Bin Baz Matee told me: ‘Years later we discovered that Munir too had joined Baz’s organisation. It (the organisation) was recruiting common Saudis and young non-Saudi Muslims working in Saudi Arabia, but they also began visiting religious schools like the one attended by my son; and (with the help of the school’s administration), the organisation began to attract educated young men like Munir. We hardly saw him anymore. We had no clue what he was up to. It was as if he had begun to hate us.’
In 1977, Juhayman had a falling out with the Dawa. He criticised Baz for continuing to be on the payroll of the monarchy. Baz explained to him that the monarchy might be corrupt and the princes may be playboys, but the monarchy remained to be a barrier against communism and secularism in the region.
Juhayman scoffed at this explanation and quit the organisation. With him also went some other members of the organisation, one of them being Munir.
‘Munir never spoke of Juhayman,’ Matee told me. ‘He would just talk about some pious Saudi hero who would cleanse the holy land. It was only latter that we realised that he was talking about Juhayman.
Juhayman now began to write and publish long essays against the ‘corruption of the monarchy,’ the sacrilege of the holy land by Saudi princes, and ‘their infidel guests,’ and also about how clerics like Baz were not practicing what they were preaching.
Juhayman soon came under the radar of the Saudi police, especially when he began to talk to the members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (settled in Saudi Arabia) about how they planned to topple Sadat.Most of Juhayman’s followers were young Saudis who had come from poor Bedouin families. They had arrived in the Kingdom’s big cities to benefit from the rapid pace of economic modernisation, but had been left feeling alienated and disorientated.
Others came from working-class groups of non-Saudi Muslims from various South Asian and African countries.
In late 1977, Juhayman formed a clandestine organisation. He told his followers to shun all material luxuries. The members also let their hair and beards grow, and walked around in dusty white robes preaching ‘the true word of God.’
They destroyed their identity cards and formed communes in Makkah, Medina and Riyadh, where they lived, ate and prayed together.
The Saudi government finally acted and arrested some members of Juhayman’s group. But Bin Baz came to their rescue and ordered their release. The Saudi regime obliged.
Then, in November 1978, the brother of one of Juhayman’s closest aids, Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtanithat, began to allude that his brother was the Mehdi (the mythical warrior-savior who according to some non-Quranic Islamic traditions would appear to spread God’s laws on Earth).
Juhayman went along with the façade. It was helpful to his cause. It gave his movement a messianic sheen. Juhayman began to tell his followers to prepare for a showdown with the unholy forces of tyranny, obscenity and greed.
The group began to amass weapons. The weapons were first stolen from the armories of the Guardsmen by Juhayman’s followers in the official paramilitary outfit.
Then more rifles and machine guns were smuggled in from Yemen. Bombs and even more guns were bought from the black market that was then packed with weaponry smuggled in from Lebanon, a country that (since 1975) had collapsed into a lethal civil war.
In late 1978, Juhayman quoted an obscure hadith foretelling the arrival of the Mehdi who would fight anti-Islam forces from the Grand Mosque in Makkah. The Mosque was located at the site of the most sacred Islamic site, the Ka'aba.
The storming On November 29, 1979, as the grand mufti of the mosque was preparing to lead the morning prayers that were being attended by thousands of Muslims from across the world, Juhayman led some 500 of his followers, all heavily armed, into the mosque and seized it.
His followers who entered the mosque also included a dozen or so veiled women who had joined his movement. Juhayman cut off the telephone lines, allowed many worshippers to leave the mosque, but retained hundreds as hostages.
He put expert marksmen on the roofs who then easily repulsed the Saudi regime’s first attempt to take back the mosque. Dozens of Saudi policemen and troops were cut down by heavy machine gun fire from Juhayman’s men.
Matee was in Riyadh at the time. He told me: ‘I was in Riyadh for some work. My wife called at a relative’s apartment where I was staying. She told him she could see black smoke rising from the Ka'aba. But then the line got disconnected and my relative just couldn’t call her back. The phone lines went dead.
‘Then we began to hear murmurings about an attack on Ka'aba. I was scared. Nobody was saying a word about it on the TV or the radio. I hurried back to Makkah on a taxi driven by a Pakistani. He told me the airports were being shut down. When I reached home the next day, indeed, I too could see black smoke rising from the site of the mosque and the Ka'aba from my apartment window. Then police vans appeared and began announcing that everyone should remain indoors. I panicked. I thought of Munir. I knew he prayed regularly at the mosque. My wife begged me to fetch him. I ran down and headed towards the school. It was sealed and being guarded by Saudi soldiers. One officer told me to go back because there was no one there. I began to shout, ‘Munir, Munir! The soldiers started to push me inside a waiting army truck, but I dodged them and ran back home …’
The Saudi regime summoned its leading religious figurehead, Bin Baz, and other official clerics to issue a fatwa against the attackers, which they did. With a fatwa in hand (sanctioning Saudi soldiers to enter the holy premises with weapons), troops moved again to retake the mosque.
But once again, they were repulsed with machinegun fire, grenades and missiles. Dozens more lay dead. The Saudi regime began to panic. It blacked-out all news coming out from the besieged kingdom.
Smoke rising from the Grand Mosque in Makkah. Mateen told me: ‘For days the whole country just stood still. The TV and radio went blank. We couldn’t even tune into the BBC (radio). Phones were dead. All we heard was gunfire. Nobody spoke. Nobody was allowed to speak.
‘But one day, our phone suddenly rang. The operator said the call was from Pakistan. It was my mother. The phones were back on. She asked us what was happening. We told her we had no clue. She said that the American Embassy in Islamabad had been burned down. I was shocked. Was it the Americans attacking Ka'aba? The phones went dead again.’
Pakistan’s state-owned TV channel the PTV was telecasting a cricket Test match between Pakistan and India being played in the Indian city of Bangalore on the day of the siege. The transmission was suddenly interrupted and the newscaster, Azhar Lodhi, appeared on screen.
In a dead sombre tone, he announced the attack on Ka'aba without giving any details about the attackers. PTV did not return to the Test match; instead it started to run na'ats and recitations from the Quran.
PTV had the details of the attack, but on the advice of the military regime (that had come to power in July 1977), it did not announce that the attackers were all Muslim.
Pakistanis tuned into BBC Radio’s Urdu service that quoted the official Iranian media that was now under the control of an Islamic revolutionary government in Tehran. The reported quote suggested that the attacks were the work of the ‘American-Zionist lobby.’
The very next day, large rallies condemning the siege appeared in major Pakistani cities. The biggest rally took place in the country’s capital, Islamabad.
It was a spontaneous gathering held outside the American embassy building. It suddenly turned violent when some students made fiery speeches, blaming the United States for the attack on the Ka'aba.
The gathering soon turned into a rampaging mob and forced its way inside the embassy’s compound and offices. The mob was acting upon what it had heard on BBC believing that the Iranian quote that the radio network had quoted was actual news.
The Iranians were well aware of the reality behind the takeover of the mosque by Saudi fanatics. But they used the opportunity to embarrass both the Americans and the Saudi monarchy by claiming that it was a part of a US plot to ‘occupy’ Makkah.
The Zia regime, unimpressed by American criticism of its takeover (in 1977) and facing American sanctions, did absolutely nothing to reveal the details of the attack.
Also read: A leaf from history: Zia’s cycle show and the siege of the Ka’aba
Suddenly, unchecked by the Zia regime, the news broadcast by Iranian radio that was then reproduced by some Urdu newspapers in Pakistan was used as a plank to organise a sit-in outside the US embassy in Islamabad.
The sit-in was then infiltrated by some boisterous young men who instigated the gathered people to attack the embassy. The mob surged forward towards the embassy, setting it on fire. The attack lasted for hours, but the police stayed put.
Pakistan Army helicopters hovered over the burning building and only landed on the roof of the crumbling structure after the mob had already killed two American and two Pakistani employees of the embassy. Two protesters also lost their lives in the chaos.
The violence and the rallies finally came to a sudden end once the military regime decided to release the full details of the attack in Makkah.