The Bin Ladens

"It’s not just about the Bin Laden family. It’s as much about how Saudi Arabia developed and interacted with the United States over time. Steve tells the Saudi-US story through the Bin Laden family, who played an important role in how Saudi Arabia developed as a modern state. The Bin Ladens were integrally involved in creating the infrastructure of the kingdom, and they became very rich as a result. The main character in the book is Mohammed Bin Laden, the patriarch of the family. He was a penniless labourer, a construction worker, when he came from Yemen in 1930. He had good timing. Saudi Arabia was formed in 1932 and the Saudi monarchy made its first agreement with an American oil company right around that time. Mohammed was a talented businessman who the king came to trust as he built up the country. As a result Mohammed was able to erect a construction conglomerate. One of the interesting things in the book is that Bin Laden had 53 siblings none of whom went down the route that he went. Steve’s book is a portrait of this family, many of whom took opposed approaches to life. One of the key characters is Salem bin Laden, Osama’s oldest brother, who died in a microlight aircraft accident near San Antonio, Texas in 1988. He was a playboy and pro-American. He was a pilot, he dated all sorts of Western women, he married into the English upper class and, like a lot of Saudis, he had a house in Orlando. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What the book shows is that there are a lot of different paths that Bin Laden could have taken. Of the 53 siblings I think a quarter studied in the United States and many had houses in the United States. The book, which was nominated for a Pulitzer in biography, is an amazing group portrait of this family and the different paths that they took, and Osama Bin Laden’s path was only one of them. It does explain that there was a religious wing of the family to which Bin Laden belonged, but Bin Laden was the only ultra-fundamentalist. He became a fundamentalist as a teen and that hardened into fanaticism because of his involvement in the Afghan war against the Soviets in his twenties. The struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan made him start thinking about founding the group which became Al-Qaeda – the Soviet War experience turned Bin Laden from a religious guy with a couple of wives working in a family business into somebody willing to engage in violence and somebody who began to believe in his own leadership capabilities."