose on accelerated schedules. Building forged ahead despite the warnings by both Western advisers and some Saudis in government that the lower classes, who were mostly rural, would never live in high-rise apartments. They were too small to accommodate the joint families in which most of these people lived and there was no place to keep their livestock. Khalid, deter mined to provide housing for everyone as fast as possible, refused to listen. The three projects cost over $295 million each, and four years after they were completed not one apartment was occupied.

*Arab News, January25, 1984

Individual family housing was more successful. I often drove through the town of Nassim, just on the outskirts of Riyadh. The town did not exist when I arrived in Saudi Arabia. The land where it now stands was parceled out by the government to low-income men, and the Real Estate Development Fund provided the loans to build square concrete- block houses. But in Nassim, like numbers of towns on the fringe of a metropolis, many people who had drifted in from the desert and small towns still lived in shacks constructed of packing cases. Some were still clinging to their nomadic roots and migrated to the cities for brief periods of time. Others had taken land grants and building funds from the government and built houses that they then rented to foreigners. Living on the rental proceeds, they were relieved of the need to take a job.

The Real Estate Development Fund was open to all Saudis, not just the poor. Any Saudi could qualify for a twenty-five-year interest- and fee-free loan to cover 70 percent of the cost of a house. There was a two-year grace period between the time the house was completed and the first payment was due. If the borrower repaid the loan a year before it was due, he was granted a 10 percent discount on the total of the loan. If the loan was repaid on time, he got another 20 percent discount. And anyone could get a loan whether he needed a house or not.

Like the residents of Nassim, enterprising Saudis who had access to land became real estate tycoons by borrowing money, building houses, and renting them out to foreigners.

Then there were the education programs. All education was free. The government paid tuition and for books and clothes. Those enrolled in higher education programs - technical, religious, or academic - were paid monthly stipends, which increased in value as a student advanced in school. Within the kingdom's own system of higher education, a student was granted twelve subsidized years to complete an undergraduate degree. The elite, Saudis who qualified to study abroad, had all their expenses paid and received a salary of approximately $12,000 a year while in school.*

Health care at government hospitals was either free or provided at absurdly low fees. This included medication, dental care, wheelchairs, crutches, and so on. Patients with unique problems who could not be treated within the kingdom were sent abroad accompanied by at least one family member, with the government paying all expenses.

* Students on govemment4unded education programs were required to return to Saudi Arabia to work for the government for the same number of years that they studied abroad. In 1984 this rule was altered to allow foreign educated Saudis to enter the private sector.

The list of handouts went on and on, and the Saudis quickly learned how to apply traditional patterns of family and tribal connections to gain a share in the largess. Of all the government programs, it was the system of social security that was the most alien to traditional Saudi culture. The General Organization of Social Insurance, started by King Faisal in 1962, was greatly expanded during the oil boom. In instituting the system, Faisal said that the social security system was designed "to make the State fully responsible for the support of the aged, the disabled, orphans, and women who have no means of support." * It was revolutionary in that it moved government into areas that previously had been the sole responsibility of the joint family system. By 1980 social assistance was going to families of prisoners, the sick, the poor, the temporarily needy, and victims of natural disasters. To make sure that the recipients understood that the money came through the graciousness of the king, special committees in Taif on occasion delivered the money personally.

As primitive as this method of distribution appears, there was no easy solution to Saudi Arabia's dilemma of too much money. By the nature of the al-Saud monarchy, the plenitude had to be spread among the people just as Abdul Aziz and his tribal predecessors had spread their meager resources. But the immediate outcome of all of this generosity was that the Saudi people learned to expect that income was delivered, not earned. Needs and desires were satisfied by plugging into the pipeline of special favors distributed by persons in power. Work continued to be held in low esteem. Saudi Arabia's promise was the pleasure of the moment.

In 1979, with oil revenues pouring in at the rate of $65 billion a year, $180 million a day, and $7 million an hour, Saudi Arabia was like a great feast to which everyone had been invited. Conspicuous consumption was rampant. Anything that could be forced through the clogged ports would sell. A group of enterprising merchandisers from Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway turned a North Sea ferry into a luxurious floating exhibition called Scan-Arab 8o and steamed into Jeddah. On board were racks of $12,000 fox fur coats and even costlier minks and sables, a 1927 vintage Cadillac, complete services of Swedish Rorstran porcelain initialed in gold, and handloomed carpets with verses from the Koran emblazoned across them. So eager were the Saudis to buy, traffic to the pier where the boat was docked was backed up bumper to bumper for a mile.

* Quoted in Willard A. Beling, Cd., King Faisal and the Modernization of Saudi Arabia (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p.22.

The parameters of good taste exploded as the Saudis embellished their homes with items so gaudy as to defy description. Typical was a suite of furniture consisting of a settee, coffee table, standing screen, sideboard, and mirror that sported fanned peacock tails incrusted with dense inlaid mother-of-pearl and turned wooden knobs on each piece. There were clam-shaped Fiberglas bathtubs flecked with gold, covered by canopies upholstered in fake fur with crystal chandeliers dangling from the center and wired for stereophonic sound. The Saudis imported absurd Venetian glass light fixtures heavily laden with designs of fruit intertwined with drooping purple irises. Pseudo-fountains, molded of black plastic with sprays of thin plastic threads propelled by a motor and illuminated by colored lights, went into their foyers. There were telephones four feet tall, carved from wood covered in gold leaf with a picture of the Mona Lisa gazing from the center of the dial.

I once had dinner at the home of a sheikh where the floors were covered with exquisite silk Niyain rugs and price tags hung from all the lamps and furniture so his friends could see how much everything had cost.

Many of the cars that clogged the streets carried the yellow grease marks wiped on by customs officials at the port of Dammam and a weathered price sheet on the back side window, both confirmations that the owner was driving a new, not a secondhand car. Princes bought and quickly cast off a vast array of automobiles. At the used car souq, some Canadian friends of mine bought a reproduction Stutz Bearcat with a mink-lined trunk, which had belonged to Prince Naif.

The wealth was preposterous. A servant once offered me a towel and a liter bottle of Chanel No.5 to wash my hands. A gold dealer sat in an open-front shop on Tamari selling kilo (2.2 pounds) bars of gold out of a dirty glass case, tossing his receipts into an old wooden box.

Electric hookahs and fine jewelry often shared the same display space. Despite the Wahhabi injunction against men wearing jewelry, Saudis were buying matched sets that included a gold watch, the face of which was incrusted with pave diamonds, a ring, pen, pencil, and set of prayer beads. Out of curiosity, I once asked a clerk in an exclusive store on Wassir Street how much one of these ensembles cost. His caustic reply was, "Too much for you."

But the real national obsession was Kleenex box holders. No Saudi room was complete without an elaborate container for tissues crafted in everything from porcelain to chrome to gold filigree to acrylic. They sat on coffee tables, dominated the accouterments attending an inter national conference, and graced the king's limousine. This enshrinement of the disposable somehow made a profound statement about the philosophy that permeated Saudi Arabia during the oil boom.

The Westerners consumed along with the Saudis, just more modestly. With large discretionary incomes and little to buy, Westerners gobbled up duty-free Japanese cameras, watches, and stereo equipment. Armed with Riyals, which the kids called "rats," Westerners hit the souqs on the weekends to see what else had made its way into Saudi Arabia. But it was gold that was the irresistible attraction. One of the major gold markets in Riyadh was in the old Dirrah souq, near the clock tower. Dirrah was an authentic Oriental bazaar, a bastion of traditional Saudi market life. Under the broad tin roof, dirt-floor stalls were jumbled together along narrow, winding aisles. There was al ways something exhilarating about entering Dirrah's dark confines spotlighted by bare electric bulbs dangling from frayed cords, smelling the pungent aroma of the spices overlaid with the heavy, mysterious fragrance of incense burning in the old wooden containers. The aisles were always crowded, an important aspect of the ambience of the souq.

Merchants selling the same items clustered together. Coming in off the Tamari Street side, the fabric dealers were first. Lengths of bright cloth hung from wires strung between the posts defining each shop. Buttons and thread were thrown into big baskets sitting before the single counter cluttered with lace and other bric-a-brac. Farther on were the underwear merchants. The big boxer shorts that Saudi men wear under their thobes were pinned to misshapen hangers that overlapped each other up a rickety wall. On past these were the spice dealers, who as a result of the boom had added laundry detergent and Pepsi to their inventory. Then there were the cosmetic and perfume dealers, always with a group of women crowded around their counters. The sandal maker, the scissors sharpener, the roving vendor hawking fly nets to put over baby beds, the darum merchant selling the soft sticks that brush a Saudi's teeth as he chews - they were all there. And grouped in among it all, occupying the same dilapidated quarters, were the gold merchants.

Of all of the signs of incredible wealth that surrounded me every day, nothing awed me as much as the gold souqs. In one shop after another, each no more than a hovel, cracked, tottery showcases held stacks of 18 and 21 karat gold bangle bracelets, heavy earrings, and charms designed to dangle from the pin in a baby's diaper. Glittering in the harsh light of unshaded electric bulbs was wedding jewelry attached to the walls by rusting nails. The gold breastplates, wide brace lets with five matching rings (one for each finger) dangling from gold chains, and big medallions set with pearls and rubies hung in the open with no protection other than the lone shopkeeper. There were items for the Westerner, too. Modest gold chains, strung in groups of twenty and thirty on clumsy metal rings, were thrown in a corner on the back counter. There were some small Western-style earrings and less cumbersome bangle bracelets that appealed to Western tastes and pocket- books. The gold merchants had little patience with their Western customers, who browsed in the gold souqs often just to pass the time. There were serious shoppers among the Westerners, however, and on occasion women as well as men bought a ring or a necklace on impulse the way they would buy a blouse or shirt at home.

Workmanship in a piece of jewelry had no bearing on its price, and the price varied every day depending on the international price of gold. A buyer interested in an item pointed it out to the merchant, who threw it on his scale, figured the weight and the price per gram on his Japanese calculator, and announced the total. The haggling then began, with weight rechecked and figures punched in the calculator again and again until either a deal was struck or the customer left, usually followed by a torrent of abusive language.

Next to gold, Westerners delighted most in T-shirts. Some enterprising Saudi entrepreneur learned about this Western passion very early. The first shirts carried captions like "I'm no tourist, I work here," "Saudi Arabia - Thrill a Minute," or "Smile, You're in Saudi Arabia." Cohn once had a mustard-colored shirt adorned with a sober group of Peanuts characters clothed in gutras that proclaimed, "Happiness is being one of the gang in Saudi Arabia."

Westerners found themselves spending an inordinate amount of time the souqs largely because there was little else to do. According to the Guide to Riyadh published by the Ministry of Information, "Entertainment for expatriates is not commercially organized . . . " In the Wahhabi world of Saudi Arabia, any form of public entertainment fell into the category of sin. There were no movies, theaters, or clubs.

There were no sporting events except the royal horse races. There was no television. Until after 1980, the Intercontinental Hotel was one of the few places where couples could go out to dinner. The foreigner was, and remains, on his own to make his entertainment. People working on isolated construction sites or living in single villas not attached to a large company truly suffered. Outside of ARAMCO, the major embassies, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the King Faisal hospital probably had the best recreation facilities available in the kingdom. Much of this was due to the desire of the royal family to staff their hospital with not only Western doctors but Western auxiliary personnel, especially nurses and technicians. With many single women in its employ, the hospital made a serious effort to provide some forms of entertainment. We had swimming pools and tennis courts, and a recreation center where hamburgers were available two hours a day. There was bingo on Monday night, and we had our own in-house television system which showed videotaped movies from the United States several hours a day. I must have seen the 1950's "B" movie Krakatoa East of Java at least ten times.

There were softball teams, tennis tournaments, exercise classes, swim meets, water polo teams - all of which the Saudis looked on with wry amusement, wondering why Westerners enjoyed physical exertion. Children played with whoever was available regardless of age, sex, or what language he spoke. They devised imaginative games that occupied them for hours and they seldom complained of being bored.

The adults read or played chess, bridge, or Monopoly. My friend Sarah Day and I made up a board game about the hassles of life in Saudi Arabia called Bukarah, in-shaalah ("Tomorrow, God Will mg"). Mostly we wandered from house to house, eating and exchanging the latest stories on the trials, tribulations, and joys of life in Saudi Arabia.

There were some less mundane entertainment as well. A few sand sailers - metal tripods equipped with wheels and a sail - made their way into the country. The lucky few who had these skirted across the empty desert in a stiff wind until they were upturned by one of the big rocks that jut out of the desert floor. For those living in Jeddah, the Red Sea offered some of the best snorkeling and scuba diving in the world. Groups equipped with tents and gear drove or flew from Riyadh and camped along the beaches from Jeddah to Yanbu. There were daybreak expeditions to the desert to search for a high-quality quartz called quasuma diamonds. Scattered on the desert, they were best spotted at sunrise, when the slanted rays of the sun reflect off the surface. Al though some people had theirs cut into stones in Bangkok, it was the thrill of the search rather than the reward that hauled people starved for recreation out of their beds while it was still dark.

Sadly, there were many Westerners who, except for the hours spent on their jobs, stayed entombed in their apartments and compounds. It was their loss. The streets teemed with marvelous scenes of human activity that can never be recaptured. Those who shut themselves up in the Western community missed it all. Even more they missed the beauty of the desert. I never believed that first day in Saudi Arabia that I would come to love the desert with a passion. Within the towns and cities, the natural beauty of earth packed to the strength of concrete, the sharding of low limestone hills, and the gift of a single flower enduring without water or shade are all corrupted by the litter of man. But within an hour of Riyadh, into the valleys of Wadi Hanifa or east to the plateaus beyond Khurays, the desert remained in its virgin state. On weekends we loaded our four-wheel-drive vehicles with everything required for survival and headed for the desert in a convoy. As I left behind the walls I spent so much of my time behind and the restraints of an Islamic state, the desert came to represent freedom, a restoration of the soul. Setting up camp, we piled up wood scrounged from Riyadh's construction sites. Charcoal pits were scooped out of the sand to cook supper. Cots and tents went up. The big mats we bought in the Yemeni souqs were unrolled and placed end to end to create the center of the camp community. People scattered out from the campsite to look for fossils or just to walk. Camels swayed across the landscape at sunset or wandered into the middle of the camp, where they stood placidly staring. As the sun went down, the sky came alive with stars we never saw from the city because of the lights and pollutants of modernization. As the evening wore on, different members of the group would break off to go to their tents, until finally the camp was engulfed in an exquisite peace.

But we were always aware that the desert could also be deadly. One summer two Americans, experts in desert survival, left their disabled car in search of help. Their bodies, charred black by the sun, were found four days later within sight of the highway. And another sum mer, Gerhardt Reiner, a towering Austrian with the body of a conditioned athlete, died of dehydration one Friday afternoon while climbing on a rock formation.

The Westerners' major form of diversion was travel. Like middle class jet setters, we traveled everywhere on the fat salaries and generous vacation time provided by our Saudi masters. It was this leave time that maintained a Westerner's equilibrium. No matter how stressful conditions might become, there was always the next vacation to look forward to. I will never forget an all-night flight to Athens on which two men in front of me were drinking one beer after another and talking and talking and talking. As I was about to scream "Go to sleep!" I heard them exchanging stories about the three-month stint they had just completed on an offshore drilling rig in the Arabian Gulf. I smiled and went to sleep myself.

After a few years in the kingdom, it was the rare Westerner who had not been on safari in Africa, shopping in Hong Kong, scuba diving in the Seychelles, trekking in Nepal, or relaxing on a houseboat in Kashmir. Many of us routinely went around the world once a year on the annual leave tickets issued by our Saudi employers. But we gladly passed up those special bargains Saudia Airlines offered, such as the nine-day excursion ticket to London by way of Hong Kong.

They were good times. Saudi Arabia was riding the crest of the wave. The Saudis perceived themselves as masters of the petroleum universe. Nations bowed down before them, flattered and propositioned them. The Westerners, although bitterly resented, were seen as posing no real threat. Perhaps we were an annoyance to their traditional values, but for the most part we did our work and stayed out of the Saudis' lives. Throughout the political upheavals in Afghanistan, Iran, and Lebanon, Saudi Arabia appeared to be remarkably stable. The House of Saud prided itself on the tranquility of its kingdom, a stability the Saudis took for granted. And the Westerners, lulled by the same sense of security, stayed on to work, feeling protected from the tumult that surrounded the kingdom. Abruptly, in one day, it all changed.

Although the political stability in the kingdom and Saudi Arabia's peaceful relations with its neighbors was much touted by the House of Saud, 1979 had been a year of uncertainty. To the east, the year began with the shah's flight from Iran. While the shah was no special friend of Saudi Arabia, his departure was nevertheless viewed with consternation by the House of Saud on several grounds. The fall of any monarchy in the Arabian Gulf threatened to bring into question the sound ness of the House of Saud. But a monarch forced to flee passions inflamed by a religious leader pierced the House of Saud's Achilles' heel - its fear of its own religious fundamentalists. Moreover, the House of Saud interpreted the hesitancy of the United States to prop up the regime of the shah as treason against its allies. The United States, although kept at arm's length by Saudi Arabia's rulers, is the House of Saud's defense of last resort. If the United States were willing to desert the shah of Iran, with whom it enjoyed a far cozier relationship than with Saudi Arabia's leaders, what were the Americans likely to do if the House of Saud were threatened? These were pro found questions for the defenseless oil producer.

Throughout the year, the Westerners in Saudi Arabia were exposed to tales of harrowing escapes from the Islamic revolution by the procession of evacuees arriving in the kingdom to work. In early November, we watched as the blindfolded hostages from the American embassy in Teheran were paraded before the world to demonstrate the impotence of the United States in the face of Islamic vengeance. Although there was no apparent instability in Saudi Arabia, our experience of living in an Islamic state nudged our mild anxieties about the possibility of a fundamentalist uprising.

Farther to the east, the government of Afghanistan had signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in December 1978. The Saudi press resounded with warnings of danger from the alliance and pleaded for the Carter administration to lead a Western response to the Soviet threat. The Saudis were shaken. More alarmed than the West, the Saudis envisioned the Russians pushing to the Arabian Gulf, planting a Marxist, atheistic, anti-monarchical superpower at Saudi Arabia's door.

To the south, the ongoing squabbles between the People's Republic of Yemen (a Soviet puppet state) and the Arab Republic of Yemen (vassal to Saudi Arabia's foreign aid) were flaring once again. In February, border clashes put the Saudi armed forces on alert, while rumors flew through Riyadh that twenty-five hundred United States paratroopers in full battle dress had landed at the Riyadh airport and crates of ammunition were being moved out of the buildings behind Abdul Aziz's decaying palace in al-Kharj to be shipped south.

Saudi anxieties were ignored by Western governments and presses alike. As I turned out one story after another about the threats Saudi Arabia perceived from Afghanistan, Iran, and Yemen, they were largely passed over by editors more interested in articles about Saudi Arabia's money, not its problems. Even for those of us in the kingdom, those were external. Except for a vague disquiet, life rolled on in the problems flush of the oil boom.

It was Tuesday, November 20, 1979. We had just sat down to dinner when Mary Johnston, my neighbor across the sidewalk in Rainbow Villas, burst through the front door. Pale, clutching her chronically nervous stomach, she gasped, "There has been a coup at Mecca!" Jumping up from the table, Dan and I fired one question after another at her. All she knew was that as her husband, Brent, left the hospital, he passed Dr. Nizar Fetieh, the king's personal cardiologist, racing toward a waiting car. Fetieh told Brent that Mecca was in the hands of rebels. Word shot through our compound, and within minutes neighbors began to collect at my house, carrying a variety of short-wave radios. Fanning out through the house, everyone tried without success to tune in the BBC or Voice of America. Dan, surprised to find the telephone still working, called the U.S. Embassy Liaison Office in Riyadh. Amazed at being able to get through, he asked if there was any word of disorders in Mecca. A flat, dispassionate female voice answered, "I will read a statement from Ambassador John West." The crux of the message was that there had been a disturbance in Mecca but there was no indication that Americans or other Westerners were involved. Americans were advised to stay within their homes or places of employment. "Thank you for calling." Then Dan said, "O.K., that's the official word, now what is really going on?" Without pausing, the efficient voice dissolved into gossipy intimacy. "We have no idea. All we know for sure is that something big is happening at Mecca and all of our international communications lines have been cut." What was happening at Mecca was the most serious challenge to the House of Saud since 1929, when the Ikhwan, proclaiming holy war, rose up against Abdul Aziz.

At 4:30 A.M. on the first day of the Hijrah year 1400, Juhaiman ibn Mohammed ibn Saif al-Utaibi grabbed a microphone in the cavernous courtyard of the Grand Mosque at Mecca and beseeched the approximately fifty thousand assembled worshipers to recognize his brother-in-law, Mohammed ibn Abdullah al-Qahtani, as the promised mahdi. * But as events unfolded, it became apparent that Juhaiman ibn Mohammed's proclamation of the mahdi was more a political tool with which to attack the House of Saud than theology.

Juhaiman, a wild-eyed man with a heavy, matted beard like the old lkhwan, shouted to the crowd. Picking up on charges being hurled by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Juhaiman railed that monarchies are alien to Islam and denounced the al-Sauds' legitimacy to rule. With the fire of evangelism, he attacked financial corruption among members of the royal family, their foreign travels, and their practice of drinking alcoholic beverages. Over the prayer microphones that carried his words to Mecca's nearby neighborhoods, he demanded that the kingdom be cleansed of the corruption of foreign ways thrust on Saudi Arabia by the House of Saud's modernization policies.

* For the Moslems who adhere to the concept, the mahdi is like a redeemer, the imam who returns as the spiritual guide of the community.

Juhaiman had with him a band of followers numbering between two hundred and three hundred men. They were purportedly armed with an odd assortment of weapons, including AK-475 and various bastardized weapons that commonly circulate among the tribesmen of Yemen. The rebels' stock of ammunition and their food supply of dates and water, the mainstay of the Ikhwan soldier, were reported to have been smuggled in through the service entrances of the mosque the day before. Yet two months after the Mecca uprising, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Tweijry, assistant deputy commander of the National Guard, told me that Juhaiman's weapons came directly from the stores of the National Guard and were driven into the mosque in convoys of National Guard trucks.

The leader and the core of his group holding the mosque were cut from the same cloth and motivated by the same ideals as some of their ancestors who fought Abdul Aziz in the Ikhwan revolt. Juhaiman and his followers wore the old Ikhwan thobe cut above the ankles and grew shaggy beards and long hair. Juhaiman himself was a member of the politically powerful Utaibah tribe and had served in the Utaibah section of the National Guard when he was a teenager. About the time of the oil embargo, Juhaiman is believed to have rediscovered religion and been drawn into the religious community at the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, where he fell under the influence of the infamous Sheikh Abdul Aziz ibn Baz. Living in one of the free hostels that the Saudi government provides for worshipers and students, Juhaiman increasingly was drawn to those disgruntled about Western influences on the Islamic world. The Westernization of Saudi Arabia under the leader P ship of the House of Saud would become Juhaiman's own crusade.

During 1979 the group acquired another source of inspiration - the escalating power of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic revival that his revolution in Iran had fired.

Soon after Juhaiman seized the mosque, the impracticality of holding fifty thousand hostages became obvious. He singled out perhaps thirty of the frightened worshipers and let the rest go to stream out of the mosque and sound the alarm. Throughout the morning, no one other than the residents of Mecca and the inner circle of the royal family and the military knew that God's house was being held hostage. At noon all communications with the outside world were cut and civilian aircraft ordered to stand silent on the runways of the airports. Meanwhile, pandemonium reigned among the decision-makers. King Khalid's brothers Sultan and Naif, ministers of Defense and Interior, rushed to Mecca. Crown Prince Fahd was in Tunis at a meeting of Arab leaders, cut off by the communications blackout. Abdullah, commander of the National Guard, was noticeably absent, an indication of the level of concern about the involvement of the military force he commanded. By nightfall, about the time I heard of the uprising, enough organization had emerged to put the Saudi Arabian army and air force on an "A" alert and mobilize the National Guard.

Through much of the night, people continued to wander in and out of my house. Radios crackled and squawked as we searched the dials for news, any news. We gathered up passports, weighted ourselves down with jewelry, and collected all of the cash that we had on hand. Some desperately tried to cram their collections of Oriental rugs into hand luggage in case we had to evacuate. Periodically scouts were sent out on the streets, who reported back that everything seemed quiet. Finally we all went to bed.

The next morning armed guards were on top of the hospital and every car that went through the gate was thoroughly searched. Hospital beds were cleared of non critical patients to make way for anticipated casualties. At this point, the crucial question facing the king was how to get the rebels out of Islam's most sacred mosque, the mosque for which the House of Saud claimed responsibility. In the pictures of the king that had begun to appear in the papers, Khalid looked anguished, like a father perplexed and disappointed by the behavior of his children. With the rebels using the mosque as a fortress, there was no alternative but to storm it with the Saudi military. The ulema, which had been summoned on the morning of the uprising, struggled with the theological problem of bloodshed and violence in God's holiest house. By noon on Wednesday, international communications had been reestablished, and the Ministry of Information began to mobilize the Islamic world in support of a move against the Grand Mosque. At last the ulema, citing an "ignoble crime and an act of atheism in the House of God," issued a fatwa declaring holy war, and the long siege on the mosque began.

The trouble at Mecca had erupted on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Pakistani mobs burned the American embassy in Islamabad, claiming the United States was responsible for the events at Mecca. With Mecca under siege, Americans held hostage in Iran, and now another American embassy in flames, the Western staff at the hospital was called together and told to stay in our compounds for our own safety. The next day, Thursday, happened to coincide with the American observance of Thanksgiving. For several weeks, we had planned to go to al-Khobar for Thanksgiving dinner with friends from home. Never ones to be deterred by undefined peril, Dan and I decided to go in spite of the warning. When we drove to the airport at about 9:00 A.M., the streets were all but deserted and an anxious pall hung over the city. The airport was similarly deserted. Saudia Airlines had one desk open. For once we were able to check in quickly and move on to the security check. This is where the trouble developed. I learned one lesson from the Mecca uprising: never go through airport security in a country in the throes of revolution, carrying a pumpkin pie! The guards, already highly nervous, took one look at me and my pie and went berserk. Every item we were carrying was thrown on the conveyor belt to be scrutinized by x-ray before it was hand searched and examined with a metal detector. As I said over and over, "Akel, akel, akel," which is the Arabic equivalent of "eat," the pie was eyed, poked, and shaken. Apparently not knowing what else to do, the guards finally allowed me and my now disheveled pastry to pass.

It was a week before the mosque was retaken. Saudi soldiers fought pillar to pillar through the great mosque, dislodging the renegades one by one. The rebels, some with their women and children, were holed up in the vast maze of rooms beneath the mosque. On the fourth day of the siege, the self-proclaimed mahdi was shot and his body dragged before photographers to prove he was not God's chosen. But Juhaiman and a core of followers still held out, despite tear gas, burning tires, and a desperate plan to electrocute the rebels by flooding the catacombs with water and sending live electrical cables into them. At last, in the glare of Saudi television cameras, Juhaiman was dragged out, still defiant. In all the government claimed that 127 of its men were killed and 461 injured. One hundred and seventeen of the rebels died, as well as a dozen or more of their hostages. The figures for both sides were probably much higher. From the reports I garnered during the week, the hospitals in Mecca and Jeddah were full, forcing the over flow to Riyadh.

On January 9, 1980, sixty-three men were executed in eight cities and towns across Saudi Arabia for their part in the uprising. The sentences and the locations in which they were carried out sent a clear message to those who would challenge the House of Saud. If the magnitude of the beheadings was a surprise to the Saudi population not accustomed to public punishment of political dissidents, so much the better. The locations of the executions, extending across the kingdom, were carefully chosen not only to give maximum exposure but, one suspects, to reach other potential nests of discontent. Mecca and Medina, aside from their religious significance, are both near Jeddah, the heart of the western coastal area. Ten were beheaded in Riyadh, where they could be observed by the large number of Yemenis and other laborers from underdeveloped countries working in the city to warn them of the danger to foreign nationals who involve themselves in the political affairs of Saudi Arabia. Tabuk, another execution site, is near the Jordanian border and is the location of the country's largest air force base. There had been continuing rumors since spring of plots within the air force against the crown, and in the official shuffles that took place in the aftermath of Mecca, the command of the air force was the hardest hit. Buraydah, in the north central part of the country, is a hotbed of fundamentalism even in the most normal of circumstances. Finally, Dammam, the capital of the Eastern Province, is not far from Qatif, the center of Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority of two hundred thousand. *

In choosing the Grand Mosque as the point of attack, the rebels seized the symbol of the theocracy presided over by the House of Saud. But by failing in the attack, the rebels sealed their own fate and gave the al-Sauds carte blanche to carry out public executions for religious transgressions that were in reality crimes of politics. Political dissent is not permitted by the House of Saud. The ban on political parties and protest is defended on the religious grounds that politics is a violation of the Koranic injunction against divisive sects. Throughout its history, the House of Saud has used Islam to justify its policies and legitimize its rule. But as a result of the uprising at Mecca, Islam turned against those who claim to be its most aggressive defenders After carefully cultivating a traditional posture on social and religious matters to protect the ruling elite from being identified too closely with the West, the royal family suddenly found its whole right to rule brought into question by those whom it had tried to placate. Religious doctrine turned on the House of Saud and sought to deny it its right of position and power.

* There is another concentration of Shiites in the Assir, but they are ethnically Yemeni and followers of Yemen's own form of Shiism.

There are several unanswered questions about Mecca. The first is whether the royal family was caught as totally unawares by the uprising as it claimed. As defender of the faith, the king or other high ranking official from the royal family annually led the prayers at Mecca on the first day of the new year. With November 20 marking the be- ginning of the year i4oo, a new century, the king certainly would be expected to be present. Although King Khalid was suffering from a mild illness, Abdullah, Sultan, or Fawwaz, the governor of Mecca, would have represented him unless they had prior warning. The original plan may well have been predicated on trapping Khalid in the mosque. With the king in custody, the revolt, in the eyes of the perpetrators, might have had some chance for success. As it turned out, their mistake was their failure to anticipate the revulsion the Saudis felt about the armed seizure of Islam's most holy site.

Throughout the ordeal of Mecca, the House of Saud tenaciously clung to its story that the uprising was the work of a cadre of religious fanatics. It was the explanation with which the rulers felt the most comfortable. The House of Saud had a certain confidence in its ability to control the religious issue. But the uprising at Mecca represented a mixed religious, sociological, and political protest. It was first a religious protest against the impious behavior and Westernization of the royal family. But it also represented the long-standing regional tensions that exist between the Nejd and the Hijaz. Moreover, Mecca raised the frightening specter of Saudi Arabia's being dragged into the Middle East's boiling political caldron. The number of foreigners who were executed along with the Saudis proved what the government was never previously willing to admit, that outside agitators were involved.

Of the sixty-three men executed, there were forty-four Saudis, seven Egyptians, six from the People's Republic of Yemen, three from Ku wait, one Sudanese, one Iraqi, and one from the Arab Republic of Yemen. From the beginning the involvement of foreigners had to be suspected because of the proficiency with which the whole revolt was organized. Members of the National Guard may have been drawn into the plot by opposition to Westernization, but it is difficult to imagine that they could have organized the revolt. It would not have been in character for Bedouin soldiers, most of them illiterate and poorly educated, to draw up an elaborate plan, commandeer arms, and smuggle them into the mosque. Bedouins do not plan and organize, they react.

Yet the great unanswered question about the Mecca uprising concerns the whole concept of the mahdi, the religious figure in whose name the rebellion was staged, and its relationship to religious fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia. The idea of a mahdi or messiah is alien to Wahhabism and is, at best, fuzzy within the mainstream of Islam. The mahdi is never mentioned in the Koran, nor does it have any real place in the traditions of the Sunni sect. Rather the idea surfaced during the leadership disputes over Mohammed's successor and was never seriously embodied into Islamic theology based on the hadith. The belief in the mahdi has its origins in Christian and Persian thought, and within Islam relates, culturally and theologically, to Shiism - a point that never seemed to work its way through all of the speculation that characterized the post-Mecca quarterbacking.

Juhaiman, who was so fanatical in his beliefs that he would not sit next to a foreigner and considered eating with anything other than his hands as sinful, was probably nothing more than a Wahhabi zealot. However, the Iranian revolution paradigm, so much admired among religious students in Mecca in 1979, doubtless had a vague and general effect on him.

There is no evidence to confirm that Saudi Shiites played any significant role in the Mecca uprising although there has been speculation to that effect. Saudi Arabia's Shiites are despised and treated as second-class citizens in a Wahhabi kingdom. Drawing much of its labor from the Shiites of the Eastern Province, ARAMCO pumped Saudi Arabia's wealth out of the ground and the House of Saud spent it on their grand schemes for Riyadh and the Western Province. The Shiites stayed locked in their ghettos on the east coast, realizing little from the elaborate welfare and development schemes enjoyed by the rest of the country.

If not engineered by Shiites, the Mecca uprising fired their long held grievances. From across the Arabian Gulf, the Ayatollah Khomeini spoke to his co-religionists, and the Rouse of Saud answered. In December, while observing Ashura, the Shiite day of mourning that commemorates the death of the Imam Hussein, the residents of Qatif took to the streets as martyrs, lashing themselves with whips until the blood ran from their backs and limbs. Violence erupted when nervous National Guardsmen apparently interfered with the procession. In February 1980, riots again broke out in Qafif. Breaking windows and burning tires, Shiite demonstrators poured out their wrath against the Wahhabi majority and the economic dominance of the Nejd. The National Guard once again set upon the demonstrators, killing at least fifteen. Qatif was ringed with tanks and sealed off from the rest of the country. Rumors abounded within the kingdom that the Guard's tanks opened fire, leveling sections of the town. Arrests and interrogations followed. Only those directly involved knew exactly what happened, for Qatif remained closed for months afterward. Roadblocks north of al-Khobar manned by the military sealed off the area, its fate hidden by the House of Saud's effective system of censorship.

As soon as the revolt at Mecca was quelled and the Shiites locked in Qatif, the government began a rigorous campaign of public relations and fence mending. Choosing to ignore the foreigners who were be headed, the House of Saud chose to regard the uprising as a revolt limited to Saudi fanatics on the fringes of Wahhabism.

Mecca was painful for rulers accustomed to being protectors of the faith, the foremost defenders of religious purity. An attack from the fundamentalists, the bedrock of their support, caught them off guard. But members of the upper echelon of the House of Saud are first and foremost politicians and only secondarily monarchists. Like a shrewd political machine, the House of Saud not only heard the voices of discontent but attacked the sources of that discontent. Although shake ups occurred in the military and governorships that smacked of a purge, the family depended more on its network of personal favors than on retribution to put its political affairs in order. As in the past, the conservatives were played off against the liberals to keep the House of Saud secure.

Several new governorships to be presided over by high-ranking members of the royal family were created. Their purpose was to in crease the royal presence in the hinterlands. The religious element was ¹placated by a vigorous crackdown on the enforcement of religious laws. Merchants in Jeddah and Dhahran, formerly immune to the rigid religious restrictions imposed on the interior areas, were forced to follow chafed against the erosion of their values by the onslaught of foreign ways.