Saudis claim that al Qaeda deliberately fills its ranks with the kingdom's alienated young. Bin Laden's goal, they believe, is to topple the Saudi royal family, partly by convincing the West that its principal source of oil is fatally infected with extremism.
"We are not a nation of terrorists and fanatics. You cannot blame an entire people for a crime perpetrated by a small number of marginal individuals," contended Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the governor of Riyadh.
"The crazies around my age, the people who say, 'We should go out and kill Americans,' are maybe one or two percent of us," said "Mustafa," a 22-year-old I met during my tour of Jeddah's Ramadan nightlife.
But Mustafa, like so many in his age group, has no job and no discernible ambition. Estimates of unemployment among Saudis top 15 percent, and approach 30 percent among those between ages 20 and 24. Each year about 340,000 Saudi men enter the workforce, vying for just 175,000 jobs. The unsuccessful drift into an ever growing army of the bored, spending their days and nights in the prolonged adolescence of the shopping mall circuit, numbering and street cruising.