THE BIN LADENS

Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens is the history of a family and its fortune: of how a one-eyed illiterate, Mohammed Bin Laden, from a harsh region of Yemen, went as a young man to the new, oil-rich country of Saudi Arabia and with remarkable speed became a vital figure in its development, building great mosques and highways and making himself and his many children into millionaires. It is the story of the Saudi royal family, who the Bin Ladens served so loyally, and without whose capricious favour they would have been nothing. And it is the story of the revolutions in a modern Islam awash with oil money: of a country founded on extreme religious purity becoming mired in the temptations of the West. In only two generations the men and women of the Bin Laden family moved from a desert canyon in Yemen to luxury jets, yachts and private compounds around the world. The religious and cultural pressures could not have been greater. This resulted in everything from enthusiasm for the West, exemplified by Osama’s brother Salem, a free-living pilot and adventurer, to an overwhelming determination to destroy it.