Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [123]
My friend said, “That is not a man. You are hearing a woman, the famous Egyptian singer Um Kulthum, the ‘Star of the East.’ Everyone in the world believes her to be the greatest singer ever to live. I believe it, too.”
“A woman?” I really couldn’t believe it. Her voice was deep and mysterious, unlike any female voice I had ever heard. Listening to any kind of singing was strictly forbidden by my father, yet I was entranced, wanting so badly to hear more that I was willing to risk his wrath.
“She is dead, now,” my friend reported, striking my heart with unexpected sadness, for the singer had been unknown to me until the previous moment. Instantly obsessed by her voice, the following day I sought out one of the religious sheiks in the area and asked him, “Is it forbidden in Islam for me to listen to poems set to music?”
That sheik brought hope and cheer into my bleak life when he replied, “One of the most important sheiks in Islam says that it is allowed, so long as the poem does not sing about the body, or the features of a woman, or does not contain any crude lyrics.”
From that moment on, poems and songs became an important distraction from the backdrop of my miserable existence. I would spend every possible moment listening to Um Kulthum singing her woeful songs of love, longing, and loss. I was so inspired by the idea of love that I even felt compelled to write a few poems of my own.
Every desire created by those love songs and poems was wrapped around my desperate need to create a new life for myself. Um Kulthum’s message brought me to the realization that there was a parallel world to our bin Laden universe of hate and revenge, a world previously unknown to me where people lived for and sang about love.
During this time of romantic dreams, my hopes soared that I might return to Saudi Arabia and marry one of my cousins, as my brother Abdullah had done. I spent hours thinking about a certain cousin, a pretty and sweet girl I remembered from my childhood, imagining us falling in love, getting married, and living in a lovely home filled with sweet-faced children. I will not identify her because it might bring her negative attention, since the children of my father are universally believed to be tarnished by my father’s activities.
There are so many who avoid us because of him.
I did receive comfort from my dear mother whose instincts warned her that all was not well with me. When I accidentally discovered that she had started a nighttime habit of relaxing by sitting on the ledge outside our hut, breathing in the cold, fresh mountain air and watching the twinkling stars hanging in the night sky, I joined her. Peaceful hours passed as we sat quietly or, when in the mood for talking, discussed our lives, and how strange it was that we had started out in a palace in Jeddah and ended in a rock hut on a mountain in Afghanistan. I had always loved my mother more than I loved anyone else, and through those talks, our mother-son relationship grew closer than ever.
A few months later when I overheard talk about my father’s plans for an important change, my mother was the first to know. I had discovered that my father no longer confided in her as he had during the early years of their marriage. He was a man pulled in so many different directions that his personal relationships slowly shriveled to the size of a dried fig, even his once loving rapport with my mother.
After living in Afghanistan for nearly a year, my father finally traveled to Kandahar for a meeting with the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. During their first visit, my father and Mullah Omar discovered that they held mutual ideas about Islam. The two men had agreed that my father should return to Jalalabad for a brief time while arrangements were made for us to visit Kabul, the former capital of Afghanistan, and then perhaps move to Kandahar where Mullah Omar lived.
I liked the idea of seeing something more of Afghanistan. I was so bored on the mountain that even an invitation to visit an active war zone held appeal, for all