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:
Osama bin Laden’s first wife has given a revealing insight into the complex character of the man behind the world’s most wanted terrorist. From The Telegraph, London:
Najwa bin Laden has published a memoir claiming he was a contradiction of personality traits.
She reveals he was a disciplinarian who would beat his children for showing too many teeth when they smiled, but maintained a passion for sunflowers and fast cars his first wife has said.
He also banned the use of electrical appliances in his home and tried to toughen up his sons by making them climb desert mountains without water.
Details from the home life of the founder of al Qaeda have emerged in the book Najwa has written with his fourth son Omar.
Growing Up Bin Laden charts his journey from teenage newly-wed to the face of international terrorism, revealing along the way that he was fond of mangos and the BBC.
Alongside details of his domestic life, the memoir portrays a man who became increasingly severe as he was pursued by the Western powers. More:
Steve Coll in the New Yorker:
The question of whether Osama bin Laden has ever visited the United States, a subject on which I have expended an unhealthy amount of energy in the course of various journalistic and biographical research, has now seemingly been settled. Osama was here for two weeks in 1979, it seems, and he visited Indiana and Los Angeles, among other places. He had a favorable encounter with an American medical doctor; he also reportedly met in Los Angeles with his spiritual mentor of the time, the Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam. All this is according to a forthcoming book by Osama’s first wife, Najwa Bin Laden, and his son Omar Bin Laden, to be published in the autumn by St. Martin’s Press.
First, some context for the book’s disclosures:
In the autumn of 2005, while conducting research in Saudi Arabia for the book that became “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” I met a Saudi journalist named Khaled Batarfi, who had been a neighbor and friend of Osama Bin Laden in their teenage years. During one of our interviews, Batarfi offered an account of Osama’s early travels-to London, to Africa on Safari, and to the United States-that was suggestive of a young man who had more direct experience of the West than was generally understood. Batarfi’s account of Osama’s American trip was particularly striking. In December of that year, I wrote a story for this magazine about the private high school Osama had attended in Jedda, and how he was first introduced to the tenets of radical Islamic politics. In that story, I also reported Batarfi’s on-the-record but unconfirmed account of Osama’s visit to America; Batarfi believed the travel had occurred not long before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1979. U.S. customs and immigration records from the relevant period had been routinely destroyed-and so the question of whether Osama had personal experience of America, and what that experience might have been, remained elusive. (Bin Laden has never referred to any trip to this country in his writings or statements.) While I found Batarfi to be credible, a single-source account, based on hearsay, could hardly be regarded as satisfactory. More:
