Roguish Lawyer
07-29-2004, 09:47
No, I haven't read it.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005413
Her Virtual Prison
Carmen bin Ladin lifts the veil on the culture that produced her infamous brother-in-law.
BY DANIELLE CRITTENDEN
Thursday, July 29, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Very few first-person accounts have emerged from behind the Saudi veil. For good reason: The rare Saudi woman not stifled into submission would risk severe punishment for speaking out. This is the importance of "Inside the Kingdom," by Carmen bin Ladin. Don't be put off by the author's last name. Ms. Bin Ladin is not a distant relation seeking to cash in on her family's notoriety. She is the ex-wife of Osama's older brother Yeslam, and she has her own story to tell. Her memoir is perhaps the most vivid account yet to appear in the West of the oppressive lives of Saudi women.
Carmen, who grew up in Geneva, is the daughter of a Swiss father and Iranian mother. She was raised as a Muslim of liberal outlook. When she met Yeslam in Geneva in the early 1970s, she had no reason to doubt that he was as forward-looking as she. She followed her husband to business school in California and then back to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and the bin Ladin family business.
The bin Ladens (the spelling varies: Carmen favors "Laden" for plural forms) are one of the richest and most important non-princely Saudi clans. Yeslam's father, the founder of the fortune, had died by the time Carmen joined the family. He left behind 22 wives, 25 sons and 29 daughters. Yeslam was known to his relatives as "Number Ten," referring to his position in the line of patriarchal succession.
Carmen's life in Saudi Arabia began when her car pulled up to Yeslam's mother's compound outside Jeddah. In the mid-1970s, the town was still not much more than a donkey crossroads in the middle of the desert. If winds weren't whipping up the sand in blinding funnels, the sun was scorching down with unbearable heat. Shrouded in her unfamiliar and suffocating black robes, Carmen entered what sounds like a luridly decorated marble tomb. From then on, she was no longer free.
Each day, Yeslam vanished to work. Carmen and her young daughter passed the hours in the company of his mother and sister. Rarely could she leave the house--rarely, even, did she see sunlight. Courtyards had to be cleared of male servants before she could poke her head outside; she was not even permitted to cross the street alone to visit a relative. When she did venture out, she had to wear a choking abaya and thick socks to hide her ankles. "It was like carrying a jail on your back," she writes.
Nor was she much freer inside the house. She could not listen to music, pick up an uncensored book or newspaper, or watch anything on television but a dour man reading the Quran. Nor could she absorb herself in household tasks. These were left to foreign servants, including the care of children.
Carmen was horrified by the effects of this isolation and uselessness. "The Bin Laden women were like pets kept by their husbands;. . . .Occasionally they were patted on the head and given presents; sometimes they were taken out, mostly to each other's houses;. . . .I never once saw one of my sisters-in-law pick up a book. These women never met with men other than their husbands, and never talked about larger issues even with the men they had married. They had nothing to say."
She would meet Osama only a couple of times. (She describes the young Osama as "tall and stern, his fierce piety intimidating.") She had more contact with his young wife, Najwah, in the female section of one of the segregated bin Laden houses: Najwah, like so many women raised in Saudi Arabia, "never permitted herself to want more from her life than obedience to her husband and father." She carried her obedience to such extremes that it nearly killed the couple's infant son. The child had become dehydrated in the heat. Carmen watched as Najwah pitifully tried to spoon water into the baby's mouth. Najwah would not use a bottle because Osama did not approve of this newfangled Western technology.
At first, Carmen consoled herself with hopes that the oil boom would soften the harsh bedouin culture of Saudi Arabia. "Naively I believed that economic change would be followed by social shifts, too." But after the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Saudi rulers crushed all liberalizing trends in their society. Yeslam, too, changed for the worse. He returned with Carmen to Geneva to expand his business but this time took along the rigors of Saudi Islam. The marriage deteriorated, and Carmen began to fear for the future of her three daughters. Although Yeslam had never been an attentive father, he sought custody of them in the couple's divorce proceedings. If he prevailed, the girls could have vanished into Saudi Arabia, never to be seen by their mother again.
Fortunately, the Swiss courts awarded custody to Carmen. She has emerged from her ordeal with some urgent insights into the kingdom from which she escaped: "Osama bin Laden and those like him didn't spring, fully formed, from the desert sand. They were made. They were fashioned by the workings of an opaque and intolerant medieval society that is closed to the outside world. It is a society where half the population have had their basic rights as people amputated, and obedience to the strictest rules of Islam must be absolute. Despite all the power of their oil-revenue, the Saudis are structured by a hateful, backward-looking view of religion and an education that is a school for intolerance . . . .When Osama dies, I fear there will be a thousand men to take his place."
Yet Carmen's own example is reason for optimism. The contempt for outsiders that Osama blindly swallowed repelled his sister-in-law--and drove her to seek a freer life for herself and her daughters. Let us hope that more brave dissenters--female and male--will follow her lead.
Ms. Crittenden is the author of "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us" and "Amanda Bright @ Home," a novel. You can buy "Inside the Kingdom" by Carmen bin Ladin from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005413
Her Virtual Prison
Carmen bin Ladin lifts the veil on the culture that produced her infamous brother-in-law.
BY DANIELLE CRITTENDEN
Thursday, July 29, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Very few first-person accounts have emerged from behind the Saudi veil. For good reason: The rare Saudi woman not stifled into submission would risk severe punishment for speaking out. This is the importance of "Inside the Kingdom," by Carmen bin Ladin. Don't be put off by the author's last name. Ms. Bin Ladin is not a distant relation seeking to cash in on her family's notoriety. She is the ex-wife of Osama's older brother Yeslam, and she has her own story to tell. Her memoir is perhaps the most vivid account yet to appear in the West of the oppressive lives of Saudi women.
Carmen, who grew up in Geneva, is the daughter of a Swiss father and Iranian mother. She was raised as a Muslim of liberal outlook. When she met Yeslam in Geneva in the early 1970s, she had no reason to doubt that he was as forward-looking as she. She followed her husband to business school in California and then back to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and the bin Ladin family business.
The bin Ladens (the spelling varies: Carmen favors "Laden" for plural forms) are one of the richest and most important non-princely Saudi clans. Yeslam's father, the founder of the fortune, had died by the time Carmen joined the family. He left behind 22 wives, 25 sons and 29 daughters. Yeslam was known to his relatives as "Number Ten," referring to his position in the line of patriarchal succession.
Carmen's life in Saudi Arabia began when her car pulled up to Yeslam's mother's compound outside Jeddah. In the mid-1970s, the town was still not much more than a donkey crossroads in the middle of the desert. If winds weren't whipping up the sand in blinding funnels, the sun was scorching down with unbearable heat. Shrouded in her unfamiliar and suffocating black robes, Carmen entered what sounds like a luridly decorated marble tomb. From then on, she was no longer free.
Each day, Yeslam vanished to work. Carmen and her young daughter passed the hours in the company of his mother and sister. Rarely could she leave the house--rarely, even, did she see sunlight. Courtyards had to be cleared of male servants before she could poke her head outside; she was not even permitted to cross the street alone to visit a relative. When she did venture out, she had to wear a choking abaya and thick socks to hide her ankles. "It was like carrying a jail on your back," she writes.
Nor was she much freer inside the house. She could not listen to music, pick up an uncensored book or newspaper, or watch anything on television but a dour man reading the Quran. Nor could she absorb herself in household tasks. These were left to foreign servants, including the care of children.
Carmen was horrified by the effects of this isolation and uselessness. "The Bin Laden women were like pets kept by their husbands;. . . .Occasionally they were patted on the head and given presents; sometimes they were taken out, mostly to each other's houses;. . . .I never once saw one of my sisters-in-law pick up a book. These women never met with men other than their husbands, and never talked about larger issues even with the men they had married. They had nothing to say."
She would meet Osama only a couple of times. (She describes the young Osama as "tall and stern, his fierce piety intimidating.") She had more contact with his young wife, Najwah, in the female section of one of the segregated bin Laden houses: Najwah, like so many women raised in Saudi Arabia, "never permitted herself to want more from her life than obedience to her husband and father." She carried her obedience to such extremes that it nearly killed the couple's infant son. The child had become dehydrated in the heat. Carmen watched as Najwah pitifully tried to spoon water into the baby's mouth. Najwah would not use a bottle because Osama did not approve of this newfangled Western technology.
At first, Carmen consoled herself with hopes that the oil boom would soften the harsh bedouin culture of Saudi Arabia. "Naively I believed that economic change would be followed by social shifts, too." But after the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Saudi rulers crushed all liberalizing trends in their society. Yeslam, too, changed for the worse. He returned with Carmen to Geneva to expand his business but this time took along the rigors of Saudi Islam. The marriage deteriorated, and Carmen began to fear for the future of her three daughters. Although Yeslam had never been an attentive father, he sought custody of them in the couple's divorce proceedings. If he prevailed, the girls could have vanished into Saudi Arabia, never to be seen by their mother again.
Fortunately, the Swiss courts awarded custody to Carmen. She has emerged from her ordeal with some urgent insights into the kingdom from which she escaped: "Osama bin Laden and those like him didn't spring, fully formed, from the desert sand. They were made. They were fashioned by the workings of an opaque and intolerant medieval society that is closed to the outside world. It is a society where half the population have had their basic rights as people amputated, and obedience to the strictest rules of Islam must be absolute. Despite all the power of their oil-revenue, the Saudis are structured by a hateful, backward-looking view of religion and an education that is a school for intolerance . . . .When Osama dies, I fear there will be a thousand men to take his place."
Yet Carmen's own example is reason for optimism. The contempt for outsiders that Osama blindly swallowed repelled his sister-in-law--and drove her to seek a freer life for herself and her daughters. Let us hope that more brave dissenters--female and male--will follow her lead.
Ms. Crittenden is the author of "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us" and "Amanda Bright @ Home," a novel. You can buy "Inside the Kingdom" by Carmen bin Ladin from the OpinionJournal bookstore.