Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [18]
When we went inside I saw that the apartment had many plain rooms that were simply decorated with traditional Persian carpets and Arabic-styled cushions lined up against the walls. I had always fancied our home to be adorned with draperies and furniture and special decorations, but who knew when Osama would return from Pakistan? It would be impossible for me to go around the city alone to purchase new furnishings.
Soon after our outing, Osama arranged for the family to move into the new building, then left Jeddah for Pakistan.
Although my husband never failed to be a kindly partner, I could see that his mind was overflowing with business not connected to our home or to our children. I was always supportive, and I yearned for success on the battlefield for two reasons: one, that the Afghans could live without danger and rebuild their shattered nation, and two, that my husband and the father of my children might come home so we could resume the life we had once known.
And so it came to be that I found myself alone with three babies.
Fortunately, I was unaware that we would never return to an ordinary life. From that time on, Osama was away from Saudi Arabia more often than not. That huge building never became the elegant home I had envisioned during those early years of marriage.
Even with maids to help with my three boys, and a driver responsible for acquiring our supplies, my life resembled a fast-moving spinning wheel. I did not want to miss a moment of my sons’ baby days, so I was often fatigued. Adding to my exhaustion, I found myself pregnant again in July of 1980.
The fourth child I carried kicked with such enthusiasm that I suffered from the inside out. Surely, after three sons, it was time for a dainty female, yet it was hard to imagine the baby inside me that was bursting with abundant energy was a delicate girl. Surely the child must be male!
Thankfully Osama was careful to mark the date in March 1981 and return home from Pakistan to be by my side when it was time for me to give birth. When I told Osama that I must go to the hospital, he was as excited as he had been with our first three. My husband was a man on a mission; he settled me in his automobile and raced to the Bukshan Hospital, driving through Jeddah neighborhoods at such a speed that familiar structures appeared as a blur.
Despite the intensity of the labor pains racking my body, I felt myself the luckiest woman in the world.
A Note Regarding Osama bin Laden’s Political Activities
JEAN SASSON
During the years that Najwa married, moved to Saudi Arabia, and began having children, Osama bin Laden completed his high school education at the Al-Thager Model School in Jeddah, and in 1976 enrolled in the King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, where he studied economics and management. Najwa says that, despite reports claiming otherwise, Osama never graduated from the King Abdul Aziz University, but left three or four years after enrolling, only a few terms before graduation. His personal awakening had roused him to move on to the political movement sweeping the entire Middle East.
Actually, throughout Osama’s formative school years, the Muslim Middle East underwent an Islamic awakening, called the Salwa. The beginnings of the Salwa could be traced to the 1967 war with Israel, when Egypt, Jordan, and Syria suffered a demoralizing military defeat. That’s when many thousands of young Arab men began to question their leaders and the internal problems of their countries, as well as their losses to Israel. The Islamic awakening would gain in strength when many young Arabs began to demand change.
Although Osama was politically quiet during these years, his passion for Jihad, or holy war, was forming. During this time Osama met his first mentor, the activist Palestinian teacher and writer Abdullah Azzam, who inspired him to devote his life to something other than increasing the bin Laden fortune.
Abdullah Azzam was born in 1941 in Hartiyeh,