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A Western womanâs journey inside the Bin Laden âvillageâ
From The International Herald Tribune - EFL & Fair UseRobert Kroon/IHT In the late 1970âs, Osama bin Laden went to visit his brother Yeslam, who lived in the sprawling family settlement near Jidda. Answering the doorbell, Carmen Binladin, Yeslamâs Swiss-born wife, stood face to face with her brother-in-law and invited him in. But Osama bin Laden froze, grumbled something in Arabic, and turned his head away. "I was unveiled and he couldnât bear looking at my naked face," recalled Carmen, who is back in Switzerland and involved in a tortuous divorce battle with her Saudi husband, who also lives in Geneva. "My brother-in-law never deigned to speak a word with me," she added. In a revealing biography, "Inside the Opaque Kingdom," Carmen Binladin chronicles her nine years of married life in a puritanical, male-dominated community, "where women are no more than house pets." The book is a diary-style account of her struggle to cope with rules and strictures as suffocating as the desert climate. The English edition will be published by the end of the year by Virago in London. The couple has three daughters but no son, much to her husbandâs disappointment. Binladin, who says that was not an issue in the divorce, returned to Geneva in 1987 "because I could no longer take it and I didnât want my children to grow up in a prison." The couple has been separated for more than 10 years, and the divorce battle is dragging on, for reasons she will not discuss. An elegant woman in her late 40âs, she says she wrote the book as a "document for my three beloved daughters, not for my own notoriety or glory. After all, they have to live with that name, and after 9/11 that has been sheer hell." ...More... An insiderâs look for the terminally curious! The value lies in the ending of the story, folks. Posted by: .com 2003-11-07 |
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