THE BIN LADENS: An Arabian Family in the American Century.
Steve Coll. Penguin. 672 pages. $35.
Life, as Kierkegaard pointed out, can only be understood retrospectively, but we must live it prospectively. It's a disjunctive paradox, as true for the lives of nations as it is for those of individuals. Steve Coll's stunningly researched and gripping new book is the sort of history that naturally gives rise to such large thoughts.
The Bin Ladens proposes not so much an alternate history of the 20th century but an account of one that occurred simultaneous to our usual collective recollection of the last 100 years. While the struggles of the American Century -- world wars, depression, imperialism, the fights with right- and left-wing totalitarianisms -- were preoccupying us, out of sight and beyond our Western and essentially secular understanding, men, ideas and appetites born of a desert were conjoining in ways that created the first great challenge of this new era, the confrontation with Islamic jihadism.
History as good as the sort Coll has written here sobers as well as enlightens. The author brings formidable credentials to his task. He's the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret operations in Afghanistan -- Ghost Wars -- and won another Pulitzer for explanatory journalism while a reporter for The Washington Post, where he later served as a foreign correspondent and managing editor. The Bin Ladens joins Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower and Mary Habeck's too-often overlooked Knowing the Enemy as the books that ought to be read by anyone who really wants to understand the origins of the current crisis.
Coll's book is important because it's a history of two families, the bin Laden and Al-Saud, whose patriarch Abdulaziz Ibn Saud ''walked out of Kuwait in 1902 with a sword, some camels and a small band of followers to reclaim, in his family's name, the mud-walled town of Riyadh in the central Arabian plateau, and the paltry realm it oversaw.'' Thirty blood-soaked years later, he ''announced at last the formation of the new Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.'' A few years after Abdulaziz stormed out of Kuwait, an impoverished, one-eyed teenage boy named Mohammed bin Laden walked north out of his native Yemen to the Arabian port city of Jeddah in search of work. Eventually, he would found a construction and trading company that would become Saudi Arabia's largest, with holdings that, today, extend around the globe, including in the United States.
There are hundreds of bin Ladens -- survivors from among Mohammed's more than 50 children and their descendants -- and Coll's book gives ample attention to the most infamous of the patriarch's progeny, Osama.
Careful readers of the torrent of post-Sept. 11 journalism and book-length studies won't find too much that's new or surprising here, although a couple of important facts about al-Qaeda's co-founder are nailed down conclusively. One has to do with precisely when and how he became radicalized. Coll reports that it occurred while he was attending an elite high school in Jeddah and came under the profound influence of an Egyptian instructor, who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Osama apparently joined the brotherhood as a teenager.
Coll's exhaustive, but cautious reconstruction of the bin Ladens' finances also clears up one of the enduring myths about Osama. He never was particularly wealthy by international standards, and, when his family cut him off from their business under pressure from the Sauds, he essentially lost everything. Coll carefully recounts the FBI's and CIA's attempts to figure out what sort of financing he still receives from various Islamic charities, and there's suspicion that some of his sisters still may be passing him money.
What's most striking about Coll's book is its undidactic but unflinching account of just how rancidly dysfunctional the Saudi royals' governance has been and of how the bin Ladens -- canny but in so many essential ways incompetent -- have benefited from their patrons' venality through a breathtakingly supine sycophancy and simple bribery. Corrupt, hypocritical, frightened and inept at everything but self-preservation, the Sauds have essentially looted their country's foreign-developed oil riches, using the bin Ladens to dole out development only when it was necessary to placate a restive populace.
Coll's book makes an important contribution to the contemporary debate by putting to rest the myth that jihadism is fueled by a passion to see justice for the Palestinians. In fact, garden-variety anti-Semitism of the most repellent sort has been part of the Saud/bin Laden axis from the start.
Today, the son of one of Osama's half-brothers runs a group called the World Assembly of Muslim Youth out of Falls Church, Va. He has a Saudi diplomatic passport and the special mission of reaching out to American Muslims with Wahabi religious materials, including one that says: ``The Jews are enemies of the faithful, God and the angels; the Jews are humanity's enemies; they foment immorality in this world.''
Tim Rutten reviewed this book for The Los Angeles Times.
