The wonderful Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (the creators of The Likely Lads and Porridge) once briefly toyed with the idea of writing a series in which Osama Bin Laden and his vast family (four wives, two dozen or so children) turned up in an ordinary English neighbourhood and attempted to live incognito. The opportunities for humour in such a set-up were obviously legion, but so, too, equally obviously, were the chances of causing grave offence, and sadly the idea was abandoned.

This lost comic masterpiece kept popping into my head, unbidden, throughout my reading of this book. Of course, Bin Laden, theoretically, is not funny at all, any more than Hitler was. But that didn’t stop people laughing at the Führer, even as he was dropping bombs on London. We laugh at what frightens us. We laugh at authority. We laugh at the pompous and the humourless and the fanatical. Bin Laden is so wicked — so much the opposite of what is commonly regarded as human — that he seems ultimately absurd.

Growing Up Bin Laden purports to be the memoirs of his first wife, Najwa (mother of 11 of his children), and her fourth son, Omar, now 28 and married to a British woman. Their accounts have been woven into a fascinating narrative by an American writer, Jean Sasson. Anyone who has read the letters of Stalin’s daughter, say, or the memoirs of Hitler’s entourage, will recognise the same tone of bewildered loyalty warring with appalled disbelief. Indeed, the careers of Hitler, ­Stalin and Bin Laden seem to have many of the same toxic precursors: an absent father (Bin Laden’s died when he was 10); a strong maternal presence; a grudge against the world, nurtured in childhood; high intelligence, manifested by a prodigious memory (Bin Laden had such a genius for mental arithmetic “men would come to our home and ask him to match his wits against a calculator”) and an inner coldness (“my father…never cuddled me or my brothers”).

Life with such men is seldom congenial, but in terms of sheer domestic awfulness Bin Laden seems to be in a category of his own. Najwa, only 15 at the time of their marriage, describes him as “the most serious man I’ve ever known”, so devout in his Muslim faith that “everything lively was banned”. There was no music in the household, no television, no toys, scant furniture and, even in the heat of Saudi Arabia, no western fripperies such as a refrigerator or air-conditioning. Najwa succumbed to a regime that in the West would be seen as little better than slavery, thickly veiled from head to toe, forbidden to travel alone or set foot out of doors unaccompanied, powerless to control her children’s upbringing (she claims to have borne Bin Laden seven sons and four daughters), obliged to share her husband with three other wives in strict rotation.

Even before he became a terrorist, Bin Laden’s idea of family fun was to make his wives and children go into the desert and sleep in holes in the sand. “No one protested, not even our babies. Everyone did as told, slowly easing our bodies into those dirt holes, waiting for a long, long night to pass.” Laughter was permitted only if the teeth were not exposed. Prescription drugs were forbidden except for dire emergencies: young Omar, a chronic asthmatic, was told to relieve his symptoms by breathing through a honeycomb, a useless remedy. If Bin Laden’s sons failed to conform to his rules, he beat them vigorously with his cane. “Although our father was a quiet figure, and generally spoke softly, his patience hung on a short thread. He was easily angered and could reach a point of violence in an instant.” Bin Laden actively sought out hardship. “Life has to be a burden,” he lectured his son. “Life has to be hard.” Hence the overnight stays in holes.

For much of the 1980s, Bin Laden was away from his family, fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. In 1991, at the time of the first Gulf war, he offered to bring 17,000 mujaheddin to Saudi Arabia to fight Saddam Hussein. The Saudi royal family, however, rejected his offer and instead invited in the infidel Americans to defend the kingdom. In response, Bin Laden openly accused the government of treason and called for an Islamic world revolution. Exiled to Sudan, he survived an assassination attempt and was then expelled by the Sudanese government to Afghanistan, where a local warlord in Jalalabad gave him his own mountain in the Tora Bora. It was to this bleak spot that Bin Laden, in 1996, summoned his vast family.

His previously well-to-do wives did not find it easy to adjust to mountain life. In a scene reminiscent of Eva Gabor in the American sitcom Green Acres, Najwa peered through her veil at her new surroundings: “I saw no taps for running water, although I did not raise the topic. I spotted a new portable gas burner with only one ring, the kind that people use on camping trips.” There was no electricity, no sanitation and no fresh food — not that this bothered Bin Laden, whose only self-indulgences seem to have been the odd glass of sultana water and two spoonfuls of sugar in his tea.

In time, with the consent of the Taliban, he moved his entourage into abandoned Russian military bases. With his cane and his Kalashnikov always close at hand, he spent his days listening to the BBC World Service and ranting into his Dictaphone about the crimes of the Americans, the British and the Jews. Nobody could address him without his permission (“Dear prince, may I speak?”). The only journalist he trusted was Robert Fisk of The Independent (“He will be fair”).

Najwa was “numb” at the turn her life had taken. For Omar the final straw came when his father gathered his sons together in a circle at his feet and suggested an exciting new career: had they considered becoming suicide bombers? “I knew then that I was leaving,” writes Omar, “and leaving soon.” In 1999, with rumours of a huge operation being planned against the Americans, he persuaded his father to let him take Najwa (now pregnant for the 11th time) back to Syria to give birth. Both returned briefly in 2000, but neither was in Afghanistan when the twin towers were destroyed.

With the greatest respect to Sasson, it is impossible to tell how much of this is true and how much made up with hindsight, based on published accounts. For obvious reasons, we have no independent verification of family life with the Bin Ladens. Najwa, if she still exists, is a recluse living back in her native Syria, who has never given an interview. Omar’s formal schooling ended when he was only 12, which makes one wonder whether his fluency here owes more to ghostwriting than to nature. Nevertheless the book seems to ring true, and the psychological portrait of the world’s most wanted man is all the more devastating for being written by two people who apparently once revered him. Like the “incorruptible” terrorist in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Bin Laden is “frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable — and terrible in the simplicity of his idea, calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world”. He is wicked, and absurd.

Growing up Bin Laden by Jean Sasson, Najwa Bin Laden and Omar Bin Laden
Oneworld £16.99 pp334

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