The Bin Ladens Read online

  The deal proved to be contentious. Aramco executives believed the natural gas belonged to them; Faisal argued that the kingdom owned it. The Roma brothers feared the dispute would jeopardize Bin Laden’s highway contracts, to which they had pledged $5 million in financing.

  In September, Faisal summoned Bin Laden and the Italians to his Taif palace. Bin Laden and Faisal spoke at length in Arabic, after which Bin Laden turned to the Romas to assure them that the crown prince was convinced the natural gas was his, and that “Aramco could not impede [the] completion [of] needed public works, providing jobs [to] many workers,” as would be made possible by Bin Laden’s deal.28

  Bin Laden and Faisal needed each other. There were other merchant families in the kingdom who were building up experience in construction and light industry, but if the crown prince were to make a convincing start on a national development program, he needed Bin Laden’s large store of construction equipment, his army of semiskilled and unskilled laborers, and his irrepressible habit of saying Yes, Your Majesty, it can be done. For his part, Bin Laden had no choice but to adapt to Faisal’s priorities and terms. The crown prince’s fiscal austerity drive had ended the palace and housing boom in Jeddah by 1959. Thousands of Yemeni laborers left the city in search of jobs elsewhere as a local recession took hold; local merchants grumbled that Faisal’s reforms might be “good for the country, but not for a merchant class brought up and nourished on the lush profits of ‘the good old days.’” Bin Laden, however, evaded the brunt of this downturn. As before, he had adapted as required to serve the royal family; if highways and infrastructure were now the priority of the day, then they would become his priority, too.29

  He was cushioned as well by another patron. By the late 1950s, Mohamed Bin Laden was not only Faisal’s favored contractor. In the three holiest cities of Islam—Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem—he was also blessed, as he put it, by the favor of God.

  5. FOR JERUSALEM

  THE DECLINE of the Roman Empire produced as much disarray in the deserts of Arabia as it did in the barbarian-ravaged forests of Europe. Rome’s late emperors promoted Christianity as a universal creed, but their decrees proved unconvincing along the camel caravan routes to the east. In the late fifth century A.D., religious faith in Arabia had evolved into a vibrant plurality. There were Jewish and Christian communities, but many Bedouin worshipped portable idols, trees, and stones. A family in an oasis town might rely upon any one of several hundred deities to bless its endeavors; there were moon gods and travel gods and swirling narratives of celestial deities. One organizing force was the entrepreneurialism of religious festival sponsors, particularly those around Mecca, which lay about halfway along one of the great camel routes of the frankincense and myrrh trade. Meccan impresarios divined that a single unified religious fair held once a year, at which all gods would be welcome, might attract more attention—and produce more income—than a looser system of seasonal events. The annual ritual that became the Hajj after the birth of Islam began as a raucous devotional attraction involving hundreds of gods.1

  At the time of the Prophet Mohamed’s birth, in 570, the Ka’ba, or “Cube,” then a flat stone structure with no roof, served as a temple for some of the more popular deities. It contained “pictures of trees and pictures of angels,” according to the Meccan historian Al-Azraqi, as well as a drawing of Jesus and his mother, Mary, and an image of Abraham as an old man. At the annual Mecca festival, pilgrims who worshipped diverse gods joined in a ritual walk around the edifice. One of the deities then recognized in the Hejaz—a god of gods, not represented by a fixed idol—was named Allah. Even before he received the Koranic revelations, Mohamed developed a conviction that Allah was the one true God, and that the hundreds of other idols worshipped locally were false.2

  In Koranic tradition, Abraham is credited as the Ka’ba’s creator. In this account, while visiting his son Ishmael in Mecca, God ordered Abraham to build a temple devoted to His oneness. As Mohamed received his revelations, he preached for the restoration of Abraham’s plan. His sermons provoked resistance from Meccan tribal leaders and elders, who seemed to view the Prophet, himself an active businessman, as a sort of anti-capitalist spoiler, one whose ideas could, in particular, ruin their lucrative festival. Meccan opposition forced Mohamed into exile, to the town later named Medina, where he found political support. He prevailed in a series of battles and returned to Mecca in triumph. He entered the Ka’ba and, according to Al-Azraqi, “he asked for a cloth which he soaked in water, and ordered all the pictures to be erased.” With this act Mohamed created an Islamic aesthetic rooted in the eradication of the multihued religious images of his Meccan youth. In the last years of his life Mohamed also announced the detailed new rules of the Hajj, one of the five pillars of the religion that Allah had revealed to him; this annual ritual’s crushing crowds, drawn from around the world, would soon belie the earlier skepticism of Mecca’s festival merchants.3

  Islam expanded from Spain to Indonesia; a succession of dynasties ruled Mecca. Egyptian and Ottoman princes took the Hejaz and managed the Hajj after the thirteenth century. They often did so in a style that recalled the pre-Islamic festivals—there were marching bands and opulent parties, and a conspicuous emphasis on profiteering, which caused the reputation of Meccan merchants to fall so low that fleeced pilgrims referred to them as “the dogs of the Hejaz.” When the Wahhabi movement first rose in the Nejd desert in the late eighteenth century, its warriors saw themselves as purifiers in Mohamed’s name; as the Prophet had done, they would rescue Mecca from idolaters. Theirs was a desert world of parched deprivation and intense kin unity that had rarely been penetrated by other cultures. They shocked Mecca’s cosmopolitan pilgrims:

  You must imagine a crowd of individuals, thronged together, without any covering than a small piece of cloth around their waist…being naked in every other respect, with their matchlocks upon their shoulders, and their khanjears or large knives hung to their girdles. All the people fled at the sight of this torrent of men…They had neither flags, drums nor any other instrument or military trophy during their march. Some uttered cries of holy joy, others recited prayers in a confused and loud voice.4

  The Wahhabis destroyed every dome and tomb in the city; their scholars regarded much existing Islamic architecture as heretical, apart from the flat-roofed Ka’ba and mosques constructed in a similar design. Egyptian soldiers eventually drove the Wahhabis away and destroyed their featureless capital in Riyadh, but under the more durable leadership of Abdulaziz, the Islamic militias returned to Mecca in 1924. Again they tore down domes and attacked foreign pilgrims who lingered too long at decorated historical shrines, which the Wahhabis regarded as false temples.

  Abdulaziz sought Mecca for its tax receipts and its prestige. He adhered to Wahhabi precepts, but he had no particular interest in the endless scholarly arguments in Riyadh about the status of every last curved roof and revered historical tourist site in his expanding kingdom. As with other aspects of his statecraft, Abdulaziz sought a synthesis: he appeased the Islamic radicals who gave him soldiers and legitimacy, yet he tried not to alienate the Ottoman subjects whom he had inherited. The king’s Wahhabi militias, for instance, wanted to tear down the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, where Mohamed had preached during his exile; they saw it as a kind of heretical tourist trap. Abdulaziz recognized that its destruction would be deeply unpopular and would also crimp the pilgrim trade. He settled on a compromise in which the Wahhabis were allowed to take off the mosque’s dome but were otherwise required to leave it be, and to accommodate its thronging crowds. As a contemporary traveler put it, the king gained credit from the Wahhabis “for having allowed the dome to be demolished, and credit from the foreign Hajjis for protecting the place from complete demolition.”5 This would become a basis for Saudi management of Mecca and Medina in the ensuing decades. The Wahhabi aesthetic would predominate, but it might, at times, be bent grudgingly to accommodate Islam’s global diversity, particularly in pursuit of pilgri
m revenue.

  With ownership of the Hejaz came responsibility for the civic upkeep and improvement of Mecca and Medina. Abdulaziz carpeted the Holy Mosque in Mecca in 1928 and paid for a new gold-plated door in 1944, but otherwise, during the sparse years of the Great Depression and the Second World War, he could afford only light renovations. Amid the postwar boom, however, as the number of pilgrims arriving in his kingdom swelled, the king allocated larger sums. His objectives were not decorative but practical: Both the Medina and Mecca mosques were too small to accommodate the number of pilgrims they now attracted, particularly during the peak Hajj season. Jumbled town houses, market stalls, and twisting lanes surrounded both mosques, preventing their expansion. Encouraged by his sons Saud and Faisal, Abdulaziz agreed to remake both the old towns—Medina first, then Mecca.6

  By September 6, 1949, when Abdulaziz published an open letter announcing his redevelopment plan for Medina, Mohamed Bin Laden had established himself as the king’s principal builder. Mecca’s and Medina’s mosques and sacred sites were organized as Islamic trusts, or waqfs, overseen by boards of scholars and Hejazi notables, but a construction contract of this size was the king’s decision, abetted by Suleiman. Bin Laden was their man. He was invited to run the entire Medina project, a lucrative grant that would include the demolition and construction work around the mosque itself, and also a new electrical grid, waterworks, and an airport. An official Bin Laden history, as well as contemporary diplomatic correspondence, suggests the Prophet’s Mosque expansion and renovation project alone cost about $19 million during the early 1950s, not counting the even larger sum spent on compensation to landowners whose property was seized and cleared.7

  The Medina project marked the beginning of the profound architectural and design influence that the Bin Laden family would have on the two holy cities for many years to come. Mohamed Bin Laden brought to the renovation a “modern architectural style,” as his company’s official history put it, involving the heavy use of reinforced concrete and decorative black marble. The brass lamps might be gaudy and the concrete oppressive, but both were certifiably up to date, and thus, during the 1950s, praiseworthy. And not only in Saudi eyes: one contemporary Lebanese visitor called the architecture Bin Laden oversaw “an impressive and luxurious piece of work.” When his redesign was completed in 1955, about two years after the death of Abdulaziz, Bin Laden had constructed more than seven hundred new pillars in the Prophet’s Mosque, as well as a similar number of concrete arches. He had added nine gates, two gravel squares for worshippers, and forty-four windows; altogether, he had expanded by 60 percent the area where pilgrims could mingle and pray.8

  Because he could not read very well, Bin Laden could not deliver his own speeches in public, and so, in late October 1955, at the celebration called by King Saud to mark the project’s completion, Bin Laden asked a substitute to read out a speech. It is the first known text attributed to Mohamed Bin Laden, a florid symphony of piety and flattery. He told the king:

  God wants you and your father to have this honor and God gave you the success to establish this historic building. And your names will be recorded in glorious history and everlasting light. Your name will be within the everlasting light of those who built this mosque in different epochs since the time of the Prophet. I congratulate you on achieving this everlasting honor. Praise be to God alone that this construction was completed in your age.9

  Bin Laden was not so humble as to avoid any reference to his own role. He listed painstakingly all the improvements he had overseen as he expanded this “very strong and fascinating building.” He emphasized the jobs that the royal family had helped him to create in the Hejaz by financing new factories for carpet making. He highlighted the huge sums spent on compensation for landowners, and he praised the king’s decision “to increase the salaries of the workers of the two holy mosques, so as to provide them with money which made them work honestly—you did not leave any door to reform unopened.” As he neared the end of his exegesis, Bin Laden recounted the work he had done to support both modern and traditional transportation to Medina:

  You ordered us to build an airport, which is one of the biggest airports. Large airplanes could use this airport; it is about to be finished. You ordered us also to build the road from Medina to Jedda, which is about to be finished. Also, we built an area for camels to gather and rest…You purchased the land which lies to the east of the Holy Mosque, and you made it a place for camels to rest for the benefit of Muslims…Your Majesty, God’s grace is looking after you.10

  The truth about Saud was less uplifting. In managing public religion, as in so many other areas, the new king struggled to sustain his father’s canny balancing act. Saud’s “enjoyment of movies, music and vaudeville, and his interest in promoting education for girls, sports, and other pursuits, are deviationist from the Wahhabi point of view,” the American embassy noted. To compensate, Saud repudiated in public the conduct he embraced in private. In an open letter, he denounced as “evil” those who listen “on the radio to songs and music; this causes corruption of the soul and morals and keeps people away from God and prayer…Another evil thing is that women are dressing extravagantly and going out of doors with full make-up, some of them without veils; this is the worst of evils and a major cause of corruption and destruction.”11

  The king sought to stave off rumors of his impiety by showering the kingdom’s holy sites with conspicuous renovation budgets. As soon as the Medina work was finished, Saud directed Bin Laden to start work on an even more expensive project in Mecca, one that would increase the capacity of the Holy Mosque surrounding the Ka’ba from about fifty thousand worshippers to four hundred thousand. Saud declared in public speeches that his budget for the Mecca and Medina projects totaled more than $130 million. The West German embassy estimated that the real figure was closer to $60 million, but as its report noted, “Even this sum seems to be tremendous in Western terms.” The Mecca project proceeded slowly, crimped by Faisal’s budget tightening after he became prime minister, but it provided Bin Laden a steady supplement to his highway and industrial work.12

  Between 1956 and the mid-1960s—including the first seven or so years of Osama Bin Laden’s life—a principal aspect of Bin Laden’s Mecca renovation involved demolishing buildings. Bin Laden had undertaken some demolition and clearing work in Medina, starting in 1951; he brought in explosives to knock down houses and markets in the old city, and the following year, he began to cart away the debris. Mecca’s urban clearance project was considerably more ambitious. Ultimately the Saudi government spent more than $375 million on eminent domain payments to Meccan property owners and shopkeepers. Mohamed Bin Laden sometimes brought his young sons to his work sites in these years, and what they saw, there beside the holy Ka’ba, was a succession of controlled explosions and falling buildings, scenes that would thrill many boys. How much of this demolition Osama witnessed is not known, but in later years, he spoke admiringly and accurately, in general terms, about his father’s renovation work in Mecca and at other religious sites during this period. Through 1962, the last year for which statistics are available, Mohamed Bin Laden used explosives to blast away eighty-six thousand cubic meters of mountains and rocks in and around Mecca. He and his engineers also demolished 768 houses in the city, along with 928 shops and stores.13

  FAISAL WAS DEVOUT. He believed that he could defeat Nasser and exclude communism from Arabia by promoting Islamic values; this was a pillar of both his foreign and domestic policies. He supported Bin Laden’s work in Mecca in part because it promoted Saudi Arabia’s credentials as a steward of Islam. In 1958, shortly after he became prime minister (a professional-sounding title in a thoroughly unprofessional government), Faisal seized on another renovation project that promised similar visibility and prestige, one that appealed in addition to Faisal’s fervent anti-Zionist convictions: the refurbishment of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

  The Haram Al-Sharif, or “Noble Sanctuary,” is a large raised area
at the southeastern corner of Jerusalem’s walled Old City. The platform is regarded as the third holiest site in Islam. It contains two important buildings, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, built in the late seventh century. The Dome’s gold-colored cupola soars ninety-eight feet above the sanctuary’s esplanade, atop what Jewish tradition identifies as a wall of the First Temple built by King Solomon a thousand years before Christ.

  The Dome of the Rock’s place in Islamic tradition is more allusive and mystical than the historical narratives of war, politics, and law provided in the Koran about Mecca and Medina. Koranic verses and later interpretations by Muslim scholars hold that the Prophet Mohamed visited the rock outcropping beneath the Dome while on a “Night Journey” on a winged horse from Mecca to Jerusalem, then onward to heaven and finally back to Mecca. After Mohamed’s death, Jerusalem became the site of continual conflict among Jews, Christians, and Muslims; as the centuries passed, the Night Journey narrative, and the Dome itself, attracted powerful allegiance from Muslims worldwide. The more Jerusalem became a locus of religious war, the stronger this allegiance grew. European crusaders captured the Dome in 1099 and turned it into a church before the Muslim hero Saladin retook Jerusalem and restored the site to Islam. Much later, Jewish projects to recognize the site’s ancient temples, some of which dated to the earliest Jewish kingdoms, drew fierce resistance from Muslims.14