Carmen Bin Ladin interview,copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2004
For every writer there comes a moment, after the manuscript has been handed in to the publisher, and the ink has been printed on the pages, when the finished product finally appears on the booksellers shelf.  It is a moment that many writers dread, that moment when the book that they have slaved over devotedly must finally be exposed to the public in all it’s glory, or all it’s shame.  A moment of truth when the readers get to vote with their dollars, pounds or euros.  A moment when the writer becomes suddenly vulnerable to the approval or disapproval of the outside world.
          For Carmen Bin Ladin, there is an added element to this vulnerability.  For not only does she risk the rejection of the reading public with her first book, she also risks potentially angering one of the most dangerous men in the world, Osama Bin Laden.  There is far more at stake here than bad reviews. Because Carmen’s book, ‘The Veiled Kingdom’, tells the true story of what it was like to be the wife of Yeslam Bin Laden,  elder brother of Osama.  In a world that is still reeling after the events of September 11, 2001, it was a courageous undertaking.
          The book tells the story of how, in 1973, the young Carmen Dufour, -half Swiss and half Persian- met and fell in love with a young man, who had come for the summer to her mother’s home in Geneva.  It was a love affair which would transport her to a world and a way of living that was completely alien to a  Western woman who had been accustomed to seeing herself as the equal of any male.  A world where women wore a thick black veil.  A world where women could not travel without the permission of their male guardians, did not cross the road without a chaperone, did not read novels, or see movies or go out dancing in short skirts and high heels.  A world where women were kept dependent on their men, but where a woman could be divorced by her husband at any moment and forbidden to see her children. And a life that eventually became a nightmare from which she is still trying to escape.
          In the light of events, it almost seems foolhardy, to be doing the rounds of chat shows and newspapers, in the weeks preceeding the third anniversary of the attack, publicising your life with the Bin Ladens.  I mention this, when we meet in her Dublin hotel room. 
Carmen lights a cigarette, one of many.  Her eyes are grey and hooded and speak of untold depths of sadness.  Depths which I am disturbing, I can clearly see. 
‘I refuse to think this way,’ she says.  And she requests that we switch off the tape machine for a moment.
‘I refuse to think about this because otherwise I would not function,’ she says, simply.  ‘And I realise that the most important thing is for people to understand the situation of my daughters.’
Carmen has three daughters, Wafah, Najia and Noor.  The eldest,  Wafah,  was living in Manhattan, when the 9/11 attack happened and it was rumoured that she had been tipped off about what would happen, by her family.  Because of the rumours, she has been experiencing difficulty getting work since that time.  Carmen wanted to write the book in order to let the world know that neither she nor her daughters supported the attack, despite their name.
          ‘Those girls have already been through emotional turmoil in order to gain the freedom to be who they want to be, as women,’ she says.  ‘The only way is for us to explain where we stand. And what is in the book is the truth.’
          She could have changed her name, she explains, but she felt that people would find out that she had changed it and be even more suspicious.  The spelling that she uses now is ‘Bin Ladin’, slightly different, but not different enough to deflect attention.
Carmen is elegant, as you might expect, having spent years in Saudi Arabia on an unlimited clothing budget, married to one of the richest men in that country.  But her elegance in understated.  Simple black.  No jewels that I can see.  Money was never an issue in her childhood - her father once demonstrated this by inviting the young Carmen to dance on banknotes that he had tossed on the floor.  Her mother was a member of the  Sheibany family, an aristocratic Persian lineage.  She grew up with the understanding that she was special.
          It pleased Carmen’s mother when Yeslam Bin Laden, a handsome, intelligent and quietly spoken young man arrived in Geneva that fateful summer.  She had ambitions for her daughter to marry.   Carmen had no intention of getting hitched, especially not to a Middle Eastern man.  She had set her sights on the American way of life, where the girls drove jeeps, wore jeans, and ate hamburgers.
          ‘People in the Middle East lived lives that seemed so closed off,’ she says.  ‘Where appearances seemed more important than desires.’
          But love has a way of blinding us to whatever else we thought we wanted.  And Carmen fell in love.
‘He was clever and charming and handsome and self assured,’ she tells me.  ‘He has a charisma about him.   And I felt that he loved me too.’
          As time passed, Yeslam became increasingly attentive, almost possessive.  Carmen could see that he wanted all of her attention.  She was flattered.  Her parents had separated and she was disillusioned with the father whom she had once adored.  Yeslam taught her to drive his brand new Porsche and only smiled when she smashed it into a wall.  Soon, she found herself engaged to him.
Her mother was pleased and a date was set.  The wedding would have to take place in Jeddah, because the King would need to give his permission for Yeslam to marry a foreigner.  Carmen, kitted out with the black ‘abaya’ or veil flew to Jeddah. 
          ‘We were completely covered in thick, black cloth,’ she writes.  ‘Even our eyes were hidden.  It gave me a strange, oppressive feeling, a sense of melancholy, an apprehension.’
Saudi Arabia was a complete culture shock.  The women were confined to the house. 
‘Even to go into the garden, we had to notify the male employees to vacate the premises.  We took no exercise.  Walking anywhere was completely unthinkable.  In any case, there was nowhere to go.’
Hotels, sports arenas, theatres, swimming-pools, restaurants were only for the men.  It is one thing to read about this kind of life, Carmen says, but it is something else to live it. 
I ask her why she put up with it.
‘I realised that it was important for my husband that I was accepted,’ she says, simply.
Did she not feel humiliated?  Would her husband have worn a veil, and stayed indoors if she had asked him to?
          ‘No of course not!’ she laughs. ‘But I am a very positive person and I could not believe that things would remain that way in Saudi Arabia.  I believe in change.  I did not realise how deeply rooted the culture is.’
          Carmen was lucky.  Most Saudi men did not treat their wives as well as Yeslam treated her.
          ‘He treated me like a Western man would, more or less as his equal,’ she says.  He enjoyed my intellect and he sought my advice.’
          Had she been married to Osama, things could have been very different.  In her book she describes a scene where Osama’s wife is trying to spoon-feed water to her baby, who is dehydrated.  Because  Osama will not approve it, she is not allowed to use a bottle.
          ‘His wife didn’t dare disobey him,’ she writes.  ‘Even Yeslam seemed to agree that Osama’s rule over his household should be absolute.’
          Even though she was frustrated, Carmen began to adapt.  She smuggled in crates of books, she gave tennis parties for diplomats and their families.  She went to Safeway and stocked up on pineapple chunks and Jello.  But when her children came and they were daughters, she was anxious for their future. 
‘In the event of a husband’s death, the daughters become dependent on the husband’s closest male relative.  He must approve the most simple of decisions, such as travel, education or the choice of husband,’ she says.
          She shared her concerns with Yeslam, but found him indifferent.
‘As a Western mother, I could not accept that. I ultimately found myself compelled to save my daughters from that culture.’
          She does not think that the Saudi women are any less intelligent than women in other countries.
‘I think they are very intelligent.  But they don’t use their intelligence.  At school they are conditioned to be submissive and to lose their curiosity.’
          In 1979, the war in Afghanistan ushered in a new wave of extreme fundamentalism.  Religious police began attacking women in the streets.  Even her husband became fearful.  And Osama Bin Laden went to Afghanistan, to fight the infidel, much to the admiration of his family.  Carmen met Osama, when he came to the house.  She happened to answer the door without her veil and he refused to look at her face. 
‘A Saudi man as religious as Osama would not sit and talk to me,’ she explains.  But she was aware of his growing reputation.  Did she have any inclination of what he might become?
‘I do not think that he himself had any idea where he was headed.  But he was convinced that he was there to defend Islam against the infidel.’
She does not want to talk about politics on the record, or about religion, in case of a fatwah, but she does believe that Osama is much admired.
‘They (the Bin Ladens) will not cut ties with a brother on the grounds that he is too religious,’ she says.
Would Osama be angry with her for writing the book?
‘This, I do not want to talk about.’
The marriage with Yeslam began to deteriorate.  He had been working exceedingly long hours, building up his own business, he was squabbling with his brothers and he began to complain incessantly of illnesses which Carmen believed were imaginary.
‘Yeslam was becoming a stranger to me,’ she writes.  ‘I longed for the warm, attentive father, the clever, emancipated man who I had married.  I simply could not deal with the reality of this petulant stranger.’
The biggest problem Carmen had with Yeslam was his changing attitude to his daughters.  He had expected and wanted sons, and none had materialised.  And he began to insist that his daughters be brought up like Saudi girls, with all the restrictions that entailed, even when they were living in Switzerland.
 The couple had been staying in Geneva, when she decided to leave him.  Under Saudi law, Yeslam would have automatically gained custody of the children.  As it turned out, he didn’t want any further contact with his daughters, or with Carmen.  She is still in the process of divorcing him, ten years later.  Her daughters are hurt, she says, that their father has not contacted them.
‘My opinion is that they are not proper Saudis, for him.  They do not behave like Saudi girls.  What Saudi men accept for their wives, they will not accept for their mothers, sisters or daughters.’
‘The certainty of a woman’s inferior status and subservience is bred into their bones,’ she writes.  Her main concern was that the girls would have the freedom to become who they wanted to be.  The book is dedicated to them, and to their immeasurable courage.
‘Wafah was in London with me, while I was doing an interview,’ Carmen tells me.  ‘And the journalist said that perhaps my daughters would not have chosen to leave Saudi Arabia.  I myself had been worried that I might have chosen to cut them off from half of their roots.  Wafah was listening, and at the end of the interview, she came over and said to the lady ‘I am her daughter and I want to let you know that I am glad she took us out!’  That made me feel so good, I can’t tell you!’  And Carmen smiles a proper smile, for the first time.
‘The Veiled Kingdom’ is published by Virago,  15.99 euros.