Clearly, the lack of formal training in Islamic jurisprudence does not preclude the ability of an individual to call for and lead a jihad. In addition, the killing of civilians is not as open and shut as Dr. Manstorp suggests. The American scholar J. T. Johnson, for example, has written that Islamic jurists have long taught that if Islam’s enemies refuse to convert to Islam “the war may be prosecuted as harshly as necessary as long as Muslims do not resort to treachery.” The jurists have added that “the faithful participating in the military form of jihad were advised to refrain from shedding blood or the destruction of property unnecessary for the achievement of their objective.”6
Most pertinent, bin Laden has never posed as a religious jurist or scholar and has repeatedly said that he is not the appropriate leader for the jihad. He describes himself as a simple Muslim who is ready and waiting to be directed by a rightful leader, one drawn from what he refers to as “the honest [Islamic] scholars … who hold the solution and have the ability to effect change.”
My personal life is always driven by my responsibilities as a Muslim. I am a humble man of God who only wants to please his God. I don’t care what people say about me. It neither hurts nor gives satisfaction. Thousands of people like me are working at their place for the glory of Islam. I do not consider myself superior to any of them. I always seek guidance from many religious scholars.7
Bin Laden claims that he has taken the lead because “our elite Ulema have put in the jails of the Islamic world, especially the Kingdom’s jails.”8 He repeatedly has emphasized that it was only after “the Saudi Government harassed the Ulema, dismissed them from their jobs in the universities and the mosques, and prevented the distribution of their tapes, I decided that, if it [the Saudi regime] was going to prevent them from speaking, I would begin to promote virtue and repudiate vice, something which has been suspended.” It also should be noted that bin Laden moved to the fore only after Shaykh Azzam was murdered in Pakistan. In this regard, a U.K.-based Islamist leader, Abu Hamzah al-Masri, has said that “Azzam would have been much more dangerous than Usama Bin Laden because he had more credibility as the founder of the jihad movement in Afghanistan.”
There is no reason to think bin Laden would dispute al-Masri’s conclusion, although bin Laden likely would add that Azzam’s scholarly credentials also would have made him a more appropriate leader. Even now, almost a decade after bin Laden began rising to international prominence, Jeune Afrique has reported that he is keenly aware of his “theological limitations and he is surrounded by imams and ulemmas.” Like Nur al-Din and Saladin, bin Laden stepped forward to assume the jihad’s leadership because no more well-credentialed individual made himself available and because participating in a defensive jihad is a binding responsibility for every pious and devout Muslim.9
Professionalism
In the West, the word jihad evokes visions of wanton acts of violence, pillage, and rape. In this view, the jihad style of war is closely associated with the human-wave attacks of the Japanese on Guadalcanal, the Chinese in Korea, and the Iranians in their war with Iraq, and not the painstaking, well-planned, and casualty-limiting—at least for the attackers—operations executed by the Afghan commanders during their jihad against the Soviets. Bin Laden, of course, learned his military skills in Afghanistan, not on the Iran-Iraq border, and, as a result, his methodological approach to waging jihad is marked by a measured manner stressing patience, preparation, and professionalism, or, as author Khalid Asaad has termed it, the Afghan policy “of the long breath and good planning to lessen losses.”10 In his statements, as Professor Magnus Ranstorp notes, bin Laden’s themes “demonstrate a sophisticated mixture of religious legitimization for the jihad (through selective retrieval of sacred passages from the Koran and the use of Muslim history) coupled with an astute political analysis of accumulated Muslim grievances within a Saudi Arabian context and the wide Middle East context.”11 Likewise, bin Laden’s patient and thorough method of warmaking is apparent. In his Declaration of Jihad in August 1996, for example, he wrote:
Today we begin to talk, work, and discuss ways of rectifying what has befallen the Islamic world in general, and the land of the two holy mosques in particular. We want to study the ways which could be used to rectify matters and restore rights to their owners as people have been subjected to grave danger and harm to their religion and their lives, people of all walks of life, civilians, military, security men, employees, merchants, people big and small, school and university students, and unemployed university graduates, in fact hundreds of thousands who constitute a broad sector of the society.12
Bin Laden always forgoes haste in favor of optimal operational planning and will not be hurried or hustled by others. Nearly a year after the Declaration of Jihad, for example, he told the London Independent that “[w]e are still at the beginning of our military action against American forces.”13 Bin Laden’s strong suits as military commander appear to be patience, organizational excellence, and fatalism. Beyond his experience as a construction engineer and insurgent, these traits also flow from his belief that he exists at God’s pleasure and is performing God’s will. “Whatever God has ordained, He always in the past has given us the ability to be patient and accept whatever He has ordained for us,” bin Laden told Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, adding that he needs to neither hurry nor fear.
A true Muslim should thank God in prosperity and be patient in adversity. There is good for him in both cases.14 … Life is only in the control of God and no human can do anything about it. God can give life or death to anybody He wants. It does not matter if you are a superpower or not. If God wants me to live, even ten countries like the United States cannot kill me. But when God wants me to die, even an ordinary person would have no difficulty in killing me. It is my faith that the United States cannot do anything to me and I am not afraid of it at all. My life and death are in the hands of God. We are fighting for the truth. The United States is plundering our resources and wandering about our sacred places. It may do anything it wants because it can never harm us because God is with us.15
Bin Laden’s academic training, experience as a construction engineer, effectiveness as an insurgent, and success over twenty years in building a unique multiethnic organization have fostered his patience and precision. In Professor Khalid Duran’s estimate, bin Laden’s “intelligence and inventiveness are considerable. Like many Afghan Arabs, the Saudi jihadist is a messianic zealot. And yet, in his own right he is a restrained person with a practical bent of mind.”16 Bin Laden has said that each Muslim’s responsibility is to patiently prepare for jihad against the Crusaders.
Muslims must prepare all the possible might to repel the enemy on the military economic, missionary, and all other areas. It is crucial for us to be patient and to cooperate in righteousness and piety…. We have urged all Muslims to study the case of each of their countries and to decide when they can start their jihad. If the time is not suitable this does not mean they should just sit. It means they must work hard in preparation. You have to do many things before waging jihad, and every Muslim should prepare himself very well for this.17
Bin Laden’s professionalism extended to those he recruited as senior lieutenants and major operatives. The bond between bin Laden and these men has been brainpower as well as Islam. The West too often has been misled by the raggedy appearance of bin Laden and his subordinates—squatting in the dirt, clothed in robes and turbans, holding AK-47s, and sporting chest-length beards—and automatically assumes they are an antimodern, uneducated rabble. “Too many Westerners and staff officers in every age,” Anatol Lieven has written, “have dismissed such adversaries as ‘savages,’ their sacrificial courage as mere ‘fanaticism’—and have subsequently paid the price.”18
Bin Laden has a university degree in economics, reads a great deal, has a “data management team” travel with him, and, according to the editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, maintains “computers, modern reception equipment, a huge database on comp
uter disks, and other information kept in the usual way.” The result of this education, reading, and tracking current events, Professor Ranstorp has noted, is a suppleness in bin Laden’s statements that shows a “general political astuteness and awareness of local regional and global issues, especially how changes in each of these environments affects the situations of Muslims in diverse political, geographical, and operational contexts.” In addition, since the early years of the Afghan jihad, bin Laden’s senior cadre always has been staffed by well-educated men who are experienced in their professions; Atwan, for example, said he found bin Laden surrounded by men who “hold high scientific degrees: doctors, engineers, and teachers.”19
Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) leader Ayman Zawahiri is a medical doctor; Mustafa Hamza is an agricultural engineer; the late Abu Ubaydah al-Banshiri, the captured Mamdouh Mahmoud Salim, and the late Mohammed Atef were professional military or security officers; Salim also is an electrical engineer, as are Mohamedu Ould Slahi—who is linked to a thwarted 1999 bin Laden attack in the United States—and the jailed Ramzi Yousef; Khalid al-Fawwaz, awaiting extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States, is a graduate civil engineer; al Qaeda’s explosives and CBW expert, Abu Khabab al-Masri, is a chemical engineer; Wadi El-Hage is a graduate urban planner; the jailed Yousef, Ahmed Salamah Mabruk, and the recently unjailed Khalil al-Deeq each studied computer sciences, and the latter teaches his skills to others; Chechnya-based Islamist Ibn Khattab is a propaganda master, broadcasting video on the Internet—often on the Abdullah Azzam Home Page—to show Muslims insurgent victories and Russian atrocities; and Wael Juleidan and Mohammed Jamal Khalifah are experienced, well-traveled, and successful businessmen and nongovernmental organization operators.20
Thus, overwhelmingly, bin Laden’s senior leadership team is experienced, well educated, and drawn from the Islamic world’s urban middle-and upper-middle classes. The ideological message of militant Islamists like bin Laden, therefore, may, as Professor Mahmood Monshipouri has written, “represent the most advanced international movement in formulating a broad and coherent set of grievances against the West and the ‘Western-dominated’ international system.”21
III
YEARS OF PREPARATION, 1957–1996
6
THE YOUNG BIN LADEN, 1957–1979: FAMILY, EDUCATION, AND RELIGION
Few words will be necessary, with good disposition on your part. Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbors as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence.
Thomas Jefferson, February 1825
Like most matters pertaining to bin Laden, information about his youth, education, and family relations is not definitive and often is contradictory. What Time’s Internet service said about bin Laden is true in spades for his family and their businesses: they are “a fact-checker’s migraine.”1 That said, there are enough data to sketch the family and the business and the effect of each on bin Laden.
The bin Laden family originally came from peasant origins in the village of al-Rubat in the Hadramut area of northwest Yemen. Muhammed bin Laden, Osama’s father, appears to have left the Hadramut area for Saudi Arabia in the late 1920s. In 1931 Muhammed founded the company that is known today as the Saudi Bin Laden Group. Muhammed is said to have retained affection for Yemen and often brought Hadramis to settle in Saudi Arabia and work on his construction projects; this practice may have yielded benefits for Osama, because Newsweek has reported that 80 percent of the fighters involved in the October 2000 attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole were born in Mecca of transplanted Yemeni families, several of which still have ties to the Hadramut. Muhammed did not trumpet pride in his Yemeni origins, however, because he was striving to be accepted in the highest levels of Saudi society despite being a foreigner.2
Osama, however, retains a strong and unhidden residual pride in his Yemeni origins, saying in 1994 that Yemen is “one of the best Arab and Muslim countries in terms of its adherence to tradition and the faith … [its] topography is mountainous, and its people are tribal and armed, and allow one to breathe clean air unblemished by humiliation.” Osama frequently notes Islam spread to Yemen soon after the religion’s founding and argues that Saudi Arabia benefits from “the strategic depth and the extended manpower fighting for God in happy Yemen.” He also stresses that the Prophet valued the strong faith of the Yemenis, saying that when Islam was attacked, there “would come 12,000 [from Yemen] who would support God and His Prophet, and they are among the best of us.”3 The Hadramut’s Kindah tribes have returned Osama’s affection. This favorite-son status was clear in the late 1990s when tribal chiefs told the United States to stop “the intensive terrorist campaign and the illegal pursuit waged against their son, Shaykh Osama Bin-Muhammed Bin Laden al-Kandi.”4
Rise of Muhammed Bin Laden
Described as “a genius in many ways” with “a mind that was like a computer for figures,”5 the reporting about Muhammed bin Laden suggests a rags-to-riches story in which he arrived in Saudi Arabia and took a job as either a hotel porter or a bricklayer. From that toehold, Muhammed saved money and slowly built a company specializing in commercial construction.6 As Osama has said, his father’s company “was one of the founders of the infrastructure of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” and in mid-1999 the Bin Laden Group’s Web page proudly asserted that since the 1930s the company has “helped the Kingdom to develop its resources and infrastructure.”7
Over the decades, the Bin Laden firm grew and diversified, so that by the 1990s it was involved in road building, housing construction, infrastructure projects—palaces, airports, tunnels, harbors, mosques, highways, and so forth—agriculture, petrochemicals, irrigation, and telecommunications. The family business also is extensively involved in light manufacturing and exports crystal tableware, foodstuffs, paint, and a variety of other products to at least eighteen countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. The company has offices in most Saudi cities, about one hundred offshore subsidiaries, and offices or representatives in Beirut, Cairo, Amman, Dubai, Geneva, London, and Washington, D.C. Another company speciality has been power plants; it has built plants in Riyadh, Mecca, Cyprus, Jordan, and Canada.8 In recent years, the Bin Laden Group also has become the representative for some foreign firms in the kingdom, ranging from Porsche, Audi, and Volkswagen to Snapple fruit drinks. Overall, the group has a deserved reputation for “professional excellence and a ‘can do’ spirit in large projects.”9 By the late 1990s, the bin Ladens were “the richest non-royal family in Saudi Arabia.” Estimates of its wealth are in the vicinity of $5 billion, and Forbes and Fortune count the bin Ladens among the wealthiest families in the world.10
Muhammed bin Laden consistently is described as a modest man, a strict disciplinarian, and a hardworking, ambitious, generous, and religious individual. The prominence of his Yemeni-origin family in Saudi society and the tremendous financial success of his company, however, have not derived solely from the sweat of his brow. Soon after arriving in the kingdom and establishing his company, Muhammed became—in ways that are not clear—a friend and then a confidant of King Abdul Aziz al-Saud. The PBS program Frontline reported that Muhammed bin Laden won the king’s favor by submitting below-cost bids on palace construction projects and then producing a quality structure on time.11 From this costly start, Muhammed’s company became the al-Sauds’ favorite contractor for infrastructure projects and palaces, and was later awarded “exclusive rights to all construction of a religious nature, whether in Mecca or Medina or—until 1967—the Holy Places in Jerusalem.”12
The friendship between King Abdul al-Aziz and Muhammed bin Laden continued to strengthen and, in the 1960s, survived bin Laden’s role in successfully persuading the king to step down in favor of his brother Faisal. Shortly after Faisal became king, according to Frontline, Muhammed bin Laden further cemented his relationship with the new monarch and his family by paying the Saudi civil service with his own funds for six mon
ths after it was found that the former king had emptied the country’s treasury. Muhammed also later served for a time as Faisal’s minister of public works. Muhammed’s relationship with the two Saudi kings spawned broad and close relations between the two families. Many of Muhammed’s twenty-five sons went to school with the sons of the two kings, and the bin Ladens often served as chaperones for the kings’ sons. In these personal relations, as well as in joint economic projects, the al-Sauds found they could rely on the bin Ladens’ discretion; the firm has a record of avoiding “any and all publicity.”13 Of the world-class Saudi companies, the Bin Laden corporation is one that “rarely if ever buys advertising space in industry publications,” and Dunn and Bradstreet reported in 1999 that “all Bin Laden companies restrict information release.” As Frontline noted in April 1999, the bin Laden–al-Saud relationship is not simply one of business ties; it is also a relationship of trust, of friendship, and of shared secrets.”14
When family patriarch Muhammed died in a plane crash in 1968—Osama claims King Faisal reacted by saying that “his right arm had been broken”—his eldest son, Salem, became head of the family and its businesses.15 Salem remained a royal confidant and one of King Fahd’s two closest friends until 1988, when he too died in a plane crash. Currently, Bakr bin Laden is the family’s chief, and he is personally and economically close to the al-Sauds. Bakr is “part of a small group of friends around the king,” and his firm is still viewed in Saudi Arabia as “the King’s private contractors.”16
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 14