Excerpt from: "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" by Morgan Spurlock, 2008...
...I kept looking for signs of Osama in Riyadh. I went back to the street I'd passed earlier, a place where young guys hung out, and thought I might spot him there, cruising for new recruits for his jihad. I was blown away when I got there. It looked like Anytown, USA. The street was lined with strip malls, and they were packed with American fast-food joints. In this one strip alone, maybe a block long, I saw Starbucks, Applebee's, Chili's, H�agen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, Dunkin' Donuts, Domino's, Quiznos, Subway... and a GNC, where you could get herbal remedies for the tummy ache you got from eating in all those places. The only un-American thing about these places was that the seating was segregated into sections for "Families" and "Singles," like all restaurants in the country.
I sat with a quartet of hip-looking young guys -- Mohamad, Ahmed (popular name), Mansour, and Faisal -- who were hanging out in front of Quiznos, smoking cigarettes, sipping Pepsi and Lipton iced tea, shooting the breeze. Their ages ranged from eighteen to twenty-two, and they looked fully Americanized -- from Mohamad, with his long rock hair and black Metallica T-shirt, to the more hipster Ahmed, who had short, chopped hair and wore little designer glasses. A couple of them had visited the States, and they all had friends or family there.
"I'm looking for Osama bin Laden," I told them.
They all laughed.
"He orders a lot from Domino's Pizza," Mohamad joked, pointing at the nearby store.
"So Quiznos is the wrong place to look?" I asked. "He's a Domino's man? No wonder I didn't see him at the Pizza Hut. Well, if I'm not going to find him, what do you guys do for fun around here?"
"Mostly, we hang out at anyone's house," Mansour said.
"Just cruise up and down the street," Mohamad said. "You can find people hanging out at caf�s and just talking. They don't give us much to do, which is a problem. Personally, I just stay home. There are no recreation centers you can go hang out at. Malls are strictly for families -- they won't let bachelors in. They have a specific day for bachelors, and it's only in the morning."
"There's nothing else to do," Ahmed agreed. "They complain about the youth, saying the youth are wasting their time on the streets doing nothing. Well, you didn't leave us much choice, did you?"
We shot the breeze about how hard it was for them to date girls, about their favorite bands, movies, and TV shows ("'South Park' is probably the greatest American literature that ever came out," Mohamad declared), and about how, like a lot of young dudes everywhere, you basically had to drag them to the mosque to get them to pray. Somehow I wasn't surprised to hear that there's a branch of the religious police that does just that, cruising the streets in SUVs in search of rebellious youths to haul off to prayer.
These were four young Muslim males that I couldn't see getting attracted to radical, extremist movements anytime soon. Extremist heavy metal, sure. Radical partying, uh-huh. But Al Qaeda? Mohamad claimed that he didn't even know what it was...
from: "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" by Morgan Spurlock Random House, 2008 Chapter 11: Saudi America pages 189-190