Smokers’ Corner: Once upon a Saudi king - Pakistan - DAWN.COM: "In 1979, dozens of armed Saudi fanatics stormed the Holy Mosque in Makkah. According to author Yaroslav Trofimov (in Siege of Mecca), the uprising was an expression of repressed anger among Saudi conservatives against Faisal’s modernisation policies.
The uprising was crushed by Khalid, but it made future Saudi monarchs give a lot more space to the conservatives, slow down modernisation and channel the radicals by exporting their energy and ideas out of the Kingdom and into Muslim lands that were recipients of large Saudi economic hand-outs.
But by then Nasserism was dead, Ba’ath Socialism was receding and the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse.
So the exported ideas and energies were now being disseminated into a tumultuous vacuum. That is why they violently transfigured and became almost entirely nihilistic, further tarnishing the legacy of perhaps the most unique Saudi monarch ever.
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 10th, 2015"
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