Osama Bin Laden.
(Photo: AP)
(This story has been reposted from The Quint’s archives to mark a series of coordinated terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda against the US on 11 September 2001, which led to the collapse of the World Trade Centre.)
(The article features excerpts from Jean Sasson’s book ‘Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World’.)
“People are not born terrorists. Nor do they become terrorists in a single stroke. But step by step, like a farmer preparing a field for planting, their lives unfold in pattern that leaves them prepared to receive the seed of terrorism.
And so it was with Osama bin Laden. And the man, men, and events that planted that seed faded away. But the seed grew and the terrorist walked. And the man before, became the terrorist thereafter.
Najwa Ghanem bin Laden knows only the man. The West knows only the terrorist.”
These words end Jean Sasson’s introduction to the book Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World. Najwa Ghanem bin Laden is Osama bin Laden’s first wife. She was his first cousin and a year younger to him. She grew up in Syria where Osama’s family would visit them and she witnessed the making of the man who would spearhead a terror attack so bloody that history would be split between events before 9/11 and after.
Six years after his death, we take a look at al Qaeda’s most dreaded leader Osama bin Laden’s roles of being a husband and father.
Sasson says the West knows only the terrorist but that’s probably true of the rest of the world as well. The book, published in 2009, shares rare insight into moments of bin Laden’s childhood through the eyes of one who loved him as deeply as the world reviled him.
Najwa bin Laden speaks of moments in the life of young Osama that sound similar to any other curious, mischievous child, albeit one who lived in a militarised zone.
The one sign of who bin Laden would become in the future reflects only in the constant reiteration of his unwavering devout belief in Islam.
Omar bin Laden, Osama’s fourth child, also speaks candidly to Sasson about his own memories of his father. Osama bin Laden was a child of divorce and after his mother remarried, she had four more children. Of these circumstances, Omar says:
While Najwa constantly emphasises her belief that Osama was a good husband, Omar’s story differs when he talks about him as a father.
But Osama bin Laden will never truly be seen as a son or a husband. He will be hated by those who lost sons, husbands and other family and friends to his terrorism or his ideology. He has firmly established himself in public memory and in history books as the mind behind one of the worst terrorist strikes in the history of mankind.
But forever more, history will show Osama bin Laden as America’s longest running Public Enemy Number 1.
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