The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family And Its Fortune By Steve Coll, Allen Lane, Rs 695

In the post 9/11 world, global terrorism has come to be identified with the face of Osama bin Laden. But the man himself represents a number of paradoxes and has helped to reveal many more. He has shown that globalization is no threat to jingoism. On the contrary, it can be used as a potent weapon to reinvigorate parochial nationalistic sentiments. Osama’s appearance, which disguises an excess of brutality under a calm, benign exterior, exemplifies another paradox.

Steve Coll follows up his Pulitzer winning bestseller, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, with this extensively researched family history of the bin Ladens. It will be an understatement to describe it as just another rags-to-riches tale. It is a breathtaking saga of the fluctuating fortunes of a Yemen-based family that emerged from obscurity to become one of the richest and the most influential groups of people, not only in south Asia, but also in the world.

Coll’s chronicle becomes an accumulation of narratives within a narrative in the way it cobbles together divergent accounts of individual members of the family. Very often, these accounts carry dramatic charge. The first chapter, “In exile”, opens with a startling, short and cryptic statement, “The trouble started when an ox died.” Coll is here referring to Awadh Abond bin Laden, the great grandfather of Osama, who borrowed a plow-ox from an Obeid tribesman in the desert village of Gharn Bashireih in modern Yemen. When the ox died accidentally, Abond had no means to pay back the loan and hence was forced to migrate to evade his “extortionist” creditor.

Coll describes in great detail the numerous migrations of the family, which belongs to the Kenda tribe having its origins in pre-Islamic Arabia. The tribe, known to be a belligerent community of rulers and sheikhs, formed a powerful federation in the 17th century in a place called Hadhramawt, meaning ‘death is among us’. The name of the place indicates the lifestyle once followed by this community. The tribe migrated all over south Asia until, in the early 19th century, “the bin Ladens had become merely a family clan of perhaps four to five hundred people, clustered defensively in an ancestral fortress village, struggling for survival”.

Coll’s narrative celebrates this survival instinct as it zeroes in on Mohammed bin Laden, a young Yemeni who began as a bricklayer like his forefathers but then made it to the oil-rich land of Saudi Arabia. He ingratiated himself with the Saudi royal family and thus put his family’s fortunes on an upward curve. It was this bin Laden who first started scripting the myth that was to take the world by surprise in the next generation.

Coll takes great pains to describe the formative years of the most illustrious, and also the most notorious, member of the family, Osama bin Laden. Readers would be interested in the chapter, “Young Osama”, which describes a shy teenager, who in the Sixties was admitted to Al-Thaghr, a “modernizing” school in Jeddah funded by the Saudi government. Osama felt bored there until a Syrian gym teacher, with his “mesmerizing” stories of violent Islamic activism stimulated him.

Coll devotes considerable space to the jihad of Osama, without which his narrative would remain incomplete. The sweeping range of his research can easily make this book another bestseller.