That God should have endowed his Holy Land with the means to finance it by the accident of oil is seen as a natural part of His plan for a world Islamic revival. Islamic maps in local classrooms show Saudi Arabia at the centre of the world, with two concentric circles drawn around Mecca. The Arab and other Islamic countries are coloured bright green, and countries with Muslim minorities…in gradually paler shades of green. Most other parts of the world are not even named.20
A FEW YEARS AFTER he enrolled at Al-Thaghr, Osama moved with his family into a comfortable new suburban house in the Al-Musharifah neighborhood of Jeddah. At the time it was one of the city’s newest residential areas. The local roads were not asphalted, and patches of open desert wasteland separated the houses, where neighborhood boys played soccer and other games. The ground was slightly elevated, and it was possible on some days to see the Red Sea in the distance. The house Osama shared with his mother and her four other children by Mohamed Al-Attas was spacious but not luxurious—two full stories, with four bedrooms, one of which Osama occupied by himself on the ground floor. As is common in Saudi Arabia, walls and iron railings surrounded the house; it had a garden but no swimming pool.21
Osama was a fan of a professional soccer team in Jeddah, Al-‘Alim, and he played on a boys’ team captained by his neighbor Khaled Batarfi. “He was tall, and so I would put him in front to use his head,” Batarfi remembered. “Sometimes I would put him on defense.” Once, when they were playing in another area, a boy on the opposing team became angry at Bin Laden and seemed as if he was about to hit him. Batarfi pushed the boy out of the way, but Osama told him, as Batarfi recalled it, “I was going to resolve this peacefully.” Batarfi said that years later, he and Osama used to laugh about the incident’s irony—“Osama the peaceful negotiator,” as Batarfi put it.22
After he became immersed in Al-Thaghr’s student Islamic movement, Osama could be a stickler on matters of religious conduct—quiet, usually, but insistent. He prayed five times a day, called other boys to join him, and insisted that they wear long pants on the soccer field, as Saudi religious teachers said was proper. “His younger stepsiblings respected him very much,” Batarfi said. “He was older. He was tough on them on religious issues, on not mixing with girls, on being modest around women. When a female servant came into the room, he would duck his head modestly and not look at her.”23
Batarfi said he and Osama watched television together—soccer games, both Saudi and international, but also American family fare such as Bonanza. Osama was a particular fan of action films and Westerns, especially those with prominent roles for horses. Batarfi recalled that they watched the American television series Fury, which was made between 1955 and 1960, and then was syndicated around the world, usually under the title Brave Stallion. The show was about a troubled orphaned boy named Joey who goes to live on the Broken Wheel Ranch with a man who has lost his own wife and son in an automobile accident. The boy learns to tame wild horses and becomes particularly close to Fury, a black stallion; through this relationship, the wounds of Joey’s earlier life are gradually healed. The sources of appeal in this narrative for Osama are not difficult to imagine; in any event, as he grew up, he became passionate about horses. His father had left a family farm—more of a desert ranch—outside of Jeddah, a place that was shared by his sons and daughters after his death. Osama spent weekends there with half-brothers from his father’s side of the family and learned to ride and handle horses. Later he acquired his own ranch, south of Jeddah, where he ultimately kept as many as twenty horses.24
Many years later, some members of the Bin Laden family, in seeking to distance themselves in public from Osama, emphasized that he had grown up in a separate household and did not have much contact with his half-siblings while he was in high school. It was certainly true that he lived away from the principal family compound with his stepfamily, but he seems to have had at least as much contact with his father’s children as did other similar “singleton” boys without full brothers or sisters. Batarfi remembered that Osama would “visit his Mohamed Bin Laden brothers on weekends and such.” Moreover, some of these half-brothers were enrolled with him at Al-Thaghr; the teacher Fyfield-Shayler re-called that “several” of Osama’s half-brothers were students at the school during various periods when Osama was also there. He seems clearly to have had a sense of himself as one of his father’s heirs and to have harbored ambition to work in the family construction firm; his cousins in Syria and his mother all recall his interest in the company, and one cousin remembers him speaking of his aspirations to leadership there. As Salem gradually established his grip on the family during the early 1970s, Osama was far from isolated.25
It was Salem, in his role as overseer of his siblings’ education, who first brought the family into contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Late in 1973, Salem decided to enroll two of his half-sisters at a boarding school in Peshawar, a Pakistani city on the Afghan frontier. At the time, Pakistan and Afghanistan were enjoying periods of relative quietude. The chief engineer at the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization, as it was still called, was a Jordanian whose wife happened to be the daughter of the governor of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, of which Peshawar is the capital. Salem flew to Peshawar on a private airplane with his wife, Sheikha, his two school-aged sisters, the Jordanian, and his wife. The local stores were poorly provisioned, and in those days, Kabul, the Afghan capital, was a relatively prosperous town with thriving markets. Salem decided to fly his sisters there to shop for supplies for their school year ahead—pots, pans, dishes, and the like. Once in Kabul, Salem met the Saudi ambassador to Afghanistan and disappeared on business; he sent his sisters into the city’s markets with the American pilot who had flown in with them. Later they all flew back to Peshawar and settled the girls into school. So far as is known, it was the first visit by members of the Bin Laden family to Peshawar. There would be many more.26
11. REALM OF CONSPIRACY
THE TENETS OF Osama Bin Laden’s education were inseparable from the national ideology promoted by King Faisal in the late years of his reign. Al-Thaghr was not idly named a “model” school; it was a conspicuous example of Faisal’s program of modernization without secularization. The Muslim Brotherhood’s revolutionary goals made the king uncomfortable because they challenged the authority of the Al-Saud family, yet Faisal’s own vision of a politically conscious Islam echoed the Brotherhood’s call for action against enemies of the faith. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, for example, Faisal spoke repeatedly of a jihad to retake Jerusalem. His speeches denouncing the Israelis as an “impudent gang” bent on the “desecration” of Islam were not just designed to pander to Arab popular opinion; they were deeply felt, voiced by the king as forcefully in private as in public. As a young and increasingly active Saudi subject at Al-Thaghr, Osama identified with Faisal’s campaign against Israel—after all, his father had been the king’s emissary to Jerusalem before the 1967 war. Osama’s radicalization during high school did not, then, carry him into a state of opposition toward the Saudi government; in some respects, it deepened his alignment with Faisal’s foreign policy.1
Faisal was a popular king because the synthesis of Islam and modernity he called for was consistent with the choices he made in his private life. There was no free press or political opposition to investigate and expose the hypocrisy of the Saudi royal family’s irreligious self-indulgence, yet through rumor, informal observation, and Western press reports that filtered in, Saudis knew well enough which princes drank or gambled or extorted commissions from business contracts. By these channels they learned, too, that Faisal was exceptional. He refused to move into a garish palace built for him in Jeddah, preferring a suburban-style compound on a busy road. He had long ago given up alcohol. Operations on his digestive tract had left him able to tolerate only a bland diet of grilled meat, boiled vegetables, and rice. He worked several hours each morning at his palace office, prayed, held a working lunch, meditated privately, and then returned to his office for a second shift. At sunset each day he drove in one of his American sedans to the edge of the desert, sometimes taking his sons along, where he prayed alone in the sand. He returned yet again to his office to work into the night.2