Thirty years ago this month, religious extremists pulled off an audacious attack on Islam's holiest site in Mecca. Sec Kanwar speaks to one of the few writers to study this under-reported event, and looks at how what followed led to the global spread of Wahhabism, whose impact has been felt the world over.

November 1979, and the Western world was focused on the Iran hostage crisis, apprehensive at the emergence of a new, militant political Islam. But while the ayatollahs decried liberal values, Saudi Arabia had been moving in the opposite direction. Under the rule of King Faisal and then Crown Prince Fahd al Saud, the preceding two decades had seen gradual attempts to open up a society founded on religious conservatism, such as the introduction of television and the education of women.

All that changed on November 20th, the start of the 15th Century in the Islamic calendar. Around 500 armed Muslim extremists stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca, home to the Kaaba, the holiest site in Islam. In a bloody episode of Muslim history that remains largely unreported to this day, the rebels set off a chain of events that many analysts say led to the emergence of a global jihadist ideology.

Yaroslav Trofimov, foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and author of The Siege of Mecca, is one of the few writers to have studied the episode and its historical repercussions. He believes the uprising laid the foundations for the formation of Al-Qaeda and contemporary Islamic extremism.

In exchange for supporting the authorities, “the Saudi religious establishment was allotted much larger financial resources to spread the Saudi brand of Islam all over the world,” he says in an interview with The Samosa.

The rebels, who included Saudis, Egyptians and even a number of African-American converts, were furious at what they saw as Saudi Arabia’s westernising, modernising and corrupt policies. They were particularly angered at the introduction of television, education for women, and at a perceived laxness in enforcing religious laws in the Kingdom. They also had a decidedly apocalyptic vision, proclaiming one of their members the ‘Mahdi’, a figure in Islamic theology whose arrival on earth heralds the final battle between Muslims and non-believers and beginning of the end of the world.

They were led by Saudi theology student and ex-National Guard corporal Juhayman al-Otaibi, a former disciple of the conservative cleric Sheikh Bin Baaz (later the Grand Mufti). While studying at the Islamic University of Medina, Otaibi preached the need to return to a purer way of life in strict accordance with his interpretation of Islamic values.

He was drawn towards Muhammad al-Qahtani, a young poet at the Islamic University who was said to have a powerful and mystical aura. Otaibi began having visions and dreams, and came to believe that Qahtani was the Mahdi, pointing out that other than his charisma he held many of the characteristics that the Mahdi was foretold to possess in certain hadiths – he had come to Mecca from the north, had the same name as the Prophet, and even had a birthmark on his right cheek.

Otaibi and his growing number of followers attracted the attention of the Saudi authorities. They were detained and questioned on suspicion of being heretics, but were released after Bin Baaz deemed them not to pose a threat. He said they harkened to the tradition of the Ikhwan, the ultra-conservative fighting force that helped establish Saudi Arabia and preached a puritanical version of Wahhabism. Otaibi’s grandfather had been a key figure in the Ikhwan, and the Saudi National Guard was created from its remnants.

According to Trofimov, the Saudi elite found it difficult to crack down on religious conservatives. “Ideologically, the objections to things like TV, printed images or the presence of non-Muslims in Arabia were shared by people like Bin Baaz,” he says. “The only difference was that the leading ulema [Muslim legal scholars] understood that only al Saud stood in the way of even faster reforms.”

Trofimov adds that the University of Medina was host to a number of members of the Muslim Brotherhood living in exile, many of whom were attracted to Otaibi. “Ideologically, it was the first fusion of the Wahhabi Saudi traditionalism with the Islamic political activism born from the Brotherhood's radical offshoots in Egypt. Al-Qaeda, by the way, shares a similar makeup.”

The decision not to arrest Otaibi and his supporters was to prove costly for the Saudi authorities. On the first day of the new Muslim century, when according to a particular hadith the Mahdi was due to reveal himself, and with the Grand Mosque packed with 50,000 worshippers, Otaibi and his followers infiltrated the compound armed with automatic weapons and declared everyone inside a hostage. Using the mosque’s loudspeaker system, which normally announced the start of prayers in the city, they proclaimed the arrival of the Mahdi and demanded all foreigners be expelled from the Arabian Peninsula.

“The events in the mosque were highly embarrassing, putting under question al Saud's role as the Custodian of the Holy Shrines,” says Trofimov. In an era predating cable TV and mobile phones, the Saudi authorities quickly attempted to impose a blackout on the city by cutting all the phone lines.

When sketchy details did filter out to the rest of the world, US president Jimmy Carter’s administration pointed the finger of blame at Iran, which the West saw as a greater threat than Sunni extremism. Ayatollah Khomeini retorted that it was conceivably the work of American and Zionist conspirators – an allegation that led to anti-American riots across the Muslim world, including in Islamabad, where the US embassy was burnt down killing two employees.

The Saudi authorities’ immediate attempts to approach the mosque were met with armed resistance. The rebels had placed snipers in the mosque’s minarets, easily picking off the approaching security forces.

The attackers soon released the vast majority of the 50,000 hostages, keeping only a few hundred, some of whom they won over to their cause. But the crisis proved troubling for the authorities. Violence in the Grand Mosque is explicitly forbidden, so strictly that a fatwa is necessary before even a plant can be uprooted.

Before any decisive military action could even be attempted, the approval of the country’s top religious leaders was required. And it was then that one of the most significant events of the siege took place. After a lengthy debate, including discussion of whether Qahtani was indeed the Mahdi, the scholars, Bin Baaz among them, agreed to sanction the use of force against the rebels in return for stronger enforcement of religious doctrine within Saudi Arabia.

It was a grand bargain between the House of Saud and the leading ulema, whose fatwa allowing combat within the Grand Mosque was “indispensible” in defeating Otaibi according to Trofimov.

But even with permission to attack the rebels, recapturing the mosque proved difficult, with a lack of coordination between the National Guard and the army hampering efforts. As well as Otaibi, many of the rebels had received military training, enabling them to put up stiff resistance.

With the aid of armoured vehicles as well as Pakistani troops stationed nearby, Saudi forces drove the rebels into the underground basement beneath the mosque. However, this was a labyrinthine warren of tunnels in which advancing troops could easily be ambushed.

The Saudis realised they needed outside help and enlisted commandos from the French GIGN, one of the best trained special forces at the time – but with non-Muslims forbidden from entering Mecca, they had to convert to Islam in a brief ceremony first.

Around two weeks after the siege began, the surviving rebels were finally captured. The episode left an estimated 1,000 people dead – although the official death toll was just 255 – including the supposed Mahdi Muhammad al-Qahtani. Otaibi was amongst those captured alive; he and 67 surviving followers were paraded on TV and executed in January 1980.

But despite seeing off the threat, the incident profoundly shook the Saudi establishment. For first time it had been attacked by groups claiming to be more religious than the monarchy, something it was increasingly conscious of in the context of Iran’s recent Islamic revolution.

Faced with the threat of internal conservative dissent, the Saudis struck a compromise. They would pacify hard-line elements by ensuring the country’s laws remained to their liking. “Women were banned from workplaces and TV newscasts,” says Trofimov. “Restrictions on alcohol started to be enforced much more vigorously.”

Crucially, the Saudis also started funding Wahhabist activities across the Muslim world as part of their pact with the hardliners. Saudi oil wealth was booming, and a large part of it was given over to establishing a network of pro-Wahhabi institutions and madrassas across the Muslim world from Nigeria to Pakistan. In order to distract extremist clerics from events within the Kingdom, the Saudis effectively adopted the promotion of radical Wahhabism as their foreign policy. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a mere matter of weeks after the conclusion of the siege allowed the Saudis to export many of those sympathetic to the rebels, and also provided an opportunity to distract them from attacking the monarchy.

This short-sighted policy sowed the seeds of the current jihadist wave currently threatening to engulf the Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia. Saudi money was used to finance the Jamaat-Ulama-Islami madrassas across the NWFP and Baluchistan in Pakistan, from which the Taliban emerged. It was also used to help the so-called Arab-Afghans fighting the Soviets including Osama bin Laden, the pre-cursors of today’s Al-Qaeda. The money allowed Wahhabism to flourish in places it had never held any previous influence, in Africa, South Asia and the Far East. And in the absence of coherent and dedicated policies on educational development, madrassas were set up preaching dogmatic and extreme interpretations of the religion, producing today’s generations of terrorists and suicide bombers.

The authorities effectively ended up defeating the rebels, but adopting their ideals and exporting them around the world.

The siege was also to impact upon the perception of Saudi Arabia by Muslim radicals such as Osama bin Laden. Reading jihadist literature such as ‘Clear Evidence of the Infidel Nature of the Saudi State’ by Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, former mentor to Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it becomes apparent that the perceived desecration of the Grand Mosque, and the violence against Muslims calling for stricter implementation of religion, marked a crucial development in the evolution of how such groups came to view the Saudi monarchy.

According to Trofimov, “bin Laden himself later reminisced about how he was shocked at the sight of King Fahd sending tanks into the shrine, violating its sanctity. For him, this was the moment where his loyalty to al Saud began to fracture.”

The entire episode encapsulates Saudi Arabia’s existential crisis: it is a theocracy that is fundamentally not theocratic enough. Buying off hard-line elements was only ever going to be a short term solution, and just as former National Guard Otaibi turned against the hand that once fed him, so have jihadist groups such as Al-Qaeda. Only instead of just Saudi Arabia, it is now the entire Muslim world that is threatened.

Juhayman al-Otaibi has become something of a heroic figure in jihadist subculture, where at worst he is thought to have made a mistake in pursuit of a noble cause. Perhaps the most chilling reminder of the link between the past and present is one of Trofimov’s anecdotes about his time working in Iraq: he was in the Palestine Hotel when a suicide bomber struck, killing around 17 people.

And the nom de guerre of the bomber?

‘Juhayman’.