Introduction: The Bin Laden family

The Saudi Bin Laden family was founded by an immigrant from Yemen, Sheik Mohammed Bin Laden, who made a fortune in the Saudi construction market. Carmen describes the family:

Islam permits a man to marry four wives, and most Saudis are content to marry one or two, four at most. But, like a few of the royal princes, Sheikh Mohamed swelled the ranks of his wives by divorcing older women and marrying new ones as the whim took him. (Divorce is a simple proce­dure in Islam--for a man.) When he died, he had amassed twenty-two wives--twenty-one of them still living.

After years of living in Saudi Arabia, I learned from one of his most trusted employees that the night he died, Sheikh Mohamed had been planning to marry a twenty-third wife. He was headed there when his private plane crashed in the desert. [65]

Sheikh Mohamed had had fifty-four children. I used to tease Yeslam, saying that his father had been competing with King Saud, who had over one hundred offspring. [p. 66]

(i) The Apartheid, xenophobic, fanatic and corrupt regime in Saudi Arabia

The first encounter with the Apartheid system in Saudi Arabia came when Carmen Bin Laden was driven to Mecca. She reports:

I went to Mecca for the first time with a female acquain­tance of Kuwaiti origin. On the road, we passed huge bill­boards warning non-Muslims to turn back. We came to an inspection post: Saudi officials are obsessive about forbidding non-Muslims to soil the Mecca holy sites. It made me nervous. [73]

[I]n Saudi Arabia foreigners may not own property. They may not even practice business without a Saudi part­ner. The sacred soil cannot be sullied by unbelievers. [p. 115]

When Carmen's daughters were old enough to attend school, she encountered the xenophobic incitement first hand:

At school, what those children met was a form of brain­washing. I watched it happen to my daughters. Lessons in Arabic, math, history were learned by rote, parrot-fashion, with no deeper understanding of their real content. There were no sports, no debates, no discussions. No games, mar­bles, or tricycles. Religious education was the most impor­tant class of all, and it seemed to take up half or more of every day.

When Wafah was seven or eight, I remember, I looked through her exercise book one evening and I found she'd written down, "I hate Jews. I love Palestine," in her childish Arabic script. What was happening to my daughter? If she was going to hate somebody, I wanted her to have a good reason. The Arab-Israeli dispute was something she knew nothing about.

The next day I went to the school principal and said, "My daughter doesn't know where Palestine is. She knows nothing about Israel. She isn't even doing geography yet.

How can she be taught to hate when she doesn't know any­thing about it?"

The principal, a small but imperious woman, was com­pletely impervious to my protest. "This is not a matter for you to discuss," she told me. "You are a foreigner, you can­not understand. Does your husband know about this?" [p. 140-141]

Probably the most dramatic case which highlights the fanatic, misogynist and barbaric system which reigns supreme in Saudi Arabia is the case known as "Death of a princess". Carmen Bin Laden recounts:

One Thursday evening in 1978 all the diplomats were talking about the latest rumor that was racing through Jeddah. One of the King's young great-nieces, Princess Mish'al, had been cold-bloodedly murdered in a parking lot downtown. Barely an adult, Mish'al had been promised in marriage to a much older man. She had tried to flee the country with her lover, using another passport. She had been captured at the airport.

No woman can leave Saudi Arabia--or even travel outside the city she lives in--without the written permission of her husband or father, or son. A woman is never a legal adult. ..

Mish'al had been caught. I don't know how. And her grandfather, Prince Mohamed, the brother of King Khaled, had ordered her killed, for bringing shame on her family.

Being a privileged Bin Laden, Carmen got a close look at the corrupt life of the royals, part of the government system in Saudi Arabia. She writes:

Like every other one of the thousands--perhaps ten thousand--Saudi princes and princesses, Latifa and Turki supported their lifestyle almost wholly out of the stipend that they received from the Treasury every year. Even small children receive this income: It is calculated by age, ranking in power, and gender· Girls receive half the share of boys. In addition, all public utilities are free for princes·

This is the Saudi system--an accumulation of more and more people into a royal family that treats the country's oil wealth as its personal treasury. Abdel Aziz ibn Saud, the first King, who created Saudi Arabia out of the desert, had at least seventeen wives. When he died in 1953, he left behind thirty-four sons. (I don't think anyone knows how many daughters he had. Even the number of his wives is a matter of specula­tion.) Before he died, Abdel Aziz laid out the succession. Saud, the oldest son, would follow Abdel Aziz as King, and would be assisted by the second oldest son, Faisal. As in all the great Saudi families, the oldest brother took control over the clan. [p. 171]

To date, the King of Saudi Arabia has always been one af­ter another of the aging sons ofAbdel Aziz, who founded the country. None of his grandsons has yet taken over the throne--which may be one reason why Saudi Arabia never changes. The family keeps growing: Latifa told me there was always at least one al-Saud child born every month--great-and great-great grandchildren now. By the time I lived in Saudi Arabia, there were well over five thousand princes in the royal family. Some say the al-Sauds now number over twenty-five thousand.

When Abdel Aziz ibn Saud named himself King in 1935, Saudi Arabia was desperately poor. His first palace was made of the same sun-dried mud-bricks that the peasants used. In those days, sheikhs and Bedouin herdsmen called each other by their first names. But then oil was discovered in the 1930s.

Since this was Abdel Aziz's country--it was even named after him--it was, I suppose, considered natural that the oil wealth go principally to his children. By the time I lived there, every member of the colossal al-Saud family received enough money to live on quite well.

But in addition, a large number of princes--those who were closest to the crown, or simply the most venal--skimmed huge percentages off major business contracts, for everything from cleaning the roads to renovating an airport or purchasing modern weapons. They lived in un­believable extravagance. Oil was their personal harvest.

The princely practice of skimming percentages--which, to call a spade a spade, is corruption--was not con­sidered immoral by any Saudi I ever met. Yet at the same time, it was haram to gain interest from a savings account, because the Koran forbids the practice of usury. I couldn't understand contradictions like this. Still, I did sometimes find them comical. One time, Yeslam's brother Tareg owed some bank a considerable sum of money. He refused to pay the interest, claiming it would be un-Islamic, and as far as I know nobody ever made him do it. [p. 174-175]

If things were bad enough before 1979, they got infinitely worse after Khomeini came to power in Iran and accused other Arab countries of being lax. Carmen writes on the post-1979 era:

The Royal family panicked and sought to placate the fundamentalists. [p. 119]

More extreme ideas of religious behavior took grip with a swiftness that stunned me. Notices were plastered in the souk warning about the dangers of improper dress. As ser­mons in the mosques began calling for more restrictions on social mores, more and more women began wearing the face veil again. Despite the punishing heat, they added thick black stockings under their abayas, to shield the few cen­timeters of feet and ankles that might be seen as they walked. Many, like Osama's wife, Najwah, and my sisters-in-law Rafah and Sheikha, started wearing gloves. The reli­gious police--the mutawa -- began wielding thick long sticks, like in Iran, to police our modesty, sometimes beating women in the street.

All of a sudden I began noticing little things, as if soci­ety was going backward. One afternoon, I was in a super-market when a pregnant woman fainted; her husband rushed to help her up. The mutawa were there, and they stopped him, yelling at him that he must not take his wife in his arms in public...

The mutawa broke into homes and smashed hi-fis. If they found alcohol, they hauled men off to jail and beat them there. They prohibited the sale of children's dolls--dolls became contraband, like whiskey, because they were human images. Suddenly, the only dolls for sale were shapeless figures with no faces, like the one owned by Aisha, the Prophet Mohamed's child-wife, in the seventh century. But this was 1979! [p. 120-121].

Summarizing her observations, Carmen writes about the Saudis in general:

These are people who feel contempt for the outside world. Individually, some may claim to be liberal. But the beliefs and ideology of their culture are deeply ingrained in them from an early age, they are inescapable.

Osama Bin Laden and those like him didn't spring, fully formed, from the desert sand. They were made. They were fashioned by the workings of an opaque and intolerant me­dieval society that is closed to the outside world. It is a soci­ety where half the population have had their basic rights as people amputated, and obedience to the strictest rules of Islam must be absolute.

Despite all the power of their oil revenue, the Saudis are structured by a hateful, backward looking view of religion, and an education that is a school for intolerance. They learn scorn for what is foreign: The non-Muslim doesn't count. Their mothers spoil them into arrogance. But then their every natural urge is denied by endless, oppressive restric­tions. Obedience to the patriarch is absolute. And when they become fathers, their rule is law. [p. 200-201]

This is the face of Saudi Arabia, a member of the UN Human Rights Commission, the job of which is to malign Israel systematically. No doubt, Saudi Arabia and the Commission deserve each other.