Things might have turned out differently for Osama bin Laden–and for the denizens of southern Manhattan–if the tall, thin, soft-spoken 44-year-old hadn’t been born rich, or if he’d been born rich but not a second-rank Saudi. It might have been another story if, while studying engineering in college, the young man had drawn a different teacher for Islamic Studies rather than a charismatic Palestinian lecturer who fired his religious fervor. Things might have been different if the Soviet Union hadn’t invaded Afghanistan, if Saddam Hussein hadn’t stolen Kuwait, or if U.S. forces hadn’t retreated so hastily after a beating in Somalia, giving bin Laden the idea that Americans are cowards who can be defeated easily.
Of course, Osama bin Laden wouldn’t buy any of that. For him, life is preordained, written in advance by God, who in bin Laden’s view must have delighted in the deaths of all those infidels in Manhattan last week. Still, those are among the seminal details that shaped the man U.S. officials believe to be not only capable but also guilty of one of the worst single massacres of civilians since Hitler’s camps were shut down. How does any one man, and an intelligent man, come to be so angry? And so callous? Bin Laden has considered himself at war with the U.S. for years, even if the U.S. is getting there only now. Still, how does one man come to be so comfortably certain in the face of responsibility for so many devoured lives?
Last week’s deadly operation took planning, patience, money, cool, stealth and extraordinarily committed operatives. It was a measure of the sophistication of the complex network of devout, high-spirited Islamic militants whom bin Laden has been assembling for almost 20 years. The big challenge here was will. Whence did the will grow to do something so atrocious?
In many ways, bin Laden’s story is like that of many other Muslim extremists. There’s the fanatical religiosity and the intemperate interpretation of Islam; the outrage over the dominance, particularly in the Arab world, of a secular, decadent U.S.; the indignation over U.S. support for Israel; the sense of grievance over the perceived humiliations of the Arab people at the hands of the West.
But bin Laden brings some particular, and collectively potent, elements to this equation. As a volunteer in the war that the Islamic rebels of Afghanistan fought against the Soviets in the 1980s, bin Laden had a front-row seat at an astonishing and empowering development: the defeat of a superpower by a gaggle of makeshift militias. Though the U.S., with billions of dollars in aid, helped the militias in their triumph, bin Laden soon turned on their benefactor. When U.S. troops in 1990 arrived in his sacred Saudi homeland to fight Saddam Hussein, bin Laden considered their infidel presence a desecration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthplace. He was inspired to take on a second superpower, and he was funded to do so: by a fortune inherited from his contractor father, by an empire of business enterprises, by the hubris that comes from being a rich kid whose commands had always been obeyed by nannies, butlers and maids.
Though bin Laden grew up wealthy, he wasn’t entirely within the charmed circle in Saudi Arabia. As the son of immigrants, he didn’t have quite the right credentials. His mother came from Syria by some reports, Palestine by others. His father moved to Saudi Arabia from neighboring Yemen, a desperately poor country looked down on by Saudis. If bin Laden felt any alienation or resentment about his status, it was good preparation for the break he would ultimately make with the privileged and bourgeois life that was laid out for him at birth.
The family’s wealth came from the Saudi bin Laden Group, built by Osama’s father Mohamed, who had four wives and 52 children. Mohamed had had the good luck of befriending the country’s founder, Abdel Aziz al Saud. That relationship led to important government contracts such as refurbishing the shrines at Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holiest places, projects that moved young Osama deeply. Today the company, with 35,000 employees worldwide, is worth $5 billion. Osama got his share at 13 when his father died, leaving him $80 million, a fortune the son subsequently expanded to an estimated $250 million.
At the King Abdel Aziz University in Jidda, bin Laden, according to associates, was greatly influenced by one of his teachers, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who was a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has played a large role in the resurgence of Islamic religiosity. Bin Laden, who like most Saudis is a member of the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, had been pious from childhood, but his encounter with Azzam seemed to deepen his faith. What’s more, through Azzam he became steeped not in the then popular ideology of pan-Arabism, which stresses the unity of all Arabs, but in a more ambitious pan-Islamicism, which reaches out to all the world’s 1 billion Muslims.
And so bin Laden at age 22 was quick to sign up to help fellow Muslims in Afghanistan fight the godless invading Soviets in 1979. For hard-liners like bin Laden, a non-Muslim infringement on Islamic territory goes beyond the political sin of oppression; it is an offense to God that must be corrected at all costs.
