The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [224]
“I formed a religious charity”: “Walidee Ramama al-Aqsa Bilkhasara” [My Father Renovated al-Aqsa Mosque, with a Loss], Al-Umma al-Islamiyya, October 18, 1991.
79 walk barefoot: interview with Jamal Khalifa.
Mohammad Qutb…would lecture: interviews with Khaled Batarfi, Jamal Khalifa, and Mohammed Qutb.
80 eleven children: interview with Khaled Batarfi; Douglas Farah and Dana Priest, “Bin Laden Son Plays Key Role in al-Qaeda,” Washington Post, October 14, 2003.
sleep on the sand: interview with Khaled Batarfi.
refused to let them attend school: interview with Jamal Khalifa.
Abdul Rahman: ibid.
81 using honey: interview with Zaynab Ahmed Khadr, who has a child with a similar disability. She discussed the problem with Abdul Rahman’s mother.
82 Umm Hamza: interviews with Zaynab Ahmed Khadr (who also supplied the tallies of bin Laden’s children) and with Maha Elsamneh.
house on Macaroni Street: tour and interview with Jamal Khalifa.
83 “I want to be”: interview with Jamal Khalifa.
“I recall, with pride”: “Walidee Ramama al-Aqsa Bilkhasara” [My Father Renovated al-Aqsa Mosque, with a Loss], Al-Umma al-Islamiyya, October 18,1991.
just over six feet tall: The 9/11 Commission Report, 55, drawing from American intelligence, places bin Laden’s height at 6'5". According to Michael Scheuer, that estimate derived from Essam Deraz, bin Laden’s first biographer, who told me bin Laden was “more than two meters tall, maybe two-five or two-four”—over 6'8" tall. John Miller, who interviewed bin Laden for ABC television, described him as 6'5", but he saw him on only one occasion. Ahmad Zaidan, the al-Jazeera bureau chief in Islamabad who met bin Laden several times, estimates his height at 180 cm., about 5'11". Bin Laden’s friends, however, closely agree on his height. Jamal Khashoggi told me that bin Laden was “exactly my height”—182 cm., nearly 6'. Bin Laden’s friend in Sudan, Issam Turabi, told me that bin Laden was 183 or 184 cm., about 6'. His college friend and housemate, Jamal Khalifa, places his height at 185 cm., just over 6'1". That is the actual height of bin Laden’s son Abdullah, who says his father is about two inches taller than he. Bin Laden’s friend Mohammed Loay Baizid also says that bin Laden is two inches taller than he is, but Baizid stands only 5’7”. One could theorize about the wide disparity in perceptions; I only include this survey as an example of one reporter’s frustration in trying to get an answer to a single simple question—among many that had conflicting responses.
4. Change
84 “Thanksgiving turkey?” Prince Turki al-Faisal speech to Contemporary Arab Studies Department, Georgetown University, February 3, 2002.
Turk or Feaslesticks: “The Lawrence,” yearbook for the Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, New Jersey, May 4, 1962, 5.
“Did you hear”: Prince Turki al-Faisal speech to Contemporary Arab Studies Department, Georgetown University, February 3, 2002.
85 Bill Clinton: Clinton, My Life, 110.
“Look, I didn’t give”: interview with Prince Turki al-Faisal.
86 average Saudi income: Wright, “Kingdom of Silence.” It became equal to the United States in 1981.
87 30 or 40 percent: Wright, “Kingdom of Silence”; interview with Berhan Hailu.
co-opt the ulema: al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, 124; also, Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, 17ff.
88 fifty thousand Muslims: Lacey, The Kingdom, 478. Much of this account comes from Lacey and from James Buchan, “The Return of the Ikhwan,” in Holden and Johns, The House of Saud, 511–26.
“Your attention, O Muslims!”: Heikal, Iran, 197. Kechichian claims that none of the thousands of pilgrims in the mosque that day heard Qahtani, “or anyone else for that matter,” invoke the Mahdi. Kechichian, “Islamic Revivalism,” 15. I could find no other sources to support this assertion.
89 an employee of the bin Laden organization: bin Ladin, Inside the Kingdom, 123–24.
90 sun rotated: AbuKhalil, Bin Laden, Islam, and America’s New “War on Terrorism,” 64.
Oteibi had been his student: Holden and Johns,