And the execution began! . . . Many did not care to watch it but lay with eyes closed in the sand; they all knew; now Justice was being done.

—Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”

Soon after I arrived in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, in 1980 to teach at the university, a new colleague pointed out the parking lot called Dira Square, in which executions took place.

“There it is, right next to the Friday Mosque. That's it—chop-chop square,” he said, gesturing toward the distant Ministry of Justice. “They slaughter the prisoner beneath the clock tower,” he added.

“I love the raw symbolism,” I remarked, scanning the area. The anomalous clock tower, standing amid the rows of parked Mazdas, Larks, and Toyotas, looked suddenly threatening, ominous. Inwardly, I asked myself if I could bear to watch a man being executed, especially by decapitation. Thinking—almost abstractly—of the blood, the human butchery, I decided that I could not. Films like Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now brought me as close as I wanted to come to explicit bloodletting. Moreover, on moral grounds, I had always felt that the arguments against capital punishment were persuasive; I wanted no part of it.

But in the weeks following that brief tour of Riyadh, the subject maintained a strange half-life among my friends and colleagues at the university. At any social gathering, during private conversations, even in taxis and buses, someone was likely to allude to Dira Square, to al-Johar (the royal executioner), to a grisly botched beheading, to the rumor of an impending spectacle at “Johar's Chopping Center.” Inevitably, the university wits had a field day: “In Riyadh, when they say ‘heads will roll,’ heads roll”; “Let's go down to Dira Stadium and catch the double-header on Friday”; “Johar passed his friend Abdu last week and cut him dead”; “If you work for Johar [a modern shopping mall], you always get a-head”—variations on a theme. In Riyadh, a particularly dull place to live and work, the topic of executions provided an interesting diversion.

As folklore, the procedure of the idaam (literally, “the annihilation”) itself had achieved the status of legend, although the event in question actually occurred on a fairly regular basis for all—except, of course, women—to witness. Authorities on the subject practically outnumbered their listeners, but the “facts” proved to be (at best) second-hand. One was assured of the following random details: the prisoner has been drugged; he has been tortured by electric thimbles; no felon receives the death penalty unless he has “freely” confessed (hence the electricity); Westerners are pushed to the front for a better view; the victim is brought out bound, gagged, and blindfolded; the executioner addresses his charge, asking his forgiveness, a moment before the great sword falls; if the crime committed was particularly heinous, Johar cuts his victim several times before administering the coup de grâce. Depending on the raconteur, any one of these details might be omitted, or an elegant variation substituted. Thus, the local ur-text of “The Tale of the Execution” was formed, the supreme exercise in hermeneutics.

As everyone was sure of his information, but no two people concurred, everything was cast into doubt. Each narrative element remained in suspension. Indeed, only the core fact—executions took place from time to time—was not in dispute, but there agreement ended. Given the circumstances, what constituted authority? The Arab News (Riyadh's English-language daily, composed in Orwellian Newspeak) provided few clues. If an execution took place on a given Friday, a short notice would appear on Saturday, the first working day of the Islamic week:

Murderer Executed

Riyadh. Mohammed Abdulaziz Yamani was beheaded here after Friday noon prayers for the murder of his wife. The Ministry of Interior, which upheld the sentence pronounced by a sharia [Islamic law] court, vowed to rid the kingdom of moral pollution and to strike with an iron fist those who violate the laws of the Holy Koran.

Characteristically, as in the above example, the government-controlled press offered a bare minimum of unverified and unverifiable facts followed by shrill self-justification.

For a month or two I attempted my own investigative reporting, short of actually witnessing a Friday execution myself. I was willing to talk to anyone (with the aid of an interpreter if necessary)—even Johar, a taboo figure in the community because (legally or not) he had spilled blood. But I was informed by Saudis that this interview could never take place. Johar was clearly out of bounds. Usually my informants were Americans, though I discussed the matter with a fair number of British, Canadian, Irish, and Pakistani expatriates who had lived in Riyadh for some time. No one residing in Saudi Arabia, particularly the capital, is unaware of sharia justice; in Riyadh, the centrally located Friday Mosque adjoining Dira Square is a local landmark, which is regularly pointed out to newcomers, as had been the case with me.

I also questioned, with studied casualness, the three or four Riyadhis whom I sometimes engaged as informal Arabic teachers. Curiously enough, my native informants proved to be no more reliable than the most credulous and naive expatriate. In fact, the young Saudis with whom I spoke were obviously terrified of Dira Square and acted extremely nervous when talking about it. Even those Saudis who addressed me as “my brother,” an unmistakable sign of trust, were uneasy answering my questions. None actually claimed to have witnessed an execution. For a long time I was deeply puzzled by their attitude. Finally, one of my informants, born and reared in Riyadh, offered a plausible explanation: “The newspaper says that the prisoner has committed a serious crime such as rape or murder. But we know the reason is politics; the government wants to show its power.” I also sensed that my Saudi informants who spoke fluent English and who understood Western sensibilities were ashamed of this brutal spectacle, though, paradoxically, some rigorously defended the practice.

Finally, after the fifth or fiftieth version of “The Tale of the Execution,” I began to reconsider my veto on attending one: here, finally, was a Riyadh rumor that could be verified, or at least laid to rest.

Yet I still had serious moral qualms. The prevailing attitude toward executions might be compared with the social stance toward pornography: everyone is interested, titillated, but no one is ready to admit publicly that he would go out of his way to see a pornographic movie. Moreover, as one six-year veteran of life in Riyadh, put it: “Executions are never announced beforehand, so those who want to see them have to hang around the parking lot—like vultures.” The scavenger simile struck me as particularly apt; indeed, the calculated effort required to watch a man get his head cut off meant a kind of unsavory participation in the gruesome proceedings. On the other hand, no matter how reprehensible, voyeuristic, or sadistic the role of spectator might be, witnessing a public execution in the final decades of the 20th century had to be an extraordinary experience, a truly unique opportunity. I finally decided to leave the matter open—to “go with the flow.”

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II

In Fact, the series of choices that brought me to Saudi Arbia in the first place were made in response to a pattern of economic and personal circumstances rather than free and clear decisions. Weeks after my successful interview in Houston, although leaning toward accepting a post in Riyadh, I had not yet made a commitment. A few days before the deadline, however, I nearly balked: PBS television, after much soul-searching, had decided to show the British-made docudrama Death of a Princess, a recreation of the supposedly true story of a princess of the Saudi royal family who had been executed for adultery. The film had become something of a cause célèbre. The Saudis were outraged by it, and attempts had been made to stop its being shown in America.

A moment before the program began, the station manager virtually coerced the viewing public into staying tuned for the post-film discussion by a panel of experts. We viewers were earnestly promised an open and even-handed analysis to explain what we were about to see. I was somewhat bemused by the evident concern that viewers might become confused and begin to draw erroneous conclusions about Saudi justice. At the same time, I was deeply annoyed by the obsequious, hushed tone of this announcement, for it carried a message that was all too clear: we must never offend the Saudis, who, after all, run OPEC, which, in turn, holds the West hostage to its oil needs. Since 1972 the highest business and political authorities had been repeating this warning ad nauseam.

The film itself hardly earned its international notoriety: from start to finish Death of a Princess is a soft-boiled, mediocre affair, barely worth the effort and risk, not to mention the consequences, of making it. (A native Riyadhi later told me that the man who cooperated with the British filmmakers had himself been executed.) The participants in the unrehearsed discussion that followed the television presentation, with the sole exception of the British journalist who had been involved in the production, turned in a better performance than the professional actors in the film. When argument could be distinguished from theatrical hand-wringing, each expert seemed to advance the position of cultural relativism. How can we judge the mores of a civilization we know nothing about? they demanded. But the award went to the Saudi lawyer (a practically meaningless term when translated into English, since advocacy plays no part in the sharia system); among other things, he gratuitously lied: “Why does it show the journalist with a spy camera hidden in his cigarette case? Taking pictures at an execution is not forbidden.” Of course, as everyone who has landed at a Saudi airport knows, passengers are warned about picture-taking even before leaving the plane. In Riyadh, simply to carry a camera puts one at risk; taking pictures of “sensitive” subjects (which range from mud dwellings and official buildings to women, whiskey bottles, car wrecks, and the national airports) is strictly forbidden.

My mixed feelings about Riyadh after seeing the film were not relieved by my dealings with the Saudi agents in Houston. By the end of the summer the Saudi Educational Mission had managed to misplace my reimbursement check for the interview expenses, lose my passport, and forget to send my plane ticket. I seemed to be entering a zone where nothing was probable and yet everything was possible. However, at the last minute I found myself at Kennedy International Airport with passport, visa, and one-way ticket to Riyadh. While glancing through an issue of Time in the passenger lounge, I noticed a full-page advertisement for Saudia Airlines. The photograph showed a close-up of a Tri-star plane with green Arabic script on the nose and in the space above it the legend: welcome to our world. Coincidentally, once on board and well into the fourteen-hour nonstop flight to Dharhan, I reached into the pocket of the seatback in front of me and found one of those glossy magazines published by commercial airlines. This Saudi publication was called Ahlan Washalan (“Welcome, Most Welcome”), the conventional Arabic greeting in many Middle Eastern countries. My knowledge of the Islamic world in September 1980 was neither broad nor deep, but even I knew that the Arabs were famous for their hospitality, and these initial signs seemed to confirm it.

That first blast of Saudi air at the Dharhan airport was like a physical assault: hot as a pizza oven and smelling strongly of petroleum. The simple explanation is that large oil refineries are located near the airport; but at the time it seemed like a bad joke perpetrated by overzealous public-relations people, like the ludicrous spectacle of grass-skirted women greeting tourists in Honolulu. However, no public-relations firm figured in the debacle one met inside the air terminal. My first contact with the Perfect System—a term Saudis often use to describe the Islamic state—quickly gave the lie to all those slick advertisements proclaiming “welcome.” In fact, from that maddening encounter in September 1980 until June 1983, when I left Saudi Arabia forever, I have never felt less welcome in any country, city, neighborhood, public building, or workplace I have known.

Inside the terminal, as in the parable of the sheep and the goats, the non-Saudis were quickly culled from the group of arrivals and herded from one line to the next. The simple matter of stamping passports developed into a major project, attended by delay and confusion. Dozens of armed soldiers, some of whom appeared to be up long past their bedtime, skulked about the terminal, ostensibly keeping order, but succeeding only in creating disorder by interfering with the entry formalities. Even after passing through passport control in full sight of these young guards, I was accosted several times with the command “Jawazee!” (“Passport!”) before I could move into the customs area.

The spectacle of a Saudi customs officer going through luggage is shocking. Each suitcase is simply ravaged: personal belongings strewn over the counter, valuable possessions mindlessly vandalized, fallen objects trampled underfoot. As new arrivals we were bewildered, mortified; we avoided eye contact. Travel-weary, confused, and angry, many of us experienced in that painful hour an equally painful revelation: we were not welcome guests or even respected foreign experts, but necessary hirelings—and permanent outsiders.

_____________

That hot September night was the first, but certainly not the last, time I witnessed or experienced at first hand uncalled-for abuse from Saudi officials and functionaries. In officialdom, the suppliant for the all-necessary worrek (permission to do or obtain anything) was powerless. No matter what your status might be in England, America, or Germany, you were nothing in the university personnel offices. A full professor, a former department chairman, an internationally recognized authority in a major scientific field—all were at one time or another reduced to babbling plaintively for their passports, their contractually guaranteed plane-ticket vouchers, even their monthly salaries. The arrogant, sullen clerk to whom these entreaties were addressed meanwhile drank tea, read the newspaper, or talked incessantly on the telephone, pointedly ignoring the distraught individual who had been standing in front of him waiting, explaining, pleading for fifteen minutes to a half-hour. At some point the clerk might turn and snarl: “Return back after Saturday and you can get it, inshallah” (“God willing”). No recourse; no appeal—the matter is closed.

At the frontier, in the personnel offices, even on the street, one felt repeatedly violated. A supreme irony is that Saudis themselves are the most secretive and self-protective of people, yet in my experience they are appallingly insensitive to the need for privacy, let alone the sensibilities, of others. To choose but one example among many, a young Saudi student whom I barely knew began to examine an image of the Buddha on my neck chain. It never occurred to him apparently to ask permission or to excuse himself before treating my person in this most familiar manner. After squinting and grimacing at the medal for a moment or two, he announced to the others looking on: “Him [the Buddha] and monkey, same-same.” But any lack of respect toward Islam—real or imagined, implicit or explicit—would be sufficient grounds for serious reprisal, not excluding assassination. As one of my students explained: “If someone believes in another religion, it is not good that he should die, but if he is against Islam then we will surely kill him.”

As a matter of historical fact, the Saudi government outlawed the institution of slavery only in 1962. Residual attitudes and their corresponding practices remain very much in evidence. “Masters” are persons with innate rights, privileges, and dignity; the rest are non-persons and treated accordingly. Further, a strict pecking order is tacitly understood to obtain among all foreigners. The top rank is not held by other Arabs or even Muslims, but by Americans, who are grudgingly admired and respected, although they are known to be decadent shirkers and in some cases atheists—a theological position nearly ungraspable for most Saudis. In descending order there are other light-skinned Westerners (race prejudice is an institutional and social fact in Saudi Arabia); other Arabs and Muslims (an unsettled order of precedence, but most would agree that Yemenis are nearly beyond the pale); and finally, East Indian Hindus, who are relegated to the outer darkness. Treated with outward contempt, these people are generally hired to sweep the streets, beginning at 3:00 A.M., and to pick up garbage. As dark-skinned, non-Muslim polytheists, with a long history of being “enemies of Islam,” Indian Hindus have no status whatsoever in the Perfect System.

There are other signs of imperfection in the system as well. Despite clichés about peace and security in Riyadh, the weak are continually and habitually preyed upon. Western doctors practicing in the various open clinics throughout the city regularly told me about the shocking number of cases involving children of both sexes suffering from gonorrhea, syphilis, genital herpes, and other proofs of adult sexuality that had been forcibly visited on the young and helpless. Public outrages are rare, but rape is not unknown in Riyadh. Indeed, the threat of rape is the collective waking nightmare, a national obsession informing and shaping the very fabric of Saudi society.

The horror of rape, literal or metaphorical, is unmistakably reflected in the unique character of Saudi architecture: there is no public building or private villa without its forbidding wall topped with shards of glass, no window without bars; one is confronted with a convict's bad dream of locks, bolts, chains, barbed wire, and spiked fences at every point of entry. The present city of Riyadh was begun, in essence, fewer than twenty years ago, yet it resembles nothing so much as a cluster of fortresses. The architectural message of Riyadh is clear and unequivocal: keep out!

Leaving nothing to chance, the Saudi government backs this explicit message with a lethal threat. Guardhouses with heavily-armed sentries are as much a part of the public scene as are the hundreds of mosques with their blaring loudspeakers. Several different cadres of police and soldiers, some out of uniform, patrol every quarter and every street on a twenty-four-hour basis. Riyadh is a city under occupation, but the grim and watchful forces, with their scores of informers, are its own. And most telling of all, those huge villas designed for multiple occupancy, corresponding to the Middle Eastern concept of the extended family, feature one entrance, which also serves as the only exit. As Heraclitus observes: “The way in is the way out.”

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III

By February 1981, nearly six months after I had arrived in Saudi Arabia, the novelty of living in an exotic capital had worn off. Owing to various projects, everyday frustrations, and academic responsibilities, my original keen interest in Dira Square (which, incidentally, was located near my apartment) had given way to a number of problems that always seemed to demand my immediate attention. Moreover, regarding the highly-charged matter of actually witnessing the spectacle, I had finally decided not to decide, but to let events take their course.

One Friday morning I was interrupted in my reading by Alan Neil, one of my best friends in Riyadh and a close neighbor. In previous conversations he seemed unabashedly enthusiastic about attending an execution, but months passed and he had never bothered to loiter in the hot sun on a Friday noon to see if anything would happen. On this particular morning, he had been waiting for a bus when he noticed the black prison van and ambulance, with a police escort, heading for Dira—according to local wisdom, a sure sign that an execution was imminent. Alan hurried back to see if I might be interested in going along.

“You know something,” he said, slightly out of breath, “I think they're going to whop someone's head off down at the mosque this morning. Want to walk over there and take a look?”

Without thinking I agreed to accompany him and quickly got ready.

The walk from the Suwayylem Street apartment building to Dira Square took less than five minutes, ample time to consider my decision. I reflected on the fact that nothing in my background had prepared me for this sight. The amount of bloodshed for which I had been personally responsible would hardly fill a teacup: a couple of bloody noses and facial cuts in street fights as a teenager and later in karate matches. Neither had I seen much blood spilled under other circumstances. Ruefully I recalled the time I had nearly fainted after giving a pint of blood to the Red Cross. All in all, not much to prepare me for a beheading. What if I were to faint, get sick, or bolt from the scene? Was it true (as I had always suspected) that I was deficient in the Right Stuff? I also considered the possible long-range psychological consequences. Watching an execution might well result in recurring, traumatic nightmares. Literature offered a number of cautionary tales detailing profound personality changes consequent on a shattering experience: as in the case of Melville's Benito Cereno, whose ordeal “cast a shadow on his soul,” or Hawthorne's Goodman Brown, whose “dying hour was gloom”—or, more precisely, Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, who countenanced beheadings and even decorated the fence around his shack with the skulls; his dying words are legend: “The horror! The horror!”

In sight of the parking lot I could see Saudis in their distinctive national dress standing in the back of pickup trucks facing the Ministry of Justice to get a better view. Suddenly, I had a vivid image of my first parachute jump, which coincided with my maiden plane ride. Peering out of the open doorway of the Cessna 180, the wind at gale force and the noise of the engine a deafening roar, I recognized, with an inward gasp, the microscopic lettering on the roof of adam's air park hangar, a large building reduced to half the size of my thumbnail—and we were still climbing to jump altitude. At that moment I addressed myself aloud, though neither the pilot nor the jump-master could hear me over the racket: “Cliff, what the hell are you doing here?”

I silently repeated this question as we approached the cleared area about the size of a football field now cordoned off by a living barricade of soldiers, each brandishing an Uzi (Israeli-made) machine gun. In utter disbelief I checked my observation with Alan, who replied in a matter-of-fact tone: “Yes, they buy them indirectly from the Belgians.”

“That explains it,” I said, freely accepting the kind of non sequitur one heard practically every day in Riyadh.

But the soldiers were all “out of uniform,” and many of them displayed unmilitary bulges at the waistline; in any case, they did not menace the crowd. Rather, these weekend warriors, some sporting corporal's stripes haphazardly secured by a single safety pin at the shoulder, ignored guarding procedures and chatted amiably with one another while scuffing their unlaced, unshined boots on the pavement. Occasionally, one would greet an acquaintance in the crowd: “Ahlain, Ahmed. Kayf halek?” (“Two welcomes, Ahmed. How are you?”) And having been asked the identical question in return, the soldier would mumble “al-humdillilah” (“God be praised”) and resume his conversation with the man standing next to him.

These two hundred heavily-armed soldiers seemed somehow superfluous. Although there was the usual pushing and shoving as the spectacle unfolded, one felt that there was no danger of riot. (Later, I learned that the extraordinary precautions were ordered to protect the executioner, who, having slain so many men, is a potential target for aggrieved family members, obliged, according to ancient tribal mores, to take revenge.) Standing there, I felt quite secure despite the fact that I was in range of all those machine guns; actually, I had sensed a more threatening atmosphere elsewhere—at passport control, or even in the university cashier's office.

The spectators, likewise, composed mostly of Saudis, Pakistanis, and Koreans (but virtually no Westerners), remained peaceful, relaxed—and unusually quiet. The noise and menace were provided by the loudspeakers, facing every direction, on the four minarets of the nearby Friday Mosque, from which was emitted a constant, shrill harangue in demotic Arabic. Meanwhile, everyone stared at the official vehicles parked at a distance in front of the Ministry of Justice and City Hall. Even first-timers like myself knew that the cast of characters we had come to see would emerge from the police cars and jeeps—and from the black van—that waited before us in the late morning glare.

Time passed, but the cleared area remained empty; the sun pressed down like a giant's fevered hand as the hands of the Dira clock moved toward noon. At ten minutes to twelve, the harangue from the loudspeakers abruptly ceased and an unnatural stillness enveloped the square for several seconds. Gradually, I became aware of muffled street noises and the barely perceptible murmur of the crowd, now numbering well over two thousand, patiently waiting in the hot sun. At once, a huge swarm of worshippers streamed from the mosque and immediately pressed into the mass of spectators. Space near the front, already at a premium, was claimed by the newcomers, who expertly wriggled into the tightly-packed area.

_____________

The magic hour passed; nothing happened. I could see hundreds of people assembled on the roof of a building at the edge of the Dira suq beyond the clock tower. From that vantage point, they could look directly into the square, though at some distance from the spectacle. My attention wandered. Alan nudged my shoulder, and I instantly refocused on the burnished black van, from which a half-dozen soldiers emerged helping one another down the step. One carried a sheaf of thin canes that looked like shepherd's crooks; they were about four feet in length. He distributed them two or three at a time to his companions. A few of the men pressed the ends of their canes into the pavement, apparently to test their flexibility, arching them into a bow; others, with a whipping motion, caused them to flow like silk in the wind. We were about to witness a jelléd, a flogging, for some minor offense like drinking or fornication—the latter to be sharply distinguished from adultery, which is punishable by the sword or, in case a woman is convicted, by stoning. (The princess of the British docudrama was apparently shot, but she was executed by the royal family and not sentenced by a sharia court, which would have handed down a traditional method of execution.) A number of Saudis informed me that, as an alternative to stoning, an adulterous woman might be hurled from the highest point in the city, but this had not occurred in Riyadh, at least during recent years—or so I was told.

Two culprits, both strapping young men in their early twenties, were taken from the jeep where they had been languishing since early morning as they awaited their hundred lashes. The taller of the two, flanked by soldiers and officials, strode unhindered to a spot deep in the cleared area, where he lay face down on the tarmac in the direction of the nearby mosque. Immediately, a soldier squatted on his heels near the prisoner's head and firmly grasped both his wrists. At the same time a pair of soldiers, each brandishing a cane, stationed themselves on either side of the prisoner near the lower half of his body. An official stepped forward and read the sentence very rapidly in formal Arabic. He then gestured to the officers. At that moment the two soldiers began flogging the prisoner alternately on the lower back and buttocks. The Koran placed under the whipping arm as a means of restraint—about which one heard so much from the self-styled experts—was not in evidence.

With each stroke the flogger raised the wand above his head and brought it down smartly on the target. When one flogger struck, the other raised his arm, so that the blows rained down steadily and without pause: whyup, whyup, whyup, whyup—the canes fell rhythmically striking the cotton thobe (shift) and the helpless backside of the man stretched out on the blacktop. The hundred lashes (actually, a few less) took perhaps forty-five seconds to administer. When the punishment was over, the prisoner quickly regained his feet and returned unassisted to the jeep.

The second prisoner, after assuming the same position, began to jerk violently after the first few blows. As the flogging continued, he flopped and thrashed like a beached fish until the soldier in front offered his lap, an incongruous and tender moment in the remorseless ritual. The floggers, however, never let up and seemed to lay on with a will. In their zeal, a cane occasionally snapped; in such cases, the soldier turned to an assistant, selected another cane, and returned to the job at hand. Although the prisoner was clearly in agony throughout the ordeal, he never cried out. Finally, after receiving the full measure of lashes, he painfully got to his feet and limped back to the jeep to join his similarly chastened comrade. During the entire ceremony the crowd remained silent, unresponsive; it might have been a religious service.

_____________

The punishment area was again empty, but no one moved from his place. I kept my attention on the jeep in which the two prisoners, their public suffering and humiliation behind them, sat awaiting transport back to prison. From the corner of my eye I caught a movement to the far left of the jeep. A young Saudi, dressed in dazzling white, was being helped from the back of the van by two soldiers who gripped his arms tightly as he negotiated the step. Once safely on the ground, the guards released him, although it was immediately obvious that he was hobbled hand and foot by wrist manacles and leg irons.

The condemned man appeared to be under thirty. He had pleasant clean-cut features; nothing in his appearance or demeanor suggested the thug or desperado. He might have been one of my upper-level literature students: serious, intelligent, thin as a whip. I stared intently at his face as he walked, slowly but deliberately, toward the knot of soldiers and officials waiting under the clock tower. His expression bore no trace of terror or confusion; neither did he affect a defiant manner in these last moments, when all social sanctions become meaningless. The only assault on his dignity were the leg irons, which caused him to proceed in a halting, lurching parody of the slow march. About halfway to his destination, he reached up and caught the tail end of his gutra (headpiece) and, with a toss of his head, let it flutter to the ground, where it lay on the macadam. I momentarily entertained the thought that the Saudi government was eliminating one of its very finest citizens.

When the condemned man reached the spot, he faced the mosque and knelt on the ground. An official stepped forward and, as in the preliminary to the floggings, read a brief notice over the prisoner. A soldier then grasped the man's collar and in two or three short jerks tore the thobe partway down his back, leaving the neck exposed to the first several vertebrae. As if by a signal the crowd began chanting “Allah akbar, Allah akbar” (“God is great, God is great”), continuing until the sentence was carried out. Meanwhile, the condemned man had assumed a nearly prostrate position, as in prayer; the upper part of his body bent well forward, and his chin rested on his chest, so that he was looking at the ground. Throughout, he neither moved nor flinched. The guttural, monotonous cadence emanating from the crowd lent a medieval atmosphere to the scene beneath the clock tower; it was a weirdly anachronistic tableau—each figure carefully arranged and precisely delineated, as in a tapestry.

Instinctively, I turned my head to see a huge black Saudi, his stern face creased with tribal scars, walking slowly but with great purpose across the square. It was al-Johar. He wore the native dress (white thobe and red-checkered schmaal); on his left shoulder was a large black sash. He was armed with a .45-caliber pistol strapped to his waist in a covered holster. On his left hip hung a magnificent scabbard, arching gently upward in an elongated crescent. Without breaking stride he unsheathed his weapon with one smooth motion, like a Samurai warrior. He held the fearsome sword in his right hand as lightly as a reed, the bright steel glinting in the midday sun.

At the last moment several hundred spectators rose as one man, partially blocking the view. Those standing nearby began to shift about to see better. A tall thin Yemeni, who had somehow managed to squeeze between Alan and me, literally hung on Alan's shoulder, and I found myself staring, close range, at the back of the man's head. Pushing myself forcefully to the right, I could once again make out the scene, as if through a peephole. The slightest movement by those in front of me, however, effectively closed off the view. Finally, as Johar approached the condemned man, I hit upon the stratagem of hopping up and down on my toes. This offered the visual effect of a strobe light, interrupting the natural flow of movement like an animated cartoon at slow speed—each pose stark and discrete.

Johar stationed himself to the right of the kneeling prisoner. He suspended the sword about eight inches over the man's neck, holding the weapon steady and taking careful aim. He then raised the blade vertically and with one powerful blow struck at the base of the neck, nearly severing it through. The head spun at a grotesque angle to the spurting stump and—horribly—a spume of blood rose and hung suspended in the bright air. Uncannily, everything froze. From a great distance, as in a dream, I heard a familiar karate yell “eeeeesaaahhhhh!” not realizing at first that the cry was emanating from my own throat. Then the body, instantaneously transformed as if by magic from a living breathing person into a mass of dead matter, crumpled and fell gently, almost gracefully, on its side. The chanting stopped, followed by vigorous applause—a stellar performance. Johar squatted by the corpse and spat copiously on the dripping blade, before wiping it clean on the sleeve of the man he had just killed.

A Saudi doctor with a stethoscope came forward and pronounced the man dead, while soldiers arranged the body. Someone had retrieved the gutra and, after aligning the head, wrapped the cloth around the neck. Instantly, it turned a deep purple. The body lay in state for a moment, looking quite peaceful, until the ambulance pulled up and the corpse was roughly placed on a crude stretcher made of wooden slats, thrust in the rear of the vehicle, and driven away. When the ambulance left, the soldiers were dismissed. The crowd immediately surged, en masse, to the site of the execution, and we were carried along with it by main force. Suddenly I looked down at my feet to see a huge pool of blood gleaming blackly on the pavement. Bits of froth, like pieces of cotton, floated in the gore. Saudis from either side approached the blood, ritually spat in it, and turned contemptuously away.

The spectacle I had long agonized over and had waited months to see was over.

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IV

“We May well ask ourselves whether there is not some general conclusion, some lesson, if possible, of hope and encouragement to be drawn from this melancholy record of human error and folly which has engaged our attention in this [account],” Sir James Frazer mused in the concluding passages of his monumental study of magic and religion, The Golden Bough. Indeed, the spectacle I witnessed some years ago seems to cry out for “some lesson of hope and encouragement,” but I have never been able to find one. In Saudi Arabia, at least, public executions are hardly a deterrent to serious crime. Despite solemn claims by Saudis or their apologists Riyadh is not free of crime, nor is it safe to walk the streets there—except during business hours. And the price each citizen (and each foreigner) pays for this superficial sense of security is total abridgement of civil rights. The issue is moot in any case, since no one in Riyadh holds a brief for due process, open trials, or a free press—not to mention access to records, any records. Judging by the ethos of the culture on a day-today basis, one is not likely to conclude that justice prevails in the kingdom; what one finds instead is favoritism, corruption, inconsistency, nepotism, bureaucratic hegemony, and mindless, constant harassment, along with implicit threat in all sectors of everyday life. Far from being an emblem of justice, the public executions underscore the pervasive injustice in Saudi Arabia.

What of my personal reactions to the idaam I witnessed at Dira Square? My fears proved totally groundless; I have yet to dream of a beheading, nor do I suffer from a morbid preoccupation with the subject. The distance between my vantage point and the site of the execution was undoubtedly a factor; basically, the spectacle seemed unreal. To be sure, I was deeply shocked at the time, but not permanently traumatized. And with respect to the man I saw kneeling before his executioner beneath the clock tower, I am reminded of Byron, who, on reporting his response to witnessing three men beheaded by the guillotine, wrote that he soon felt indifferent to the horror of the bloodshed—“though,” he added, “I would have saved them if I could.”