As we mark the eighth year since the Sept. 11 attacks, it is worth remembering that the world’s most infamous proponent of fundamental Islam, Osama bin Laden, is not as far removed from American culture as one might think. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steve Coll spoke recently about his latest book, “The bin Ladens: Lessons from an Arabian Family in the American Century.” Mr. Coll said he set out to illuminate the recent history of Saudi Arabia by writing about one family, the bin Ladens, the way one might write about the U.S. by focusing on the Kennedys or Rockefellers. The family’s history reveals sharp cultural differences with American culture, yet it has intersected with Americans in unusual and yet typically American ways.
Mohamed, the patriarch, was born poor, but became a bricklayer, and in the post-World War II building boom, grew a construction business. The elder bin Laden’s company became the preferred builder for the Saudi royal family and landed defense contracts from the U.S. and Great Britain. He also built a family.
Mohamed bin Laden had 22 wives who bore 54 children. As was accepted in the culture, he had two “senior” wives, and married the others and divorced each after a few years, but treated each of his children as legitimate. In 1967, he was killed when an aircraft he was traveling on, piloted by an American, crashed.
Eldest son Salem, who had been attending a boarding school in swinging London where he played drums in a rock band and toured the city in a sports car, returned to run the family business.
Living a high-octane playboy life, with adventures that frequently included flying ultralights, Salem spent some time in Texas in the early 1970s, where he may have been a handshake or two away from George W. Bush. While in Texas in 1988 attending a wedding, Salem crashed his ultralight into power lines and was killed.
Osama, Mr. Coll said, exhibited the “streak of charismatic genius” like his father. He attended a private school in Saudi Arabia with British and Middle Eastern teachers. At age 13, a few years after his father’s death, Osama was recruited by a Syrian gym teacher for the Islamic Brotherhood, and never really wavered from its teachings.
Mr. Coll said despite reports of his living in caves, “Osama is a creature of modernity,” who, like his late brother Salem, is a “gadget hound,” having to own the latest technology.
Osama believes his role is to “awaken God’s followers” to a fight “to the end of time,” Mr. Coll said, to further Islam. Although the killings Osama plotted and financed are reprehensible, his family’s story is not so removed from the American century.