air-conditioning during the 1960s, and it hosted some of the kingdom’s first classroom computers in later years. Students did not wear the national dress of a
Each year’s graduating class numbered about sixty boys. Every morning, the students would assemble in rows for a military-style call to order; on a stool to one side sat a schoolmaster with a cane, ready to discipline boys who misbehaved by beating them on the soles of their bare feet. The school’s curriculum included English-language instruction given by teachers from Ireland and England, and demanding courses in mathematics. At the same time, as with all institutions in Saudi Arabia, Al-Thaghr adhered to Islamic ritual and included religion as an essential aspect of instruction. At midday, students would kneel together for the
When Osama entered the school, he stood out because he was unusually tall, but he was a reticent personality. He sat by a window in a back corner of the classroom, overlooking the playground. In an intermediate- English class, recalled Brian Fyfield-Shayler, a Briton who taught at the school, “I was trying to push the spoken aspects of the language. To succeed, the student needs to be prepared to make mistakes. They need to make a bit of an exhibition of themselves, and Osama was rather shy and reserved and perhaps a little afraid of making mistakes.” He was also “extraordinarily courteous…more courteous than the average student, probably partly because he was a bit shyer than most of the other students.” Seamus O’Brien, an Irishman who taught English at Al-Thaghr, remembered Osama as “a nice fellow and a good student. There were no problems with him…He was a quiet lad. I suppose silent waters run deep.” Another teacher, Ahmed Badeeb, remembered Osama as “in the middle” academically, an assessment that accords with the account of Osama’s mother.14
Around 1971 or 1972, when Osama was in the eighth or ninth grade, he was invited to join an after-school Islamic study group led by one of Al-Thaghr’s Syrian physical-education teachers, who lived on the second floor above the courtyard. In that period at Saudi high schools and universities, it was common to find Syrian and Egyptian teachers, many of whom had become involved with dissident Islamist political groups in their home countries. Some of these teachers were members of, or were influenced by, the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 by a schoolteacher, Hassan Al-Banna. The Brotherhood was initially a religious-minded movement opposed to British colonial rule in Egypt; later, its leaders continued their struggle against Nasser. In his approach to the Brotherhood, Nasser alternated between periods of accommodation and brutal crackdowns. Some of the Brotherhood’s organizers were forced into exile, and they began to form new chapters across the Muslim world. Their aim was to replace secular and nationalist Arab leaders with Islamic governments, and they often operated clandestinely. The movement typically recruited its members from elite, well-educated families. Its goals included the imposition throughout Muslim societies of Koranic law and the empowerment of Islamic scholars as cultural arbiters and dispensers of justice. Over the years, the Brotherhood operated both in the open and in secret, through peaceful political campaigning and through support for violence.
King Faisal regarded the Brotherhood with some suspicion; certainly, he and others in the royal family were wary of its penchant for political organizing across national boundaries. Still, in his campaign to outflank Nasser through appeals to Islam, Faisal found the Brotherhood’s exiled teachers a useful resource. He wished to see the Saudi population educated as rapidly as possible, and he had no indigenous teachers to rely upon. Brotherhood- influenced teachers were a significant grouping, particularly among those educators from Syria and Egypt.15
In recruiting candidates for his after-school Islamic study group, the Syrian physical-education teacher at Al-Thaghr appealed to five or six boys, enticing them with promises of extra credit and organized sports. The teacher was “tall, young, in his late twenties, very fit,” recalled a schoolmate of Osama’s who was also a member of the study group. “He had a beard—not a long beard like a mullah, however. He didn’t look like he was religious…He walked like an athlete, upright and confident. He was very popular. He was charismatic. He used humor, but it was planned humor, very reserved. He would plan some jokes to break the ice with us.16
“Some of us were athletes, some of us were not,” the schoolmate recalled of the group’s initial membership, which, besides Bin Laden, included the sons of several prominent Jeddah families. The Syrian “promised that if we stayed we could be part of a sports club, play soccer. I very much wanted to play soccer. So we began to stay after school with him from two o’clock until five. When it began, he explained that at the beginning of the session we would spend a little bit of time indoors at first, memorizing a few verses from the Koran each day, and then we would go play soccer. The idea was that if we memorized a few verses each day before soccer, by the time we finished high school we would have memorized the entire Koran, a special distinction.
“Osama was an honorable student,” the schoolmate remembered. “He kept to himself, but he was honest. If you brought a sandwich to school, people would often steal it as a joke and eat it for themselves if you left it on your desk. This was a common thing. We used to leave our valuables with Osama because he never cheated. He was sober, serious. He didn’t cheat or copy from others, but he didn’t hide his paper, either, if others wanted to look over his shoulder.”
At first, the study group proceeded as the teacher had promised. “We’d sit down, read a few verses of the Koran, translate or discuss how it should be interpreted, and many points of view would be offered. Then he’d send us out to the field. He had the key to the goodies—the lockers where the balls and athletic equipment were kept. But it turned out that the athletic part was just disorganized, an add-on. There was no organized soccer…I ended up playing a lot of one-on-one soccer, which is not very much fun.”
As time passed, the group spent more and more time inside. After about a year, Bin Laden’s schoolmate said, he began to feel trapped and bored, but by then the group had developed a sense of camaraderie, with Bin Laden emerging as one of its committed participants. Gradually, the teenagers stopped memorizing the Koran and began to read and discuss hadiths, interpretive stories of the life of the Prophet Mohamed, of varied provenance, which are normally studied to help illuminate the ideas imparted by the Koran. The after-school study sessions took place in the Syrian gym teacher’s room; he would light a candle on a table in the middle of the room, and the boys, including Osama, would sit on the floor and listen. The stories that the Syrian told were ambiguous as to time and place, the schoolmate recalled, and they were not explicitly set in the time of the Prophet, as are traditional hadiths. Increasingly the Syrian teacher told them “stories that were really violent,” the schoolmate remembered. “It was mesmerizing.”
The schoolmate said he could remember one in particular: It was a story “about a boy who found God— exactly like us, our age. He wanted to please God and he found that his father was standing in his way. The father was pulling the rug out from under him when he went to pray.” The Syrian “told the story slowly, but he was referring to ‘this brave boy’ or ‘this righteous boy’ as he moved toward the story’s climax. He explained that the father had a gun. He went through twenty minutes of the boy’s preparation, step by step—the bullets, loading the gun, making a plan. Finally, the boy shot the father.” As he recounted this climax, the Syrian declared, “Lord be praised—Islam was released in that home.” As the schoolmate recounted it, “I watched the other boys, fourteen- year-old boys, their mouths open. By the grace of God, I said ‘No’ to myself…I had a feeling of anxiety. I began immediately to think of excuses and how I could avoid coming back.”
The next day, he stopped attending. But during the next several years, he watched as Osama and the others in his former group, who continued to study with the gym teacher, openly adopted the styles and convictions of teenage Islamic activists. They let their young beards grow, shortened their trouser legs, and declined to iron their shirts (ostensibly to imitate the style of the Prophet’s dress), and increasingly, they lectured or debated other students at Al-Thaghr about the urgent need to restore pure Islamic law across the Arab world.
By the time of Osama’s high school years, Al-Thaghr had become something of a hotbed of debate, within the limits of Saudi Arabia’s dull political culture, involving Nasser-influenced students who advocated pan-Arab nationalism, and Brotherhood-influenced students who argued for a restoration of Islam in Arab politics. Osama was clearly in the latter camp; he “joined the religious committee” at the school, recalled Ahmed Badeeb. “He was a prominent member,” remembered Khaled Batarfi. “That group was influenced by the Brotherhood. He was influenced by this philosophy.” Batarfi’s account is corroborated by Jamal Khashoggi, who knew Bin Laden during the 1980s; he said Osama “started as a Muslim Brother,” meaning that he was formally recruited into the movement during his adolescent years or soon thereafter.17
The Brotherhood, to which Khashoggi also belonged for a time, “is a membership,” he said. “Usually you will
