– W. Somerset Maugham
His name was Naseer Ziad and he was nineteen years old.
Like most other boys in Riyadh, he’d been brought up in a very conservative household. As the oldest male child, Naseer had a degree of freedom denied to his sisters, or even to his younger brothers, one that he’d used to ensure that he had very little actual work to do. Along with most of his contemporaries, he’d gone into an Islamic school when he was very young, and through that school, had gained a near-perfect knowledge of the Qu’ran. He could recite a
And it led him nowhere. He’d found out fairly quickly that there was little chance of a job without training or connections…and he had neither. He considered the Saudi military to be beneath him – and, besides, an older cousin he looked up to was in the National Guard and told him that it wasn't a pleasant job. The highly-paid – and without doing any actual work- posts were denied to someone without the right blood, or the right connections…and, again, he lacked them. The American and European companies doing business within Saudi Arabia wouldn’t hire someone who could offer them nothing, not even introductions to the right people, and the Saudi companies reserved most of their slots for princes or their lackeys. At eighteen, he found himself unemployed and, it seemed, stuck.
He’d drifted into the radical fringe merely for something to do. He couldn’t swear to any kind of devout belief, merely a conviction that the Americans, or the Jews, or the British were to blame for his troubles. He’d certainly enjoyed the trip to Bahrain he’d made with his father as an eighteen-year-old birthday present, where he’d tasted alcohol and lost his virginity. He was nineteen…and unmarried, unemployed, and completely without prospects. No father or brother would consider him as a possible relative…and, caught up in his need to blame someone, he'd gone radical. The teachers and contacts he’d met in the radical mosques had singled the young Naseer out – there was little wrong with his intelligence, only his learning and application – and played on his fears and beliefs until he was willing to do almost anything for them. They’d seen it a thousand times before; the products of the Saudi educational system, designed to co-opt or keep down the Saudi population, found themselves in a world where their skills were worthless. The recruiters gave them a cause and something to die for.
The radical mosques had praised the aliens to the skies, at first, for running roughshod over Texas. Cartoons of former President Bush performing oral sex on one of the aliens had been passed around the mosques for weeks, despite Wahhabi bans on images of human beings, while the radicals had delighted in the Royal Family’s discomfort. They held the whip hand for once; as long as they seemed to speak for the people, the Royals didn’t dare move against them. Naseer had learned to
And then the news had sunk in, slowly, that the aliens were coming to destroy religion, human religion. Naseer hadn’t wanted to believe it, but the internet-based service which had replaced Al Jazeera – it had been knocked off the air by the destruction of their satellite, although Naseer knew, of course, that it was a plot of the wicked Zionists – had passed on images of the destruction of churches, synagogues…and mosques. The radicals warned, changing their tune slightly, that Islam was in as much danger as the other religions…and, when the aliens had landed in the north, Naseer had realised that the aliens were coming for Riyadh.
