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In The National, a review of a new memoir of Osama bin Laden by his wife and son, “Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World” by Jean Sasson, Najwa bin Laden, Omar bin Laden:

“I remember staring into his kindly eyes, tartly thinking to myself that my cousin was shyer than a virgin under the veil.” Thus Najwa Ghanem recalls a meeting with 16-year old Osama bin Laden shortly before she became his first wife: “My life progressed from childhood into adulthood by the end of that evening. I was a married woman in every way.”

It’s anyone’s guess how much money has gone into the quest for information about Osama bin Laden since he rose to prominence in the mid-1990s. Now, for less than Dh100, we can get details on his personal life that are more reliable than all previous works combined. The publication of Growing up bin Laden is astonishing, not because of its tame bedroom confessions, but because nobody in the bin Laden family has ever spoken publicly about Osama before. The development is so unlikely that one inevitably wonders: is this for real?

The sheer number of bin Laden biographies published in the past decade leaves room for doubt. A few of these books have been serious, such as Jonathan Randal’s Osama and Peter Bergen’s The Osama bin Laden I Know. However, the majority are filled with inaccuracies and in some cases sensationalist fabrications. In one dubious book, Adam Robinson wrote that bin Laden was an avid Arsenal FC supporter who regularly attended matches at Highbury stadium in the 1990s. In another, a woman named Kola Boof claimed – falsely, by most accounts – to have been raped by bin Laden in Morocco in 1996. And the fake rumour that bin Laden was a playboy in 1970s Beirut has proved remarkably persistent. More:

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