Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: All in the Bin Laden Family (Part 10)

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. Part 5 is here. Part 6 is here. Part 7 is here. Part 8 is here. Part 9 is here.

“I do not remember him ever doing anything outside of Islamic law,” Osama bin Laden once recalled of his father, as quoted in Lawrence Wright’s 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The bin Laden family faith is striking for what it reveals about Islamic orthodoxy, whose mores are often objectively disordered, contrary to politically motivated platitudes about Islam’s virtue that emerged after 9/11 25 years ago.

Osama’s father, Mohammed bin Laden (circa 1908-1967), displayed intense religiosity throughout his life in Saudi Arabia. “The patriarch enjoyed religious debates, and he would bring together the most notable clerics in the Kingdom to discuss often very obscure points of theology,” Wright noted. Moreover,

Mohammed bin Laden was known to be pious and openhanded. He paid for the operation in Spain of a man who had lost his sight. On another occasion, a man sought his help in building a well for his village. Bin Laden not only provided the well, he also donated a mosque. He avoided the publicity that usually attends such notable gifts, saying that his intention was to please God, not to gain fame.

Such charity contrasted with the lurid life of a father who hardly seemed to know best, as Wright depicted:

The extravagant side of Mohammed bin Laden’s nature made itself evident when it came to women. Islam permits a man four wives at a time, and divorce is a simple matter, at least for the man who only needs to declare, ‘I divorce you.’ Before his death, Mohammed bin Laden officially had fathered fifty-four children from twenty-two wives. The total number of wives he procured is impossible to determine, since he would often ‘marry’ in the afternoon and divorce that night. An assistant followed behind to take care of any children he might have left in his wake. He also had a number of concubines, who stayed in the bin Laden compound if they bore him children.

Osama’s mother, Alia Ghanem, joined Mohammed’s polygamous household in 1956 as a teenager with 14 years when he was about 48 years old. She came from a family of citrus farmers living near the Syrian port of Latakia, where Mohammad often had business travels. Wright did not portray a match made in heaven:

Alia joined bin Laden’s household as the fourth wife—a position that is sometimes called the “slave wife,” especially by the wives with more tenure. It must have been all the more difficult for a girl of fourteen, taken from her family and placed in the highly restricted environment that bin Laden imposed. By comparison with the other wives, Alia was modern and secular, although like all of bin Laden’s wives she was fully veiled in public, not even letting her eyes show through the several layers of black linen.

Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in January 1958, Osama (“the Lion,” named after one companion of Islam’s seventh-century prophet Muhammad), was Alia’s only child with Mohammed. Osama’s childhood was hardly the stuff of Leave it to Beaver, as presented by Wright:

Osama spent his early years among a horde of children in his father’s house. Mohammed ran the family like a corporation, with each wife reporting on her division. The children rarely saw the great man, who was often away on business. Whenever he returned, he would call them into his office and gaze upon his vast brood. During the Islamic feasting days, he would kiss them and give each child a gold coin; otherwise, he rarely spoke to them.

Even this relationship between Mohammed and Osama only lasted until he was about four or five years old. Wright thus explained the Muslim serial divorcée Mohammed:

Mohammed bin Laden had a custom of marrying off ex-wives who had borne him children to employees of his company. The wives had little or no say in the matter. They sometimes found themselves marrying below what they now considered their station—to a driver, for instance—an arrangement that influenced the future standing of their children in the family. Alia was fortunate when Mohammed decided to divorce her. He awarded her to one of his executives, Mohammed al-Attas, who was a descendant of the Prophet.

Osama moved with Alia a few blocks away from his father’s house to a modest two-story villa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “Over one of the front entrances there was a brown-and-white-striped awning—the doorway that women used; the men entered through the gate into the courtyard,” Wright wrote. Such traditional Islamic sex segregation aside, Alia’s second marriage was somewhat of an improvement in Wright’s narrative:

The marriage between Alia and her second husband proved to be an enduring match. Atta was kind and calm, but his relation to his stepson was somewhat compromised by the fact that Osama was the child of his employer. As for Osama, he went from being in a house full of children to one in which he was the only child. Eventually three younger half brothers and a half sister would be born, and Osama oversaw them almost as a third parent.

Although Osama bin Laden himself followed his father’s example as a Muslim polygamist, Osama rejected the patriarch’s practice of divorcing wives. “Instead of marrying scores of women, like his father had done, bin Laden intended to fulfill the Quranic injunction to treat his four wives equally,” Wright qualified. Nonetheless, the facts about human feelings partially frustrated Osama’s intentions. “Although he tried to treat his wives equally, as the Quran commands, everyone knew that Umm Hamza was his favorite. She was not beautiful, but she was sensible and devoted,” Wright noted.

This partiality particularly affected Osama’s first wife, Najwa Ghanem, a cousin from his mother’s family in Syria whom Osama married in 1974 when he was 17 and she was 14. Najwa became known as Umm (mother of) Abdullah in the Arab tradition of naming a woman as the mother of her first child. Wright sadly reported:

Umm Abdullah was extremely jealous of their relationship. Although she was first in the rank of wives, and the mother of eleven of bin Laden’s children, she was also the youngest and least educated. Her beauty was her only advantage, and she worked hard to keep herself attractive. Whenever other women traveled, especially to Western countries, Umm Abdullah gave them a shopping list of brand-name cosmetics and lingerie, preferring American products that no one else would consider buying. Bin Laden’s wives all lived within a small inner court in the larger compound, and Umm Abdullah would put on a jogging suit and run around the perimeter to keep in shape.

While in Afghanistan in 2001 preparing the 9/11 attacks with Al Qaeda, Osama (age 43) took another bride, a Yemeni girl with 15 years named Amal al-Sada. The marriage appeared to have a political purpose of establishing relations with an important Yemeni tribe to boost Al Qaeda’s Yemen recruitment. Nevertheless, the betrothal upset bin Laden’s other wives as well as his mother and two of his sons.

“Najwa, bin Laden’s first wife, left at about this time,” Wright observed:

After eleven children and twenty-seven years of marriage, she decided to return to Syria, taking her daughters and her retarded son, Abdul Rahman, with her. The man she had married was not a mujahid or an international terrorist; he was a rich Saudi teenager. The life she might have experienced as bin Laden’s wife was one of wealth, travel, society; an easy existence made more comfortable with the usual retinue of servants, a beach house, a yacht, perhaps an apartment in Paris. This was the minimum. Instead, she had lived a life on the run, deprived, often in squalor. She had sacrificed so much, but now she was free.

Such a chaotic bin Laden family reveals Islam’s historically nominative ethics. Thus, the right or wrong of any given action depends not on fixed moral principles but rather upon the invocation of a posited authority. In Islam’s case the canonical precedent of the faith’s founding prophet, Muhammad, justifies all the marriages (including with children), divorces, and concubines that marked bin Laden home life.

This domestic disorder makes mockery of claims that Islamic teaching is necessarily good, as repeatedly announced by President George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11. Christians and others should especially exercise caution towards any proposed alliance with Muslims in an “ecumenical jihad” against modern Western society’s social decadence. Traditional Islam lacks the natural law belief in a human conscience formed in a rational God’s image, as proclaimed both by the Hebrew God in Genesis and the Declaration of Independence. Rather, jihadists who commit massacres like those on 9/11 often come from a background of Muslim moral mayhem that begins in the homes of believers. Additionally, Al Qaeda’s attacks on America also reflected the violent oppression non-Muslim minorities such as Christians and Jews have suffered in Muslim societies throughout history, the topic of the final article in this series.