contradictions within Osama is his emotion and tenderness on the one hand, and his strength and stubbornness on the other hand. He loves to read, and does so frequently, and has an unusual passion for going through information, documents, and archives, as well as following the press.10
Some of his most uncompromising conduct involved women. Dating among suburban Jeddah teenagers was a difficult, risky, and frustrating endeavor even among relatively secular families, and for a young man as devout as Osama, it was just about out of the question. He was notably attracted to girls, however, according to Batarfi; by his account, Osama decided to marry at seventeen essentially because he wanted to have legitimate sex. The female cousins he saw in Syria in the summers did not veil or segregate themselves as rigorously as young women in Jeddah did. During his sojourns there, he had gotten to know Najwa, a daughter of his mother’s brother. Marriages among first cousins were commonplace in Arabian families; Osama’s mother and family may have encouraged and even arranged the match. Najwa’s brother, however, has suggested that the initiative came from Osama, and that he asked formally for his cousin’s hand. She was fourteen.11
Initially they lived with Osama’s mother and stepfamily in Jeddah; Najwa became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Abdullah. The marriage bed seems only to have sharpened Osama’s conviction that a righteous Muslim man should not cast his eyes even in passing on women other than his legal wives and his mother. He did not permit his wife to meet strangers. He averted his eyes from the family maid. When he made social calls on his brothers, he would back away and cover his eyes if an unveiled woman opened the door. He would not shake hands with any woman.12
Osama graduated from Al-Thaghr in 1976. The class photo depicts several rows of boys and teachers in ties and blazers, but Osama is not in the picture. By then, photography was one of the innovations that he rejected— photographs drew faithful eyes to false idols, to human imagery that competed with God’s oneness. Around this time he rejected secular music as well, because, as his teachers would have explained, it had not been a part of the Prophet’s life and it competed with the sacred sounds of Koranic recital and prayer. Osama did not smoke. He condemned gambling. His only conspicuous pleasures were sex, cars, work, and the outdoors. If he sometimes imagined himself as living in his departed father’s image, as some of his friends have suggested, he did so with considerable faithfulness.13
An exception was his view of polygamy. He talked with his friend Jamal Khalifa about the serial marriages their fathers had each undertaken, apparently from sexual motives. They felt this was “not the Islamic way at all.” They believed that there were more women then men in society, and so for that reason, multiple marriages were desirable, since they “solved a social problem,” Khalifa recalled. Yet, according to Islamic teaching, “you have to be fair, you have to give equal justice between all of them, and you have to divide the time, to give each of them what is enough for her.” They pledged to handle their married lives more responsibly—they might take the four wives permitted, but they would not divorce frivolously, and they would concentrate on the issue of equity.14
As his house filled up with young children (Najwa’s intervals between her pregnancies were short), he banned videotapes of Disney cartoons or
He seems to have derived his early ideas about fatherhood in part from the lessons about self-reliance, faith, and parsimony imparted by his own self-made father. He took his young children camping in the desert. He taught them to ride horses, to sleep in the open, and to cover themselves with sand if they needed warmth. “He did talk a lot about how we lived in luxury, and how we would have to toughen up,” Batarfi recalled. “He wanted them to grow up tough—they would practice hunting and shooting.” He would not let his children drink from a straw, because these had been unknown in the Prophet’s lifetime; on one particularly hot family outing, Carmen Bin Laden watched, appalled, as Osama’s wife, draped in black, tried to hydrate her sweating children by spooning water into their mouths. The other Bin Ladens present, she felt, were “simply awed by Osama’s zeal, intimidated into silence.” Yet others who knew him then have said that while he could be severe with his children about Islamic precepts and instruction, he could also be playful and warm, particularly on family camping trips to the desert.15
IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD, liquids and gases swirl or condense when temperatures and densities rise and fall. A similar convection of cultures molded Osama’s late adolescence. He stood one degree separated from Mecca and two degrees from Las Vegas. And yet, in his own way, he seemed as comfortable with the presence of those competing densities as was Salem; he just managed their demands and temptations differently. Osama, in any event, was hardly the only Bin Laden of his generation to adhere strictly to Islamic teaching. In addition to his half- brother Mahrouz, two of his sisters, Sheikha and Rafah, became particularly devout in this period; they started a religious school in Jeddah for young family members. A number of his other brothers studied Islam formally and circulated in religious circles in the Hejaz. Among other things, religious credibility remained an imperative of the family business—Islamic scholars on urban planning committees in the two holy cities influenced contracting and real estate development decisions, as they had in Mohamed’s time.
Osama did not appear in the famous Swedish family portrait, but he certainly knew Europe. According to Batarfi, he visited London at age twelve, with his mother, to receive medical treatment for an eye condition; he stayed for at least a month and did some sightseeing. On a second trip, as a teenager, Bin Laden joined some friends and relatives on a big-game safari in East Africa. According to Batarfi, he also made one trip to the United States. Walid Al-Khatib, Osama’s supervisor at the family construction company, has also said that he “went on trips to the U.S. and Europe.” In Batarfi’s account, the visit to America came about because he and his wife sought treatment for a medical problem of one of their sons.16
Only one aspect of the journey made a particularly strong impression, according to Batarfi. On the way home, Osama and his wife were sitting in an airport lounge, waiting for their connecting flight. Najwa wore a black abaya, a draping gown, as well as the full head covering often referred to as hijab. Other passengers in the airport “were staring at them,” Batarfi said, “and taking pictures.” When Bin Laden returned to Jeddah, he said the experience was like “being in a show.” By Batarfi’s account, Bin Laden was not particularly bitter about all the stares and the photographs; rather, “he was joking about it.” The provenance of this account of Osama’s journey is uncertain; Batarfi is generally reliable, but in this case, his firsthand knowledge is limited. It seems clear that Osama did travel to the West to seek medical treatment for a son during the late 1970s, but he may have gone no further than Britain.17
Whatever his itineraries, the same themes prevail: Osama was not a stranger to the West, but he was not radicalized there. Through his own travel and that of his family, he knew something of Europe and America, but by age fifteen, he had already erected a wall against their allures. He felt implicated by the West, and by its presence in his own family, and yet, as he would demonstrate in the years ahead, he lacked a sophisticated or subtle understanding of Western society and history. He used his passport, but he never really left home.
THE AMBITION that most firmly bound Osama to his half-brothers was his interest in the family business. As his generation of Mohamed’s sons reached college, some of them drifted away from the prospect of a life in the construction trade—a few of his half-brothers managed to never work a day in their lives. Osama was among the larger group of boys who were strivers. They jockeyed for influence, salaries, and leadership roles. Osama’s religious inclinations made him a natural for management assignments involving the family’s Mecca and Medina renovation work. Assigning the most ardently religious Bin Laden brothers to work on projects in the holy cities would become a pattern as the family allocated management roles over the years.
Walid Al-Khatib, a Palestinian who supervised Osama in the Mecca office when he was still a teenager, remembered him as “serious for his age, and from the first day, I noticed his interest in small details. We operated heavy equipment, and soon this tall skinny boy was driving them all. His technical ability was impressive.”18
There were two main educational pathways for those brothers interested in a career at the company— engineering and business administration. The former was demanding academically and required a willingness to attend university abroad, as Saudi universities were not adequate. Between his religious studies and his swelling young family, the prospect of four or more years in Cairo or the West may have seemed undesirable to Osama.
