Through Our Enemies' Eyes Read online

  The status of Bakr and his family was most recently attested to by a senior member of the royal family. “The Bin Ladens are a noble family,” Prince Turki al-Faisal told the Arab News in November 2001. “Its members, except Osama, are an example of fine patriotism, and allegiance, brotherhood, and friendship…. They are true followers of Islam and have strong family attachments.”17

  Muhammed’s Influence on Osama

  Muhammed appears to have played an important part in Osama’s youth, and, according to John F. Burns, writing in the New York Times, those who knew Muhammed claim that his character is replicated in Osama, as the son shares “his [Muhammed’s] shrewdness and singularity of purpose, his deeply conservative religious and political views, his profound distaste for non-Islamic influences, … [and] even the cunning tradecraft he has used in his meticulously planned attacks.”18

  Osama was born in Riyadh in July 1957, the last-born son of Muhammed’s brood. Like other aspects of his life, the status of Osama’s mother in the pecking order of Muhammed bin Laden’s wives is a subject of controversy. Newsweek, for example, has claimed she “was one of the last and least regarded of the father’s many wives,” and Time has said that Osama’s mother “is universally derided as the billionaire’s tenth and least favored wife.” In contrast, Mary Anne Weaver reported in the New Yorker that Osama’s mother was a “Syrian beauty” who was “considered by the conservative bin Laden family to be far ahead of her time. (For instance, she refused to wear a burka over her Chanel suits when she traveled abroad),” and it has been said Muhammed bin Laden preferred “the tiny last one” to the other wives.19

  Until he was seventeen, Osama is reported to have spent portions of each summer with his mother, visiting her family in Syria. Bin Laden is said to hold his mother in high regard, a sentiment she returns, saying that he is “a good son who is kind to” her. After the press reported that she was angry with her son for the 11 September 2001 attacks, she took up the cudgels in defense of herself and Osama. In a press statement—rare for any member of the bin Laden family, but especially so for a woman—bin Laden’s mother adamantly set the record straight.

  I do not approve of the ambitions, ideas and actions attributed to him [by the press]. But I deny what was attributed to me that I am angry with him. I, like all mothers, am satisfied and pleased with my son, and pray to God to guide him to the right path and save him.20

  During his childhood, Osama absorbed a zeal for Islam from his father, who, Cherif Ouazon has written in Jeune Afrique, “was very conservative [and] raised his children in the Wahabite tradition, a demanding Islamic education that advocates a return to the Prophet’s austere life.” Muhammed bin Laden is said to have “developed a reputation for piety as well as wealth,” and Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA) leader Sa’d al-Faqih has said Muhammed was a “fairly devoted Muslim, very humble and generous. The father had [a] dominating personality…. He had a tough discipline and observed all the children with strict religious and social code…. He dealt with his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at a young age. He was very keen not to show any difference in the treatment of his children.” Muhammed bin Laden was intent on maintaining a pious family that was closely knit; unusual for a wealthy and multiwived Saudi businessman, Muhammed “kept all of his children in one residence” so that he could preside over “their discipline and observance of religion and morals.” All of Muhammed’s sons participated in the family construction business from an early age, and he arranged managerial experience for each son on individual projects.21

  Osama has said that he received a hands-on education in construction work during his school holidays. “I started working with my father when I was a child,” bin Laden told journalist Hamid Mir in March 1997. “I worked on the expansion of the Al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem]. During the early years of my life, I received training in the use of explosives for construction work and [for the] demolition of mountains.”22

  Although some writers speculate Osama “turned to God” after being ignored by his father and siblings because of his mother’s low status, there is little information to support this contention.23 To the contrary, Osama speaks proudly of his father, consistently portraying him as a pious man who worked for the glory of God. In late 1998, for example, Osama told Qatar’s Al-Jazirah television that “Allah blessed him [Muhammed bin Laden] and bestowed on him an honor that no other contractor had ever known. He built the holy Mecca Mosque … [and] the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina.” Osama also claims that his father submitted a below-cost bid for the contract to refurbish the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Osama said that his father did this “to guarantee that Allah’s mosques, and this mosque [in Jerusalem] in particular are well served.” Bin Laden’s company won the contract, and Osama has said that his father was later able to “sometimes pray in all three mosques in a single day.”24 Bin Laden’s long-standing support for the Palestinians against Israel also appears to have been learned at his father’s knee. “My father … once contracted to restore a mosque in an area under the control of Israel,” bin Laden told Hamid Mir in 1997. “My father thought of converting the firm’s 200 bulldozers into military tanks. He wanted to use them to attack Israel. However, his technicians told him that it would be impossible and he gave up the idea. But he was disappointed.”25

  Osama told Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir that, at his death, Muhammed bin Laden had set aside $12 million to contribute when the Hazrat Mahdi—the “Rightly Guided One”—returned at the end of time to “revive the glory of Islam,” and Amman’s Al-Ra’y explains that Osama’s career reflects his father’s success in ensuring he “was brought up in a religious environment, which says that jihad is a duty that must be fulfilled.”26 Osama also has said that his father would surely approve of his current line of work. “My father used to say,” Osama told Hamid Mir in March 1997, “that he had fathered 25 sons for the jihad.” He also added that he intends to follow his father’s example. “It is my desire,” Osama wrote in summer 2000, “that my children grow up in the atmosphere of jihad and absorb Islam in its true spirit.”27

  Osama’s Family Relations

  Beyond his father, Osama always has spoken well of his mother, brothers, and sisters, notwithstanding the spring 1994 letter Bakr bin Laden published in which he—in the family’s name—expressed “regret, denunciation and condemnation” of Osama’s activities.28 Osama has never publicly objected to this statement or to a similar statement issued by the family four days after the September 2001 attacks. According to the Islamabad daily The News, “Bin Laden doesn’t believe that his wealthy clan … has disavowed him. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ he [Osama] remarked when asked whether the bin Laden family had declared him an outcast.”29

  MIRA leader al-Faqih concurs, noting “there is a very interesting thing in the structure of [the Islamic] family. You are obligated to support your family members…. Well, they [the bin Ladens] have to say that [they disowned Osama]. They have to pretend to be cutting off Bin Ladin. But in all actuality they admire him, they respect him…. I do not claim that all … the [bin Laden] brothers do that. But quite a significant number of them work hard to get [rid of what they see as] sinful money—which has to reach its rightful owner.”30 Frontline’s unattributed biography of bin Laden amplified this point, explaining that

  Most of the [bin Laden] brothers and sisters are observing Muslims and are very keen not to “spoil” their income with money that is not theirs. They believe that it is their duty to let the owner of any riyal to have it. The only way they guarantee [this] is by letting [Osama] Bin Ladin’s share reach him. Some of the brothers and sisters also believed it was their religious duty to support this distinguished brother from their own money. While many are very careful not to irritate the royal family, many more do not care and insist on letting the money reach Usama.31

  Rather than being alienated from his family, Osama has praised their role in his life and has strongly implied that
the family has supported his commitment to jihad. “I am immensely thankful to God that He enabled my family to understand this,” Osama told Karachi’s Ghazi Magazine in August 2000. “My family members are pray[ing] for me and no doubt have gone through a lot of difficulties. But God gave them the courage to face all that.”32

  Regarding these difficulties, bin Laden resents the al-Sauds for their treatment of his own and his extended family since he left the Kingdom in 1991. In January 1999, for example, he told Newsweek that the Saudis had kept his eldest son and other family members from visiting him in Afghanistan, and added that at various times “four of my sons have been imprisoned in Saudi jails.”33 He also explained that his brothers had been hurt. “Obviously, the family has been harmed … but relatively,” he told Al-Quds Al-Arabi. “Great pressures have been exerted on them for the sake of my return.” He said the pressure was most acute in the financial area as “a lot of our money is still in the hands of the Saudi royal family [which has accrued due] to the activities of our family and company.”34

  In the context of this close-knit family, Osama was raised and educated in a more religious and insular manner than his brothers. Of Muhammed’s sons, only Osama received all of his education in Saudi Arabia; according to Sa’d al-Faqih, Osama received his primary, secondary, and university education in Jeddah, although Osama himself says he also received some schooling in Mecca and Medina. Osama claims to speak only Arabic, although other reporting disputes his contention. Journalists Rahimulah Yusufzai and Peter Bergen claim Osama understands English, and Edward Giradet, the journalist who brilliantly covered the Afghan jihad for the Christian Science Monitor, claims that in early 1989 he encountered Osama near Jalalabad and describes him as a “young, arrogant Saudi” who spoke “fluent English.”35

  Only recently, Giradet’s recollection appears to have been confirmed by a man named Brian Fyfield-Shayler, who claims to have taught English to bin Laden and thirty other wealthy Saudi youths four times a week in Jeddah around 1970. Fyfield-Shayler’s words offer the fullest view yet available of bin Laden as a student and sketch some of the unpretentious characteristics he has displayed in his adult life.

  He was very courteous—more so than many of the others in his class…. He also stood out because he was singularly gracious and polite, and had a great deal of inner confidence. [In his work, bin Laden was] very neat, precise, and conscientious. He wasn’t pushy at all. Many students wanted to show how clever they were. But if he knew the answer to something he wouldn’t parade the fact. He would only reveal it if you asked him.36

  In addition to a Saudi-only education, there is no solid evidence that Osama traveled to Europe or North America, although there are unconfirmed reports of trips to Britain and Turkey. His overseas trips appear limited to the Gulf, Syria, Pakistan, Sudan, the Philippines, Algeria, Yemen, and Afghanistan. The data on Osama’s university education is conflicting. He himself claims he graduated in 1981 from Jeddah’s King Abdul Aziz University with an economics degree; other reports claim he studied engineering or public administration and that he never graduated.37 What is most important in Osama’s university education is that he began his studies with a deep religious faith that he, according to al-Faqih, strengthened by adopting “the main trend of many educated Muslims at the time, [that of] the Muslim Brotherhood.” The Brotherhood’s goal was and is as stated in the late 1920s by its founder Hassan al-Banna: “[The] doctrine of reclaiming Islam’s manifest destiny: an empire, founded in the seventh century, that stretched from Spain to Indonesia.”38

  University Years

  Osama attended King Abdul Aziz University when its atmosphere was one “of freewheeling Islamic thought.” While there, his faith was made more assertive by the influence of three Islamic scholars, one who was then teaching at the institution. The first two influences came from the writings of medieval Islamic scholar Taqi al-Din Ibn-Tammiyah and those of modern Egyptian Islamic scholar Mohammed Qutb. Tammiyah belonged to the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam and polemicized against the other Sunni schools. He also attacked Christians and Jews for refusing to recognize that Islam had displaced them. Most important for Osama, Tammiyah said jihad was the responsibility of each individual when Islam was attacked by non-Muslims, when Muslim rulers were ungodly, when they ruled by man-made law rather than Sharia, and when they oppressed their subjects. In short, as Professor Iftikar H. Malik has argued, “Tammiyah established jihad as an ideology for self-defense.” Tammiyah’s work inspired the Arabian Peninsula’s eighteenth-century Wahabi sect, whose intolerant, puritanical, and martial interpretation of Sunni Islam still dominates Saudi Arabia.39

  Mohammed Qutb, who is revered today by many Islamists, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was its leading theoretician, and argued after a three-year stay in the United States that Western civilization had led humanity “to corruption and irreligion from which only Islam can save it.” Qutb was imprisoned and then executed in 1966 for his role in “an ill-defined plot against Nasser’s government.” While in prison, Qutb wrote a book titled Signposts along the Road in which he argued “that jihad—or struggle—should be waged not only defensively in the protection of Muslim Lands, but offensively against the enemies of Islam.”40

  In addition to Tammiyah and Qutb, Shaykh Abdullah Azzam, who taught at the university when Osama attended, decisively influenced Osama. Shaykh Azzam would later play a pivotal role in the Afghan jihad and in Osama’s personal Afghan experiences, and, as American terrorism analyst Steven Emerson has written, the Al-Azhar-educated Azzam “is more responsible than any Arab figure in modern history for galvanizing the Muslim masses to wage an international holy war against all infidels and non-believers until the enemies of Islam were defeated.” More subtly, Osama’s affinity for the teachings of Ibn-Tammiyah, Qutb, and Azzam may have been sharpened by the humiliation his generation of Muslims felt as what author Kahlid Khalil Ahmed has called “the young sons of that era of severe defeats”—Israel’s defeat of the Arabs in 1948, 1967, and 1973.41

  The steeling of Osama’s faith at the university complemented his upbringing and work and social experiences. Together they gave Osama an enduring foundation for the views and cause he now espouses. Faqih says Osama grew up as a “religiously committed boy.” Osama’s brother, Abdul Aziz, remembers his youngest brother as “tall … thin and very religious,” and Osama says he spent much of his childhood in Mecca and Medina and so was exposed early and for long periods to the atmosphere of Islam’s two most holy cities.42 Osama is said to have been “occupied with fundamentalist groups” as a youngster and there are reports his first contact with the groups was at age seven.43

  While a teenager, Osama “struck those around him as an ordinary man. But he was more pious than his brothers and was deeply affected by the involvement of his family’s company in rebuilding the holy mosques in Medina and Mecca.”44 Indeed, some argue that the “teen-aged Bin Laden” became “fired up with religious fervor while working on restoring the Islamic sites in Mecca and Medina.”45 Osama’s personal circumstances in his teenage years also kept him focused on religion. He was a young man, Cherif Ouazon wrote, whose “status as the son of a rich man allowed him to rub elbows with the princes, but, starting in his teenage years, he preferred the company of the ulemas.” Frontline’s unattributed biography says bin Laden was “married at the age of seventeen to a Syrian girl who was a relative…. The early marriage was another factor in protecting him from corruption.” Osama’s first wife was the daughter of his mother’s brother, again suggesting his father and siblings did not ostracize his mother.46 Conjugal activities appeared to be favored by Osama for the time he spent away from prayer, mosque, and jihad; in 1998, London’s Al-Majallah reported he was then married to three wives and had ten sons and ten daughters from a total of four wives.47

  During his youth, Osama also regularly met well-known Islamists in social and religious settings arranged by his father and elder brothers, and these events “started forming an Isla
mic responsibility [in him] at an early age.” His father, for example, “financed halaqat, nighttime meetings that brought together the kingdom’s greatest preachers over a theological topic. It was in this environment that Osama grew up.” In addition, Osama’s family hosted “hundreds of pilgrims”—prominent Muslim scholars, jurists, and leaders—from outside the kingdom whom Muhammed bin Laden, and later his eldest sons, would entertain at the family’s many residences during the annual Hajj season. “Some of those [guests],” according to Frontline, “were senior Islamic scholars or leaders of Muslim movements. He [Osama] used to make good contacts and relations through those gatherings.”48

  Among those Osama met at his family’s pre-1979 Hajj gatherings were the future Afghan jihad leaders Burnahuddin Rabbani and Abdur Rasul Sayyaf. Both men, according to Frontline, “became common faces to him.” In 1980 Rabbani received one of Osama’s first two jihad-related monetary donations; the other went to the virulently anti-U.S. leader of the Afghan Hisbi Islami party, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Overall, Osama’s exposure to the Hajj visitors his family hosted introduced him to the variety of the Islamic world beyond Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula, and, in essence, prepared him to work in the 1980s and after with the ethnically diverse band of Muslims he would encounter in Afghanistan, fight alongside, and eventually lead and shape into an effective international insurgent organization.49

  Militant Sentiments

  On the eve of the Afghan jihad, then, Osama was a young adult who had been “pious since he was a small child” and who had been “brought up with very good manners. He matured as an extremely humble and very generous person” and was described as “quiet and unremarkable.” According to the Frontline biography, “there was nothing extraordinary in his personality and the trend [of Osama’s personality] was very non-confrontational.” Not surprisingly, an exception to Osama’s well-mannered, nonconfrontational demeanor was his support for the Palestinians and negative attitude toward the United States and Israel. “Since the late 1970s,” Frontline’s unattributed biography noted, “he [Osama] had strong anti-American feelings. He committed himself and his family and advised all friends to avoid buying American goods unless necessary.”50 According to the Associated Press, Osama described the reasons for this economic boycott on an audiocassette recorded and distributed in the 1990s. “When we buy American goods,” Osama said, “we are accomplices in the murder of Palestinians. American companies make millions in the Arab world with which they pay taxes to their government. The United States uses that money to send $3 billion a year to Israel, which it uses to kill Palestinians.” In a late-1998 interview, Osama acknowledged his long-held anti-American sentiment, saying, “Since I became aware of things around me, I have been in a war, enmity, and hatred for the Americans.”51 Testifying to the depth of this hatred, bin Laden has said that he stuck to this boycott even as he was procuring much-needed materiel for the mujahedin fighting for Allah’s cause in Afghanistan.52