One of the family members, as we all know by now, was very different. Osama Bin Laden, one of the 54 children of the paterfamilias and infrastructure tsar, Mohammed Bin Laden, began as a shy, unassuming, courteous and religious child and ended up exporting global jihad. But as Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Steve Coll shows in his amazingly well researched The Bin Ladens, Osama, one of his father’s 25 sons, was also an ardent globaliser, hiring fighters from all over the world to set up the al-Qaeda, sending them all over the world to fight his infidel enemies, and using the media cannily to get his message across.
In Coll’s book, the Bin Ladens emerge as a product of globalisation, a potent mix of a vast and rich family with its conservative and liberal wings, growing up and operating in a schizoid political and social environment in oil-rich Saudi Arabia. Thanks to Osama, the family name today spits out a staggering nearly 26 million results on Google, but the story of the family’s diversity, resilience and flair for networking with men of power and pelf around the world is truly remarkable.
http://newageislam.com/bin-ladens,-done-that/current-affairs/d/126
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11:31 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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