In demanding that President Bush pay attention to Osama, is Osama somehow confusing Mr. Bush with his own Yemeni father, Mohammed, who had ten wives and 54 children? Osama was the seventeenth of twenty four sons – how much positive paternal attention could he have received? (Also, his father died when he was only ten years old).
More important, Osama’s mother, Hamida, was a Syrian whose father gave her to Mohammed bin Laden as part of a business deal. Hamida was known as “Al Abeda” (the slave.) But she was also known for being outspoken and western. (She liked designer pants suits by Chanel). Poor Hamida was also the fourth wife – an unlucky position since Mohammed bin Laden engaged in the convenient practice of divorcing his fourth wife so he could remarry. (Muslims can only have four legal wives). In addition, Mohammed bin Laden punished Hamida by permanently exiling her to another city. He did so when Osama was not yet two years old.
Osama was brought up by a stepmother, Mohammed’s first wife, Al-Khalifa. Thus Osama not only lost his mother at a very young age, he had to live with her devalued status as a woman, a “slave,” a divorced wife, and an admirer of western couture. Osama had to overcome not only the “shame” that all Arab Muslim men unconsciously suffer, namely, being of (devalued) woman born; he also had to overcome the shame of being abandoned by a divorced, “slave” and pro-Western mother.
Are we saying that Osama’s tape can be reduced entirely to autobiographical ravings? Of course we’re not. But we cannot afford to neglect this dimension. Focusing precisely on such childhood and cultural variables will be crucial in any attempt to bring democracy and freedom to this barbarous region. The overall status of women, as well as specific practices such as polygamy, female illiteracy, veiling, stonings to death, and Arab honor killings all shape Arab Muslim psychology and national character. It is important that Americans and Israelis understand such Arab and Muslim cultural values in order to understand how these values have affected someone like Osama bin Laden -and there are more like him where he came from.
Let us briefly return to Osama’s tape. He is very bitter about both Presidents Bush. He compares them to the corrupt monarchies and theocracies in the Middle East. He says that the elder Bush “transferred the oppression of freedom and tyranny to his son and they call it the Patriot Law to fight terrorism. [The elder Bush] was bright in putting his sons as governors in states and he didn’t forget to transfer his experience from rulers of our religion to Florida to falsify elections to benefit from it in critical times.”
Here again, he is confusing President Bush with the Saudi rulers – and with his own father and older half-brothers – who have disinherited him, if not financially, then psychologically. Osama (as do many western intellectuals) views President Bush as an ally of the House of Saud. To the extent to which this is true, Osama is at war with the House of Saud not only because they’ve disinherited him but because he finds them far too modern. Osama is also at war with America and Israel because of their stated, if not fully actualized, values of modernity, democracy, human rights, and women’s rights.
Finally, Osama is also still psychologically at war with his father Mohammed – a builder and who renovated the famous mosques in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. While Muslims have destroyed and torched mosques, Osama has not directly done so. He can, however, destroy buildings that dare to “tower” over mosques. This is forbidden. No infidel or “dhimmi” building can be higher than a Muslim building.