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"Saudi Arabia is a country defined by paradox: It sits atop some of the richest oil deposits in the world and yet its roiling disaffection produced fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. It is a modern state, where wealthy princes and tycoons raise futuristic cities in the desert, and yet its powerful religious establishment would roll back its values fourteen hundred years to the time of the Prophet Mohammed. To fully understand our interdependent twenty-first-century world, we must understand Saudi Arabia." With Inside the Kingdom, author Robert Lacey gives readers a remarkable portrait in full of this most enigmatic of lands. More than twenty years after moving to Saudi Arabia during the oil boom to write his groundbreaking epic The Kingdom, Lacey returned to live once again among the princes and the paupers, the clerics and the progressives. What he found was a society slowly recovering from the past. In this recounting, which takes us from the bloody seizure of Mecca's Grand Mosque in 1979 to the deepening of U.S.-Saudi relations during the Gulf War of 1991 to the fostering of a new generation of Islamic holy warriors led by Osama bin Laden, Lacey shows how Saudi Arabia came to the precipice at which it now stands, struggling to learn how not to be at war with itself.
Map: Saudi Arabia and Its Neighbors
Preface: Welcome to the Kingdom
Family Tree: Rulers of the Kingdom
Note on the Islamic Calendar
Pt. 1 Kingdom of God
1 Angry Face 3
2 The Brothers 14
3 Siege 24
4 No Sunni, No Shia 37
5 Vox Populi, Vox Dei 46
6 Salafi Soccer 54
7 Jihad in Afghanistan 62
8 Special Relationship 68
9 Dawn Visitors 78
10 Stars in the Heavens 86
11 Into Exile 97
12 The Dove and the East Wind 105
13 Vacationing Jihadi 114
Pt. 2 Kingdom at War
14 Desert Storm 127
15 Battle for Al-Khafji 141
16 Awakening 148
17 Stopping the Sins 157
18 In from the Cold 167
19 Change of Heart 174
20 Enter the Crown Prince 180
21 The Students 193
22 Infinite Reach 204
23 New Century 214
Pt. 3 Al-Qaeda Comes Home
24 Fifteen Flying Saudis 225
25 Fire 237
26 Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula 244
27 Prodigal Sons 253
28 King Abdullah 264
29 Girls of Saudi 274
30 Illegitimate Occupation 284
31 End of the Affair 292
32 Condition of the People 303
Epilogue 316
Time Line 333
Glossary of Names and Arabic Terms 335
Notes 343
Suggested Reading 377
Acknowledgments 381
General Index 389
House of Saud Index 401
Photographic Sources 403
Overview
"Saudi Arabia is a country defined by paradox: It sits atop some of the richest oil deposits in the world and yet its roiling disaffection produced fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. It is a modern state, where wealthy princes and tycoons raise futuristic cities in the desert, and yet its powerful religious establishment would roll back its values fourteen hundred years to the time of the Prophet Mohammed. To fully understand our interdependent twenty-first-century world, we must understand Saudi Arabia." With Inside the Kingdom, author