the northern limits of the city. Batarfi and Bin Laden would bump out across the scrubby wasteland as the heat of the day wore off, their cars full of chattering friends.
“We’d play a game, then kneel together and pray the maghreb (sunset prayer).”
The boys sat side by side in the warm darkness, munching sandwiches and drinking cans of juice and fizzy drinks from the cooler.
“Osama was very quiet and shy,” remembers Batarfi. “He was always soft-spoken. But he had this strange authority about him. He loved football, but he didn’t approve of the very short shorts that players wore in those days. He wore long shorts to the knees, then tracksuit slacks, and we all copied him. He divided us into four groups—Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali, named after the Companions of the Prophet who were the first four caliphs. Then he’d ask us questions: ‘When was the Battle of Uhud?’ ‘Three years after the Hijrah,’ someone would say. ‘Right,’ he’d say, ‘that’s five points to Abu Bakr.’ It was like a TV quiz show, but without the clapping—that, he explained, is not Islamic. When someone got the right answer we’d all sing out ‘Allahu akbar! ’ ”
Osama’s religiosity—and his love of soccer—would have given great pleasure to his late father, Mohammed, once one of the most respected and powerful businessmen in Saudi Arabia.
THE BUILDER
King Abdul Aziz and his friend Mohammed Bin Laden had just two working eyeballs between them—one each. Their handicapped sight was one of the personal bonds that linked the two men. Another connection was that, through multiple marriages, they had both derived great pleasure from the fathering of several dozen children each. Abdul Aziz had lost his eye to trachoma, and legend had it that the Yemeni-born Bin Laden had won royal favor by offering one of his own eyes to the king in an unsuccessful eye transplant.
This myth was respectfully whispered in the ranks of the Bin Laden construction company, but the truth was more prosaic. A fanatical footballer when young, Mohammed Bin Laden had lost his eye in a wild game of pickup soccer when he was a building laborer in the Sudan, a decade before he set foot in the Kingdom, where he built up his own business in the 1940s and ’50s as a construction tycoon.
The one-eyed center forward made his fortune through hard work and by avoiding shortcuts. Mohammed Bin Laden paid his fellow Yemenis fairly and he did not overcharge his clients. His fortune derived less from his customers’ pockets than from his own shrewd investment in bargain-price land around his developments—and when it came to royal projects, he asked for no payment until the palace was finally completed to the prince’s total satisfaction. He served Abdul Aziz as director of public works and played the same role unofficially, after 1953, with his son King Saud.
Mohammed Bin Laden never scuttled from a job on which he was losing money. He was “the Builder”—he always delivered. He was admired across the Kingdom for the solidity of his work, and he was known to be a pious man. He had been the obvious choice for contractor in the 1950s when the House of Saud decided they wished to expand the grand mosques of Mecca and Medina, recasting the old prayer halls with soaring, Alhambra-style arcades, and enlarging the covered area no less than sixfold.
The new buildings featured colorful Maghreb tiles that were plastered over miles of steel-reinforced concrete of extraordinary strength—as the Saudi National Guard and army discovered in Mecca in 1979 when they tried to blast holes in it.
“We should give the Bin Ladens a medal for their workmanship,” said the jaunty young Prince Bandar bin Sultan at the time. “Then behead them.”
It was a common shortcut for Saudi contractors to skimp on materials, so the siege of the Grand Mosque provided an unexpected endorsement to the thoroughness of Mohammed the Builder, who died in a plane crash in
“We’d play a game, then kneel together and pray the maghreb (sunset prayer).”
The boys sat side by side in the warm darkness, munching sandwiches and drinking cans of juice and fizzy drinks from the cooler.
“Osama was very quiet and shy,” remembers Batarfi. “He was always soft-spoken. But he had this strange authority about him. He loved football, but he didn’t approve of the very short shorts that players wore in those days. He wore long shorts to the knees, then tracksuit slacks, and we all copied him. He divided us into four groups—Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali, named after the Companions of the Prophet who were the first four caliphs. Then he’d ask us questions: ‘When was the Battle of Uhud?’ ‘Three years after the Hijrah,’ someone would say. ‘Right,’ he’d say, ‘that’s five points to Abu Bakr.’ It was like a TV quiz show, but without the clapping—that, he explained, is not Islamic. When someone got the right answer we’d all sing out ‘Allahu akbar! ’ ”
Osama’s religiosity—and his love of soccer—would have given great pleasure to his late father, Mohammed, once one of the most respected and powerful businessmen in Saudi Arabia.
THE BUILDER
King Abdul Aziz and his friend Mohammed Bin Laden had just two working eyeballs between them—one each. Their handicapped sight was one of the personal bonds that linked the two men. Another connection was that, through multiple marriages, they had both derived great pleasure from the fathering of several dozen children each. Abdul Aziz had lost his eye to trachoma, and legend had it that the Yemeni-born Bin Laden had won royal favor by offering one of his own eyes to the king in an unsuccessful eye transplant.
This myth was respectfully whispered in the ranks of the Bin Laden construction company, but the truth was more prosaic. A fanatical footballer when young, Mohammed Bin Laden had lost his eye in a wild game of pickup soccer when he was a building laborer in the Sudan, a decade before he set foot in the Kingdom, where he built up his own business in the 1940s and ’50s as a construction tycoon.
The one-eyed center forward made his fortune through hard work and by avoiding shortcuts. Mohammed Bin Laden paid his fellow Yemenis fairly and he did not overcharge his clients. His fortune derived less from his customers’ pockets than from his own shrewd investment in bargain-price land around his developments—and when it came to royal projects, he asked for no payment until the palace was finally completed to the prince’s total satisfaction. He served Abdul Aziz as director of public works and played the same role unofficially, after 1953, with his son King Saud.
Mohammed Bin Laden never scuttled from a job on which he was losing money. He was “the Builder”—he always delivered. He was admired across the Kingdom for the solidity of his work, and he was known to be a pious man. He had been the obvious choice for contractor in the 1950s when the House of Saud decided they wished to expand the grand mosques of Mecca and Medina, recasting the old prayer halls with soaring, Alhambra-style arcades, and enlarging the covered area no less than sixfold.
The new buildings featured colorful Maghreb tiles that were plastered over miles of steel-reinforced concrete of extraordinary strength—as the Saudi National Guard and army discovered in Mecca in 1979 when they tried to blast holes in it.
“We should give the Bin Ladens a medal for their workmanship,” said the jaunty young Prince Bandar bin Sultan at the time. “Then behead them.”
It was a common shortcut for Saudi contractors to skimp on materials, so the siege of the Grand Mosque provided an unexpected endorsement to the thoroughness of Mohammed the Builder, who died in a plane crash in
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