High-ranking National Security Council veteran Richard Clarke raised this intriguing question while analyzing Saudi Arabia’s connections to jihadist terror in his controversial 2004 memoir, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.

Clarke’s book is still highly relevant 20 years after 9/11, as continuing controversies over Saudi Arabia’s responsibility for that day’s ravages indicate.

Clarke’s thought experiment ran thus:

Without even looking at the evidence offered by the foreign government, some in the government in Washington would say that they agreed with the basic beliefs of Opus Dei. Some in sensitive government jobs might even be members of Opus Dei (as FBI Director Louis Freeh was alleged to be), and thus reluctant to arrest their cobelievers.

Similarly, Clarke noted in detail,

it is certainly true that the core al Qaeda beliefs are not very different from those of many leading Saudis, whose Wahhabist version of Islam teaches intolerance of other religions and support for expanding the realm of Islam. As Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques (the Saudi King’s official title), the House of Saud has seen itself as both protector of Muslims everywhere and supporter of Wahhabist evangelism everywhere. They did, therefore, use Saudi government funds to support the jihad in Afghanistan. Saudi funds, whether officially governmental or not, almost certainly funded jihadist activities in Bosnia and, as the Russian government has charged, in Chechnya. Saudi government funds established Wahhabist mosques and schools not only in the jihad countries, but in Europe and the United States. Saudi government funds and those of concerned wealthy Saudis flowed to a series of charities and nongovernmental organizations, which in turn provided support for al Qaeda operatives.

“One thing was clear,” Clarke elaborated:

a lot of the money being raised was coming from people in Saudi Arabia. Many Saudi charities being used by al Qaeda were quasi-governmental entities that the regime used to spread its version of Islam abroad.

Clarke would

doubt any Minister or senior member of the royal family supported the attacks on the United States; indeed there is evidence that there were ineffectual efforts to control bin Laden. But it must also be said that Ministers and members of the royal family did knowingly support the global spread of Wahhabist Islam, jihads, and anti-Israeli activities. They ignored anti-American teaching in and around mosques and schools where intolerance was indoctrinated. They replaced a technical, Western-styled curriculum in Saudi schools with a Wahhabist religion-focused education. As long as the royal family and its rule were not the obvious targets, some undoubtedly turned a blind eye to a host of things that made al Qaeda’s life easier.

Ultimately, though, Al Qaeda hit home in Saudi Arabia in 2003 with truck bomb attacks in the capital Riyadh, Clarke noted. Thereafter the

Saudi security services appear to have been ordered to root out al Qaeda in the Kingdom. Not surprisingly to American counterterrorist experts, the Saudi security services have become involved in gun battles and street chases. They have uncovered large arms caches, not intended for jihad elsewhere or attacks on U.S. facilities in the Kingdom, but almost certainly intended for guerrilla war in Saudi Arabia, a war intended to replace the House of Saud.

The fall of the House of Saud would not come as a shock to many senior American officials who have followed the Middle East for years. Many have long feared, without being able to prove it, that that House and its military and security services are riddled with termites. Stung by the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and its replacement with an anti-American theocracy, many American officials have feared a repeat performance of that tragedy across the Gulf in Saudi Arabia.

The aftershocks of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution had also placed strains on Saudi Arabia, as America in reaction to new Iranian threats strengthened its base system in Saudi Arabia. “Thousands of American civilian contractors moved into the Kingdom, causing resentment among some Muslims who read the Koran as banning the presence of infidels in the country that hosted the two holiest mosques of Islam,” Clarke noted. The problem only worsened in 1990 when hundreds of thousands of American and other foreign troops entered Saudi Arabia as a defense against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after his armies had menacingly subjugated neighboring Kuwait.

Saudi leaders thus welcomed the American-led coalition’s plans to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait and end Hussein’s threat to the wider Arabian Peninsula. “The Saudis supported the offensive plan fearing the effects in their own country if hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops had to stay for years defending the Kingdom against a possible Iraqi invasion,” Clarke noted. Yet some American forces had to remain in Saudi Arabia when Hussein’s military continued to pose a threat even after his 1991 defeat in Kuwait. Thus, “Saudi dissidents who had protested the original U.S. presence now complained again that the American forces in the kingdom were a sacrilege.”

Clarke cited Saudi instabilities as among the factors motivating President George W. Bush and others in his administration, such as Vice-President Richard Cheney in 2003

to go to war with Iraq. With Saddam gone, they believed, the U.S. could reduce its dependence on Saudi Arabia, could pull forces out of the Kingdom, and could open up an alternative source of oil.

America has vital interests in eliminating Islamic supremacist influences in Saudi society and government, but Clarke stressed the need for caution in any Saudi reform program, given the kingdom’s fragilities and Iran’s ominous history:

Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey has talked publicly about the need for a new government in Riyadh. The risk that the United States runs is of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, removing the American “mandate of heaven” from the House of Saud without a plan or any influence about what would happen next.

Precisely the sobering account Clarke gave of Saudi realities called into question his own proposals for a worldwide Islamic reform movement. He fondly envisioned that if Bill Clinton were still president after 9/11, he would be “going to Saudi Arabia and addressing the Muslim people in a moving appeal for religious tolerance.” Yet religious freedom is just as disruptive to Saudi theocracy as any American troops.

In the years since Clarke’s 2004 memoir Saudi Arabia has taken important steps under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reform programs. These include dramatic domestic liberalizations such as concerning women’s rights. Meanwhile Saudi policies have attempted to counter religious intolerance and improve relations with Israel, particularly in the face of a common Iranian enemy.

Yet Clarke’s Catholic analogy is still eminently important. As he himself has indicated, Islam’s holy sites in its Arabian Peninsula birthplace make Saudi Arabia central to Islam much like the Vatican in the Catholic Church. If Catholics often criticize the current Holy Father, Pope Francis, for muddled representations of Catholic doctrine, Muslims worldwide would perhaps be even more outraged by any dilution of faith coming from Saudi Arabia. Many devout Muslims would no more accept Clarke’s “religious tolerance” in Saudi Arabia’s national population than Catholics would accept Protestant worship services among Vatican City’s clergy and officials. Indeed, what would Muslims worldwide do if religious freedom allowed the Saudi people to abandon Islam for other beliefs such as atheism or Christianity?

As Saudi Arabia shows, any call for liberalism by people such as Clarke confronts Islam with enormous doctrinal challenges. His projected shift of Islam from a theocratic ideology guiding public policy to a matter of private piety entails a radical revision of received Islamic orthodoxy. As future articles will examine, Clarke had to confront Islam’s inherently political nature in countries beyond Saudi Arabia, such as Pakistan.