I married a bin Laden

Even in 1979, after the Islamist revolution in Iran, when Saudi Arabia returned to harsher ways, being a bin Laden meant something. In Saudi Arabia at that time a husband couldn't tend to his pregnant wife in public: "One afternoon, I was in a supermarket when a pregnant woman fainted; her husband rushed to help her up. The mutawa [religious police] were there, and they stopped him, yelling at him that he must not take his wife in his arms in public." Carmen, however, had a Sudanese driver by her side to shield her from the mutawa with two words: "Bin Laden," the driver would say, and the police would back down.

The truth is that the bin Ladens choose to live the Wahhabi way, even though, as Carmen often suggests, they had the potential for more freedom than everyone else. The Iranian revolution also made Yeslam and his extended family, extraordinarily nervous and religiously obedient, terrified of the militant radicals in their own country. Yeslam would change forever, becoming a perpetually sick, intolerant, harsh and religious man, and later a harsh, religious man with mistresses on the side.

It was these changes in her husband that finally broke Carmen -- both Yeslam's infidelity and his demand that she have an abortion when she became pregnant with her third child. It was a request she'd complied with before, much to her despair. The hypocrisy in Saudi Arabian culture about women is difficult to get your mind around. Bin Ladin writes of Saudi princesses, locked up and disdained by their husbands, suffering from "bone density problems from lack of sunlight and exercise," who, not surprisingly, fall in love with one another.

"We all heard rumors of a kind of lesbian party circuit in Riyadh," Bin Ladin writes, "where women would socialize and pick each other up." In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality is punished by public flogging. Yet, Bin Ladin implies, who can really be bothered to punish the silly Saudi lesbians? "Women don't matter to a Saudi man," Bin Ladin explains. "Possessing them matters -- matters crucially -- but once the women are locked in and breeding, what happens among them doesn't count for much." The rules in Saudi Arabia, it seems, are at once terrifyingly oppressive and weirdly arbitrary.

Carmen Bin Ladin rarely, if ever, talks about how the rest of the bin Laden clan regard the U.S. and the Western values that her former brother-in-law Osama despises so much. Yeslam and some of his other brothers conduct themselves like Westerners while vacationing in the West (Yeslam now lives in Switzerland himself), but we get no sense of whether their politics fall in line with those of their militant brother.

But Carmen does discuss the intense bin Laden clan loyalty, the Bedouin mentality that she believes makes Saudi Arabian men unique. She writes that she "cannot believe" the bin Ladens would cut Osama off completely: "I simply can't see them depriving a brother of his annual dividend from their father's company, and sharing it among themselves. That would be unthinkable -- among the Bin Ladens, no matter what a brother does, he remains a brother." At the end of the memoir, Carmen "openly defies" the bin Ladens to open their books and prove that they had nothing to do with Sept. 11.

The author, who now lives in Geneva and whose daughters studied in America, also never says outright what she thinks of the close relationship between the U.S. and the Saudi regime. Considering the steady and compelling case she builds for the tyranny of the society, however, it's pretty easy to read between the lines. Or, at least, to share with her this fear about Saudi society and America's silence about it: "If we, in the Western world, are not vigilant enough, there will be no end to their terrorism."

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