in their teens, emigrate to Ethiopia or Somalia or Egypt, and stay away for as long as two decades, taking other wives while abroad. For most young men in Doan the question was not whether to leave, but where to go. They depended upon informal employment networks sponsored by Hadhrami traders who had business interests in particular ports abroad. The loyalty of one Hadhrami stranger to another was extraordinary, and by the early twentieth century this ethic had created a thriving diaspora from the Levant to Southeast Asia. In one letter discovered from the early twentieth century, a father writes instructions to two of his young boys about how they should make their way from Hadhramawt to Singapore—he provides lists of trusted contacts in four different port cities and urges the boys to send many postcards home. Young men from the northern Hadhramawt valleys generally emigrated through these kin networks to Southeast Asia; from Doan, they went primarily to Africa or up the Red Sea coastline.
Emigration would have seemed a natural choice for fatherless Mohamed and Abdullah Bin Laden. As they considered their destinations they were probably advised by their mother’s family and by other townspeople concerned about their welfare, now that Awadh was gone. The richest man in Rabat was a descendant of the Prophet Mohamed named Sayyid Muhammed Ibn Iasin, a Red Sea cotton dealer with a “long face and large pleasant mouth” whose household kept bees and Ethiopian slaves.13 The Iasins had connections in Massawa, the main Eritrean port. Another prominent family in the canyon, who lived about a mile or two away, had relatives in Addis Ababa, and had made a small fortune trading skins there. It was likely through one of these contacts that Mohamed Bin Laden, the eldest of Awadh’s sons, but a boy of less than twelve years old, first climbed the canyon walls and joined the camel caravans for the walk to the port of Mukalla.
He sailed to Africa, survived the voyage, and found work somewhere in Ethiopia. But his journey ended in disaster. The Bin Laden family’s oral history contains at least two versions about what happened to him. In one, Mohamed was working as a sweeper in a store or small business. According to what his brother Abdullah later told the family, his boss was a disagreeable man with a fierce temper who kept a ring of keys fastened to his belt; one day, annoyed at Mohamed, he hurled the keys at the boy and struck him in the face. The injury was so severe that Mohamed lost his eye. A second version, told by some of the Bin Ladens who remained in Yemen, holds that Mohamed was working on an Ethiopian building site when an iron bar dropped accidentally from a high building, hit the ground, bounced up, and struck his eye. In any event, Mohamed Bin Laden would grow into adulthood with a right eye made of glass.14
Mohamed returned to Doan after his injury. A massive earthquake destroyed the Abyssinian port of Massawa in 1921, devastating the region’s economy; this may also have been a factor in his retreat. Townspeople in Rabat say it was 1925 when Mohamed left again. This time he traveled with his younger brother Abdullah. It would be about twenty-five years before the brothers returned. Their mother later died in Doan, according to Bin Laden family members who stayed in Yemen; it seems doubtful that the boys ever saw her again.
They aimed now for the eastern coast of the Red Sea. In the port of Jeddah, the gateway favored by Muslim pilgrims traveling to the holy city of Mecca, there was a sizable community of Hadhrami merchants and laborers, including some from Doan; other Hadhramis resided in Mecca itself.
At the time the Bin Laden boys embarked on this journey, Abdullah was only about nine or ten years old; Mohamed was perhaps fourteen or fifteen, according to what Abdullah later related to his family. The journey Abdullah remembered was inflected by magic, miracles, and religious portents. They found their way aboard the overloaded wooden dhows at Mukalla, sailed around the Arabian Peninsula, then up the Red Sea, as far as the port of Jizan, nearly four hundred miles south of Jeddah. From here they began to walk. They became lost in the desert; they were hungry, nearly starving, and thought they might die. A fierce storm blew in on them, and when it cleared the boys found a farm, and in the irrigated fields they found a watermelon. They ate it and were revived.15
They walked on and finally reached the stone and coral walls of Jeddah, a fetid city of perhaps twenty-five thousand beside the Red Sea.16 Perhaps only a teenager who had known the deprivations and perpetual warfare of the Hadhramawt could regard this claustrophobic, disease-ridden port without a single paved street as a place of opportunity. Yet Mohamed Bin Laden had seen in Doan the proud mud skyscrapers, with their painted doors and complements of slaves, which had been built by Hadhramis who had earned their fortunes in all sorts of unlikely places, through luck and faith and hard work. He possessed the drive to seek a fortune of his own.
THE AIR WITHIN Jeddah’s protective walls “held a moisture and a sense of great age and exhaustion such as seemed to belong to no other place,” wrote T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. There was “a feeling of long use, of the exhalations of many people, of continued bath-heat and sweat.” Temperatures rose well above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, and salty Red Sea winds stifled breath. “Newspapers flop into rag, matches refuse to strike and keys rust in the pocket,” a British visitor complained. Each day about five thousand camels moved through the city, dropping what Jeddah’s mayor estimated to be more than thirty thousand pounds of manure. “The goods on display in the market are covered with so many flies that you cannot tell the color of the goods without chasing them away,” the Persian pilgrim Hossein Kazemzadeh wrote. “In the evening, when the shops close, the flies go, like the merchants, to private houses to seek their prey.”17
For more than a thousand years Jeddah had served as the gateway to Mecca. Through the city poured pilgrims bound for the annual Hajj festival—one hundred thousand of them each year by the early twentieth century. They were Muslims of every hue and background, from Africa, Southeast Asia, India, and Europe. They came, too, for lesser pilgrimages throughout the year; rowboats called
Cholera epidemics swept through the city. Europe’s nascent public health authorities recognized the global migration to and from the Hajj as a potential source of pandemics. The colonial powers struggled to create a workable system of quarantine. An Ottoman doctor summoned to treat one cholera scourge around the century’s turn found Jeddah “a vast cemetery” teeming with “dead bodies that filled the caravansaries, mosques, cafes, houses and public places”; he was haunted by “the cries of men, women and children mixed with the roaring of the camels.”19
Harry St. John Bridger Philby, a British adventurer who would soon play a remarkable role in the city’s growth, arrived in Jeddah during the 1920s, around the same time as Mohamed Bin Laden. Philby encountered a
jumble of wealth and poverty; great mansions of the captains of commerce and enterprise, with their solid coral walls and wide expanses of woodwork tracery, side by side with hovels broken and battered with age; mosques great and small, with pointed minarets tapering skyward…Everywhere a contrast of light and shadow, splendor and squalor, dust and dirt; and above it all flew the flags of many nations, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Holland, amid the countless emblems of a united Arabia.20
The city’s economy turned on pilgrims, who paid taxes amounting to about 3 million British pounds each year in this period and generated another 4 to 5 million pounds in commercial profits for the merchants, camel owners, tour guides, and hoteliers who competed for their purses. The greed and carnival-barking style of Jeddah’s hospitality industry was legendary; the medieval traveler Ibn Jubayr noted skeptically that even before the arrival of Islam, the city fathers had raised “an old and lofty domed shrine” to attract tourists; “it is said that this was the resting place of Eve, mother of the human race…God knows best about all that.”21 The opening of the Suez Canal in the late nineteenth century transformed the Red Sea into a colonial bazaar where European steamers, African traders, and Arabian middlemen competed for profit and influence. By the time Mohamed Bin
