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.
The year 1979, when Osama turned twenty-two, marked the start of a new century in the Islamic calendar, a time said to herald change.
Sure enough, upheaval piled on upheaval. First, and in the name of Islam, came the toppling of the monarchy in Iran, a monarchy that had long been sustained by the United States. Then, in November, came a bloody event in Saudi Arabia itself, one in which Osama may have played a minor role.
“For forty years,” Osama would say years later, “my father kept on waiting for the appearance of Hazrat Mahdi. He had set aside some twelve million dollars for the Mahdi.” The Mahdi, according to some Islamic texts, is an Islamic Messiah who will return to earth, bring justice in a time of oppression, and establish true Islamic government.
In 1979, a Saudi religious zealot claimed that the Mahdi had arrived—in the shape of his brother-in-law, a university drop-out named al-Qahtani. They and some five hundred heavily armed comrades then committed the unprecedented outrage of seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca—one of the three holy places that bin Laden Sr. had renovated. They entered the mosque, indeed, through an entrance used by the bin Laden company, which was still completing construction within the complex.
This was more than sacrilege. It was sedition. The zealots accused the Saudi royal house of being pawns of the West, traitors to the faith. The government crushed the insurrection, but only after a bloody standoff that lasted for two weeks. Hundreds died in the battles, and sixty-eight prisoners were later beheaded.
The Mahdi did not survive to be executed. He had believed, until the fatal moment that he discovered otherwise, that he could pick up five live hand grenades and not be harmed.
THE MONTH AFTER the battle at the mosque, forty thousand Soviet troops began pouring into Afghanistan, the vanguard of an army that would eventually become a hundred thousand strong. The invasion marked the start of a savage conflict that would last almost a decade, kill a million Afghans, and drive some five million into exile. Long before it ended, it became a trial of strength between the Soviet Union and the United States—at the time underreported and minimally understood by the American public.
The war got scant attention not least because it did not involve the commitment of American troops. It was, rather, a purposeful, secret war to push back communism. Covertly, the United States committed cash and weaponry on a grand scale, using Afghans and foreign irregulars to do the fighting. Appropriately for a secret war, the conflict was orchestrated by the intelligence agencies of three nations: America, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
So it was that, very relevantly for the 9/11 story, the Afghan saga that began in 1979 drew in two men, Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam.
“MY FATHER,” bin Laden would one day tell a visitor, “was very keen that one of his sons should fight against the enemies of Islam. So I am the one son who is acting according to the wishes of his father.”
He had been called, he also believed, by a higher power. “Just remember this,” he was to tell his son Omar. “I was put on this earth by God for a specific reason. My only reason for living is to fight the jihad.… Muslims are the mistreated of the world. It is my mission to make certain that other nations take Islam seriously.”
IN 1979, the day bin Laden would be taken truly seriously was still more than two decades away. It was then, however, that—as his friend Batarfi has said, “the nightmare started.”
EIGHTEEN
ON EVERY LEG OF THE JOURNEY TO 9/11—OVER ALL THE TWENTY-ONE years that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—there would never be a time when several intelligence agencies were not involved.
Truth for public consumption is not a tool much favored by intelligence services. Those who direct the agencies prefer not to share information at all, except—in principle—with their own governments. It may, on occasion and in democracies, be useful to offer information to others—to investigating commissions, congressional and parliamentary committees, and the like, even to the media—but rarely can it be wholly relied upon.
