The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [44]
He had an adventurous adolescence—mountain climbing in Turkey and big-game hunting in Kenya. On his family farm south of Jeddah, Osama kept a stable of horses, having as many as twenty at one time, including his favorite, a mare named al-Balqa. He liked to ride and shoot, just like the cowboys on his favorite television shows.
Osama began driving early, and he drove fast. In the mid-seventies, when he was sixteen or seventeen, he had a big white Chrysler that he accidentally ran into a culvert and destroyed. Amazingly, he was unhurt. After that, however, he made an effort to slow down. He began driving a Toyota jeep and a Mercedes 280S—the kind of car a respectable Saudi businessman would drive. But he still had trouble keeping his foot off the gas.
His science teacher, Ahmed Badeeb, noticed the change in his strong-willed young student. “At this time, Osama was trying to prove himself within the company,” said Badeeb. “There is a law in the bin Laden family that if you prove yourself as a man, you can inherit.” The Saudi Binladin Group had a contract for a large project in Jizan, near the Yemen border, and Osama badly wanted to be a part of it. “I decided to drop out of school to achieve my goals and dreams,” bin Laden later related. “I was surprised at the major opposition to this idea, especially from my mother, who cried and begged me to change my mind. In the end, there was no way out. I couldn’t resist my mother’s tears. I had to go back and finish my education.”
In 1974, while he was still in high school, Osama married for the first time. He was seventeen, she was fourteen—Najwa Ghanem, his cousin from his mother’s village in Syria. She was unusually tall and quite beautiful. There was a small wedding party for the men in Osama’s house, who never got to see the bride. Bin Laden’s future sister-in-law, Carmen, described Najwa as meek and “constantly pregnant.”
It was also during this time, in high school, that bin Laden joined the Muslim Brothers. The organization was very much an underground movement in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. “Only nerds were in it,” a fellow member recalled. The members were highly religious teenagers like bin Laden, and although they were not actively conspiring against the government, their meetings were secret and took place in private homes. The group sometimes went together on pilgrimages to Mecca, or on outings to the beach, where they would proselytize and pray. “We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a friend of bin Laden’s who joined the Brotherhood at about the same time. “We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.”
Bin Laden entered King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah in 1976. He studied economics, but he was more involved in campus religious affairs. “I formed a religious charity at school, and we devoted a lot of time to interpreting the Quran and jihad,” he later said.
In his first year in the university, bin Laden met Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, another member of the Brotherhood, who would become his closest friend. Jamal Khalifa was a year older than bin Laden. A gregarious young man with an easy smile, Khalifa came from a family of modest means, although he was able to trace his lineage back to the Prophet, which gave him a standing in Islamic society quite apart from his financial status. He and Osama played soccer together. Bin Laden, being tall and fast, was the striker, always in front. The two young men soon became inseparable.
On weekends, they would head out into the desert between Jeddah and Mecca, usually staying at the bin Ladens’ family farm, an oasis called al-Barood. To keep the Bedouins from homesteading on his property, bin Laden erected a small cabin, little more than a kitchen and a toilet, and began farming. He kept a small herd of sheep and a stable of horses. Even in the summer he would cast off his shoes as soon as he arrived and walk barefoot through the