14. THE CONVERT’S ZEAL
OSAMA BIN LADEN moved freely as a teenager through overlapping worlds. He joined the Bin Laden family on outings and was a visible presence at its two main companies, Bin Laden Brothers and the larger Mohamed Bin Laden Organization. He played soccer and rode horses with local boys from his suburban Jeddah neighborhood. Each summer, until about 1976, he traveled to the more secular Syrian sphere of his mother’s family, on the Mediterranean coast, where he hiked in the mountains and apparently fell for a younger cousin, whom he had known as an unveiled girl since childhood. All the while, he immersed himself in Islamic study groups—at Al-Thaghr, his elite high school, and also at a special religious school in Mecca, Thafiz Al-Koran Al-Kareem; he continued this study after he matriculated at Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz University in 1976. In all, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, Osama managed to integrate his deepening religious faith with his enthusiasm for business administration and the outdoors, as well as his desire for sexual companionship. He accomplished this, after 1973, in a posture of ardent Islamic devotion from which he would never deviate.
Salem, with his rather different synthesis of enthusiasms, was nonetheless “like a father” to Osama in this period, according to Osama’s mother.1 Their relationship was typical of those between Salem and the group of his younger half-brothers who spent their early adulthoods mainly in the Arab world. When he was in Jeddah, Salem shed his jeans and donned his thobe and headdress. He chain-smoked cigarettes and was not noted for his leadership at prayer time, but he conducted himself nonetheless as a Saudi. He maintained some distance from his brothers and half-brothers. There were a few half-brothers, such as Tareq and Shafiq, with whom Salem seemed to share a genuine friendship. Mainly, however, Salem drew his friends and international entourage from outside the Bin Laden family—from Lebanese, Turkish, European, and American schoolmates, or from pilots and musicians he met on the road. These foreigners were playmates or aides-de-camp who depended on Salem financially or simply enjoyed his company. With them, he was free from censure and complications. With his family, he tried to be a judicious ruler.
Salem had no qualms about smuggling some of his non-Muslim friends or girlfriends into sacred Mecca or Medina, a practice that annoyed Osama when he learned about it. For their part, some of Salem’s friends learned to be wary of Osama’s piety. An Arab friend who was not particularly religious recalled meeting Osama in Medina: The muezzin sang out a call to the first of Islam’s two evening prayers, which usually take place about one and one half hours apart, and Osama insisted on leading his visitors into the Prophet’s Mosque. Salem’s friend waited in the car, and he wound up stuck there for much of the evening—Osama insisted, the friend recalled, that the entourage “pray and pray and pray.” The others in his group eventually returned shaking their heads. “They were complaining very much. I said, ‘Thank God I didn’t go inside with you. At least I’m in the fresh air outside, smoking.’”2
Osama was “perfectly integrated” into the family during this time, recalled Carmen Bin Laden. Beginning around 1974, while he was still in high school, he received enough money from his allowances, as well as from his work at the family companies, to buy a succession of fancy cars—a Lincoln or a Chrysler, and later, a gray Mercedes sedan, according to his neighbor and friend, Khaled Batarfi. He drove his cars very fast and wrecked at least one of them, in Batarfi’s recollection. He also had access to four-wheel-drive Jeeps and trucks from the family firms, which he drove to work sites and into the desert for weekend relaxation with his friends and his beloved horses. Riding horses, he would say years later, was his “favorite hobby,” and he prided himself on his ability to ride for forty or more miles at a time. He favored modest outdoor clothing, yellow work boots, and a Swiss Army watch.3
He turned up periodically in the smoke-filled reception room of Bin Laden Brothers, where, sometimes in the company of other younger brothers, he would wait patiently for his allowance or for some check or document to be signed. “I remember him only as a sort of supplicant, presumably for some extra cash,” Rupert Armitage recalled. Salem’s longtime mechanic and friend Bengt Johansson remembered him as “just another kid brother.” He had grown into a tall, thin young man, and as he let his beard come in, it sprouted at first in light tufts, and later to a full, dark thickness. He remained quiet and deferential. Many of his half-brothers possessed a similarly restrained demeanor; Salem’s continual displays of raucous energy were exceptional. The younger sons of Mohamed “floated” into the Bin Laden Brothers offices during school breaks, Armitage remembered, and quietly lined the chairs around the outer edges of the office. They usually needed something, but they learned to be patient. Every action in their lives, it seemed, required a “bloody signature,” which often proved complicated to obtain.4
During Ramadan, on weekends, and other holidays, the Bin Ladens entertained themselves at communal properties in Jeddah and its environs. There was a barren desert “farm” in Al-Bahra, between Jeddah and Mecca, where Osama fenced off a small ranch for about twenty horses. There was a large bland summerhouse in Taif, constructed during the 1950s or 1960s, where family members sometimes retreated during the hot season. Along the Red Sea there were family “beach houses,” which were little more than concrete sheds where a person might change into swimming trunks or find a little shade. By the standards of the day in Jeddah, these vacation properties were symbols of the family’s wealth and privilege, but they were not particularly opulent. Osama seems to have enjoyed all of them, although as he became more and more of a believer, he could be a pain, particularly at the beach.
He was self-conscious about his own conversion experience, aware that in some sense he was special or separate because he had been born again. In later years, he referred to 1973 as the year his “interaction” with Islamic groups began, when he was fifteen. He seemed to interpret—or was taught to interpret—his own conversion or recruitment into the Muslim Brotherhood at that age as the natural passage of a true Muslim: “As is known,” he once said, “from birth to fifteen years of age people do not look after themselves, nor are they really aware of great events…If we’re really honest, we find that this section, between the ages of fifteen to twenty-five, is when people are able to wage jihad.”5
The intensity of Osama’s conversion experience in his after-school study group had been unusual, but it was not so unusual that it marked him as some sort of cultish outsider. No young man devoted to Islam in Saudi Arabia would feel that way, or would be seen as such by his family and peers—and certainly not a young Bin Laden, whose father had been a steward of Mecca and Medina, and an emissary to Jerusalem. For many hours each week, state television broadcast scenes of thousands of pilgrims clad in white cloth circling slowly en masse around the Holy Ka’ba in Mecca; it was like having an entire network devoted to perpetual scenes from a religious aquarium. At prayer time, loudspeakers rang out in every town and city with the call to worship; shops and supermarkets closed immediately and mutawawa, or “religious police,” patrolled the streets with sticks to enforce compliance. The art hanging on Jeddah’s office walls, the books on living room shelves, the buildings on every other street corner, the calendar of public life, the speeches of public figures, the rituals of birth, seasons, and death—all of these drew heavily, if not exclusively, upon the idioms of Islam. Religion in Saudi Arabia was like gravity; it explained the order of objects and the trajectory of lives. The Koran was the kingdom’s constitution and the basis of all its laws. The kingdom had evolved into the most devout society on earth, not only in its constitutional and legal systems but also in the rhythms of its households, schools, and circles of friendship. The influx of European and American businessmen and advisers during the 1970s, and the widespread introduction of consumer technologies, did not alter Islam’s central place in the daily lives of the great majority of the kingdom’s subjects. Nasir Al-Bahri, a Yemeni who grew up in Jeddah and later served as Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard, recalled that particularly for those teenagers, like Osama, who were attracted to religious teaching