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For more than a dozen years during the 1970s and '80s, Carmen Bin Ladin lived a shadowy and increasingly threatened existence as the problematic foreign wife of a junior member of Saudi Arabia's powerful Bin Laden clan. (Spellings of this now-infamous name vary, depending on whether one refers to an individual or the family.)
That she escaped (along with two young daughters) a veiled and psychologically suffocating life in the most restrictive Islamic nation in the world, and chose to tell about it so many years later, is remarkable in itself. Even today, although legally divorced and financially independent, she alludes to living under the pressure of periodic harassment by Bin Laden clan operatives.
Lured by what seemed to be true, youthful love and (at first) an extended "honeymoon" of affection, respect, and material indulgence from husband Yeslam --- whose elusive sibling is the notorious Osama --- the half-Swiss, half-Persian Carmen had fewer illusions about her new role than most Saudi outsiders. But even she didn't imagine the full impact of living in a rigidly patriarchal regime where internal family politics proved every bit as onerous as the heavy, tent-like abayas all women must wear if they dare set foot outside the home.
Viewed through the often humbling lens of perfect hindsight, life in Saudi Arabia a quarter-century ago looked full of promise. Young Carmen and her equally idealistic husband lived a cosmopolitan and sophisticated life, sustained effortlessly on the abundant resources of old family wealth and the sudden influx of vast new oil revenues. In Europe and North America, they lived as Westernized jet-setters; in Saudi Arabia, they slipped through a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland looking glass, where everything was in flux, where an ancient Islamic society was struggling with seemingly opposite demands of theocracy and modernity.
And for a while, as Carmen poignantly recalls through personal anecdotes and several dozen black-and-white family snapshots, it seems as if the forces of liberalization and openness were gaining the ascendant. There were more opportunities for women to study and work, more freedom of unchaperoned association, more personal autonomy in conduct and apparel. But this tantalizing taste of freedom and equality, this crack in the door of religion-based oppression, abruptly slammed shut with the Kuwait invasion and 1990 Gulf War.
By then, her volatile marriage to the increasingly distant, extremist and hypochondriac Yeslam Bin Ladin had been emotionally over for some time, which made Saudi Arabia's accelerated rush back to the Middle Ages even more onerous for Carmen and daughters Wafah and Najia. With almost no genuine friendship to draw on from among the passive, materialistic and often self-absorbed wives, sisters, mistresses or daughters of the vast Bin Laden household, Carmen (while pregnant with a third daughter who would be born in Europe) orchestrated a meticulous plan of escape. Not surprisingly, many details of that plan are not divulged, except that it succeeded in giving the former abaya prisoner and her children a new lease on life in a world where women can speak, move, dress, and believe for themselves.
Carmen Bin Ladin didn't start out as a feminist, social activist, author, or even a student of applied religion. But her passionate and often breathlessly told story says much about her commitment to genuine transcending love; as a mother, daughter, even (however briefly) as a wife. Just critics will find here no opportunistic infidel (of which she's been accused numerous times), nor an opponent of true Islam. She is by no means alone in contending that the Wahhabist sect that rules Saudi Arabia according to its own interpretation of Shari'a Law is in fact a perversion of the faith revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, and is in dire need of reclamation and reform. But perhaps that's the substance of another book.
When I closed the cover on Carmen Bin Ladin's fast-paced but often gut-wrenching INSIDE THE KINGDOM, it didn't even matter to me that the rather sensationalist hook of the "Osama connection" never amounted to more than a name in the background, nor that she never apparently even met the alleged perpetrator of the catastrophes of September 11, 2001. Like her, all I wanted to do was rush outside into the sunshine, breathe unveiled air, and thank God/Allah for creating a world whose beauty still manages to transcend the terrible things human beings keep doing to one another.
--- Reviewed by Pauline Finch (paulinefinch@rogers.com)
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