The Bin Ladens Read online

  Awadh belonged to Ali’s branch. The family’s oral genealogy holds that Ali was Awadh’s great-great grandfather. Little is recalled about the intervening generations except that Awadh was the only child of his father, Aboud. He therefore inherited all of Aboud’s land in Gharn Bashireih. This proved to be a very meager estate, however, and as it turned out, it was not enough to help Awadh forestall his ox creditor.4

  At first, in lieu of forty silver riyals, which he did not have, Awadh negotiated to provide Bilawal with a lien on the several acres he farmed. Bilawal agreed to accept half of the profits from Awadh’s harvests until the debt was paid. If the rains had returned, Awadh might have worked himself out of difficulty and the subsequent history of his branch of the Bin Laden family might have turned out quite differently. As it happened, however, a drought hit Rakiyah. Awadh could offer his creditor no profits in the ensuing months, which angered Bilawal. By one Bin Laden family account, Bilawal threatened to kill Awadh unless he either came up with the cash he owed or turned over full title to his land.5

  Awadh decided to abandon his ancestral village. He was a bachelor, free to travel. The drought had deepened steadily since the ox’s demise. Emigration was a common survival strategy in the Hadhramawt, even without the spur of a tribal death threat. Awadh packed his belongings and set out across the high plateau for a neighboring canyon known as Wadi Doan, about a day and a half ’s ride by camel or donkey. There he would begin again.

  SHEER CLIFF WALLS of nine hundred feet or more plunge to the floor of the Wadi Doan, seventy miles inland from the Arabian Sea. Dark green date palm trees nourished by a riverbed cover the canyon’s floor. A race of giants hewed the chasm’s stones until God took umbrage at their arrogance and destroyed them with a sandstorm, according to local legend. This may explain the stunning architecture: Stacked against the rock walls rise the giant skyscrapers of fortified castle-villages, each town a gated, vertical redoubt against its neighbors. For purposes of defense there are no windows on the houses’ lower floors, and the slits higher up are designed for shooting.

  To Europeans of the time, the canyons of the Hadhramawt seemed remote and filled with dangerous xenophobes; they were a “parallel, interior world…a blank on the map.” In truth, the Hadhramawt was not isolated at all, but its deeply religious inhabitants, although capable of gracious hospitality, did not always take kindly to unannounced Christian visitors. For several thousand years Hadhramis had been migrants, travelers, traders, and entrepreneurs, sailing out in wooden dhows from the port of Mukalla to the East Indies, Zanzibar, Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), and up the Red Sea to Mecca and Cairo. For a time, centuries ago, they and their Sabean kings enjoyed enormous wealth as caravan monopolists in the global trade in myrrh and frankincense, drawn from the gum of Arabian trees. In pharaonic Egypt and during the Roman Empire, incense burned from costly frankincense and even more expensive myrrh transformed these oils into two of the most precious commodities on earth. In Rome, no god could be worshipped properly, no funeral commemorated, no respectable marriage bed entered, without the smoke of frankincense swirling through the room. Only as its empire dissolved and austere Christian preachers denounced incense as a perfume of blasphemers did the trade decline and Hadhramawt fall back into poverty. With Islam’s arrival in the seventh century, the men of the canyons sailed again as soldiers in proselytizing Muslim armies. They stayed on in the lands they conquered as bodyguards, traders, and, eventually, political notables. They remained devoted to their homeland and by the turn of the twentieth century, many prosperous Hadhramis had carried their colonial-era trading wealth back to the canyons to build retirement homes and family compounds. So many returned from Asia and Africa that when a British officer carried out the first formal survey of the gorges during the 1930s, he discovered Swahili and Malay among the local languages.6

  At the time of Awadh Bin Laden’s arrival, Britain claimed Doan as part of its Aden Protectorate, a political entity that was more wish than fact, one in a chain of loosely governed coastal territories the empire’s strategists had stitched together in Arabia to protect India’s shipping lanes from Turkish and German scheming. The local instrument of British control was the Sultan of Mukalla, who ruled from a compound of whitewashed palaces on a rock outcropping beside the Arabian Sea, protected by a personal bodyguard of African slaves. The sultan’s family had earned its fortune as mercenaries for the Nizam of Hyderabad, in India; by the early twentieth century, they preferred to spend their time in Hyderabad’s luxurious courts. In Mukalla, they left in charge a succession of wazirs, or ministers, from the Al-Mihdhar family, which hailed from the Wadi Doan. One of these deputies, Sayyid Hamid Al-Mihdhar, was recalled by a British visitor as “a smooth, oily character, outwardly jovial but with unsmiling eyes,” who used his office “to ensure preferential treatment for his fellow Doanis.”[1] The Mukalla sultanate was far from a model government; to the extent it controlled the interior canyons, it did so by taking hostages from prominent local families.7

  The real powers in southern Doan at the time of Awadh’s arrival were not the British or the Mukalla sultans, but a family of local sheikhs called the Ba Surras, who ruled from a mud-brick castle named Masna’a. The Ba Surra governor at the time Awadh Bin Laden arrived took ten wives during his lifetime and suffered from blindness. He ruled the canyon with a firm hand. “Murder cases are now practically non-existent,” a British agent reported with satisfaction to London. “Murderers are executed with a dagger plunged into the supra sternal notch.”8

  Doan had about twenty thousand inhabitants, by the Ba Surras’ count. They were succored by nearly two hundred mosques, but only two small schools, in which the curriculum was the Koran. None of the women the English traveler Freya Stark met during the early 1930s could read. Palm trees from the riverbed were harvested for profit, and a few wealthier traders kept bees on their terraces, extracting an export crop of aromatic honey known as an aphrodisiac, particularly if eaten with meat, “something that only men may do, as it is thought inadvisable to excite women too much,” the traveler Doreen Ingrams noted.9

  Awadh Bin Laden chose Doan as a sanctuary from the Obeidis because it enjoyed a reputation for peace and order under the Ba Surras that was then rare in the Hadhramawt, according to some of Awadh’s descendants. He settled a few miles from the Ba Surra fortress, in Rabat Bashan, a town stacked up against Doan’s southernmost wall, surrounded by palms on the valley floor. Eight hundred men owning one hundred rifles lived there, according to the British survey conducted in the early 1930s. Awadh seems to have had few firm connections when he first arrived in Doan; he relied instead on the region’s reputation for hospitality, and his own willingness to work. The evidence about Awadh’s circumstances after his arrival in Rabat is sketchy, as he was now separated from the family group in Rakiyah that has kept what oral history survives. He is said to have worked as a wage laborer on local small farms. He did well enough to marry a woman in the town; she was from the Al-Madudi family.10

  Awadh and his wife had three daughters and three sons. The boys were Mohamed, Abdullah, and Omar; the latter died in childhood, a common fate. (The names of the daughters are not recalled; in Arabia then, as now, the stories of a family’s women were rarely told.) The year of Mohamed’s birth is sometimes given as 1908, an approximation at best; the celebration of birthdays is not an Arabian tradition, and there was barely a government in Doan then, never mind a birth registry.11

  Once he settled into his Rabat exile, Awadh Bin Laden worked hard and died young. Indeed, he seems to have died before his two surviving sons, Mohamed and Abdullah, had reached adolescence.12

  As was true elsewhere in the Hadhramawt, Doan’s economy relied upon the persistent willingness of local boys and young men to sail away to foreign jobs, work for years at a time in difficult conditions, and remit money home. Some left at very early ages, as young as six or seven years old. It was also common for local men to marry in their teens, emigrate to Ethiopia or Somalia or Egypt
, and stay away for as long as two decades, taking other wives while abroad. For most young men in Doan the question was not whether to leave, but where to go. They depended upon informal employment networks sponsored by Hadhrami traders who had business interests in particular ports abroad. The loyalty of one Hadhrami stranger to another was extraordinary, and by the early twentieth century this ethic had created a thriving diaspora from the Levant to Southeast Asia. In one letter discovered from the early twentieth century, a father writes instructions to two of his young boys about how they should make their way from Hadhramawt to Singapore—he provides lists of trusted contacts in four different port cities and urges the boys to send many postcards home. Young men from the northern Hadhramawt valleys generally emigrated through these kin networks to Southeast Asia; from Doan, they went primarily to Africa or up the Red Sea coastline.

  Emigration would have seemed a natural choice for fatherless Mohamed and Abdullah Bin Laden. As they considered their destinations they were probably advised by their mother’s family and by other townspeople concerned about their welfare, now that Awadh was gone. The richest man in Rabat was a descendant of the Prophet Mohamed named Sayyid Muhammed Ibn Iasin, a Red Sea cotton dealer with a “long face and large pleasant mouth” whose household kept bees and Ethiopian slaves.13 The Iasins had connections in Massawa, the main Eritrean port. Another prominent family in the canyon, who lived about a mile or two away, had relatives in Addis Ababa, and had made a small fortune trading skins there. It was likely through one of these contacts that Mohamed Bin Laden, the eldest of Awadh’s sons, but a boy of less than twelve years old, first climbed the canyon walls and joined the camel caravans for the walk to the port of Mukalla.

  He sailed to Africa, survived the voyage, and found work somewhere in Ethiopia. But his journey ended in disaster. The Bin Laden family’s oral history contains at least two versions about what happened to him. In one, Mohamed was working as a sweeper in a store or small business. According to what his brother Abdullah later told the family, his boss was a disagreeable man with a fierce temper who kept a ring of keys fastened to his belt; one day, annoyed at Mohamed, he hurled the keys at the boy and struck him in the face. The injury was so severe that Mohamed lost his eye. A second version, told by some of the Bin Ladens who remained in Yemen, holds that Mohamed was working on an Ethiopian building site when an iron bar dropped accidentally from a high building, hit the ground, bounced up, and struck his eye. In any event, Mohamed Bin Laden would grow into adulthood with a right eye made of glass.14

  Mohamed returned to Doan after his injury. A massive earthquake destroyed the Abyssinian port of Massawa in 1921, devastating the region’s economy; this may also have been a factor in his retreat. Townspeople in Rabat say it was 1925 when Mohamed left again. This time he traveled with his younger brother Abdullah. It would be about twenty-five years before the brothers returned. Their mother later died in Doan, according to Bin Laden family members who stayed in Yemen; it seems doubtful that the boys ever saw her again.

  They aimed now for the eastern coast of the Red Sea. In the port of Jeddah, the gateway favored by Muslim pilgrims traveling to the holy city of Mecca, there was a sizable community of Hadhrami merchants and laborers, including some from Doan; other Hadhramis resided in Mecca itself.

  At the time the Bin Laden boys embarked on this journey, Abdullah was only about nine or ten years old; Mohamed was perhaps fourteen or fifteen, according to what Abdullah later related to his family. The journey Abdullah remembered was inflected by magic, miracles, and religious portents. They found their way aboard the overloaded wooden dhows at Mukalla, sailed around the Arabian Peninsula, then up the Red Sea, as far as the port of Jizan, nearly four hundred miles south of Jeddah. From here they began to walk. They became lost in the desert; they were hungry, nearly starving, and thought they might die. A fierce storm blew in on them, and when it cleared the boys found a farm, and in the irrigated fields they found a watermelon. They ate it and were revived.15

  They walked on and finally reached the stone and coral walls of Jeddah, a fetid city of perhaps twenty-five thousand beside the Red Sea.16 Perhaps only a teenager who had known the deprivations and perpetual warfare of the Hadhramawt could regard this claustrophobic, disease-ridden port without a single paved street as a place of opportunity. Yet Mohamed Bin Laden had seen in Doan the proud mud skyscrapers, with their painted doors and complements of slaves, which had been built by Hadhramis who had earned their fortunes in all sorts of unlikely places, through luck and faith and hard work. He possessed the drive to seek a fortune of his own.

  THE AIR WITHIN Jeddah’s protective walls “held a moisture and a sense of great age and exhaustion such as seemed to belong to no other place,” wrote T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. There was “a feeling of long use, of the exhalations of many people, of continued bath-heat and sweat.” Temperatures rose well above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, and salty Red Sea winds stifled breath. “Newspapers flop into rag, matches refuse to strike and keys rust in the pocket,” a British visitor complained. Each day about five thousand camels moved through the city, dropping what Jeddah’s mayor estimated to be more than thirty thousand pounds of manure. “The goods on display in the market are covered with so many flies that you cannot tell the color of the goods without chasing them away,” the Persian pilgrim Hossein Kazemzadeh wrote. “In the evening, when the shops close, the flies go, like the merchants, to private houses to seek their prey.”17

  For more than a thousand years Jeddah had served as the gateway to Mecca. Through the city poured pilgrims bound for the annual Hajj festival—one hundred thousand of them each year by the early twentieth century. They were Muslims of every hue and background, from Africa, Southeast Asia, India, and Europe. They came, too, for lesser pilgrimages throughout the year; rowboats called sambuks ferried the new arrivals from ships anchored in the port’s deep water. At the pier porters and guides hustled them to crude barracks where they were segregated by national origin. Many of these pilgrims stayed on in Jeddah after they had offered their devotions, and their descendants had transformed the region, known as the Hejaz, into a polyglot, a “hodge-podge of humanity which Islam brings together from every corner of the earth,” as the pilgrim Amin Rihani wrote in 1922. In Jeddah there were extremes of wealth and poverty, observed Kazemzadeh: “You see rich people who will pay several pounds for a flacon of perfume, pour it all out on their heads and walk off…On the other hand, there are wretches in a state of total privation, lying nearly nude along the road, seeking some relief in the shade of the bushes.” Wealthier families lived in tall Turkish-style town houses fashioned from coral dug from the shoreline and covered in slatted wooden shutters that cooled the interiors and kept women invisible to passersby. The poor wrapped themselves in cloth and slept in Jeddah’s sandy lanes.18

  Cholera epidemics swept through the city. Europe’s nascent public health authorities recognized the global migration to and from the Hajj as a potential source of pandemics. The colonial powers struggled to create a workable system of quarantine. An Ottoman doctor summoned to treat one cholera scourge around the century’s turn found Jeddah “a vast cemetery” teeming with “dead bodies that filled the caravansaries, mosques, cafes, houses and public places”; he was haunted by “the cries of men, women and children mixed with the roaring of the camels.”19

  Harry St. John Bridger Philby, a British adventurer who would soon play a remarkable role in the city’s growth, arrived in Jeddah during the 1920s, around the same time as Mohamed Bin Laden. Philby encountered a

  jumble of wealth and poverty; great mansions of the captains of commerce and enterprise, with their solid coral walls and wide expanses of woodwork tracery, side by side with hovels broken and battered with age; mosques great and small, with pointed minarets tapering skyward…Everywhere a contrast of light and shadow, splendor and squalor, dust and dirt; and above it all flew the flags of many nations, Great Britain, France, Italy, a
nd Holland, amid the countless emblems of a united Arabia.20

  The city’s economy turned on pilgrims, who paid taxes amounting to about 3 million British pounds each year in this period and generated another 4 to 5 million pounds in commercial profits for the merchants, camel owners, tour guides, and hoteliers who competed for their purses. The greed and carnival-barking style of Jeddah’s hospitality industry was legendary; the medieval traveler Ibn Jubayr noted skeptically that even before the arrival of Islam, the city fathers had raised “an old and lofty domed shrine” to attract tourists; “it is said that this was the resting place of Eve, mother of the human race…God knows best about all that.”21 The opening of the Suez Canal in the late nineteenth century transformed the Red Sea into a colonial bazaar where European steamers, African traders, and Arabian middlemen competed for profit and influence. By the time Mohamed Bin Laden arrived, Jeddah was a citadel of hustlers.

  He began as a porter in the pilgrim trade; a leather satchel he used to haul goods and luggage hung later in one of his offices. He and his younger brother were so poor during their first days in Jeddah that they slept in a ditch they dug in the sand, and covered themselves with bags, according to Nadim Bou Fakhreddine, who worked for the family years later. Early on, Mohamed opened a small grill stand in the Nadha market on the Jeddah seafront, “a small shop with one or two big dishes” for cooking, recalled Hassan Al-Aesa, who worked as a laborer with Bin Laden in Jeddah during the 1930s. An account of Bin Laden’s origins written by a British diplomat several decades later reported that he had sold “fruit off a donkey” in these early years, an assertion that may have been more metaphorical than factual.