THE ROYALS' PROMISE:

"Indeed, as Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, the governor of Asir province and son of King Faisal, put it a few years ago, "we have eliminated the individuals who committed the Juhayman crime, but we have overlooked the ideology that was behind the crime. We let it spread in the country as if it did not exist."

He said this because in order to secure religious assent from the clergy, or ulama--assent without which many Saudi troops refused to fight in the holy shrine--the royal family had to promise the clerics that it would reverse the slow modernization that had been occurring in the kingdom up until then. The royals fulfilled their promise. In the weeks after the siege ended, female newscasters were taken off television; the enforcement of the ban on alcohol became much more severe; and vast amounts of oil money started flowing into the clerics' Wahhabi proselytizing campaign around the world. And it's precisely this missionary effort all over the Muslim world that subsequently created a pool of eager recruits for Al-Qaeda."

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