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GROWING UP BIN LADEN by Najwa bin Laden

GROWING UP BIN LADEN

Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World

by Najwa bin Laden & Omar bin Laden and Jean Sasson

Pub Date: Nov. 1st, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-56016-4
Publisher: St. Martin's

He was a quiet man, a good neighbor, kept to himself—until he went funny in the head and took on the Great Satan.

It may have been an incident at the Indianapolis airport that set Osama bin Laden on his long quest to destroy the United States. Recounts Najwa bin Laden, first cousin and first wife of Osama (“It is common for Muslim women to marry their first cousins”), it was then that a blithering yahoo stared belligerently at the veiled women, “curious eyes growing as large as big bugs popping from his skull,” even as her tall, imposing husband sat beside her. But the hatred took time to build, as Osama became first a jihadist and then a terrorist—and, along the way, a father to many children and husband to other women besides Najwa. The fourth child was co-author Omar, who picks up Najwa’s story with somewhat less inclination to psychologizing. Omar is instead often defiant, particularly when dad suggests that all good boys his age ought to be signing up for suicide-bombing detail. “I was turning out to be a disappointment,” writes Omar, “a son who did not want the mantle of power, who wanted peace, not war.” Peace was not in the cards, of course. The bin Ladens recount assassination attempts, constant escapes, secretive relocations to new homes and countries and the occasional lobbed cruise missile. The two logged time in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, before, by Najwa’s account, she was allowed to return to her family in Syria. Omar left separately, just in time to get out before the events of 9/11 and the arrival of American forces in Afghanistan.

A middling as-told-to memoir, but of some interest to students of recent history—and to intelligence experts, who might want to have a chat with the authors about the layout of the Tora Bora caves.