The Looming Tower (12 page)

Surrounded by the lunar foothills of the al-Sarawat escarpment, which shield the city from the eyes of nonbelievers, Mecca arose at the intersection of two ancient caravan routes and served as a depot for silk, spices, and perfumes from Asia and Africa on their way to the Mediterranean. Even before the advent of Islam, this important trading center was esteemed as a holy site by virtue of the empty cubical building called the Kaaba. In Muslim tradition, the Kaaba is the center of the planet, the focus of all Muslim prayer. It is said that Adam laid the first stone and that the structure was rebuilt by the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham in the Jewish and Christian traditions) and his son Ishmael, the forefather of the Arabs, using the gray-blue rock from the enclosing hills. Thus Mohammed bin Laden joined hands with the first man and the progenitor of monotheism.

The renovation of the Grand Mosque took twenty years. Mohammed bin Laden would not live to see it finished; indeed, the Saudi Binladin Group would renovate both the Grand Mosque and the Prophet’s Mosque a second time, at a total cost of more than $18 billion. Bin Laden’s original plan for the Grand Mosque is a masterwork of crowd management, with forty-one main entrances, bathroom facilities for
1,440
people, and escalators that can transport
100,000
people per hour. Two wide galleries of arches enclose a gargantuan open courtyard. During hajj, the mosque can accommodate a million worshippers at once. Nearly every surface—even the roof—is made of marble, lending the building a final touch of cool, impersonal, formidable splendor—the universal mark of modern Saudi religious architecture.

King Saud’s rule was disastrous in so many ways that, in 1958, Crown Prince Faisal effectively seized control of the government. He later said that when he took over there was less than a hundred dollars in the treasury. He couldn’t meet the payroll or pay the interest on the Kingdom’s debt. The National Commercial Bank turned down Faisal’s application for a loan, citing King Saud’s miserable credit record. While the crown prince shopped for another institution willing to bail out the government, Mohammed bin Laden quietly fronted the money, a gesture that sealed the ties between the bin Ladens and the royal family, and particularly between Faisal and his chief builder.

M
OHAMMED BIN
L
ADEN
was one of the first people to view the country from above, rather than from the more modest vantage of the camel’s back. He received special permission from the king to fly, an activity prohibited for private citizens, so he could survey his far-flung projects from the air. Most of his pilots were from the American military, which had begun training Saudi forces in 1953. The country is as big as the eastern half of the United States, but in the 1950s one could still fly from the Persian Gulf—or the Arabian Gulf, as the Arabs call it—to the Red Sea without seeing a single mark of civilization except for the occasional Mercedes trucks crisscrossing the desert floor along elusive caravan tracks. The imposing dunes flatten out and the wadis become dim tracings in the bright, buttery sand. There are no rivers, no large bodies of water, few trees. Development was confined largely to the oil fields in the salt flats of the Eastern Province. The entire lower portion of the country, an area the size of France, is called the Empty Quarter—a great forbidding vacancy, the largest sand desert in the world. Flying over the middle of the country, one sees a featureless graveled plain. In the northern section, the few pilots operating at the time would fly low to view the ruins of the Hijaz railroad, which the Arab forces, led by T. E. Lawrence, destroyed in the First World War.

As one flies west, however, the earth suddenly lurches up, forming the al-Sarawat Range, a steep mountain barrier that stretches a thousand miles, from Jordan to the southern coast of Yemen. There are peaks within the range over ten thousand feet high. The al-Sarawat escarpment divides the country into unequal halves, with the slender western portion, the cosmopolitan Hijaz, squeezed into the space between the mountains and the Red Sea, effectively cutting it off from the vastness and the radical spirituality of the interior.

Like a sentry on the mountain rim stands the ancient summer resort of Taif. It is different from any other place in Arabia. The breeze from the Red Sea collides with the mountain barrier, creating a cooling updraft, which bathes the high plateau in fog and sudden violent rains. In the winter, there are occasional freezes. Before Islam, the region was noted for its vineyards, and later for its prickly pears and fruit trees—peaches, apricots, oranges, and pomegranates. Roses from Taif have such a potent aroma that they are used to make prized perfumes. Mountain lions once stalked herds of Arabian oryx in fields of wild lavender, but when the lions were hunted to near extinction, the local population of hamadryas baboons boomed out of control, roaming the upper reaches like a horde of demanding beggars. It was to Taif, surrounded by the cool gardens and the scent of eucalyptus, that the old king, Abdul Aziz, went to die, in November 1953.

Twice it has been Taif’s unfortunate fate to stand in the way of the consolidation of Arabia, first spiritually and then politically. In 630
C
.
E
., the Prophet Mohammed laid siege to the walled city, which until then had resisted his authority. The Muslim forces gained permission from their leader to use a catapult to breach the city’s defenses despite the fact that women and children would be harmed. (Later, al-Qaeda would use this precedent to justify the killing of noncombatants on September
11,
likening the use of airplanes to that of the catapult so long ago.) In that instance, the siege failed and Mohammed withdrew from the city, but within the year the town’s leaders converted to Islam and the last outpost of paganism fell. Then again, in
1924,
when Abdul Aziz was waging his campaign to unify Arabia, the city surrendered to the Ikhwan, only to see the town pillaged and more than three hundred men slaughtered, their throats slit, their corpses thrown into the public wells. With the fall of Taif, the rest of the Hijaz lay open to the Saudi forces.

In the aftermath of that massacre, Faisal, who was then one of the teenage warrior sons of Abdul Aziz, led the Saudis down the precipitous caravan trail that spiraled toward Mecca. He had a vision at the time that one day a genuine road would connect the Hijaz with the nation that his family was forging, however bloodily.

Until Faisal became king, however, a road to Taif remained an unattainable dream. The sheer mountain wall defied even the most muscular and sophisticated approaches of modern construction. Apath could be blasted through the rock, but there was still the strategic problem of getting equipment to the site—the excavators, bulldozers, backhoes, dump trucks, and graders necessary for modern construction. Otherwise, the road would have to be built almost like a tunnel, with one segment completed before the next could be started. Faisal invited many foreign companies to bid on the project, but none of them could figure out how to do it, even with an extravagant budget. Then bin Laden offered to build the road. He even provided a timetable.

Bin Laden’s brilliant solution for getting the equipment to the site was to disassemble the giant machines and mount the pieces on the backs of donkeys and camels. Once in place, the bulldozers and tractors were put back together and set to work.

In Taif, there is a legend that to establish the route, bin Laden pushed a donkey over the edge of the mountain and followed him as he picked his way down the course of the future highway. For twenty months, beginning in
1961,
he lived with his men on the side of the mountain, personally setting the dynamite charges and marking the path for the bulldozers with chalk. Despite his timetable, work went slowly. Occasionally King Faisal would arrive at the site to inquire about the mounting unbudgeted expenses.

The two-lane road that bin Laden built tiptoes down the granite escarpment in long winding loops, past the circling raptors, through geological time zones. In the distance, the Red Sea underscores the horizon; just beyond lies the barren shore of Sudan. The craftsmanship of the workers is evident in the stone walls and bridges that echo the caravan trail nearby. About two-thirds of the way down the mountain, the granite turns into basalt, and then to sandstone; the road widens into four lanes and becomes less headlong; and then finally the highway breaks free, six lanes now, on the yellow desert floor. The road from Taif to Mecca is only fifty-five miles; when it was completed, Saudi Arabia was finally united, and Mohammed bin Laden became a national hero.

T
T IS THE CUSTOM IN THE KINGDOM THAT,
during the fasting month of Ramadan, beggars bring their petitions to the princes and the wealthy members of society; it’s a particularly intimate and direct expression of charity. Mohammed bin Laden was known to be pious and openhanded. He paid for the operation in Spain of a man who had lost his sight. On another occasion, a man sought his help in building a well for his village. Bin Laden not only provided the well, he also donated a mosque. He avoided the publicity that usually attends such notable gifts, saying that his intention was to please God, not to gain fame. “What I remember is that he always prayed on time and would inspire people around him to pray,” his son Osama once recalled. “I do not remember him ever doing anything outside of Islamic law.”

The extravagant side of Mohammed bin Laden’s nature made itself evident when it came to women. Islam permits a man four wives at a time, and divorce is a simple matter, at least for a man, who only needs to declare, “I divorce you.” Before his death, Mohammed bin Laden officially had fathered fifty-four children from twenty-two wives. The total number of wives he procured is impossible to determine, since he would often “marry” in the afternoon and divorce that night. An assistant followed behind to take care of any children he might have left in his wake. He also had a number of concubines, who stayed in the bin Laden compound if they bore him children. “My father used to say that he had fathered twenty-five sons for the jihad,” his seventeenth son, Osama, later remembered.

Mohammed had already taken a Syrian wife from the port of Latakiya in the early fifties. He went to the region frequently on business, and in the summer of 1956 he met a fourteen-year-old girl named Alia Ghanem. Her family were citrus farmers living in two small villages outside the port, called Omraneya and Babryon. The region is a center of the Alawite sect, a branch of Shia Islam that claims
1.5
million adherents in Syria, including the ruling Assad family. Within Islam, the Alawites are often denigrated as a cult since they incorporate certain Christian, Zoroastrian, and pagan elements into their beliefs. They subscribe to the notion of reincarnation, believing that upon death a person may be transformed into another being or even a star. They also practice
taqiyya,
or religious dissimulation—denying, for instance, that they are members of the sect to outsiders so they can blend into the mainstream.

Alia joined bin Laden’s household as the fourth wife—a position that is sometimes called the “slave wife,” especially by the wives with more tenure. It must have been all the more difficult for a girl of fourteen, taken from her family and placed in the highly restricted environment that bin Laden imposed. By comparison with the other wives, Alia was modern and secular, although like all of bin Laden’s wives she was fully veiled in public, not even letting her eyes show through the several layers of black linen.

Mohammed bin Laden and Alia’s only child was born in Riyadh in January
1958,
named Osama, “the Lion,” after one of the companions of the Prophet. When he was six months old, the entire extended family moved to the holy city of Medina, where bin Laden was beginning renovation of the Prophet’s Mosque. For most of Osama’s young life, however, he lived in Jeddah. Though his father was by now prosperous and esteemed, the family occupied a large, ramshackle house in al-Amariyya, a modest neighborhood with small shops and lines of laundry hanging off the balconies. It was Jeddah’s first suburb, built just outside the boundary of the old city walls. The house is gone now, replaced by a mosque, but Mohammed bin Laden’s office across the street still stands—a dingy, one-story stucco building with a long row of barred windows. It bespeaks the modesty of a man who despised the show of wealth that was so characteristic of the newly rich nation. “Rest his soul, my father was very strict, and he would pay no attention to appearances,” Osama said. “Our house was of a lower standard than most of the houses of the people working for us.”

Osama spent his early years among a horde of children in his father’s house. Mohammed ran the family like a corporation, with each wife reporting on her division. The children rarely saw the great man, who was often away on business. Whenever he returned, he would call them into his office and gaze upon his vast brood. During the Islamic feasting days, he would kiss them and give each child a gold coin; otherwise, he rarely spoke to them. “I remember reciting a poem to him, and he gave me a hundred riyals, which was a huge amount of money in those days,” Osama remembered. The children sought to either please him or run from him. It is not surprising that the remote and powerful father stirred deep currents of longing in his shy and willowy son, even though their exchanges were rare.

Mohammed frequently entertained distinguished male guests in his modest home, especially during the hajj, when pilgrims from all over the world passed through Jeddah on their way to worship at the holy sites. In typical Saudi manner, the men would sit barefoot on the carpeted floor, resting one arm against a bolster, as Mohammed’s younger sons passed wordlessly among them, serving dates and pouring weak cardamom coffee from long-spouted silver pots. The patriarch enjoyed religious debates, and he would bring together the most notable clerics in the Kingdom to discuss often very obscure points of theology.