“Osama was an honorable student,” the schoolmate remembered. “He kept to himself, but he was honest. If you brought a sandwich to school, people would often steal it as a joke and eat it for themselves if you left it on your desk. This was a common thing. We used to leave our valuables with Osama because he never cheated. He was sober, serious. He didn’t cheat or copy from others, but he didn’t hide his paper, either, if others wanted to look over his shoulder.”
At first, the study group proceeded as the teacher had promised. “We’d sit down, read a few verses of the Koran, translate or discuss how it should be interpreted, and many points of view would be offered. Then he’d send us out to the field. He had the key to the goodies—the lockers where the balls and athletic equipment were kept. But it turned out that the athletic part was just disorganized, an add-on. There was no organized soccer…I ended up playing a lot of one-on-one soccer, which is not very much fun.”
As time passed, the group spent more and more time inside. After about a year, Bin Laden’s schoolmate said, he began to feel trapped and bored, but by then the group had developed a sense of camaraderie, with Bin Laden emerging as one of its committed participants. Gradually, the teenagers stopped memorizing the Koran and began to read and discuss hadiths, interpretive stories of the life of the Prophet Mohamed, of varied provenance, which are normally studied to help illuminate the ideas imparted by the Koran. The after-school study sessions took place in the Syrian gym teacher’s room; he would light a candle on a table in the middle of the room, and the boys, including Osama, would sit on the floor and listen. The stories that the Syrian told were ambiguous as to time and place, the schoolmate recalled, and they were not explicitly set in the time of the Prophet, as are traditional hadiths. Increasingly the Syrian teacher told them “stories that were really violent,” the schoolmate remembered. “It was mesmerizing.”
The schoolmate said he could remember one in particular: It was a story “about a boy who found God—exactly like us, our age. He wanted to please God and he found that his father was standing in his way. The father was pulling the rug out from under him when he went to pray.” The Syrian “told the story slowly, but he was referring to ‘this brave boy’ or ‘this righteous boy’ as he moved toward the story’s climax. He explained that the father had a gun. He went through twenty minutes of the boy’s preparation, step by step—the bullets, loading the gun, making a plan. Finally, the boy shot the father.” As he recounted this climax, the Syrian declared, “Lord be praised—Islam was released in that home.” As the schoolmate recounted it, “I watched the other boys, fourteen-year-old boys, their mouths open. By the grace of God, I said ‘No’ to myself…I had a feeling of anxiety. I began immediately to think of excuses and how I could avoid coming back.”
The next day, he stopped attending. But during the next several years, he watched as Osama and the others in his former group, who continued to study with the gym teacher, openly adopted the styles and convictions of teenage Islamic activists. They let their young beards grow, shortened their trouser legs, and declined to iron their shirts (ostensibly to imitate the style of the Prophet’s dress), and increasingly, they lectured or debated other students at Al-Thaghr about the urgent need to restore pure Islamic law across the Arab world.
By the time of Osama’s high school years, Al-Thaghr had become something of a hotbed of debate, within the limits of Saudi Arabia’s dull political culture, involving Nasser-influenced students who advocated pan-Arab nationalism, and Brotherhood-influenced students who argued for a restoration of Islam in Arab politics. Osama was clearly in the latter camp; he “joined the religious committee” at the school, recalled Ahmed Badeeb. “He was a prominent member,” remembered Khaled Batarfi. “That group was influenced by the Brotherhood. He was influenced by this philosophy.” Batarfi’s account is corroborated by Jamal Khashoggi, who knew Bin Laden during the 1980s; he said Osama “started as a Muslim Brother,” meaning that he was formally recruited into the movement during his adolescent years or soon thereafter.17
The Brotherhood, to which Khashoggi also belonged for a time, “is a membership,” he said. “Usually you will be selected.” Recruits “go through different stages.” Weekly meetings and religious instruction might unfold for two years before a recruit is invited to “more exclusive meetings…And they will say, ‘Do you want to be a part of the Muslim Brotherhood?’ Mostly he will say ‘Yes,’ because he will have felt that it is coming…And he will become part of the movement.” Brotherhood recruiting is often secretive, and its classes of membership have varied over time and from country to country. There is no specific evidence available about when or in what way Osama formally joined, but the Brotherhood normally takes only adults into full membership, so it seems most likely that his schoolyard activism served as a sort of apprenticeship for more formal participation in the movement after he reached university.18
The Brotherhood’s Egyptian roots and emphasis on political activity would have an influence on the course of Osama’s life once he reached adulthood. In high school, however, its precepts were probably difficult to distinguish from the general emphasis on Islamic piety that Faisal promoted in Saudi Arabia as an antidote to Nasserism. Largely because of the Saudi royal family’s repression of political organizing in the kingdom, religious scholars usually tried to avoid overt politics, preferring instead to concentrate on the theological topics of prayer, Islamic rituals, and a Muslim’s private conduct. Bin Laden’s group at Al-Thaghr, Khaled Batarfi said, was influenced to some extent by this emphasis on the search for a truly Islamic life, but it also adopted “a more activist or a political agenda” drawn from the Brotherhood. Saud Al-Faisal, a son of the king who would become foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, complained years later that Islamist teachers from Egypt and Syria had “misused” the hospitality offered them by preaching politics. “We dealt with them honestly, and they dealt with us underhandedly.”19
In June 1973, when Osama was finishing tenth grade, the British ambassador to the kingdom composed a confidential report for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office titled “The Young People of Saudi Arabia.” His findings suggested that Osama’s education, while perhaps more ideological than that of some of his peers, was hardly unusual. The ambassador wrote:
The Royal Family are alive to the dangers to their position that education could represent if modern ideas were allowed to flow so freely in schools…that they challenged traditional beliefs and customs. Thus the study of Islam features very heavily…Prominent families will admit that in choosing to send their children to school abroad, for example to the Lebanon, they are influenced not by any lack of quality in teaching of the best local private schools, but the fact that the syllabus is so taken up with religious instruction and study as not to leave enough time for the children to reach normal proficiency in other subjects.
The report described how teenagers in these local elite schools were taught to understand the place of Saudi Arabia and its holy cities in the wider world: