The Monarch Who Declared His Own Revolution

摘要

The night of september II, 2001, had come and gone in Saudi Arabia, and the dawn prayers had been said in Jidda. But at mid-morning, when a visitor to Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz al-Saud found him in one of the vast rooms of his palace, the de facto ruler of the country was still bent on the floor. "He was alone," remembers the visitor, insisting on anonymity. "He prayed long, long, long-much longer than I have ever seen." At last the man who is now the king of Saudi Arabia (he would inherit the throne in 2005) arose and spoke. He seemed stunned. "I am sure our good people did not do these things," he said. Yet word had already come from the United States that most of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. "He could not put this within a context that he understood," recalls the visitor. "Not in an Arab context or a Muslim context or a Saudi context." In the years since, when Abdullah has talked of Al Qaeda and its allies, he uses words that translate as "the deviant group," or "the miscreants," as if it is impossible that they could have been his subjects.