Hatred's Kingdom
How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism
by Dore Gold
Regnery, 309 pp., $27.95

AL QAEDA'S May 12 bombing in Riyadh is a wake-up call for the Saudi Arabian royal family, President Bush declared. A White House spokesman added that the terrorist attack "makes it clear" the Saudis need to do more to fight terrorism. In response, the Saudis pledged they will do better--for now both Saudis and Americans are in the crosshairs. Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal explained that al Qaeda made a bad tactical error by angering and uniting Saudi Arabia "in resisting and confronting the work they are doing."

All of this talk out of Washington and Riyadh is carefully couched within what both sides call the "longtime strategic partnership" between Saudi Arabia and the United States (just as it was after the 1995 bombing of the American military mission in Riyadh and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing). It is far from clear, however, that the problems of that partnership are amenable to tactical adjustments. To read Dore Gold's "Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism" is to see the unfortunate fact that al Qaeda-like fundamentalism is central to the Saudi social and political regime.

Gold traces what he describes as the "Saudi-Wahhabi Covenant," the bargain between the House of Saud and the sect that traces its origins to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his movement in the eastern Arabian peninsula at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Wahhabism emerged as an attempt to recover the severest form of Islam and politicize it. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab reacted strongly to a variety of religious and political currents of his time: the decadence of the Ottoman Empire (and perhaps also the rising power of European Christendom), the traditional polytheism of Bedouin tribesmen, the Shia strain of Islam.

Not surprisingly, his puritanism put him at odds with the local clerical hierarchy and the Ottomans. But the clarity of ibn Abd al-Wahhab's religious vision was matched by an eye for political opportunity. He found shelter, patronage, and a partnership with a young prince named Muhammad ibn Saud. The alliance of 1744 was consecrated by a mithaq, or covenant, under which ibn Saud formed the first Saudi state, and Wahhabism became its ideology. "It was, in short," Gold writes, "a political bargain: Ibn Saud would protect ibn Abd al-Wahhab and spread his new creed, while ibn Abd al-Wahhab would legitimize Saudi rule over an expanding circle of Bedouin tribes, which were subdued through a new jihad."

Thus, Saudi political rule has always been inseparable from Wahhabism. Over time, the clerics provided the ideological glue that sustained the Saudis through attacks from the Ottomans (who could not ignore the rivalry for suzerainty over Mecca and Medina and the threat to their legitimacy as Muslim rulers), from the Hashemites, and from the West. After World War I, as ibn Saud struggled to create the modern Saudi state, he first employed the Wahhabi Ikhwan--the militarized "brotherhood" that eventually became the Saudi Arabian National Guard--to overthrow the Hashemites. But the clever ibn Saud understood that he needed a base for broader rule, especially in the largely Shia eastern provinces.