Bin Laden's former sister-in-law has written a heck of a book. A review:
theglobeandmail.com
By MARGARET WENTE
Thursday, July 22, 2004 - Page A15
When your name is bin Ladin, life becomes more difficult. People you meet wonder whose side you're on. Your children will have trouble finding jobs. "There is no escape from that name," says Carmen bin Ladin over a cup of tea in Toronto. "It is too notorious."
Ms. bin Ladin (she spells it with an "i"), tall, slender, chic and jittery, did manage to escape from the bin Laden family, along with her three daughters. Now she has written Inside the Kingdom, a book about life with the in-laws as seen from the women's quarters. When it was published in February in France, it became a bestseller. The book depicts the stifling, rigid Saudi culture as few Westerners have seen it.
The author also has a chilling message for the rest of us. Despite official protestations, she says, the vast majority of Saudis support Osama's extremist world-view. "Osama bin Laden is considered a true Muslim. They don't have any doubt about that," she says in a husky, French-accented voice. The Saudis, she maintains, are essentially Taliban with money.
Ms. bin Ladin, who is half Swiss and half Iranian, was married for 14 years to Yeslam bin Ladin, the 10th son of the family patriarch, Sheik Mohamed. Osama is Yeslam's younger brother. Ms. bin Ladin lived in the Kingdom with the extended bin Laden clan from 1976 to 1985. Today, she lives in Switzerland, where she's still in a bitter, protracted divorce battle with Yeslam. The family have cut off all contact. "I know they're not very happy about the book," she says. "But they know it's true."
The book's a scorcher, not for its fleeting glimpses of Osama (who recoiled in horror when she once answered the door unveiled), but for its depiction of the utter oppression and submissiveness of Saudi women and the dysfunction of the elites. While Saudi princes rake off billions in business kickbacks, their neglected and depressed wives abuse drugs, drown their sorrows in extravagant shopping sprees, and turn to lesbian affairs for comfort. Many of them have bone density problems because they never go outside or exercise. When their husbands divorce them, they may never see their children again.
The bin Laden women "did nothing, read nothing, and were like pets kept by their husbands," she writes. They were fanatically religious. Because Yeslam was thoroughly westernized, she was far freer than they were. (They had met and married as students in California and had their first child there.) She played tennis and entertained people from the diplomatic corps. She dressed her daughters in T-shirts and shorts. Even so, she couldn't speak to any unrelated Saudi man, and life was so constrained that she was rarely able to go outside. There was, literally, nothing to do but raise her young daughters and wait for her husband to come home from work, where he was rising fast in the bin Laden construction empire.
How could she stand it?
"I loved him," she says. She also was certain that the Kingdom was on the verge of liberalizing. Meantime, "I had the impression I could protect my daughters from all of that."
But, gradually, it dawned on her that she could not.
One day, she found herself with a group of wives who included a timid young woman called Najwah. Najwah was Osama's wife. She was trying to spoon-feed their baby with water in the stifling heat. The infant was too small to take water from a spoon, and Carmen urged her to use a bottle. But Najwah refused, because Osama had decreed that rubber nipples were un-Islamic. The baby was in terrible distress, but none of the women dared to intervene.
Afterward, Carmen tried to express her fear and rage to her husband. He didn't understand. And that was when she began to realize how powerless she really was.
One day, she threw a birthday party (frowned on as irreligious) for her older daughter, Wafah. She was shocked when a nine-year-old cousin arrived veiled. "Already?" she thought. But soon it would be her daughters' turn. "I watched that society as a mother of two daughters. I thought, what will be the future of my daughters because they are girls?"
She knew they might not be lucky enough to marry men as westernized as Yeslam. Besides, even the most westernized Saudi men had a way of becoming Saudi again, as she was finding out. Meantime, if anything were to happen to him, neither she nor her daughters would have any rights at all. To save the girls, they would have to leave.
In 1985, the bin Ladins relocated to Geneva, where they had a third daughter. But Yeslam became more and more controlling. The marriage crumbled, and Carmen, who used to be phenomenally rich, began a long fight for financial support. Today, Yeslam still lives in Geneva and runs a successful business empire. He has cut off all contact with his daughters. "They are not the Saudi daughters he thought he should have," she says.
She wrote this book for them, to explain why she acted as she did, and also for the world, to explain where they stand. She hopes it will ease the burden of their notorious name. "Since 9/11, things have been hard for them," she says. Wafah, now 26, is an American citizen. She has two law degrees and travels between Geneva and London. Najia, 24, has gone into business with a friend. The youngest, Noor, is still in school. "I've achieved the most important thing," Carmen bin Ladin says. "I've given my daughters freedom of choice."
She is deeply pessimistic that Saudi society is capable of reform. "I have never seen Saudis questioning their culture and principles." And that's bad news for the rest of us.
"When Osama dies, I fear there will be a thousand men to take his place," she writes. "The ground of Saudi Arabia is fertile soil for intolerance and arrogance, and for contempt toward outsiders. It is a country where there is no room for mildness, mercy, compassion or doubt. . . . Their way has been chosen by God.
"They are eager to understand our technology, and they understand our political systems. But inside them, there is nothing but scorn for what they perceive as the godless, individualistic values and shameless freedoms of the Western way of life."
One senses that it's not pleasant to cross the bin Ladens. But, in her view, the risk is worth taking. "I don't want to shut up," she says defiantly, "because that means they have won." |
