The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [91]
Nothing enhanced bin Laden Sr.’s prestige so much as his work on Islam’s religious sites. “Religion in Saudi Arabia is like gravity,” bin Laden family biographer Steve Coll has written. “It explained the order of objects and the trajectory of lives. The Qur’an was the kingdom’s constitution and the basis of all its laws. The kingdom … evolved into the most devout society on earth.”
Religion and Saudi royalty are inseparable. The Saud family had gained power in the eighteenth century thanks to a deal with a reformist preacher named Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab. He and his followers insisted on the most austere interpretation of Islam, banned the arts, music and dancing, celebration of holidays, and memorials to the dead.
The author Stephen Schwartz has defined Wahhabism as a “form of fascism” built on “a paramilitary political structure comparable to the Bolsheviks and Nazis” and “a monopoly of wealth by the elite, backed by extreme repression and a taste for bloodshed.” In Saudi Arabia, someone who had lived there for many years told the authors, “Everything comes down to money. The extent of the greed is beyond the understanding of the ordinary Westerner.”
Under the extreme form of shari’a—Islamic law—applied in today’s Saudi Arabia, theft may be punished by amputation of a hand. Public beheading remains the designated penalty for murder, drug trafficking, rape, and adultery. In some cases a beheading is followed by crucifixion of the body, and placing of the head upon a pole. Human rights are severely limited. Women cannot attend university, have bank accounts, or take employment without permission of a male relative.
The Yemeni immigrant Mohamed bin Laden had no quarrel with Saudi ways. A devout Muslim himself, he would invite prominent clerics to his home to debate religion. His renovations and innovations at the three holy shrines of Medina, Mecca, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem—before the Israeli occupation of 1967—earned him high honors in Saudi Arabia. He was appointed a minister of state by royal decree, and the letter appointing him to the Jerusalem work styled him “Your highness, Sheikh Mohamed bin Laden.”
Mohamed’s son Osama was the eighteenth of some two dozen sons sired by his series of some twenty-two wives. He was the product of a short-lived marriage to a Syrian girl named Allia who was fourteen years old to her husband’s forty-nine. In the year Allia gave birth to Osama, her new husband fathered seven children.
Even by Saudi standards, Mohamed behaved bizarrely in the marital home. According to Osama, his mother confided that he had had “a shocking habit of asking his wives to take off their veils and stand in a line, sending for his male servants to look upon their faces … like harlots on view … and point out his most beautiful wife.” Allia asked for a divorce, for reasons unknown, and went on to marry one of her husband’s employees. Osama, who lived principally with her from then on, is said by his son Omar—one of the children of his first wife, Najwa—to have loved his mother “more than he loved his wives, his siblings, or his children.”
Mohamed, Osama was to tell his own family, would usually summon his sons to see him as a group, and only a few times a year. “In my whole life,” Osama said, “I only saw your grandfather five times … brief meetings, all but one with my large clan of brothers.”
Mohamed had a strict rule, Osama told Omar, that “when he met with his sons, we must stand in a very straight line, organized according to height, rather than age.… Before I became a teenager, I was not the tallest … [One day]