The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [41]
Osama spent his early years among a horde of children in his father’s house. Mohammed ran the family like a corporation, with each wife reporting on her division. The children rarely saw the great man, who was often away on business. Whenever he returned, he would call them into his office and gaze upon his vast brood. During the Islamic feasting days, he would kiss them and give each child a gold coin; otherwise, he rarely spoke to them. “I remember reciting a poem to him, and he gave me a hundred riyals, which was a huge amount of money in those days,” Osama remembered. The children sought to either please him or run from him. It is not surprising that the remote and powerful father stirred deep currents of longing in his shy and willowy son, even though their exchanges were rare.
Mohammed frequently entertained distinguished male guests in his modest home, especially during the hajj, when pilgrims from all over the world passed through Jeddah on their way to worship at the holy sites. In typical Saudi manner, the men would sit barefoot on the carpeted floor, resting one arm against a bolster, as Mohammed’s younger sons passed wordlessly among them, serving dates and pouring weak cardamom coffee from long-spouted silver pots. The patriarch enjoyed religious debates, and he would bring together the most notable clerics in the Kingdom to discuss often very obscure points of theology.
By now, the bin Laden construction empire extended well beyond Saudi Arabia. One of Mohammed’s major projects outside the Kingdom was the renovation of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which meant that the three holiest spots in Islam all bore his mark. “He gathered his engineers and asked them to estimate the cost of the project, without profit,” Osama later stated. “Because of God’s graciousness to him, sometimes he prayed in all three mosques in one single day.”
Mohammed bin Laden had a custom of marrying off ex-wives who had borne him children to employees of his company. The wives had little or no say in the matter. They sometimes found themselves marrying below what they now considered their station—to a driver, for instance—an arrangement that influenced the future standing of their children in the family. Alia was fortunate when Mohammed decided to divorce her. He awarded her to one of his executives, Mohammed al-Attas, who was a descendant of the Prophet. Osama was four or five years old. He moved with his mother a few blocks away, to a modest two-story villa on Jabal al-Arab Street. The house was white stucco with a small courtyard and a black filigree iron gate in front of the garage. On top of the flat roof was a towering television antenna. Over one of the front entrances there was a brown-and-white-striped awning—the doorway that women used; the men entered through the gate into the courtyard.
Soon after Osama moved to the new house, Mohammed bin Laden died in a plane crash on his way to take another teenage bride. His body was so charred he could only be identified by his wristwatch. At the time of his death, Mohammed was still an active, vigorous man, not yet sixty years old, at the peak of his astonishing career. “King Faisal said upon the death of my father that today I have lost my right arm,” Osama once remarked. Mohammed’s sons were not yet old enough to take control of the family enterprise, so the king appointed three trustees who ran the company for the next ten years. One of the men, Sheikh Mohammed Saleh Bahareth, also oversaw the education of bin Laden’s children. Their inheritance was withheld until they were twenty-one—and in any case, most of the value was tied up in the ownership of the