Al-Qaeda (10 page)

Bin Laden and his fellow extremists are millenarian, fundamentalist, reformist, revivalist, Wahhabi/Salafi and, at least in their rootedness in modernity if not their programme, Islamist. A key element of the success of their discourse is that it combines so many elements of preceding ideologies. No single term exists to describe their thought or the broad movement of which they are part. However, a detailed look at bin Laden, his career and his operations, situated within the context of modern Islamic militancy, provides an insight that a label cannot.

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Radicals

It was late October 2001. Across the border, the Pentagon said, the jets were running out of targets. In the frontier city of Peshawar news filtered in through refugees, through snatched conversations on satellite phones with scared Afghan aid-workers, through the Taliban officials who slipped across into Pakistan to rally support and to rest. When I was in the city, between trips out into tribal territory, I spent most of my evenings in the bazaars, in the bar at Pearl Intercontinental, sitting amid mounds of cushions, rugs, meat, rice and grapes at the house of Ekram, my Afghan friend and colleague, or with Mr Khaled.

Mr Khaled, a local journalist who had been deeply involved with the more radical Afghan resistance groups during the war against the Soviets, was well placed to find out what was happening. He also, as he disclosed one evening as we strolled back through University Town from a cheap Afghan restaurant on the Khyber road, had been, for a while, a close friend of ‘Mr Osama’.

We were walking along Syed Jamal al-Din Afghani Road, a pleasant, quiet street close to the canal that marks off University Town, with its villas for retired Pashtun bureaucrats and senior soldiers, from the more crowded streets in Afghan Colony where the wealthier Afghan refugees have made their homes. It is named after the nineteenth-century Muslim thinker who first started talking about the Islamic world and ‘the West’ as two discrete entities. The tarmac of the road is perpetually covered in a thick layer of dust and gravel, and bright bougainvilleas hang down the whitewashed walls of the houses, most of which are set back from the road behind large well-tended lawns. At the road’s eastern end there is a small mosque, built in the classical
Mughal style, with complex patterned screens,
chattris
and curling arches, overlooked by tall, mature eucalyptus trees. As we passed it, Khaled told me that he and ‘Mr Osama’ used to pray there together in the mid 1980s. Mr Osama had been such a sweet man, such a good and honest friend, Khaled said. He could not understand how what had happened in New York could have been done by him. Khaled speaks quietly and with unfailing and elaborate courtesy.

Mr Osama’s story starts in the remote, poor and fiercely conservative Hadramawt province of the Yemen. The legend has it that in around 1930 Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a powerfully built labourer, six foot tall and with one dead eye, packed a bag and bought a place on a camel caravan that was heading north. It stopped, a thousand miles later, in the port of Jeddah, where Osama’s father started work as a labourer, putting away a few coins each day as capital for the time when he could set up a company of his own. In fact, Osama’s father is more likely to have been a minor Hadramawti sheikh or a master-builder who did little physical work himself.
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Either way, he had arrived in Jeddah, the southern Arabian port city, at a critical time. Nearly 200 years before, chieftains of the al-Saud clan had given refuge to a militant Islamic preacher and theologian called Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Now their alliance was finally bearing fruit. Al-Wahhab’s radical doctrimes were known as Wahhabism, the latest in a succession of revivalist and reformist movements that swept through the Islamic world in the eighteenth century.

Like ibn Taimiya, to whom he often explicitly referred, and many other reformers, al-Wahhab believed that the original perfection of Allah’s message as transmitted by Mohammed had become obscured by centuries of
bida
, or innovation, and called for a fresh interpretation of Islam that returned to its sources. Al-Wahhab said all Muslims must rigorously observe all the laws of Islam if a true and just Islamic society was to become a reality. He was particularly exercised by the sort of intercessionary practices – the use of shrines, talismans and saints – that were common on the Arabian peninsula. These, he believed, constituted
shirk
, or polytheism of the sort practised by local tribes before the Prophet Mohammed had enlightened them more than 1,100 years previously. Other elements that he believed contravened the
principles followed by the first and best generation of Muslims included dancing, wearing jewellery and playing music.

The followers of al-Wahhab, known later as the
ikhwan
or brothers, believed that, as they were fighting a ‘jihad’, death for the cause would gain them entry to heaven as martyrs. This made them extremely effective fighters. Persecuted in his hometown, al-Wahhab was given shelter in a town called Diriya by a local tribal leader from the al-Saud clan. The leader and his successors were to use the ikhwan to great effect against the ramshackle, hierarchical and fractious tribes of the Arabian peninsula. In a series of campaigns, the ikhwan carried the rule of the al-Saud and their own Wahhabi faith to much of central and eastern Arabia, before being rebuffed at the end of the eighteenth century by the Egyptian clients of the Ottomans. The wars, with the al-Saud tribes providing political leadership and the ikhwan providing the muscle, recommenced in the twentieth century. This time the Ottoman Empire, who, as caliphs, were theoretically the successors of the Prophet as political rulers of the Islamic world, were unable to resist their onslaught. The Ottomans had sided with the Germans in the First World War and had been defeated and seriously weakened. A young army officer called Kemal Ataturk took power, launched a brutal and radical programme of secularization and abolished the caliphate in 1924.

The British, the major power in the region in that post-war period, were happy for the house of al-Saud to consolidate their hold on Arabia. In return for British recognition of his rule, Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the clan’s leader, pledged to rein in the ikhwan, who had begun threatening key strategic British outposts along the Gulf.
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With most of Arabia, including the holy places of Mecca and Medina, already in al-Saud’s control, the ikhwan had outlived their usefulness to the new dominant power in the peninsula and were disbanded in 1929. The more moderate among them were incorporated into the national guard. The more extreme were gunned down at the Battle of Sabilah in March 1929. The state of Saudi Arabia was declared three years later, about the time Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was getting his construction business off the ground.

Having destroyed the Wahhabi warriors as an independent force,
Abdul Aziz took a different tack with the Wahhabi ulema, co-opting them into the new state to provide it with much-needed religious legitimacy. The Saudi Arabian ulema could usually be relied upon by the rulers to issue supportive fatwas when necessary, but the al-Saud dynasty had to pay a substantial price. The Wahhabi ulema were allowed to run state-sponsored schools, universities and government bureaucracies (especially the ministries of Justice and Haj) and were permitted to direct the growing number of international nongovernmental organizations established to promote Wahhabism, or its affiliates, overseas. This compact was to be of critical importance, particularly after 1979.

Mohammed bin Laden worked hard to set himself up as a construction contractor. The discovery of oil in the peninsula in the early 1930s meant that Abdul Aziz, the new king, had huge resources at his disposal, much of which he spent on palaces for the ruling elite, foreign guests and the royal court (as well as funnelling substantial amounts to the religious establishment).
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By the early 1950s, Mohammed bin Laden was running a successful small firm. By heavily undercutting local firms he expanded quickly. His big break came when a foreign contractor withdrew from a deal to build the Medina–Jeddah highway and he took on the job.
⁴
By the early 1960s, business was flooding in, bin Laden was a very rich man and the bin Laden group was a huge and growing construction conglomerate.
⁵

Mohammed bin Laden, who died illiterate, was born near the holy city of Tarim in Britain’s South Arabian Protectorate, a stronghold of traditional ‘Shaf’ism’. In Saudi Arabia, he appears to have taken on the rigorous Wahabbi Islam of his adopted land. He hosted large groups of ulema and Islamic leaders from throughout the world at his homes in Jeddah, Mecca and Riyadh, often funding their travel to, and around, the Arabian peninsula. He donated substantial sums to Islamic charities and activists and boasted that, using his private helicopter, he could pray in the three holiest locations in Islam – Mecca, Medina and the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem – in a single day. Visiting the former two sites must have been especially satisfying, for it was the contract to restore and expand the facilities serving pilgrims and worshippers there that had established the reputation of his company across the
Middle East, confirmed its status as the in-house builders of the house of al-Saud and made him fabulously wealthy. Quite how wealthy became clear when, in 1964, a royal succession battle was won by Crown Prince al-Faisal. When it was found that the state’s finances had been so badly mismanaged that the new king was unable to pay his civil servants’ salaries, Mohammed bin Laden stepped in, and for six months he paid their wages instead.
⁶

Osama bin Laden’s mother, Hamida Alia Ghanoum, was neither Saudi nor Wahhabi, but the beautiful, cosmopolitan, educated 22-year-old daughter of a Syrian trader. She shunned the traditional Saudi veil in favour of Chanel trouser suits, and this, coupled with the fact that she was foreign and Mohammed bin Laden’s tenth or eleventh spouse, diminished her status within the family.
⁷
Hamida was still married to the millionaire magnate when he died and, as Mohammed bin Laden allowed even his former wives to live at his palace at Jeddah, it was there, amid a huge family and the solid gold statues, the ancient tapestries and the Venetian chandeliers, that Mohammed’s seventeenth son, Osama, grew up. Stories of Hamida, or her son, being rejected by the family appear exaggerated.
⁸

Osama bin Laden was born in Riyadh on 10 March 1957 and was ten when his father, of whom he had seen little, died in a helicopter crash.
⁹
A flavour of the bin Laden household comes from an anonymous document provided to an American PBS television programme in 1998 by ‘an anonymous source close to bin Laden’. It offers good, if awkwardly phrased, insights into Osama’s childhood. ‘The father had very dominating personality. He insisted to keep all his children in one premises,’ it reads. ‘He had a tough discipline and observed all the children with strict religious and social code… At the same time, the father was entertaining with trips to the sea and desert,’ the document goes on. ‘He dealt with his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at young age.’
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Teachers at the al-Thagh school, an elite Western-style Saudi school in Jeddah where Osama bin Laden received four one-hour English lessons a week during 1968 and 1969, describe a ‘shy, retiring, gracious and courteous’ boy who was ‘very neat, precise and conscientious’ in his work.
¹¹
In bin Laden’s early teens there was little indication of
excessive religiosity, but the stories of youthful excesses in the nightclubs of Beirut, of drinking and of fights over barmaids are almost certainly false. All authoritative accounts indicate a quiet, rather intense young man unlikely to be out whoring in Beirut’s Crazy Horse nightclubs, as sometimes alleged.

Quite how much of a personal fortune bin Laden had inherited on his father’s death is uncertain. Though high figures are often quoted, it is likely to be far less than the $300m sometimes estimated. Saudi families do not tend to divide their wealth. On the death of the father, the eldest son usually manages it on behalf of the whole family. In bin Laden’s case, there was little in the way of cash distributed. Most of the sprawling bin Laden group’s assets were simply not realizable, being held in shares, equipment, buildings and land. At most, bin Laden may have had access to a reserve of several million dollars that was his to spend.
¹²

Not that the young bin Laden was interested in money. In fact, the very things that had made the father huge riches were troubling the son. The early 1970s was a time of huge cultural change in Saudi Arabia. In 1973, King Faisal brought the country to the attention of the world when he declared an oil embargo following the Arab–Israeli war, trebling the price of a barrel of oil to around $12 per barrel.
¹³
But the vast bulk of the growing population of his state saw little benefit from the massively enhanced incomes brought to the kingdom. For many, increasing contact with the West and burgeoning links with Muslim countries throughout the world were forcing instead a profound re-examination of old certainties. For most of Mohammed bin Laden’s children, the answer lay in greater Westernization, and the elder members of the family set off for Victoria College in Alexandria in Egypt, Harvard, London or Miami.