The shy sheikh and a plane tale

Abdulaziz Ibn-Saud traveled out of Kuwait in 1902 with a ragged army and the Al Saud family put shape and gave its name to the new country after three decades of bloody skirmishes. What would have happened to Saudi Arabia without oil—what a delicious counterfactual question given what did happen to Saudi Arabia because of oil. Coll’s biography of Saudi Arabia, which is also a biography of the Al Saud family, is clinically factual. The following adjectives come to mind about Saudi style of government after reading Coll’s account: venal, dysfunctional and bizarre (in its relationship with modernity). Coddled by hydrocarbon-hungry America, the Al Saud family for a long time simply took state oil money as licence for shopping.

You can see why promoting an austere version of the state religion is so useful when the rulers actually want to have a wild time—it keeps the aam aadmi in line. And when common Saudis did get a bit unhappy, the Al Sauds got the Bin Ladens to build a highway or, even better, a grand place of worship. Bin Ladens got the contracts through a combination of sycophancy and backhanders that make for cringe-making reading. This is corrosive misgovernance and another reminder why resource-rich non-democracies are such a problem in international affairs. Coll is merciless on America’s, as he calls it, greed and secret-fuelled relationship with the Saudi royals. There’s magnificent irony when he quotes Ronald Reagan, hosting King Fahd in White House when Islamic radicals were CIA darlings, as saying “we all worship the same god”.

That was mid-1980s and the eldest of Mohamed Bin Laden’s many, many sons (daughters never mattered, of course), Salem, was a bit player in global politicking. Salem was Osama’s stepbrother and, in many ways, a more interesting character. Indeed, Coll’s thesis, that understanding Osama requires understanding patriarch Mohamed’s huge family, is best exemplified by the contrast between Salem and Osama. Salem: British public school educated, eccentric hedonist (he would bribe his way to stages in nightspots to exhibit his decidedly average musical skills), gregarious, a business networker. Osama: educated in a Saudi school which employed radical Islamic teachers fleeing Nasser’s secular pan-Arabism, austere (by the standards

of Saudi sheikhs), a bit of a loner and a political organiser.

Coll pinpoints the beginning of Osama’s politicisation to that Saudi school—proof again that if states play footsie with radical religious types, there’s payback—and charts his political career with such precision that it is possible to examine the hypothesis whether there was anything inevitable about Osama becoming the architect of 9/11. The answer will vary with the reader’s interpretation of Coll’s account. Osama had become a bit too political for Saudi royals, whose first motto seems to be oily hypocrisy, and he left for Sudan in 1991 where he practised what can be called garden-variety jihadism (he was raising an orchard there). Did his anger towards America crystallise when Washington got Khartoum to expel him? Did his ending up in Afghanistan, home to the Taliban, provide the last mile connectivity to global terror?

Coll provokes these and many more immensely important questions. But he also allows you to contemplate this: what’s with Bin Ladens and airplane crashes? Mohamed Bin Laden, the patriarch, died in an air crash. So did his eldest son, Salem. And wrecked airplanes will forever be associated with his most famous son.

Postscript: In America, Penguin subtitled this book “An Arabian Family in the American century”. Here it’s changed to “The story of a family and its fortune”. So “American century” and “Arabian family” were considered inapposite for the Indian market. Interesting.