The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [93]
The teenage husband brought his wife home to Jeddah swathed in black, her face totally veiled. “Osama,” she recalled in a 2009 memoir written with her son Omar, “was so conservative that I would also live in purdah, or isolation, rarely leaving the confines of my new home.” Her husband explained “how important it was for me to live as an obedient Muslim woman.… I never objected because I understood that my husband was an expert regarding our faith.”
It was decided that Najwa would no longer go to school. Instead she sat in the garden reading the Qur’an while Osama went to school. Her husband, she discovered, could recite the sacred texts by heart. Proudly, he took her to pray at the mosque in Mecca that his father had rebuilt. He fit attendance at school, and occasional arduous work for the family construction company, around praying at the mosque several times a day.
Najwa soon had a first baby, to be followed not long after by another. The obedient Muslim wife would bear eleven children over the years. The devout Muslim husband, meanwhile, observed his faith to the letter. Muslims should in principle avoid shaking hands with a person of the opposite sex or of a different religion, but Osama took things further than that. When a woman—his European sister-in-law Carmen bin Ladin—opened the front door of her home unveiled, he averted his gaze and ducked speaking to her. He did not allow Najwa to feed her baby from a bottle, because it had a rubber teat.
His rules extended to male company. Osama slapped one of his own brothers for ogling a female servant. He stared in disapproval when a male friend arrived in shorts, on the way to a soccer game. In the broiling heat of Saudi Arabia, he even urged his brothers not to wear short-sleeved shirts. In Syria, offended by the sound of a woman singing in a sexy voice, he ordered a driver to turn off the car radio.
“Around eighteen or nineteen or so,” his half-brother Yeslam would say of Osama after 9/11, “he was already more religious than the average person or the average member of the family.” Most Westerners might think that comment a gross understatement and dismiss Osama as having been an obsessive, a religious nut. To be super-strict about religion, however, was not—is not—unusual in Saudi Arabia. Far from alienating everyone, Osama’s zealotry earned him respect. “His family revered him for his piety,” his sister-in-law Carmen said. “Never once did I hear anyone murmur that his fervor might be a little excessive.”
Osama would rise to pray even during the night, Batarfi remembered. It was not compulsory for Muslims, but it was “following the example of the Prophet.” When he went on from school to university—he would start but not complete his economics degree—Osama became close to a fellow student named Jamal Khalifa, one day to become his brother-in-law. “I was almost twenty, and he was nineteen,” Khalifa remembered. “We were religious … very conservative; we go to that extreme side.”
Osama no longer watched movies. He did not watch television, except for news programs, and he avoided music with instruments, which some religious advisers deemed sinful. He disapproved of art, so no pictures hung on the walls. He avoided being photographed, though this was a matter on which he was to vacillate.
The shift to the extreme had not happened overnight. Looking back, Najwa remembered how—even while still at school—her husband had regularly gone out at night “for impassioned discussion of political or religious topics.” Even before his marriage, a schoolfriend revealed, Osama and a half dozen other boys had begun studying Islam after school hours, taught by a Syrian teacher on the staff who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was at his urging that Osama memorized the Qur’an,