The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [46]
JAMAL KHALIFA also wanted to marry. The custom, in Saudi Arabia, is for the groom to pay a bride price and furnish a home before the wedding takes place. Khalifa found a suitable young woman, but he didn’t have enough money to provide an apartment. Bin Laden owned a lot near the university, and he built a small home for his friend. Unfortunately, it was too spartan for Khalifa’s bride.
Bin Laden did not take offense; indeed, he made an even more generous gesture. At that time, he was living in his mother’s house with his stepfather and their children. Osama and his family occupied the first floor, which he divided in half by building a wall through the middle of the living room; then he invited Khalifa and his bride to move in. “You live on this side, and I’ll live on the other,” bin Laden said. Khalifa and his wife lived there until he graduated from King Abdul Aziz University in 1980.
While they were still in the university, Osama and Jamal made a resolution. They decided to practice polygamy. It had become socially unacceptable in Saudi Arabia. “Our fathers’ generation was using polygamy in not a very good way. They would not give equal justice to their wives,” Khalifa admitted. “Sometimes they would marry and divorce in the same day. The Egyptian media used to put this on television, and it made a very bad impression. So, we said, ‘Let’s practice this and show people we can do it properly.’” In 1982 bin Laden set an example by marrying a woman from the Sabar family in Jeddah who was descended from the Prophet. She was highly educated, with a Ph.D. in child psychology, and taught at the women’s college of King Abdul Aziz University. Seven years older than Osama, she bore him one child, a son, and became known as Umm Hamza.
Managing two families wasn’t easy, but bin Laden wasn’t discouraged. He developed a theory of multiple marriages. “One is okay, like walking. Two is like riding a bicycle: it’s fast but a little unstable. Three is a tricycle, stable but slow. And when we come to four, ah! This is the ideal. Now you can pass everyone!”
He bought a run-down four-unit apartment building on the corner of Wadi as-Safa Street and Wadi Bishah, about a mile from his mother’s home. The units were in alternating gray and peach colors, and each had window air-conditioning units. There used to be an old pasta factory nearby, and because street numbers are rarely used in the Kingdom, bin Laden’s new dwelling got to be known as the house on Macaroni Street. He put his two families in separate units. He married again a few years later a woman from the Sharif family in Medina, who was also highly educated—she held a doctorate in Arabic grammar and taught at the local teachers college. They would have three daughters and a son, so this wife was known as Umm Khaled. His fourth wife, Umm Ali, came from the Gilaini family in Mecca, and she bore him three children.
Academically undistinguished himself, and clearly uninterested, bin Laden would never pursue the respectable professions, such as law, engineering, or medicine, that might have given him independent standing. His brothers