The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [45]
“Osama was very stubborn,” Khalifa said. “We were riding horses in the desert, and we were really going very fast. I saw fine sand in front of us, and I told Osama this is dangerous, better stay away. He said no, and he continued. His horse turned over and he fell down. He got up laughing. Another time, we were riding in a jeep. Whenever he saw a hill, he would drive very fast and go over it, even though we didn’t know what was on the other side. Really, he put us in danger many times.”
It was a time of spiritual questioning for both of them. “Islam is different from any other religion; it’s a way of life,” said Khalifa. “We were trying to understand what Islam has to say about how we eat, who we marry, how we talk. We read Sayyid Qutb. He was the one who most affected our generation.” Many of the professors at the university were members of the Brotherhood who had been run out of Egypt or Syria. They had brought with them the idea of a highly politicized Islam, one that fused the state and the religion into a single, all-encompassing theocracy. Bin Laden and Khalifa were drawn to them because they seemed more open-minded than the Saudi scholars and were willing to lead them to the books that would change their lives, such as Qutb’s Milestones and In the Shade of the Quran. Each week, Mohammad Qutb, the younger brother of the martyr, would lecture at the school. Although bin Laden never formally studied with Qutb, he usually attended his public lectures. Qutb was extremely popular with the students, who noted his calm demeanor despite the fact the he had also endured the rigors of Nasser’s prisons.
At that moment Mohammed Qutb was jealously defending his brother’s reputation, which was under attack from moderate Islamists. They contended that Milestones had empowered a new, more violent group of radicals, especially in Egypt, who used Sayyid Qutb’s writings to justify attacks on anyone they considered an infidel, including other Muslims. Foremost among Qutb’s critics was Hasan Hudaybi, the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brothers, who published his own prison book, Preachers Not Judges, to counter Qutb’s seductive call to chaos. In Hudaybi’s far more orthodox theology, no Muslim could deny the belief of another so long as he made the simple profession of faith: “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His messenger.” The debate, which had been born in the Egyptian prisons with Qutb and Hudaybi, was quickly spreading throughout Islam, as young Muslims took sides in this argument about who is a Muslim and who is not. “Osama read Hudaybi’s book in 1978, and we talked about it,” Jamal Khalifa recalled. “Osama agreed with him completely.” His views would soon change, however, and it was this fundamental shift—from Hudaybi’s tolerant and accepting view of Islam to Qutb’s narrow and judgmental one—that would open the door to terror.
That same year, Osama and Najwa’s son Abdullah was born. He was the first of their eleven children, and following Arab tradition, the parents came to be called Abu (the father of) Abdullah and Umm (the mother of) Abdullah. Unlike his own father, Osama was attentive and playful with his children—he loved to take his quickly expanding family to the beach—but he was also demanding. He had unyielding ideas about the need to prepare them for the tough life ahead. On the weekends, he brought both his sons and his daughters with him to the farm to live with camels and horses. They would sleep under the stars, and if it was cold, they would dig and cover themselves with sand. Bin Laden refused to let them attend school, instead bringing tutors into the house, so he could supervise every detail of their education. “He wanted to make them tough, not like other children,” said Jamal Khalifa. “He thought other kids were spoiled.”
Bin Laden’s second son, Abdul Rahman, was born with a rare and poorly understood birth defect called hydrocephalus, commonly called water on the brain. It results from an excess of cerebrospinal fluid building up inside the neural ventricles, which in turn causes the