By birth, Juhayman was a Bedouin; these tribal, nomadic people have lived in the region for thousands of years. He was also an Islamic preacher. He had spent eighteen years in the Saudi national guard, where he never rose above the rank of corporal but had ample time to attend lectures on Islam. His father had been an extremely devout follower of a Sunni sect founded in the mid-1700s by Muhammad Ibn Abdel Wahhab, who preached that Islam had become corrupt, paganized, and Europeanized. He rejected what he viewed as unnecessary cultural sophistication as well as personal luxuries—including silk clothing, tobacco, gold adornments for men, and music and dancing. He wanted a return to the pure form of Islam as first practiced by Muhammad (PBUH) and a rigorous application of even the smallest details of original Islamic law. Ibn Abdel Wahhab found an ally in Muhammad bin Saud, whose descendants would become the House of Saud, the future kings of Saudi Arabia. But the alliance partly fractured in the twentieth century. The family of Abdel Wahhab remained a powerful religious force, but the religious militia that had backed the Wahhabis and the House of Saud turned on the Saudi king after he allowed Westerners into the country. In 1929, King Abdul Aziz of the House of Saud defeated his former military allies in battle. One of the survivors of that defeat was Juhayman’s father.
By 1979, Juhayman had become steeped in this highly fundamentalist Wahhabi-Salafi preaching, which joined the original Wahhabi belief in a strict interpretation of Islam that rejects modern influences with a second, radical, highly Puritanical view of Islam (Salafism) that was being formulated among extremist scholars. The result is a set of extreme Salafist beliefs that is critical of and even downright hostile to modern advancements in technology and human thought. Juhayman also increasingly became convinced that the Muslim world was nearing the fateful end of days, the great cataclysm that would destroy the globe and leave only the most devout standing. Muslims believe that before this day, the Mahdi, Islam’s redeemer who would rid the world of evil, will come. Juhayman was convinced that the Mahdi had arrived in the form of his brother-in-law, who accompanied him on the siege of the Grand Mosque.
Juhayman’s takeover of the mosque and its grounds caused utter confusion. Initial reports suggested that the besiegers were Iranians. Just sixteen days before, on November 4, Iranian militants had seized the US embassy in Tehran and taken more than sixty hostages. Information about conditions inside the mosque came only when an American helicopter pilot who had served in Vietnam made two passes above to snap photos. (The pilot and his crew had to convert to Islam by saying the Islamic profession of faith, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger,” in order to be cleared to fly over the site, since no non-Muslims are permitted. At that time the government lacked any of its own pilots capable of undertaking the mission.) The Saudis quickly realized that the man in control of the mosque was part of an extremist group whose main adherents had been detained and then released less than two years before, a man whose innocence had been vouched for by none other than Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah bin Baz (one of the nation’s leading Islamic scholars and a strong proponent of this growing extremist Salafi ideology). Bin Baz had in fact preached to and had taught Juhayman in Medina, the second home of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).I
As the siege continued, the Saudi kingdom imposed an information blackout, even cutting telephone and telegraph communications lines to the outside world: at various points, the kingdom also falsely claimed that the siege was over. It took two weeks, the assistance of a contingent of French commandos and Pakistani special forces, a massive fire, pitched gun battles, the shelling of five of the seven minarets, and the deployment of chemical gas in the vast tunnels underneath the mosque (tunnels largely built by the bin Laden construction firm, the family of Osama bin Laden) to end the siege. A fatwa by Bin Baz was written to justify the armed attack by Saudi troops on the Grand Mosque.
In the days following the takeover, the turmoil spread beyond Mecca. The American embassies in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Tripoli, Libya, were violently attacked by local mobs, incited by claims that the Americans were behind the desecration of the Grand Mosque. The US embassy in Pakistan was completely destroyed; the 137 Americans inside barely made it out alive after hiding for hours in the building’s safe-room vault, surrounded by an out-of-control fire. One Marine was killed. Elsewhere in the embassy compound, a US Army warrant officer asleep in his staff apartment on his day off was also killed, his body burned by the mob.
In Mecca, the final death toll was far higher. Officially, the number of dead—including Saudi kingdom soldiers, rebels, and pilgrims trapped in the Mosque when the siege began—is listed as 270, but there are other estimates that put the number of deceased at 1,000 or more, with many of those being innocent pilgrims.
On January 8, 1980, a little more than a week after Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan, the Saudi government publicly beheaded sixty-three of the rebels who had occupied the Grand Mosque. The executions were carried out in eight Saudi cities. Juhayman was the first to die, in Mecca. But his ideology did not. It has become one of the animating forces of contemporary Islamist extremism. The Egyptian army officer who would assassinate President Anwar Sadat eighteen months later was inspired by Juhayman: by chance, his brother had been a pilgrim at the Grand Mosque during the siege. Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, ISIS, and even groups like Nigeria’s Boko Haram are rooted in the same fundamentalist ideology that Juhayman once preached, advocating a strict interpretation of the Koran, the application of harsh Islamic law, and calls for jihad against the infidels, particularly Jews and Christians.
Until “the days of Juhayman,” which is how the siege is still referred to in Mecca, Saudi Arabia had been both increasingly prosperous and increasingly modern, supported by the global oil boom, which had lifted the country out of poverty and turned it into a land of plenty. But afterward, fears of a radical Islamist tide began to pervade the country, prompting the ruling family to meet with senior religious clerics and elders to discuss how this new brand of extremism could be addressed. In an effort to appease those who had gravitated to this ideology, the Saudi state decided to embrace some of their doctrines. Juhayman and his followers might have been driven from the Grand Mosque, but now their extreme beliefs would increasingly occupy the entire Saudi nation from within.
The first group to feel the full impact were women. In the weeks after the uprising, female announcers were banned from television. Pictures of females were censored in newspapers, and the government cracked down on the employment of women. A hard-line Salafist ideology was introduced and taught not only in Saudi schools but around the world by Saudi-funded missionaries. Bin Baz would issue another fatwa, declaring that jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan was an individual duty of every Muslim. One of those who left the kingdom to join that fight was Osama bin Laden.
Growing up in Mecca, I would hear veiled references to the days of Juhayman. We never studied the siege in school, and it was never spoken about publicly. Today it has been all but erased from the public Saudi record. Even the hole in the Kaaba has been covered up. But the legacy of Juhayman and his embrace of extreme Salafism would come to impact even the smallest details of my life inside the Saudi kingdom.