READING: Sasson & Bin Ladin: Growing Up Bin Laden

Jean Sasson with Najwa & Omar Bin Laden
Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World
2009

THOSE that maintain fictional novels more entertaining or diverting than non-fiction – particularly “heavy” non-fiction on terrorism, Islam and geopolitics – should read Growing Up Bin Laden.

There are those who would never consider reading a book with Bin Laden’s name on the cover, but think nothing of devouring Khaled Hosseini’s fictional Afghan tales The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns because they saw them on Richard & Judy.

Growing Up Bin Laden seems tailor-made for such reading groups. It looks, feels and reads like a Hosseini novel and confirms that many of his semi-fictional plot devices [coming of age in an Afghan war zone / dodging male-rape gangs / living with an austere and abusive husband and father] to be based in fact.


“There was a sickening incident when [my friend]...was abducted and brutally gang raped. The rapists added insult to injury by snapping photographs of the young man during and after the rape.

“Those damning photographs ended up in the hand of Dr. [Ayman] Zawahiri, the leader of the al-Jihad group [and later founder member of Al-Qaida]. Zawahiri was incensed, believing that the young teenage boy was somehow at fault. There were pictures to prove it! In our world, sex between men is punishable by death...He was arrested by the group leaders, put on trial, and condemned to death.” (Omar Bin Laden)


“My brothers and I all suffered from asthma...but my father was adamant that we should not take modern prescription drugs, no matter how serious our affliction...
“After only a month in Jalalabad, [Osama] announced that we were travelling to Tora Bora [the Bin Ladins’ Afghan mountain home with a name that means ‘Black Dust’].

“I was foolish not to have sneaked my medicine past my father, for my breathing difficulties were becoming worse with each passing day...Once when gasping, I though I caught the scent of grave dirt. I was ready to trade my share of the bin Laden mountain for a single puff from my inhaler.” (Omar)


I read this book looking for some semblance of humanity in Bin Laden, the man who orchestrated the murder of 2,976 people in New York and many more elsewhere under the pretence of protecting his home and allies from foreign influence and spreading his religion with missionary zeal, aims which are not too dissimilar from warmongering fundamentalists in the USA, Israel and other countries that the UK regards as allies rather than terrorists.

However, in Growing Up Bin Laden I failed to find a modern-day Saladin defending Islam from modern day Crusaders, but a sociopath who used his money, family connections, influence and war-hero status to bend people to his own warped worldview.

Najwa Bin Laden, the first of Osama’s five wives [arguably six if you count one “unconsummated” annulment], introduces her cousin Osama as a quiet, surly and serious teenager. Her love for him is palpable throughout the book and she refuses to criticise him directly, but her insights and those of her favourite son Omar, who is less reserved with his criticism, reveal the inner-rage that would turn Osama into a monster.

Critics of Islam should note that in this book Osama’s rage against the world doesn’t appear rooted in his fanatical religious devotion, although this undoubtedly plays a part, but in a complex psychology and dysfunctional family background similar to many other run-of-the-mill sociopaths. Osama comes across as an unappreciated war hero and bitter exile, harbouring resentment of being both an unloved middle-child and product of an abandoned single-mother*. If he grew up in America he would be Rambo [the original “don’t push me or I’ll give you a war” psycho in First Blood rather than the anaemic hero of the sequels], but equally if he grew up in Kilmarnock he’d be skinning up joints in The Scheme before signing up to the army to shoot “rag-heads”


*Osama is 18th son of 22 sons and 23 daughters born to Mohammed Bin Laden, and the only child from Mohammed’s short lived marriage to Allia Ghanem. Following his role in Afghanistan’s expulsion of Russia in the 1980s Osama was welcomed back to Saudi Arabia as a war hero, but soon exiled to Sudan for his objection to the USA’s protection of the kingdom in the first Gulf War, and later back to Afghanistan when he was subsequently kicked out by the Sudanese.