I married a bin Laden

Osama's former sister-in-law tells all: Secret Saudi lesbian trysts, a husband who ordered her to have abortions, and the magical power of the name bin Laden within the Saudi luxury class.

By Suzy Hansen

Jul 10, 2004 | "Inside the Kingdom," Carmen Bin Ladin's new memoir about the bin Laden clan, contains only a few passages about Osama bin Laden, the world's most feared terrorist and the author's brother-in-law. (Carmen's husband, Yeslam, is Osama's half-brother; their father, Sheikh Mohamed, founder of the amazingly powerful Bin Laden Organization, had 22 wives. Western transliterations of Arabic names vary and "in accordance with convention," bin Laden is used when referring to the family and Bin Ladin when referring to Carmen and Yeslam. To confuse matters further, the family company is known as the Saudi Binladin Group.)

Readers hungry for the mere mention of Osama's name, especially now, at a time when Sept. 11 remains fresh but the only glimpse of Osama is on "Saturday Night Live," will turn these few sentences over and over in their minds. During the Afghan-Soviet war, Carmen Bin Ladin writes: "He was admired. He was involved in a noble cause. Osama was a warrior -- a Saudi hero." After meeting him for the first time, she notes, almost unimpressed: "He was not strikingly different from the other brothers -- just younger, and more reserved." But then there's this: "When Osama stepped into the room, you felt it." It's one of many lines in "Inside the Kingdom" that leaves us desperate for more. What did she feel?

Of course, in Saudi culture, hardline Wahhabi Muslims like Osama insist that women's faces be covered. Carmen Bin Ladin's real, human contact with Osama was limited, and by Western standards almost nonexistent. But one scene in this plainly written but arresting memoir does shed light on Osama.

It was 1977, a time of relative freedom and ease in Saudi Arabia, after the rush of oil money flooded the country and two years before the Iranian revolution. The extended bin Laden brood had taken off to the family mountain house, two hours from their compound in Jeddah and the deadly August heat. Even in the mountains it was 100 degrees, but Osama's wife Najwah, a tellingly miserable woman, refused to feed her tiny baby with a bottle. She was trying to feed him with a teaspoon, because her husband had decreed that his child would not be fed by bottle.

Carmen Bin Ladin, scared that the infant might become dehydrated, pleaded with a bin Laden sister to tell Yeslam, who was in the other room, to tell Osama that the child would become ill. (The men and women of the family couldn't socialize together, and Carmen couldn't intrude on the men as a female bin Laden blood relative could; often in Saudi Arabia, these elaborate, infantile games of "telephone" must be staged.) Yeslam's reply? "It's no use. This is Osama."

This experience was a huge turning point for Carmen Bin Ladin, a Lausanne-born woman of Swiss and Iranian heritage. Not long after, she decided to leave Saudi Arabia behind forever and save her three daughters from an uncertain but probably unhappy fate. It coincided with another realization, an ominous and foreboding one for those Americans who are questioning our dubious relationship with the Saudis: "Underneath [Saudi men] have always maintained their self-assured and inflexible value system, and it rises to the surface as they age. This is what happened to the Bin Ladens in the years I lived with them, and it's what happened to Saudi Arabia as a whole while I was there. It is still happening today." The pictures of the Westernized Bin Laden brothers in their youth, sprinkled in the book, all Afros and bell-bottoms, are hard to shake, and the transformative power of the Wahhabi ideology that later overtook them seems at once bone-chilling and bewildering, fantastical and childish.

Next Page: According to Carmen, Osama was never a Westernized, disco-loving playboy

• View blog reactions