So hard to live down that Bin Ladin name

By CHRIS BARTON


Of all the surnames in the world, Bin Ladin* is one that most people would want to avoid. Imagine the dinner party conversation.

"Hmm, Bin Ladin - any relation to Osama?"

Yes, I was married to his brother."

"Oh really. Er ... what was he like?"

It's a question scantily answered in Carmen Bin Ladin's The Veiled Kingdom - a memoir published here last week of her time married to Yeslam Bin Ladin and life in the 70s and 80s among Saudi Arabia's elite society.

Interactions with Yeslam's brother Osama were few - mainly because contacts with men were not allowed in the hardline Wahhabi Muslim culture she found herself inhabiting. There was the time Carmen answered the door - foolishly forgetting she should be concealed in her head-to-toe abaya. "Osama snapped his head away when he saw me and glared back towards the gate. 'No really,' I insisted. 'Come in.'

"Osama was making rapid back-off gestures with his hand waving me aside and muttering something in Arabic, but I truly didn't understand what he meant."

Osama acted this way because he was not allowed to see Carmen's naked face. In Saudi culture, any man - except your father, brother or husband - is not supposed to see you unveiled.

Carmen tells us, unsurprisingly, that Osama was a religious fanatic from an early age and discounts reports of him as a playboy teenager in Beirut: "As far as I know, Osama was always devout. His family revered him for his piety."

So devout, that he insisted his wife Najwah must not use a bottle to feed his son Abdallah. On a two-hour drive through desert heat to the family country house in the mountains, Carmen watched Najwah struggle to feed water to the howling baby - with a teaspoon. She tried to intervene through her husband Yeslam, but Osama was unmoved by the baby's suffering: "It's no use. This is Osama," said Yeslam.

That's all we get about the world's most notorious terrorist. He was "tall and stern, and his fierce piety was intimidating". Plus he had a commanding presence - "when Osama stepped into the room, you felt it".

Carmen felt the full force of Osama's name following September 11 when she was separated from Yeslam and living in Geneva with her three daughters. "I was the only Bin Laden in Europe with a listed phone number. Friends called, their voices strained. Then they stopped. We were rapidly becoming personae no gratae."

Then there were news reports that her eldest daughter Wafah who had an apartment in New York had been tipped off about the attacks and fled to Geneva just in time.

Next, a friend staying in Wafah's apartment had death threats. "It was an understandable reaction - how could strangers distinguish one Bin Laden from another?"

Indeed. Carmen felt she had no choice but to go to the media saying she and her daughters "had no connection whatsoever with this evil, barbaric attack on America - a country we loved and whose values we shared and admired".

Yet while she agreed the name had become "synonymous with evil, infamy and death", Carmen did not give it up. "We could, of course, try to change our name, but my daughters and I have nothing to hide, and we do not want to mislead anyone.

"The truth always catches up with you one day, and changing our name would not change who we are."

Of course it might change book sales. But while The Veiled Kingdom, also published as Inside the Kingdom, has little to say about Osama, it does provide an extraordinary insight into life in Saudi Arabia and the country's medieval treatment of women.

Carmen, of Persian-Swiss heritage, married into Osama's clan in 1974. She soon found Bin Ladens everywhere thanks to the dedicated procreative efforts of Yeslam's father Sheikh Mohamed, who had 22 wives and 53 children and was founder of the powerful Bin Laden Organisation. Osama was just one of 23 brothers-in-law.

Knowing the culture she was marrying into, you have to ask what an intelligent Western-educated woman was thinking.

But when Carmen first met Yeslam, he and his brothers had Afros and wore platform shoes. In love, married and living happily in California, Carmen was blind to future problems. But behind the Westernised Saudi lay a culture that regards women as property - possessions for breeding that should be unseen and unheard. The reality sank in when Yeslam took Carmen home in 1976 to live in Jeddah.

"Half the population of Saudi Arabia is kept behind walls all the time. It was hard to fathom a city with almost no women. I felt like a ghost: women didn't exist in this world of men."

And when they're weren't behind walls, women were cloaked in the "impenetrable gauze" of the abaya. Becoming enfolded into the Saudi Arabian women's world was "like going under an anaesthetic". Life became intertwined with Islamic rules and rituals.

"Everything seemed to be haram or sinful; and if wasn't sinful it was abe, shameful. It was haram to play music, abe to walk around the street; abe to talk to a male servant; haram to be seen by a man outside the family."

Carmen survived nine years of being a dutiful wife, largely by having plenty of holidays in Switzerland, holding Thursday night tennis parties attended mainly by foreigners and embassy staff, but vital for providing human contact. And by shopping.

"In those days I had five or six fur coats for my trips to Europe, a safe full of jewellery, and a walk-in wardrobe filled with pret a porter dresses. I never asked the price of anything - if something attracted me, I bought it."

She also found her surname came in handy when dealing with the mutawa or religious police who would challenge women on the street if their hands were showing or their abaya was held too high. Her driver would simply utter "Bin Laden" and the mutawa would back off.

Ultimately, Carmen says the need to protect her daughters - from an oppressive culture where dolls and dancing were prohibited, and where at school her 8-year-old was taught to write "I hate Jews. I love Palestine" - led to the decision to get out.

She's also scathing of the hypocrisy of the Wahhabi Islamic law that pervades Saudi government and society - especially at the highest levels where princesses of the ruling House of Saud, locked away in palatial splendour, suffer bone density problems from the lack of sunlight and exercise and line up Harley St doctors to feed prescription pill habits.

While homosexuality is forbidden and punishable by flogging, it's of no concern that princesses and women of the privileged clans, segregated since birth in lives of decadence and inertia, indulge in a "a lesbian party circuit".

It doesn't matter either that women divorced at will by their husband have no rights and are brutally cut off from seeing their children again. And it's quite okay for two men to hold hands in the street, but if a man and a woman do so - even if they are married - it is seen as obscene.

For Carmen, it is an unbearable orthodoxy that has more to do with maintaining power in the hands of select clans than providing a spiritual path. "The only difference between Saudi Islam and that of the ultra hardline Afghan Taleban is the opulence and private self-indulgence of the al-Sauds. The Saudis are the Taleban in luxury."

* Following Arab name conventions the spelling "Bin Ladin" is used when referring to individuals and "Bin Laden" for a clan and its members.