Osama bin Laden was born into an almost unlimited family fortune amassed from a potent mixture of Western technology and Islamic loyalties, two forces that would come to be violently opposed in his imagination and ideology.
Propelled by that wealth, by Islamic asceticism and by a rising hatred of the United States, he would become the Western world’s most enterprising and dedicated enemy.
His early life provides few indications of his future identity. He was born in 1957, the 17th of 52 children sired by Mohammed bin Laden, a dirt-poor labourer from Yemen whose fortunes rose with those of the Saudi royal family in the later half of the 20th century. By the time Osama was born, Mohammed had taught himself engineering and become the sole official builder for the House of Saud, which gave him exclusive contracts to build their palaces, the burgeoning nation’s highways, and eventually to rebuild the holiest sites of Mecca. As oil money flooded into the desert, Mohammed was paid a healthy share of it, soon becoming almost as wealthy as royalty.
Mohammed’s fortune and social standing brought him wives, and his wives brought him children. A devout follower of the Wahabi sect of Sunni Islam, he kept four wives at any time: three permanent Saudi Wahabi wives and an ever-changing string of “fourth wives,” often from abroad.
Osama’s mother, Hamida, was one of these later wives, in fact his 10th or 11th spouse, and possibly the least reputable of them. The daughter of a Syrian trader, she offended the faithful with her ravishing looks, her stylish Western dress and her education. She was known to many as “the slave wife”; Osama, in turn, became known as “the son of the slave.”
Osama saw little of his father, and the chance for further contact ended abruptly in 1967, when Mohammed was killed in a helicopter crash. The family construction business carried on, buoyed even higher by the phenomenal wealth of the OPEC years. The young Osama rejected his mother’s bewildered attempts at parenting, and was raised by the family’s staff at their Jedda compound, among outlandish wealth.
Some friends and acquaintances have speculated that Osama bin Laden’s adult views were shaped by childhood alienation.
“I think he had an unhappy childhood,” said Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s former ambassador to the United States, who knew Mr. bin Laden years before he became an international fugitive.
“I think he was the black sheep of the family in a way. ... but for a while, we thought his religious leanings were positive things.”
But Mr. bin Laden seemed far from disturbed or pathological during his teen years. He toured Europe with his brothers, typically in a Rolls-Royce or a Cadillac the family had flown in from Saudi Arabia. The shy, gangly boy had a brief but chaste flirtation with a Spanish girl in Oxford, England. Many were impressed by his charisma and dedication.
“He was very courteous – more so than any of the others in his class,” Brian Fyfield-Shayler, who taught Mr. bin Laden English in Jedda, said in an interview with the Observer. “Physically, he was outstanding because he was taller, more handsome and fairer than most of the boys. He also stood out, as he was singularly gracious and polite and had a great deal of inner confidence.”
Mr. bin Laden finished high school at a propitious moment for a young man in the Third World. The modernizing independence movements that had swept much of Africa, Asia and the Middle East in the 1950s and 60s had metamorphosed into severe, totalizing ideologies by the early 70s: Marxism, dictatorship and emerging forms of Islamic fundamentalism, sometimes in combination.
Mr. bin Laden, for reasons unknown, decided not to attend university in England or the United States, as many of his siblings had – instead, he entered engineering studies at Jedda’s King Abdul Aziz University, which was becoming a proving ground for the new Islamic thought.
It is unclear whether his decision to stay in Jedda arose from a rejection of the West, or vice versa.
“Since I was a boy, I have been at war with and harbouring hatred for the Americans,” he told an interviewer from the al-Jazeera television network in 1998. In fact, there is little evidence that his anti-Americanism developed much before the 1990s.
