Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

This was not only because the king had held the dead man in great affection. The bin Laden companies were important to ongoing government operations, and Faisal decreed that they must continue to function. The overall value of Mohamed’s estate was in the region of $150 million, almost a billion dollars at 2010 values. His children, the sons as stipulated by law entitled to twice as much as the daughters, all instantly became millionaires.

The son named Osama, still in the care of his doting mother, was ten at the time. His most recent memory of his father was of a patriarch who—in spite of the boy’s tender age—had recently given him a car as a present. Though of course not allowed to drive it, he remained crazy about cars for years to come.

The sparse memories of Osama’s early life, however, recall a child who was “shy … aloof … gentle … polite … obedient … quiet, to the point of timidity.” Briefly, before his father’s death, he had been sent as a boarder to a Quaker school in Beirut. Not long afterward, back in his homeland, he began the first of eight years at a school for the Saudi elite founded by the king himself. An Englishman who taught there, Brian Fyfield-Shayler, remembered a pupil who was “extraordinarily courteous … not pushy in any way … pleasant, charming, ordinary, not very exceptional.”

Fyfield-Shayler thought Osama’s command of English mediocre, though a person who met him years later found him fluent enough in the language. His science teacher judged him “normal, not excellent.” In arithmetic, he had inherited his father’s flair. According to his son Omar, “No calculator could equal my father’s remarkable ability, even when presented with the most complicated figures.” Given the school’s top national ranking, Fyfield-Shayler thought, Osama was probably “one of the top fifty students” in his age group.

Away from class, he was a boy like other boys. His schoolfriend Khaled Batarfi recalled him taking part in soccer games, near the Pepsi factory. Taller than most of his pals, Osama would “play forward to use his head and put in the goals.” Off the pitch, he and his peers enjoyed watching cowboy and karate movies.

Batarfi recalled an incident when his friend was confronted by a bully. “I pushed him away from Osama, and solved the problem. But then Osama came to me and said, ‘You know, if you waited a few minutes I would have solved the problem peacefully.’ … This was the kind of guy who would always think of solving problems peacefully.”

IN SUMMER during his childhood, Osama traveled to his mother’s seaside home in Syria. There were camping trips, long hikes with a male cousin, and a special friendship with the cousin’s young sister—Najwa. To her he seemed “soft-spoken, serious … delicate but not weak … a mystery—yet we all liked him.” She had these impressions, by her account, before either child turned ten.

By the time Najwa turned thirteen, in 1972, “unanticipated emotions began to swirl” between her and Osama. He seemed “shyer than a virgin under the veil,” said nothing directly to her. Instead he spoke to his mother and the respective parents spoke to each other. There was a wedding and a celebratory dinner—male and female guests carefully segregated, no music, no dancing—when Osama was seventeen and Najwa fifteen.

The teenage husband brought his wife home to Jeddah swathed in black, her face totally veiled. “Osama,” she recalled in a 2009 memoir written with her son Omar, “was so conservative that I would also live in purdah, or isolation, rarely leaving the confines of my new home.” Her husband explained “how important it was for me to live as an obedient Muslim woman.… I never objected because I understood that my husband was an expert regarding our faith.”

It was decided that Najwa would no longer go to school. Instead she sat in the garden reading the Qur’an while Osama went to school. Her husband, she discovered, could recite the sacred texts by heart. Proudly, he took her to pray at the mosque in Mecca that his father had rebuilt. He fit attendance at school, and occasional arduous work for the family construction company, around praying at the mosque several times a day.

Najwa soon had a first baby, to be followed not long after by another. The obedient Muslim wife would bear eleven children over the years. The devout Muslim husband, meanwhile, observed his faith to the letter. Muslims should in principle avoid shaking hands with a person of the opposite sex or of a different religion, but Osama took things further than that. When a woman—his European sister-in-law Carmen bin Ladin—opened the front door of her home unveiled, he averted his gaze and ducked speaking to her. He did not allow Najwa to feed her baby from a bottle, because it had a rubber teat.

His rules extended to male company. Osama slapped one of his own brothers for ogling a female servant. He stared in disapproval when a male friend arrived in shorts, on the way to a soccer game. In the broiling heat of Saudi Arabia, he even urged his brothers not to wear short-sleeved shirts. In Syria, offended by the sound of a woman singing in a sexy voice, he ordered a driver to turn off the car radio.

“Around eighteen or nineteen or so,” his half-brother Yeslam would say of Osama after 9/11, “he was already more religious than the average person or the average member of the family.” Most Westerners might think that comment a gross understatement and dismiss Osama as having been an obsessive, a religious nut. To be super-strict about religion, however, was not—is not—unusual in Saudi Arabia. Far from alienating everyone, Osama’s zealotry earned him respect. “His family revered him for his piety,” his sister-in-law Carmen said. “Never once did I hear anyone murmur that his fervor might be a little excessive.”

Osama would rise to pray even during the night, Batarfi remembered. It was not compulsory for Muslims, but it was “following the example of the Prophet.” When he went on from school to university—he would start but not complete his economics degree—Osama became close to a fellow student named Jamal Khalifa, one day to become his brother-in-law. “I was almost twenty, and he was nineteen,” Khalifa remembered. “We were religious … very conservative; we go to that extreme side.”

Osama no longer watched movies. He did not watch television, except for news programs, and he avoided music with instruments, which some religious advisers deemed sinful. He disapproved of art, so no pictures hung on the walls. He avoided being photographed, though this was a matter on which he was to vacillate.

The shift to the extreme had not happened overnight. Looking back, Najwa remembered how—even while still at school—her husband had regularly gone out at night “for impassioned discussion of political or religious topics.” Even before his marriage, a schoolfriend revealed, Osama and a half dozen other boys had begun studying Islam after school hours, taught by a Syrian teacher on the staff who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was at his urging that Osama memorized the Qur’an, under his tutelage that Osama and friends themselves began attending secret meetings of the Brotherhood.

In their impressionable teenage years, meanwhile, bin Laden and his contemporaries lived through a decade that destabilized the Arab world. The running sore of Palestine remained a concern for everyone. When Osama watched the news on television, he wept.

At his house, Batarfi recalled, they and their friends would “sing religious chants about Muslim youth and Palestine.” The 1973 war, when Israel managed to beat back invading Arab forces, had been a great humiliation. Saudi Arabia’s participation in the oil embargo that followed, the first use of the oil weapon against the West, had been a temporary consolation.