Some of us may think the material trappings of Western society which we have exported to the Islamic world—television, fast-food and the electronic gadgets of our everyday lives—are a modernizing, self-evidently good, influence. But we fall into the trap of dreadful arrogance if we confuse “modernity” in other countries with their becoming more like us. The fact is that our form of materialism can be offensive to devout Muslims—and I do not just mean the extremists among them…Western civilization has become increasingly acquisitive and exploitative in defiance of our environmental responsibilities. This crucial sense of oneness and trusteeship of the vital sacramental and spiritual character of the world about us is surely something important we can re-learn from Islam.8
In February 2001, Charles and Khaled brought “Paintings and Patronage” to the Al-Faisaliah Center in Riyadh, a glass shopping mall, office tower, and luxury hotel complex constructed by the Saudi Bin Laden Group. At a celebratory banquet, Charles sat beside Crown Prince Abdullah and Bakr Bin Laden sat at a nearby table. The Saudi press dutifully promoted the works on display and honored the kingdom’s distinguished royal guest—there was, of course, no risk of independent-minded art criticism in the newspapers that might irritate either of the royal painters.
Also in attendance that night at the Al-Faisaliah was Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, chairman of the Committee of Managing Directors of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies, the international oil giant, a cosponsor of the Riyadh exhibition, along with BAE Systems, the British defense contractor. Their financial contributions to the gala might not reflect the “vital sacramental and spiritual” link between Islam and the West that Charles had earlier emphasized, but unlike his friend Khaled, of course, Charles was only a figurehead prince, an informal ambassador in service of Her Majesty’s government, whose elected job it was to attend to more material concerns of British factory workers and automobile owners.9
Prince Charles’s Christmas cards offered Bakr one additional source of reassurance as Osama’s violent ambitions became more visible. Bakr and his brothers actively sought other such contacts in the United States and Europe after the Africa embassy bombings. Philip Griffin, from his office in Maryland, telephoned his former contacts at the State Department, but his connections operated at a lower level than that to which the Bin Ladens were accustomed. The Carlyle Group, where the Bin Ladens had already made investments, offered a more influential pathway: George H. W. Bush, the former American president, traveled to Saudi Arabia in November 1998, three months after the Africa attacks, and again in 2000, to speak at Carlyle events designed to raise money from Saudi investors. He met the Bin Ladens and wrote them gracious thank-you notes for their hospitality.10
Former president Jimmy Carter, seeking to raise money for the Carter Center, which promoted human rights and disease eradication worldwide, met with a group of ten Bin Laden brothers during a fundraising campaign in Saudi Arabia in early 2000. The Bin Ladens assured Carter that they had nothing to do with Osama; the former president, in turn, urged them to support his efforts to combat poverty and suffering in the Third World. Perhaps the Bin Ladens realized that at the end of a two-term Clinton administration, with Vice President Al Gore looking like a plausible next president, it would be useful to broaden their political contacts beyond the Republican-heavy, Texas- centric networks offered by Carlyle. In any event, Bakr flew to New York in September 2000, on the eve of the U.S. presidential election, and had breakfast with Carter. It was a very rare effort on Bakr’s part—one of only two trips to the United States that he had made since he left the University of Miami in 1973. Bakr pledged a $1 million gift to the Carter Center, to be paid over several years; the initial donation was $200,000. The funds would support Carter’s campaign to control and prevent river blindness disease.11
INSIDE THE UNITED STATES itself, after 1998, what the Bin Ladens sought most was to avoid attention, but even this did not always prove easy. Bin Laden children continued to attend prep schools, colleges, and universities in the U.S. Khalil Bin Laden’s children were among them. Although he had long since abandoned America in Motion, Khalil still visited Desert Bear, the estate outside Orlando. His wife’s Brazilian mother often stayed there, as did his wife’s sister, Regina Frisaura, and her four daughters. Regina had lived in Jeddah during the mid-1990s, but she had gone through a divorce from her American husband, Franklin Frisaura, and had returned to Orlando. She was a deeply troubled woman, and her behavior increasingly threatened to attract the interest of the police at a time when the Bin Laden family did not need such attention.
On June 11, 1999, Michele Smith, a local Florida police officer, arrived at Regina Frisaura’s home, where she discovered the aftermath of a violent argument. Regina’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Vanessa, told the policewoman that her mother had beaten her with her fists, thrown a picture frame at her, thrown a skateboard at her three times, and grabbed her by the hair. Vanessa said that “for as long as she can remember, she has been physically and emotionally abused by her mother,” according to Smith’s police report. Two other daughters joined Vanessa in recounting “numerous acts of violence” over the previous several years.12
That police encounter plunged the Orlando outpost of the extended Bin Laden family into the debilitating world of American family court, with its custody struggles, social worker reports, and judicial hearings. A report filed in July 1999 by a county social worker quoted one of the Frisaura girls saying that Regina used drugs, including crack cocaine, and “that the mother would disappear for days when they lived in Saudi Arabia, and the father once found the mother in a crack house.” This was only the beginning, it turned out, of a disturbing series of reports filed in an Orange County, Florida, courthouse after 1999, which described abusive behavior by Khalil Bin Laden’s sister- in-law toward her own children. Khalil appeared occasionally at Orlando court hearings called to evaluate the best interests of Regina’s children. It was a sad and prolonged ordeal; Regina sometimes disappeared in the night and left her children alone, according to reports filed with the court. Much of her violence appeared to be related to her abuse of crack cocaine, which continued into the spring of 2001, according to a home study filed by the Department of Children and Families.13
Addictive drugs ruined lives in Jeddah just as they did in Orlando, and it was hardly surprising that a family as large as the Bin Ladens would be affected. The timing and geography of this particular case was awkward, but the Bin Ladens were fortunate: there was no publicity.
BY EARLY 2001, the biggest change occurring in the Bin Laden family was the rise of a large third generation. The older children of Mohamed’s fifty-four sons and daughters were reaching their twenties, and a phalanx of teenagers stood right behind them. The sheer numbers were staggering: well over one hundred direct descendants of Mohamed, plus the collateral branch descending from his brother Abdullah Bin Laden’s many children, plus dozens more incorporated into the family through marriage. The children of Mohamed still tried to assemble together as a family, particularly in the summer. A number of them gathered each year at a modern, gated seaside resort in Egypt called the Marina, an archipelago of islands fashioned from reclaimed land along a palm-draped shore of the Mediterranean. The Bin Ladens had helped to develop the resort, and they had claimed an island for themselves—Bin Laden Island, as locals called it—where the family had built a ring of stone vacation homes side by side. It was an Egyptian version of the Oaktree family village in Florida that Salem had once envisioned. On their Marina island, the Bin Ladens laid themselves out on the seashore in all of their diversity— women who were fully covered, and women who were not; men who were bearded and prayed conspicuously, and others who strapped on earphones and jogged to contemporary music.14
The Bin Laden women were by now just as striking in their diversity as the men; the difference was that they were much better hidden from view. Among Mohamed’s daughters, Randa remained an impressive figure, at least to the family’s American and European friends. She had retired from medical practice and raised her family in Jeddah. Bakr occasionally drew upon her unconventional life and comfort with the United States by inviting her as a guest at dinner when he hosted visiting American dignitaries, such as the U.S. consul general in Jeddah. One summer, Randa and her husband insisted that their teenaged son take a summer job at a Pizza Hut in Jeddah, so he would know something of ordinary life. In the family’s Westernized caucus, in addition to her, there was also Saleha, still married to her Italian designer and living on the Riviera. There was Najiah, who spent much of her time in Los Angeles, where she had taken up piloting lessons at the Santa Monica Airport. That such unconventional Arabian women shared membership in a family—and occasionally, a summer seashore—with much more traditional sisters, draped in their black abayas, was perhaps no more or less striking than the fact that Osama and Shafiq Bin Laden had been born in the same month and had now fashioned such different worlds. Indeed, without Osama, by the year 2001, the Bin Ladens might have seemed no more remarkable than thousands of other Muslim melting-pot
