Laden family’s oral history holds to be an outrageous demand: forty silver riyals. This smacked of extortion, but while there were perhaps several hundred Bin Ladens in the village, “they were so poor they could not stand by” Awadh, said Syed Bin Laden, who still lives in Gharn Bashireih.3
The Bin Ladens belonged to the Kenda tribe, which traced its origins to pre-Islamic Arabia and became a powerful federation in southern Hadhramawt by the seventeenth century. It had been known then as a tribe of rulers and sheikhs, but perpetual warfare gradually dissipated its strength and scattered its members. By Awadh’s time, the Kenda no longer functioned as an organized group with recognized leaders and armed militias. The Bin Ladens had become merely a family clan of perhaps four to five hundred people, clustered defensively in an ancestral fortress-village, struggling for survival. They were in no position to sustain warfare against rival groups.
The Bin Ladens divided themselves into four branches, each of which traced itself to the generation of the turret builders, Ahmed and Ali, who were two of four brothers, the others being Mansour and Zaid. Each of these brothers fathered a line of descendants who, by Awadh’s lifetime, acted together as an extended family within the wider Bin Laden clan.
Awadh belonged to Ali’s branch. The family’s oral genealogy holds that Ali was Awadh’s great-great grandfather. Little is recalled about the intervening generations except that Awadh was the only child of his father, Aboud. He therefore inherited all of Aboud’s land in Gharn Bashireih. This proved to be a very meager estate, however, and as it turned out, it was not enough to help Awadh forestall his ox creditor.4
At first, in lieu of forty silver riyals, which he did not have, Awadh negotiated to provide Bilawal with a lien on the several acres he farmed. Bilawal agreed to accept half of the profits from Awadh’s harvests until the debt was paid. If the rains had returned, Awadh might have worked himself out of difficulty and the subsequent history of his branch of the Bin Laden family might have turned out quite differently. As it happened, however, a drought hit Rakiyah. Awadh could offer his creditor no profits in the ensuing months, which angered Bilawal. By one Bin Laden family account, Bilawal threatened to kill Awadh unless he either came up with the cash he owed or turned over full title to his land.5
Awadh decided to abandon his ancestral village. He was a bachelor, free to travel. The drought had deepened steadily since the ox’s demise. Emigration was a common survival strategy in the Hadhramawt, even without the spur of a tribal death threat. Awadh packed his belongings and set out across the high plateau for a neighboring canyon known as Wadi Doan, about a day and a half ’s ride by camel or donkey. There he would begin again.
SHEER CLIFF WALLS of nine hundred feet or more plunge to the floor of the Wadi Doan, seventy miles inland from the Arabian Sea. Dark green date palm trees nourished by a riverbed cover the canyon’s floor. A race of giants hewed the chasm’s stones until God took umbrage at their arrogance and destroyed them with a sandstorm, according to local legend. This may explain the stunning architecture: Stacked against the rock walls rise the giant skyscrapers of fortified castle-villages, each town a gated, vertical redoubt against its neighbors. For purposes of defense there are no windows on the houses’ lower floors, and the slits higher up are designed for shooting.
To Europeans of the time, the canyons of the Hadhramawt seemed remote and filled with dangerous xenophobes; they were a “parallel, interior world…a blank on the map.” In truth, the Hadhramawt was not isolated at all, but its deeply religious inhabitants, although capable of gracious hospitality, did not always take kindly to unannounced Christian visitors. For several thousand years Hadhramis had been migrants, travelers, traders, and entrepreneurs, sailing out in wooden dhows from the port of Mukalla to the East Indies, Zanzibar, Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), and up the Red Sea to Mecca and Cairo. For a time, centuries ago, they and their Sabean kings enjoyed enormous wealth as caravan monopolists in the global trade in myrrh and frankincense, drawn from the gum of Arabian trees. In pharaonic Egypt and during the Roman Empire, incense burned from costly frankincense and even more expensive myrrh transformed these oils into two of the most precious commodities on earth. In Rome, no god could be worshipped properly, no funeral commemorated, no respectable marriage bed entered, without the smoke of frankincense swirling through the room. Only as its empire dissolved and austere Christian preachers denounced incense as a perfume of blasphemers did the trade decline and Hadhramawt fall back into poverty. With Islam’s arrival in the seventh century, the men of the canyons sailed again as soldiers in proselytizing Muslim armies. They stayed on in the lands they conquered as bodyguards, traders, and, eventually, political notables. They remained devoted to their homeland and by the turn of the twentieth century, many prosperous Hadhramis had carried their colonial-era trading wealth back to the canyons to build retirement homes and family compounds. So many returned from Asia and Africa that when a British officer carried out the first formal survey of the gorges during the 1930s, he discovered Swahili and Malay among the local languages.6
At the time of Awadh Bin Laden’s arrival, Britain claimed Doan as part of its Aden Protectorate, a political entity that was more wish than fact, one in a chain of loosely governed coastal territories the empire’s strategists had stitched together in Arabia to protect India’s shipping lanes from Turkish and German scheming. The local instrument of British control was the Sultan of Mukalla, who ruled from a compound of whitewashed palaces on a rock outcropping beside the Arabian Sea, protected by a personal bodyguard of African slaves. The sultan’s family had earned its fortune as mercenaries for the Nizam of Hyderabad, in India; by the early twentieth century, they preferred to spend their time in Hyderabad’s luxurious courts. In Mukalla, they left in charge a succession of
The real powers in southern Doan at the time of Awadh’s arrival were not the British or the Mukalla sultans, but a family of local sheikhs called the Ba Surras, who ruled from a mud-brick castle named Masna’a. The Ba Surra governor at the time Awadh Bin Laden arrived took ten wives during his lifetime and suffered from blindness. He ruled the canyon with a firm hand. “Murder cases are now practically non-existent,” a British agent reported with satisfaction to London. “Murderers are executed with a dagger plunged into the supra sternal notch.”8
Doan had about twenty thousand inhabitants, by the Ba Surras’ count. They were succored by nearly two hundred mosques, but only two small schools, in which the curriculum was the Koran. None of the women the English traveler Freya Stark met during the early 1930s could read. Palm trees from the riverbed were harvested for profit, and a few wealthier traders kept bees on their terraces, extracting an export crop of aromatic honey known as an aphrodisiac, particularly if eaten with meat, “something that only men may do, as it is thought inadvisable to excite women too much,” the traveler Doreen Ingrams noted.9
Awadh Bin Laden chose Doan as a sanctuary from the Obeidis because it enjoyed a reputation for peace and order under the Ba Surras that was then rare in the Hadhramawt, according to some of Awadh’s descendants. He settled a few miles from the Ba Surra fortress, in Rabat Bashan, a town stacked up against Doan’s southernmost wall, surrounded by palms on the valley floor. Eight hundred men owning one hundred rifles lived there, according to the British survey conducted in the early 1930s. Awadh seems to have had few firm connections when he first arrived in Doan; he relied instead on the region’s reputation for hospitality, and his own willingness to work. The evidence about Awadh’s circumstances after his arrival in Rabat is sketchy, as he was now separated from the family group in Rakiyah that has kept what oral history survives. He is said to have worked as a wage laborer on local small farms. He did well enough to marry a woman in the town; she was from the Al-Madudi family.10
Awadh and his wife had three daughters and three sons. The boys were Mohamed, Abdullah, and Omar; the latter died in childhood, a common fate. (The names of the daughters are not recalled; in Arabia then, as now, the stories of a family’s women were rarely told.) The year of Mohamed’s birth is sometimes given as 1908, an approximation at best; the celebration of birthdays is not an Arabian tradition, and there was barely a government in Doan then, never mind a birth registry.11
Once he settled into his Rabat exile, Awadh Bin Laden worked hard and died young. Indeed, he seems to have died before his two surviving sons, Mohamed and Abdullah, had reached adolescence.12
As was true elsewhere in the Hadhramawt, Doan’s economy relied upon the persistent willingness of local boys and young men to sail away to foreign jobs, work for years at a time in difficult conditions, and remit money home. Some left at very early ages, as young as six or seven years old. It was also common for local men to marry
