Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

“GOD ALMIGHTY was gracious enough for me to be born to Muslim parents in the Arabian Peninsula in al-Malazz neighborhood, in al-Riyadh, in 1377 hegira …”

Bin Laden, perorating—he was always long-winded—on his early life and parentage. The year of his birth, 1377 hegira, is the Muslim calendar’s rendering of the year most of the world refers to as 1957. The actual birthday appears to have been February 15.

Nineteen fifty-seven was the year that President Dwight Eisenhower took office for a second term, and that a rebel named Fidel Castro—previously rumored to have been killed—surfaced to fight on against the Cuban government. The nations of Western Europe began forming a unified economic bloc. The Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit and began catching up with U.S. missile technology.

The Saudi newborn’s full name was Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Aboud bin Laden al-Qatani—“bin” meaning “son of.” He would one day tell his own children that “al-Qatani,” which denotes those who trace their ancestry to Yemen, was their true family name. “Osama” means “Lion,” apt for a man who came to see himself as a warrior.

“I was named,” bin Laden himself said, “after one of the venerable Companions of the Prophet, Osama bin-Zeid … He was someone whom the Prophet, God’s peace and blessings be upon him, has loved and has loved his father before him.” That Osama was an Islamic hero, a commander said to have defeated a Roman army.

“My father was born in Hadramaut,” bin Laden said in 1999. “He went to work in Hejaz at an early age, more than seventy years ago. Then God blessed him and bestowed on him an honor that no other contractor has known. He built the holy Mecca mosque where the holy Ka’bah is located and at the same time, because of God’s blessings to him, he built the Holy Mosque in Medina.… [Then] the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.… It is not a secret that he was one of the founders of the infrastructure of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

The father, Mohamed bin Laden, had been a legend in his time. The Hadramaut was a sparsely populated region of what is now Yemen, which borders on Saudi Arabia, and the young Mohamed made his way the thousand miles to Jeddah penniless and hungry. He started out portering for pilgrims, moved on to lowly work in the construction trade, worked incessantly, thrived as a manager, and eventually—though almost illiterate, he had a phenomenal memory for facts and figures—rose to become a fabulously wealthy construction magnate.

The key to the rise of bin Laden Sr. was the patronage of the all-powerful Saudi elite, the rulers of a land that emerged from obscurity to gilded affluence in the space of a few decades. He hit his prime just as American money for Saudi oil began to bring the royal princes unparalleled riches. From the reign of King Abdul Aziz in the 1930s to that of King Faisal in the 1960s, he built palaces, roads across the desert, reservoirs, power stations. He catered to every royal whim, from providing the ramp that delivered the wheelchair-bound Abdul Aziz to his throne room to—a measure of his wealth—bailing out Faisal when the royal coffers ran dry for a while.

Nothing enhanced bin Laden Sr.’s prestige so much as his work on Islam’s religious sites. “Religion in Saudi Arabia is like gravity,” bin Laden family biographer Steve Coll has written. “It explained the order of objects and the trajectory of lives. The Qur’an was the kingdom’s constitution and the basis of all its laws. The kingdom … evolved into the most devout society on earth.”

Religion and Saudi royalty are inseparable. The Saud family had gained power in the eighteenth century thanks to a deal with a reformist preacher named Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab. He and his followers insisted on the most austere interpretation of Islam, banned the arts, music and dancing, celebration of holidays, and memorials to the dead.

The author Stephen Schwartz has defined Wahhabism as a “form of fascism” built on “a paramilitary political structure comparable to the Bolsheviks and Nazis” and “a monopoly of wealth by the elite, backed by extreme repression and a taste for bloodshed.” In Saudi Arabia, someone who had lived there for many years told the authors, “Everything comes down to money. The extent of the greed is beyond the understanding of the ordinary Westerner.”

Under the extreme form of shari’a—Islamic law—applied in today’s Saudi Arabia, theft may be punished by amputation of a hand. Public beheading remains the designated penalty for murder, drug trafficking, rape, and adultery. In some cases a beheading is followed by crucifixion of the body, and placing of the head upon a pole. Human rights are severely limited. Women cannot attend university, have bank accounts, or take employment without permission of a male relative.

The Yemeni immigrant Mohamed bin Laden had no quarrel with Saudi ways. A devout Muslim himself, he would invite prominent clerics to his home to debate religion. His renovations and innovations at the three holy shrines of Medina, Mecca, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem—before the Israeli occupation of 1967—earned him high honors in Saudi Arabia. He was appointed a minister of state by royal decree, and the letter appointing him to the Jerusalem work styled him “Your highness, Sheikh Mohamed bin Laden.”

Mohamed’s son Osama was the eighteenth of some two dozen sons sired by his series of some twenty-two wives. He was the product of a short-lived marriage to a Syrian girl named Allia who was fourteen years old to her husband’s forty-nine. In the year Allia gave birth to Osama, her new husband fathered seven children.

Even by Saudi standards, Mohamed behaved bizarrely in the marital home. According to Osama, his mother confided that he had had “a shocking habit of asking his wives to take off their veils and stand in a line, sending for his male servants to look upon their faces … like harlots on view … and point out his most beautiful wife.” Allia asked for a divorce, for reasons unknown, and went on to marry one of her husband’s employees. Osama, who lived principally with her from then on, is said by his son Omar—one of the children of his first wife, Najwa—to have loved his mother “more than he loved his wives, his siblings, or his children.”

Mohamed, Osama was to tell his own family, would usually summon his sons to see him as a group, and only a few times a year. “In my whole life,” Osama said, “I only saw your grandfather five times … brief meetings, all but one with my large clan of brothers.”

Mohamed had a strict rule, Osama told Omar, that “when he met with his sons, we must stand in a very straight line, organized according to height, rather than age.… Before I became a teenager, I was not the tallest … [One day] two of my older brothers, taller than me, locked me between them.… Your grandfather noticed. Furious, he marched to stand in front of me and without one word of warning struck me across the face with his strongest force.… I’ve never forgotten the pain.” “Most of us were afraid of him,” said Yeslam, one of Osama’s half-brothers.

Bin Laden Sr. believed that Palestine belonged to the Arabs, not the Jews, and was accordingly “very, very, very anti-Israel, anti-Jewish.” In June 1967, when Israel seized East Jerusalem and King Faisal made bellicose noises, Mohamed suggested a contribution he could make. He would, he said, convert the 250 bulldozers he used in his building operations into army tanks.

Three months later, Osama’s father was dead. Ten thousand people reportedly attended the ceremonies that followed his death in an airplane crash. His myriad sons and daughters and wives, separated according to sex of course, gathered for the days of mourning. King Faisal, who said his protégé had been his “right arm,” declared that he would henceforth act as father to the bin Laden children.