They married the following summer and bought a house on Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood near the ocean. Yeslam took flying lessons and purchased a twin-engine propeller plane for weekend trips to Santa Barbara and Arizona; his wife drove a Pontiac Firebird. Yeslam’s great passion, apart from Carmen, was his rather unfriendly Doberman, Khalif.18
Salem flew into Los Angeles periodically and organized family expeditions to Las Vegas, where the Bin Ladens stayed at Caesars Palace. He gambled the way he drank—lightly, and to pass the time. He once wandered over to a Vegas blackjack table while waiting for his traveling party to organize themselves in the hotel lobby. Soon he built up a pile of chips worth more than a thousand dollars. He joked with the female card dealer, and when it was time to go, simply shoved all his winnings over to her with a shrug. He reveled in the thrill that ordinary Americans and Europeans, particularly women, would express when he unexpectedly handed them large amounts of cash; he seemed to enjoy those exchanges more than some of the luxuries his money could buy.19
Salem never seemed to doubt himself or to question his identity as a Saudi who traveled widely in America. Some of his brothers and half-brothers, however, found themselves unsettled by the adventures he led them on.
The older boys, in particular, had all known their father in his prime. They had been instilled, naturally, with pride in the family’s achievements as Muslims, Arabs, Yemenis, and Saudis. This pride was not only a matter of family honor or some vague sense of national or religious belonging; it was inseparable from the detailed Koranic instruction the boys had received from an early age—the verses memorized and recited, the laws listed and observed. It was part and parcel, too, of the scenes they had enjoyed and the prayers they had offered on frequent visits to Mecca and Medina. Their father’s religion was not that of an ardent proselytizer; among other things, in his long association with American, Italian, and Lebanese Christians, he displayed little of the xenophobia sometimes exhibited by Saudi clerics. Yet his devotion lay at the core of his own identity and that which he hoped his sons and daughters would embrace. His adherence to Islamic ritual and values, the prayers he gave five times each day, the many Hajj pilgrimages he hosted in his carpeted tent, the fasts he adhered to during Ramadan—it would be difficult for any son of Mohamed’s to blithely set all this aside, even if Salem seemed at times to provide an example of how it might be done.
During Ramadan’s long afternoons, when he was supposed to be fasting and abstaining from tobacco, Salem chain-smoked and asked his younger brothers to serve him food and coffee. He rarely prayed when traveling in Europe or America, and he ate pork without hesitation—he thought it was delicious. In Saudi Arabia, he did attend mosques, but he was more likely to poke his friends in the belly while standing in a prayer line than to prostrate himself in humble supplication to God. He had a spiritual side—he talked about time travel, and infinity and the shape of the universe, questions that seemed to encroach upon him during his long hours in the sky. Islam did not seem to press upon him, nor he upon it. His more religious brothers would gently encourage him to find his way a little closer to God’s well-marked path, but the culture of deference to the family leader within an Arabian clan like the Bin Ladens was so strong that not even the most devoted of Salem’s younger siblings dared to challenge him severely about his lapses. Perhaps more important, their faith, as they understood it, taught that judging sinners was God’s business, not mortal man’s, as long as the sinner in question did not renounce Islam altogether. “No sin besides that of unbelief makes a believer step outside his faith, even if it is a serious sin, like murder or drinking alcohol,” Osama Bin Laden would say years later. “Even if the culprit died without repenting of his sins, his fate is with God, whether He wishes to forgive him or to punish him.”20
America during the 1970s, roiled by its recent cultural and sexual revolutions—not to mention its garish hairstyles and clothing—continuously demanded an answer of each young Bin Laden who lived there: Are you a Muslim, and if so, how will you practice your faith? Many of Salem’s siblings found that they could not shrug off the question, as he seemed to do, and they tacked back and forth, searching for a comfortable answer. Carmen, who lived as a secular European, saw this when Yeslam’s brothers came to visit from San Francisco or Jeddah. “You never knew which brother would turn very religious,” she recalled. “Even if you had seen them very young, and being very open…The men, they used to go out. They go to the movies. They go to bars. And you think they are Westernized. And suddenly small things make you realize: No.” Her own husband, she gradually came to realize, “was not as Westernized as I thought he was. They cannot cut that bond that is embedded in them.”21
An American businessman recalled visiting Yeslam’s brother Khalil in Los Angeles on the day Khalil decided to dump out all the alcohol in his house. “That’s it,” Khalil declared, as this person recalled it. “We’re not doing this anymore.” Afterward, Khalil still joined his brothers and university friends at the private clubs in Beverly Hills where they often went on Fridays and Saturday nights to dance and search for girls. Khalil would pay the maître d’ for a table but preferred to sit soberly and watch. Some of his brothers danced and caroused, but others let their beards grow and ensured they made time for evening prayers. For many of them, this was not a search for religious or personal identity that had a fixed destination; it was a journey of continuous motion, changeable at any time and place. One of the most striking examples involved Salem’s half-brother Mahrouz. He initially married a Frenchwoman; at his home, recalled a business partner of the family who visited him, he kept a globe that opened up to serve alcoholic drinks. Rupert Armitage remembered him as “kind of a party animal.” But suddenly, during the 1970s, “he turned.” Mahrouz rededicated himself to Islam. He eventually took four wives, grew a long beard, moved to Medina, and began to wear clothes thought typical of the Prophet’s lifetime. He built a large housing complex with a home for himself and his mother at the center, and homes for each of his four wives at equal distance, around the points of a square.22
These questions and struggles involving Islam and identity were hardly unique to the young Bin Ladens. When they traveled or attended school in the West, young Saudis often had a sophisticated, self-conscious sense of their own dilemma. They did not carry themselves around America as disoriented victims, but rather as experimenters in accommodation. Gradually, wrote Peter Theroux, who lived in Riyadh during this period, this kind of private bargaining drove many Saudis back toward Islam, even those who were not necessarily prepared to live fully by its precepts: