Adrian Weale
MOSTLY BRICKS
The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and its Fortune
By Steve Coll (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 671pp £25)

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Mohamed bin Laden was born in 1908 (or thereabouts) in the town of Doan in what is now Yemen. His father died when he was still a young boy and, as a teenager, he left home to find work, first in Ethiopia - where he lost an eye in an industrial accident - then in Jeddah, in the newly emerging Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he eventually started a small building company. A pious Muslim, a hard worker, and possessing the gift of inspiring friendship and loyalty from the people he dealt with, over the next thirty years Mohamed bin Laden built his company into the largest construction contractor in Saudi Arabia, involved in projects throughout the Islamic world. After his death in an aircraft crash in 1967, leadership of the family business passed to his eldest son, Salem, a British-educated playboy with an astute commercial brain. He died in 1988, after flying a microlight aircraft into power lines, and nowadays the family companies are run by Salem's younger brother Bakr: amongst their current projects is a $1.6 billion contract to build nine prisons for the Saudi government.

The family story has been carefully documented by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll in The Bin Ladens. It is a painstaking, well-written account that seems to have left few sources of information untapped in digging out the details of a family who are, like many of their compatriots, inclined towards reticence and secrecy.

It's interesting stuff. Mohamed bin Laden owed much of his success to his relationship with King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, the founding ruler of Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud treated the oil revenues that began to roll into the country in the 1930s as his own personal cash, and rewarded bin Laden with contracts to build homes and palaces for members of the royal family. From these beginnings, bin Laden established himself as the 'go-to guy' for construction work in Saudi Arabia: aside from housing, he became involved in road building and airport construction, and eventually acquired the task of renovating and maintaining the holy places of Islam in Mecca and Medina (and Jerusalem, prior to the Israeli capture of East Jerusalem in 1967).

Along the way, Mohamed bin Laden managed to father twenty-five sons and twenty-nine daughters from an astonishing number of wives, most of whom he married and divorced as casually as other people have one-night stands. Amongst five sons of Mohamed bin Laden born in 1958 to various different women (making him somewhere between seventeenth and twenty-first in the sequence of bin Laden sons) was the one who would bring the bin Laden family global notoriety: Osama.

It turns out from what Coll has uncovered that the bin Ladens are a likeable enough bunch. They seem to be honest and straightforward in their business dealings; modest, dutiful and loyal. Salem bin Laden, who controlled the businesses for twenty years after his father's death, had a notable sense of fun. Typically amongst dynastic Arab families, some of the bin Ladens have been inclined towards more secular, Western ways whilst a few, like Osama, embraced a strict and puritanical form of Islam.

The problem that Coll has is that the story of the bin Laden business empire and the story of Osama bin Laden, the Islamist radical terrorist, are effectively two separate stories. Osama was largely brought up by his mother (who was a fourteen-year-old Syrian girl when she married Mohamed bin Laden and only fifteen when he divorced her) and was still a small boy when his father died. His relationships with half-siblings were affectionate but do not seem to have been especially close: many of them met each other for the first time at Mohamed's funeral.

As a young man, Osama was involved in managing a few construction projects for bin Laden family companies but he was not a success. Instead, when the US and Saudi governments began to pour resources into the Afghan Mujaheddin who were fighting the Soviets, the pious Islamist Osama bin Laden appeared to be the ideal choice to manage the secret distribution of Saudi funds to the fighters and he was dispatched by his brothers to Peshawar. Already of a radical cast of mind (Osama had joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a high-school student), it was his experiences in Pakistan and Afghanistan which led him to create al-Qaeda and his philosophy of global jihad.

The fact is that as Osama bin Laden became more deeply embroiled in jihadi terrorism, the family repudiated him and cut off all support. Osama had benefited from an inheritance of a little under $20 million after his half-brother Salem died, but there is no evidence that the bin Laden family has provided any further support to him or al-Qaeda. The reality is that he has brought them shame and ignominy, and the family make no bones about it.

Steve Coll's book is a fascinating account of a hugely rich Arab dynasty, and worth reading for that reason alone, but it doesn't add much to our understanding of the most notorious terrorist of the modern age for the simple reason that Osama bin Laden's personal trajectory is perpendicular to that of his wider family. After reading this book, it's hard not to feel sympathy for them.

Adrian Weale is writing a history of the SS for Little, Brown. In 2003 he was recalled to the British Army and served as Chief of Staff for the Coalition Provisional Authority in the Iraqi province of Dhi Qar for six months.