The impression sometimes prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self, breeds pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit this earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish.
—Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
The bin Ladens originally hail from Hadhramaut in Yemen, a region of rocky deserts and boulder-strewn valleys known as wadis bounded to the north by Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter and the Arabian Sea to the south. Hadhramaut means “death is present,” an evocatively apt name for a harsh, arid place whose inhabitants have long eked out only the most basic of livings.
One of the larger valleys is Wadi Doan, where the road is not much more than a rocky path shaded by palm trees. The bin Laden ancestral village of al-Rubat lies at the end of Wadi Doan nestling in the shade of honey-colored cliffs that tower above the valley floor by a couple thousand feet. In the village there is a Bin Laden Street, a crumbling, mud-brick bin Laden mansion, and a number of impoverished, distant cousins of the bin Ladens.
Black-robed women flit like wraiths down the alleys of the towns of the wadi, and in the fields women harvest crops while completely swathed in black, shielded from the unremitting sun by distinctive conical hats made of straw. The segregation of the sexes is so rigorously enforced that the women have developed a separate dialect, and the dictates of purdah have shaped the mazelike layout of the tall, mud-brick buildings that are characteristic of Hadhramaut. Small wonder, then, that bin Laden felt so much kinship with Yemen, as he told his wives and children in one of their last family discussions at his compound in Abbottabad.
In the early 1930s the formidable English explorer and writer Freya Stark visited al-Rubat around the time that Osama’s father, Mohammed bin Laden, was living there and found “poverty and little commerce.” Slavery was still commonplace, and when Stark visited a harem of some dozen women, it was the first time that they had ever met a European woman. Stark observed that most of the men of Hadhramaut had left their native villages to find work in Egypt, or had taken the long sea voyage to Malaysia; staying away for up to twenty years.
Seeking his fortune, which certainly wasn’t going to happen in desperately poor al-Rubat, Mohammed bin Laden immigrated to what would soon become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, embarking for the seaport city of Jeddah around 1930 together with his brother, Abdullah.
Mohammed had good timing because he arrived in Saudi Arabia as a great gusher of oil wealth was first being tapped that in the decades to come would shower a deluge of petrodollars on the desert kingdom, from which Mohammed would greatly prosper. Mohammed started working as a porter for pilgrims in Jeddah, the port city that had long served as the gateway to the holy city of Mecca, some forty miles away. Later in life Mohammed proudly displayed his porter’s bag in one of his palaces. Mohammed, a skilled bricklayer, founded a construction company in 1931. A year later King Abdel Aziz inaugurated the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the following year geologists from Standard Oil of California arrived to begin to prospect for oil fields.
Mohammed bin Laden adeptly ingratiated himself with the source of all the richest contracts in the kingdom, dropping by frequently at King Abdel Aziz’s regular majlis, a public meeting where supplicants could lobby the monarch. The king was partially confined to a wheelchair, so Mohammed built him an ingenious ramp on the outside of one of his palaces in Jeddah so that the aging monarch could easily move between the floors of the palace using his car. One thing led to another, and when a British company pulled out of its contract in the early 1950s to build a major road from Jeddah to the holy city of Medina, Mohammed stepped in to save the day and built the highway.
Mohammed, who had only one eye and retained the manners of a laborer with few airs and graces, was now a rich man who had a number of current and former wives. Aged around fifty, Mohammed was visiting the Mediterranean port city of Latakia, Syria, in 1956 when he encountered a beautiful girl in her mid-teens, Allia Ghanem. Allia was from the nearby, desperately poor village of Jabaryoun. The surrounding region of orange groves and olive trees is well known as a home to the Alawites, who are an offshoot of mainstream Shiism. Many Alawite religious practices are secret and they celebrate both Christian and Islamic holidays. As a result, Alawites are considered heretics by orthodox Sunni Muslims such as the bin Ladens. The Ghanems were Alawite, but Mohammed didn’t seem to mind. A year after they met in 1957 Allia bore the bin Laden patriarch their first and only child, Osama, who also happened to be Mohammed’s eighteenth son. The union between Allia and Mohammed bin Laden was brief; when Osama was two his parents divorced. Allia then married Mohammed al-Attas from a prominent family originally from Hadhramaut who was working as a midlevel manager at the bin Laden construction company. Attas brought Osama up like he was his own son, and he and Allia would also have three sons and a daughter together.
Bin Laden was exceptionally close to his mother. Allia told Osama when he was ten that she was going to take him to visit her family in Syria.
When Osama’s biological father, Mohammed, got wind of the trip, he told Osama that if he stayed with him in Saudi Arabia he would buy him a parrot in a cage and a watch.
Osama replied that he wanted to be with his mother.
Mohammed bin Laden told his son that he couldn’t be bribed with “earthly things,” which was a testament to Osama’s true Muslim nature. It was one of the only times that Osama ever had a substantive discussion with his biological father.
Osama often proudly told the story of how Mohammed bin Laden would routinely visit the three holiest Islamic sites during the course of one day, offering his morning prayers in Medina, his afternoon prayers in Mecca, and then his evening prayers in Jerusalem, because he had his own plane. The bin Laden family fortune was deeply intertwined with these holy sites, as Mohammed bin Laden was the sole contractor for their extensive renovations, which brought him not only great riches, but also the considerable prestige of rebuilding the holy places. Bin Laden won the contract to extensively renovate the area in and around the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, expanding the area of the mosque by more than half. He was paid around $19 million during the early 1950s for the renovations. He also built a new airport to service Medina.
Next, Mohammed embarked on a project that was even more ambitious: massively expanding Islam’s holiest site, the Ka’ba sanctuary in Mecca, which previously held some fifty thousand pilgrims, so that it could accommodate up to 400,000. The Saudi royal family estimated that this renovation cost $130 million. Mohammed bin Laden was also granted the contract to renovate the third-holiest site in Islam, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the location from which the Prophet Mohammed is supposed to have ascended for his “Night Journey” on a winged horse through the heavens. Mohammed purchased a house in East Jerusalem so he could live close by as the renovation work on the Dome of the Rock and the mosque progressed during the mid-1960s.
The Six-Day War that Israel fought against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in early June 1967 had a profound effect on the Arab world. The Egyptian government had promised a quick victory against Israel; instead it was a spectacular defeat, and East Jerusalem itself was seized by the Israelis. Mohammed bin Laden was furious. He demanded of the engineers in his construction company, “How many bulldozers do we have?” They told him more than 250. Mohammed asked them, “Can you convert these bulldozers into two hundred and fifty tanks? I want to use these tanks against the Jews, because they have captured our land.”
Essam Deraz, an Egyptian army officer who would spend more than a year with bin Laden on the front lines in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet war in the 1980s, understood that the 1967 defeat was profoundly traumatic to his generation: “It wasn’t a military defeat. It became a civilizational defeat. We didn’t know that we were so backward, we were so retarded, so behind the rest of the modern civilization. There was an earthquake in the Arab-Islamic personality, not only in Egypt, but in the entire Arab world.”
The Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam, who in the mid-1980s would become bin Laden’s key mentor, took up arms against the Israelis after the Israeli army took his hometown in Palestine during the 1967 war. Azzam, then a twenty-six-year-old high school teacher, moved into neighboring Jordan and joined military training facilities known as “the bases of the sheiks,” and he took part in small-scale raids into Israeli territory. These were the beginning of Azzam’s forays into what would become effectively his full-time career of fomenting holy war and also writing influential books inciting jihad.
The same year that the hated Israelis seized East Jerusalem, bin Laden, aged ten, suffered a huge personal loss: the death of his father. On September 3, 1967, the small plane that transported Mohammed bin Laden from one construction project to the next crashed while trying to land at a remote landing strip in the far south of Saudi Arabia near the Yemen border, killing both bin Laden and his American pilot. Mohammed was sixty when he died. Despite the fact that bin Laden seldom met his father and seems to have only once had a one-on-one meeting with him, Osama took the death badly. Following his father’s death, Osama, always a grave child, became even more subdued, and he increasingly embraced fundamentalist Islam. He later told his own children that the “mental turmoil” caused by the death of his father led him to memorizing the Koran, which he could recite by heart as an adult, a major feat of memory as there are more than six thousand verses in the holy book.
During the next year the future of the bin Laden business hung in the balance; it was the major construction company in Saudi Arabia and many projects were not completed, while the oldest of Mohammed bin Laden’s twenty-two sons, Salem, was only twenty-one. Due to Islamic inheritance laws, the sons received just over 2 percent each of the bin Laden company, while his thirty-three daughters received around one percent each, and Mohammed’s four current wives received the rest. Salem was responsible for distributing the dividends from the company to his siblings.
King Faisal was so close to Mohammed bin Laden that Osama claimed to a journalist that the king cried for days following his father’s untimely death. After the bin Laden family patriarch was killed, King Faisal called in the older bin Laden sons and told them that he would be their “father” and that he was putting the bin Laden company into trusteeship until they were old enough to run it.
A year after his father died, bin Laden, aged eleven, started attending the prestigious Al-Thaghr high school in Jeddah, a school for the elite modeled after British schools, where the boys wore Western-style uniforms of shirts and ties. The curriculum was constantly in a state of development and the school prided itself on its science syllabus. Brian Fyfield-Shayler, an Englishman who had recently graduated from Oxford, taught English at the school to a number of the bin Laden boys, including Osama. Fyfield-Shayler recalled, “Why did I remember Osama? First of all, I would have noticed because of his name, because of the family, and of course, when you walked into a class of anyone of his age, he was literally outstanding because he was taller than his contemporaries.” Fyfield-Shayler remembered that bin Laden’s English “was not amazing. He was not one of the great brains of that class,” but he was extraordinarily courteous, “probably partly because he was a bit shyer than most of the other students.”
Four decades later bin Laden gave himself a more generous assessment of his early academic prowess, boasting to his family at his compound in Abbottabad that both his teachers and his fellow students thought that his parents must have been paying a lot of attention to his schooling. Bin Laden claimed that he was so smart that he would answer his teachers’ questions before they had even finished them.
In Abbottabad, a family member had a follow-up question, asking, “Who had the biggest impact on your intellectual growth?” Bin Laden waved the question away, saying he didn’t have any key influences, and that since he had been a child he just naturally gravitated to true Islamic thought.
Bin Laden was a member of one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, yet in many ways he was an outsider: as an only child, and as one of fifty-five children sired by his revered father, whom he had met on only five occasions and who now was dead. Meanwhile, bin Laden’s mother was from the Alawite sect, which wasn’t considered part of the ummah, the community of Muslims, by most Saudis. She had been married to Mohammed only briefly, so she wasn’t really treated as a member of the extended bin Laden clan. And despite their fabulous wealth, the bin Ladens originally hailed from rural Yemen, rather than from the Saudi heartlands, so they were not considered to be truly Saudi.
As a young teenager bin Laden seemed discomfited by his status in his family and on rare occasions would tell someone about his feelings, as he did to two young Spanish women he met when he was fourteen while studying at an English-language school in Oxford during the summer of 1971. One of the Spaniards recalled, “I think he needed confidants and for that we became fond of him.” Bin Laden told the women that his mother was beautiful, which is what had caught the attention of his father. But he seemed sad when he confided that his brothers all had different mothers and that his own mother was not “a wife of the Koran, but a concubine.” A concubine.
At Oxford, bin Laden was accompanied by two seventeen-year-old half-brothers, and the Spanish women thought that all three were Saudi princes. “They invited us to row a boat on the Thames. We were older than them and it amused us that they wanted to pay for the boat rentals.” The Spaniards found bin Laden to be a “very handsome” tall boy who was slow to speak, polite, and quite “deep” for his age. They noticed that, unlike his half-brothers, he did not relish his time in the West. One of Osama’s older brothers was always off buying rock and pop albums, while the other brother was a style maven busy updating his wardrobe with the latest accoutrements of the hippie era such as scarves and pointed-toe boots. But Osama had little interest in the “Swinging London” of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, telling the Spanish women that the young foreigners who swarmed around London that summer were a bit crazy.
Four decades later, during one of the family meetings at his Abbottabad compound, bin Laden told his wives and adult children that he had spent a summer as a young teenager studying in Britain, staying for two and a half months, but that when he was asked to repeat the experience the following year, he had refused to go again on the grounds that “a pious Muslim should not go to the lands of the West. I had the impression that they were people of loose morals.” He said that while he was impressed when he visited Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon, in general the British were “morally degenerate.”
While bin Laden was rejecting the West, many of his half-siblings were embracing it. That embrace was led by the oldest brother, Salem, who had attended Millfield, an English boarding school not known for its academics and populated by fabulously wealthy foreigners. Salem quickly adapted to Western ways, playing 1960s hits on his guitar such as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Unlike Osama, most of the bin Ladens were strikingly Westernized and pro-American. After all, they owed much of their vast fortune to the marriage of petro-convenience between the House of Saud and the United States. Eventually, more than a dozen of his siblings would acquire some kind of schooling in the States, and Salem, who was the dominant force in the family after his father’s death, went on to buy an estate in Orlando, Florida, that he named “Desert Bear.”
Salem was also an indulgent big brother and a Pied Piper of fun who took his siblings on blowout vacations in Europe. He visited Sweden to purchase a fleet of trucks from Volvo for the bin Laden construction company, spending some time in the town of Falun, often with his siblings in tow. The visits were not all business; Salem enjoyed the local discos, and the police in Falun reported that one of the bin Ladens was charged with drunk driving in 1969.
Christina Akerblad owned the Hotel Astoria in Falun where Salem and another brother came to stay in 1970. She recalled, “They had so much money, they didn’t know how much money they had.” The brothers wore immaculate white shirts from Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, which they used only once and then would throw away. Akerblad asked the bin Laden brothers how they had managed to bring their large Rolls-Royce with them to Sweden. They told her, “We have our own plane.”
On a visit to Falun the following year, Salem brought many of his siblings, a visit that was so unusual for the town that a reporter from Falun’s newspaper ran a feature about them headlined “Arab Celebrity Visit.” The reporter wrote, “Salem bin Laden visited Falun on a combined business and pleasure trip through Europe. He was accompanied by twenty-two members of his family.… The young sheikh, who is twenty-six-years old, arrived in his private jet to Borlänge airport, while the rest of the family arrived by car. He has visited the Club Ophelia in Falun. The young sheikh is reportedly a big fan of discos and has visited the discos of Falun at various times in the past.”
This vacation was memorialized in a photograph of the twenty-three bin Laden siblings leaning on a pink Cadillac, dressed up in a riot of colors and bell-bottoms, the girls with their long brown hair uncovered. (There is some debate about whether Osama was one of the bin Laden siblings in the photograph. Osama’s trip to Oxford for summer school just preceded the bin Laden family trip to Sweden during the first week of September 1971.)
While his many half-brothers were off partying in discos, Osama was charting an altogether different course. At his school in Jeddah, bin Laden, aged fourteen, started attending an after-school Islamic study session led by a Syrian teacher who was in his mid-twenties, physically fit and charismatic. The teacher may or may not have been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that seeks to inject Islam into the political sphere. But whatever his formal affiliation, he had a big influence on bin Laden and the other students in the study group. They adopted the style and habits of Islamists, shortening the legs of their trousers in supposed imitation of the Prophet, letting their beards grow, and debating other students about the need for a deeper Islamicization of Muslim societies. Bin Laden later told his family that it was around this time that he first started thinking about jihad.
Bin Laden was three years older than his neighbor Khaled Batarfi when they were growing up in the mid-1970s on Jabal al-Arab Street in Mushrefah. It was a typical middle-class Jeddah neighborhood anchored by both a small mosque where the two friends said their daily prayers, and by a playground where they played soccer after school.
Aged sixteen bin Laden was already displaying a fierce religiosity. When Batarfi was leaving his house to play soccer wearing shorts—which fundamentalist Muslims frown upon—bin Laden just looked at Batarfi’s legs and said, “Goodbye.” Bin Laden also warned his stepbrothers not to wear short-sleeve shirts or to ogle the maid. And if he passed the maid on the stairs, bin Laden would rearrange his keffiyeh so that he couldn’t see her. The kids in his neighborhood avoided using swear words around him because he behaved like a cleric.
Bin Laden fasted every Monday and Thursday just as the Prophet had done, and he also prayed more than the five times a day required by his faith, adding an extra set of prayers in the middle of the night as only the most devout Muslims do. When he invited his friends over to his house they chanted hymns about Palestine. He often said, “Unless we, the new generation, change and become stronger and more educated and more dedicated, we will never reclaim Palestine.” He later claimed that he was deeply affected by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which he believed was given a green light by the United States, saying, “I cannot forget those unbearable scenes of blood and severed limbs, the corpses of women and children strewn everywhere.” As a teenager bin Laden already believed that the Muslim world was “backward” compared with the West and not doing enough to counter Western influence in the Middle East.
Bin Laden certainly had friends, but there was always a reserve about him that suggested he was “kind of a lonely guy,” says Batarfi. He was a teenager of few words who did more listening than talking.
He did indulge in some diversions. He and Batarfi enjoyed watching cowboy movies, Bruce Lee karate flicks, and the TV series Fury, about a stallion living on an American ranch. The series meshed well with bin Laden’s own love of riding. On a desert ranch south of Jeddah, he kept some twenty horses, one of them named Al-Balqa, after a horse ridden by one of the Companions of the Prophet. As many Saudi young men did in a country where gas was almost free and the roads ran smooth and straight across the desert, bin Laden loved driving fast cars, especially a prized white Chrysler tricked out with red leather upholstery.
As sex outside marriage was simply unimaginable for bin Laden, when he turned seventeen he began thinking about a wife. He was very close to his mother, Allia, who frequently visited her family in Syria with Osama in tow. On these trips Osama would often see his younger cousin Najwa, who privately nursed a crush on her tall, monosyllabic, handsome cousin, trembling with excitement when he was in the same room as her. Bin Laden asked his mother if he could marry Najwa, and their families agreed to the match. In 1974 Osama, aged seventeen, and Najwa, aged fifteen, were betrothed. True to bin Laden’s fundamentalist beliefs there was no singing or music at their wedding, and laughter and jokes were not encouraged.
Bin Laden and his wife moved in with his mother at her house in Jeddah, where they were given a floor to themselves. Continuing his exceptionally close relationship with his mother, he would kiss her hands and make small talk about her cooking. He was still attending the Al-Thaghr high school, but he was also working on road projects for the Saudi Binladin Group, often operating the heavy equipment himself.
Najwa was soon pregnant and delivered Abdullah, and Osama, as was customary, was now referred to as Abu Abdullah, “the father of Abdullah,” his firstborn son. Soon came another son, Abdul Rahman.
When Abdul Rahman was born he had a deformed head, likely caused by hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid on the brain that causes enlarged heads in infants. Bin Laden decided to go to the United States together with Najwa and their two sons so Abdul Rahman could receive medical attention. It would be his only visit to the country that would become his life’s obsession.
During their two-week trip Najwa recalled that she and her husband “did not hate America, yet we did not love it.” Najwa’s most memorable moment from the trip to the United States was at an airport when a man became so transfixed by her black face veil and all-enveloping abaya that he paced back and forth in front of her gawking in disbelief. Bin Laden told Batarfi that some Americans even took photos of him and his wife in their Arab robes. Bin Laden told another friend, “We were like in a zoo.” Najwa and her husband later had a good chuckle about this incident.
After graduating from high school in 1976 bin Laden went to King Abdel Aziz University in Jeddah to study economics and business administration. At the age of nineteen, he soon met Jamal Khalifa, who was a year older and studying science. They became fast friends, drawn to each other by their shared religiosity. Neither of the friends watched movies, listened to music, or took photographs, believing that they were all haram, forbidden by Islam. They did watch the news on TV, and in the days before remote control devices, Khalifa had his son stand by the television so if music came on during a newscast his son could turn it down.
The two friends went riding together out into the desert on bin Laden’s beloved Arabian horses, subsisting on dates and water and sleeping on the sand at night. These desert adventures were the beginning of bin Laden’s interest in testing himself and toughening himself for a time of privation that he believed would soon be coming.
Both came of age as the Muslim world was experiencing an Islamic resurgence known as “the Awakening.” This awakening followed the devastating defeat of the Arab states during the 1967 war with Israel. That defeat had exposed the failings of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and his avowedly secular regime, which had promised a swift victory.
The Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, a key ideologue for the Muslim Brotherhood, provided much of the theoretical underpinnings that shaped this Islamic awakening. In his massive multivolume treatise, In the Shade of the Qur’an, Qutb argued that Islam was not simply the traditional observation of the five pillars of Islam—the profession of faith, the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, the giving of alms to the poor, fasting during Ramadan, and the five daily prayers—it was a whole way of life. Qutb’s writings were widely distributed after his execution for purported treason in Cairo in 1966, which made him a martyr for the Muslim Brotherhood movement.
The Awakening had revolutionary features because Qutb’s writings contended that most Muslim governmental systems were mired in Jahiliya, a state of pre-Islamic ignorance and even barbarism, a charge that was implicitly directed against the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East. In Qutb’s polemical book Milestones, he provided inspiration for Islamist movements across the Muslim world, explaining that jihad must not only be defensive in nature, but also be waged offensively. Qutb wrote, “The persons who attempt to defend the concept of Islamic jihad by interpreting it in the narrow sense of the current concept of defensive war… they lack understanding of the nature of Islam and its primary aim.” By implication Qutb was saying that it was a religious duty to take up arms against repressive and corrupt governments in the Muslim world that were not adhering to true Islamic precepts.
In their first years at university Khalifa and bin Laden read Qutb’s books, and the two friends also attended lectures at their university given by Sayyid Qutb’s brother, Mohammed. Mohammed Qutb was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt who had fled persecution and had sought sanctuary in Saudi Arabia. There were a number of Muslim Brothers from Egypt, Iraq, and Syria who were similarly fleeing persecution at home who taught at King Abdel Aziz University when bin Laden and Khalifa were students. These teachers helped shape the Islamist ideology that the two friends were adopting.I
Khalifa, who probably understood bin Laden as well as anyone, said that he developed a very literal interpretation of Islam that he felt he had to carry out, and he was very much afraid that if did not do so, God would punish him. By the time he was twenty bin Laden was a fully fledged religious zealot, convinced that if he didn’t follow his ultra-fundamentalist interpretation of his religion to the letter he would face the wrath of God.
Carmen bin Laden, who married one of bin Laden’s half-brothers, remarked that Osama’s “fierce piety was intimidating, even to the more religious members of the family.” He might have been something of an outsider in the family, but his claims to be a priggish, ultra-observant Muslim were incontestable. And as he became an adult, bin Laden’s identity as a person merged with his religious zealotry.
He continued to work for his family construction company, and idolized his father who had built it from nothing and always seemed to be in command while out in the field managing and working on projects. Bin Laden tried to emulate him by driving the bulldozers at the family’s building sites himself. Like his father, he ate with the workers and worked from dawn to sundown tirelessly.
Osama decided to skip graduating from university and went to work for the family business full-time. He did so at a moment when his oldest brother, Salem, had taken the reins of the family business. Salem was as adept as his father at ingratiating himself with the Saudi monarchy and generating big contracts from King Fahd, the monarch who had succeeded King Faisal after he was assassinated in 1975. Salem acted as a kind of semiofficial jester in the court of King Fahd, doing things that no one else could get away with like buzzing the king’s desert camp in one of the many planes that Salem loved to pilot himself. But Salem was also presiding over a serious business. An authoritative account of Saudi merchant families published in 1979 found that the bin Laden construction business had diversified into a number of areas including engineering, the manufacture of aluminum and concrete, brickmaking, installing air-conditioning systems, and telecommunications.
Bin Laden was twenty-two years old when, seemingly out of nowhere, several hundred Islamist militants seized the Great Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in the Muslim world, on November 20, 1979. It was the first day of the new century according to the Islamic calendar. The rebels believed that among their ranks was the Mahdi, the savior who was prophesied to come at the end of the world to rid it of evil. They were also critical of the corruption of the Saudi monarchy, a critique that bin Laden would echo publicly a decade and a half later.
The bin Laden family knew the Great Mosque well, since they had spent many years expanding and renovating it. Several bin Laden brothers spent weeks at the mosque providing advice to the Saudi security services trying to extirpate the rebels. When the militants fled underground into tunnels beneath the mosque, the bin Ladens brought in equipment to bore holes in the floors so that grenades could be dropped below to kill the rebels. King Fahd conferred with Saudi religious leaders and he ordered the mosque be retaken. The bin Laden family provided blueprints and maps of the Great Mosque to the Saudi Special Forces who stormed it. Some sixty militants were later publicly beheaded.
Bin Laden subsequently reflected on this event, which seems to have precipitated an early skepticism about the Saudi regime. “King Fahd defiled the sanctity of the Great Mosque. He showed stubbornness, acted against the advice of everybody, and sent armored vehicles into the mosque. I still recall the imprint of tracked vehicles on the tiles of the mosque. People still recall that the minarets were covered with black smoke due to their shelling by tanks.”
The Saudi royal family saw the rebels’ seizure of the Great Mosque as a great threat to their power, just as the Iranian Revolution had been earlier in the year. The Saudi monarchy was determined to ensure that they would not be outflanked on matters of religion by Sunni militants at home or by the Shia militants in Iran. So the Saudi monarchy went back to its roots, and embraced the most austere form of Wahhabi Islam. In the mid-eighteenth century the first Saudi king had allied with Muhammad bin Abdul-Wahhab, a cleric who promoted an extremely harsh interpretation of Sunni Islam. This marriage of convenience had survived for more than two centuries and was the key to the political economy of Saudi Arabia: the Saudi royal family retained absolute authority—so much so that their family name was embedded in the name of the country—while the Wahhabi religious establishment sanctioned that absolute authority.
The Wahhabi religious establishment was now given a free hand: women announcers disappeared on Saudi TV; the religious police could arrest purported malefactors and harass unveiled women; illicit alcohol became much harder to obtain; movie theaters closed, as did music stores; and the Saudis dramatically increased their support to Islamic universities in the country and to charitable organizations that exported hardline Wahhabi ideas around the world.
Carmen bin Laden noticed that the atmosphere in the kingdom changed even in small, subtle ways. Despite the baking heat, bin Laden’s wife, Najwa, started routinely wearing gloves outside, as did bin Laden’s most observant half-sister, Sheikha.
Three weeks after the end of the Mecca siege there was another momentous event: The “infidel” Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The Soviets were trying to prop up the communist government of Afghanistan, which was facing a growing insurgency. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan would transform the shy, monosyllabic zealot with a capacious wallet into a leader of men.
I. When he became a public figure leading a self-proclaimed jihad, bin Laden never cited Sayyid Qutb’s works in support of his actions, probably because Qutb wasn’t a cleric with a formal religious education, just like bin Laden himself, who never studied Islam formally. So neither had any real standing to make rulings on Islamic law. Instead, when bin Laden advocated jihad he cited religious authorities such as the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyya.