Since the day 19 hijackers, owing allegiance to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the name “Bin Laden” has reverberated around the world as shorthand for a benighted medievalism, the deadliest anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, hatred of the West, of secularism, of “infidels”—the reverse, in short, of civilization as much of the world knows it.
Renegade: Bin Laden’s family once wanted to purchase McDonald’s franchises for West Asia.
But, as The New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll shows in his new book The Bin Ladens, Osama’s background is far more complex. His break in the early 1990s from his massive family — for long, the biggest business group in Saudi Arabia—and from all that they stood for (persistent modernization, business ties with America, fealty to the corrupt ruling dynasty of Saudi Arabia, a love of material and secular pleasures) occurred very slowly and tentatively.
Coll’s book is simultaneously the biography of a terrorist and that of a great business house (Osama only makes his first appearance a quarter of the way into the book). Coll’s story begins early in the 1930s with Mohamed bin Laden, an impoverished but enterprising Yemeni national who came to Jeddah in search of work and became a contractor in construction. Mohamed’s trade gradually flourished, and he came close to the court of Al Saud, the ruling dynasty of newly formed Saudi Arabia. Mohamed’s links with the court would set his own dynasty firmly in step with that of the Al Saud for decades to come. Mohamed was a much-married man — he sired 54 children from several wives, and Osama was one of seven children born in one year. A construction contract funded with American money in January 1951 — half a century before 9/11 — marks the first appearance of the name “Bin Laden” on an American state document.
Private jets were a luxury enjoyed by many Saudi notables, and Mohamed had his own jet manned by an American pilot who took him from site to site. Mohamed’s death in a plane crash in 1967 would be the first eerie episode in a long list of links between members of the Bin Laden family and plane crashes. Most of the Bin Laden business was divided up, as per Islamic law, between the many children, but the burden of running it till many of the children became adults rested upon Salem, Mohamed’s eldest son and Osama’s eldest brother.