Steve Coll on “The Bin Ladens: An...
AMY GOODMAN: So, tell us about his family. He had fifty-four children, one of them Osama bin Laden. Where was Osama in the lineup?
STEVE COLL: Osama is reckoned to be about his seventeenth son. He had twenty-five sons and twenty-nine daughters. He was inspired by the example of the Saudi royal family and many sheikhs in Yemen, where he had come from, men who took multiple wives and had many children by them. But he took that example to extremes, even by Arabian standards. He wasn’t the only prominent sheikh in the peninsula at that time who did so, but it was not, on the other hand, common to do what he did, which was he married at least twenty-two times, probably more than that, and by these wives had fifty-four children, twenty-nine daughters and twenty-five sons.
Each time one of his wives became pregnant, he recognized her as legitimate, and he recognized the children as legitimate, and he treated them all, according to Islamic law, as equals. But there were sort of two classes, in an informal sense, of children. There were a couple of senior wives who stayed married to him for many years, decades, and bore a number of children and lived with him on a big compound. And then there were other wives—and Osama’s mother was such a wife—who were typically married to him for a short period of time, perhaps a couple or three years, and then, after the divorce, he would arrange for the wife’s remarriage to someone with a good income, often a manager in his own company. And so, there were many children who were essentially singleton sons or daughters of short-lived marriages. And yet, they were not outcasts or, you know, discriminated against in law or even in the way he organized his family. They just had a somewhat lesser status than the children of the senior wives.
Sep 15th