i dunno why these women marry into these types of families in the first place. And then they come out with these books, ten years later, with titles along the lines of “My life in the desert”, “Life behind a veil”, “Arab princess”, “Politics of the harem”, etc. If you know the family you are getting married into, then i am not certain why you would want to marry them if their ways of life are so different than your’s. Or at least don’t act so surprised about how the family believes in doing things in a particular way, considering the fact that - if you are a mature, rational-thinking adult - you knew what you were getting yourself into in the first place. Or should have known.
Then again, who knows… maybe she was just smitten with Yeslam. And i’m sure it must be hard to have that surname. But then why not just change it?
Anyways, Carmen bin Ladin was Osama bin Laden’s sister-in-law. Excerpts from her book may be read here.
**Meet the in-laws**, The Guardian
Carmen bin Ladin and her daughters, Wafah, Najia and Noor, are the only Bin Ladins in the western world to be listed in the telephone book. They live in Switzerland, where Carmen grew up and where she fled to 20 years ago from her marriage to Osama’s older brother, Yeslam bin Ladin. I am to meet her at a hotel on Lake Geneva today, because she wants to talk about what life was like inside the Bin Laden clan (she differentiates between her immediate family and the wider Bin Ladens by altering the spelling of the name - her only concession to obscurity). For nine years, she lived at the heart of the world’s most notorious family and the only way to exorcise this, she believes, is to spill the beans. The Bin Ladens would like her to shut up; but she will not even go ex-directory.
Unsurprisingly, the lives of Bin Ladin and her children have been enormously difficult since September 11. The hotel at which we meet is one of those sinister, international clubhouses for the world’s most powerful, where men with earpieces guard the door and the car park is full of Ferraris. We sit on the terrace under a mauve sky and Bin Ladin twitches and jitters, chain smoking (“Does my cigarette disturb you?”) and apologising for her English. Her father was Swiss, her mother Iranian and she grew up speaking French in Geneva. When people walk by, she lowers her voice.
Bin Ladin’s book, The Veiled Kingdom, is one she would rather not have written, given the hostility it will in all likelihood generate from an already hostile family. But she wanted to explain to her daughters why she fled their father’s house and, to the world, why she continues to carry his name. She also, I gather, hopes that the book will do something to alleviate the loneliness of her position; she is at once exiled from the society of her husband and from polite society in the west, where the name Bin Ladin doesn’t open many doors. “For 14 years I fought alone. And nobody believed me. I fought the Bin Laden clan in private.” This is a plea for her struggle to be recognised.
Carmen Dufour met Yeslam Bin Laden in 1973, when he rented a floor of her mother’s house in Geneva for the summer. She was already accustomed to luxury; her mother’s family, the Sheibanys, were Persian aristocrats and their life in Switzerland was awash with money. But Yeslam came from a background of quite staggering wealth. He was 24, a little older than she, the 10th son of Sheikh Mohamed bin Laden, one of the wealthiest men in Saudi Arabia. After they married, they moved to Los Angeles to study at the University of Southern California and then, in 1976, Yeslam asked her to return to Jeddah with him, so he could work in the family firm: multi-billion dollar construction company, the Bin Laden Corporation. She reluctantly agreed. “I loved my husband,” she says. “That’s it.”