From the beginning, bin Laden's life was a tangle of contradictions. He is the scion of one of Saudi Arabia's richest and most prominent families, but then again his family are outsiders among the insiders and Osama himself is an outsider among them. His father, Mohammed, was a Yemeni who walked with his two brothers from their homeland, in the region called the Hadhramaut, to Mecca, a grueling 1,000-mile trek. There, the hard-working Mohammed endeared himself to the ruling elite and became the Saudi kingdom's preeminent building contractor, despite never learning to read or write.

Osama himself is merely one among Mohammed's 24 sons (the exact number of his siblings appears open to doubt; Randal says there are 51, but the 9/11 commission report has the total at 57). His working-class Syrian mother comes from a family of Alawites, a heterodox Muslim sect disdained by the majority Sunni Muslims in Syria and considered "polytheists and apostates" by the fundamentalist Wahhabi Sunnis who prevail in Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Laden was an observant Muslim (sometimes described as "pious"), but according to Randal, "neither by upbringing in Yemen, nor by inclination, a Wahhabi." Why the son so vigorously embraced a faith alien to his parents remains unknown; perhaps he wanted to fit in better with the Saudi elite, which would be ironic considering where his faith has taken him.

Mohammed soon tired of Osama's mother and saw to it that she was married off to another Hadhrami who worked for him. Osama remained close to both his mother and stepfather, but there are rumors about his legitimacy. A Spanish woman who claims to have befriended Osama during a brief boyhood visit to England told Randal that Osama believed his mother was "not a wife of the Koran," and some mean gossip going around Jeddah characterized him as "son of the slave," that is, a child born out of wedlock to a servant. Nevertheless, Osama's father raised him as his legitimate son, putting him to work early on in the family business and teaching him how to live rough in the desert, one of those character-building exercises to which certain fathers are prone. Mohammed died in a plane crash when Osama was 10, and he and his brothers became the temporary wards of the royal family.

Unlike many of his siblings, who traveled widely and attended Western boarding schools and colleges, Osama remained unworldly. He has rarely left the Muslim world and chose to study business management in Saudi Arabia because, according to Randal, he wanted to stay near his mother. Even after he married for the first time, at age 17, he and his bride chose to live with his mother and stepfather instead of setting up their own household.

"Osama: The Making of a Terrorist"

By Jonathan Randal

Alfred A. Knopf

340 pages

Nonfiction

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Randal dismisses as "fanciful" persistent rumors that Osama indulged in a youthful playboy phase in the notorious nightclubs of Beirut. (There is even more unlikely gossip about escapades in London and other far-flung locales.) "The most charitable interpretation" of such accounts, he writes, "is that they confused Osama with his brothers or rich Saudis out on the town." As Randal points out, civil war had begun to ravage Beirut before Osama was 18, and by all accounts, bin Laden was serious, conscientious, quiet and, above all, pious from childhood on.

Randal finds an old soccer buddy of bin Laden's who recalls being gently if persistently urged by Osama to attend mosque and make daily prayers more regularly. Bin Laden would stage quiz competitions among his teammates with questions on the Koran and sharia (Islamic law), but would distribute the cakes he had brought to the losers as well as to the rest. Saudi youth, bin Laden feared, were being led astray by the Western vices made so available by oil-boom money, but he was not preachy. "He sort of hoped you would follow his example," the friend told Randal, "but if not, you were still good friends. He had a very strong, quiet, confident and effective charisma."

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