"The Bin Laden women were like pets,
patted on their heads and given presents."
-- Ms. Crittenden is the author of "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us" and "Amanda Bright @ Home," a novel.
Posted on 07/29/2004 5:49:31 AM PDT by OESY
Very few first-person accounts have emerged from behind the Saudi veil. For good reason: The rare Saudi woman not stifled into submission would risk severe punishment for speaking out. This is the importance of "Inside the Kingdom," by Carmen bin Ladin (Warner Books, 206 pages, $23.95). Don't be put off by the author's last name. Ms. Bin Ladin is not a distant relation seeking to cash in on her family's notoriety. She is the ex-wife of Osama's older brother Yeslam, and she has her own story to tell. Her memoir is perhaps the most vivid account yet to appear in the West of the oppressive lives of Saudi women.
...
Carmen's life in Saudi Arabia began when her car pulled up to Yeslam's mother's compound outside Jeddah. In the mid-1970s, the town was still not much more than a donkey crossroads in the middle of the desert. If winds weren't whipping up the sand in blinding funnels, the sun was scorching down with unbearable heat. Shrouded in her unfamiliar and suffocating black robes, Carmen entered what sounds like a luridly decorated marble tomb. From then on, she was no longer free.
Each day, Yeslam vanished to work. Carmen and her young daughter passed the hours in the company of his mother and sister. Rarely could she leave the house -- rarely, even, did she see sunlight. Courtyards had to be cleared of male servants before she could poke her head outside; she was not even permitted to cross the street alone to visit a relative. When she did venture out, she had to wear a choking abaya and thick socks to hide her ankles. "It was like carrying a jail on your back," she writes.
...
Carmen was horrified by the effects of this isolation and uselessness. "The Bin Laden women were like pets kept by their husbands....Occasionally they were patted on the head and given presents; sometimes they were taken out, mostly to each other's houses....I never once saw one of my sisters-in-law pick up a book. These women never met with men other than their husbands, and never talked about larger issues even with the men they had married. They had nothing to say."
She would meet Osama only a couple of times. (She describes the young Osama as "tall and stern, his fierce piety intimidating.") She had more contact with his young wife, Najwah, in the female section of one of the segregated bin Laden houses: Najwah, like so many women raised in Saudi Arabia, "never permitted herself to want more from her life than obedience to her husband and father." She carried her obedience to such extremes that it nearly killed the couple's infant son. The child had become dehydrated in the heat. Carmen watched as Najwah pitifully tried to spoon water into the baby's mouth. Najwah would not use a bottle because Osama did not approve of this newfangled Western technology.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
"The Bin Laden women were like pets,
patted on their heads and given presents."
-- Ms. Crittenden is the author of "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us" and "Amanda Bright @ Home," a novel.
Fortunately, the Swiss courts awarded custody to Carmen. She has emerged from her ordeal with some urgent insights into the kingdom from which she escaped: "Osama bin Laden and those like him didn't spring, fully formed, from the desert sand. They were made. They were fashioned by the workings of an opaque and intolerant medieval society that is closed to the outside world. It is a society where half the population have had their basic rights as people amputated, and obedience to the strictest rules of Islam must be absolute. Despite all the power of their oil-revenue, the Saudis are structured by a hateful, backward-looking view of religion and an education that is a school for intolerance....When Osama dies, I fear there will be a thousand men to take his place."
Yet Carmen's own example is reason for optimism. The contempt for outsiders that Osama blindly swallowed repelled his sister-in-law -- and drove her to seek a freer life for herself and her daughters. Let us hope that more brave dissenters -- female and male -- will follow her lead.
Crittenden is David Frum's wife.
So where is she from originally? And how did she get involved with him which led to the point of her beginning her life as an adult in Saudi?
It's unfortunate that most of us didn't start paying attention to the perfidious and malignant nature of the House of Saud until the demon seeds of this corrupt regime began to lash out at the United States.
Finally, we're cracking down on these "charities", but there's still a lot more work that needs to be done. Hopefully, this women will help to expose the true nature of this tyrannical regime and all of the other despotic sheikdoms in the Middle East.
Yes, and when self-righteous, self-serving, self-contratulatory, smug Leftists--including especially American Democrats--finally succeed in delivering the West to Muslim domination, we will remind them to see the humor.
Optimism yes, but on balance to the 'thousand' who take Osamma's place; not much.
This is where our presence; our efforts come into play as well; surely tips the scales for optimism.
We should not have diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia as long as they commit such gross human rights violations.
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