Osama Bin Laden is a name many of us know, and also a name we always link to terrorism, as he is one of the most well known terrorists ever. However, most of us probably don't actually know too much about his life and past.
Osama Bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1957 or 1958, and he was the 17th of 52 children born to Mohammed bin Laden. His father was a Yemeni immigrant who owned the largest construction company in the Saudi Kingdom. This lead to Osama and his siblings growing up very privileged, and many of his siblings were educated in the West then came back to work for their father's company. However, Osama decided to stay close to home, and like many Saudi men, he eventually joined the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.
For bin Laden, Islam was more than a religion. It shaped his political beliefs and influenced many of the decisions he made. During the late 1970s, he became a follower of the radical pan-Islamist scholar Abdullah Azzam, who believed that all Muslims should rise up in jihad, or holy war, to create a single Islamic state. This appealed to bin Laden, who despised the increasing Western influence on the Middle-East.
In 1988, bin Laden created a group called al-Qaida which was focused on the symbolic acts of terrorism. However, the comparatively pro-Western Saudi royal family feared that bin-Laden would cause trouble in the kingdom, and they took away his passport and even asked the US for help. Infuriated, bin-Laden left to the more militantly Islamist Sudan, where he continued to gain supporters.
In 1993, al-Qaida started to perform acts of terrorism, increasingly more destructive up to the very well known September 11, 2001 twin tower attacks which made him globally known. This caused him to become "public enemy #1," and the US endlessly chased him for 10 years until they caught and killed him on May 2, 2011. Bin-Laden is no longer a threat to America, but we still have to be wary of possible future acts of terrorism.
Sources:
https://www.history.com/topics/osama-bin-laden
https://www.theguardian.com/world/osamabinladen
Great blog post Ryan, I was kind of surprised to learn that he was one of 52 children in his family and it led me to be more curious about his own children, if he even had any. He actually had 23 children in total as well as many wives. I also found this article by the Guardian about what the family had to do in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. They were all ordered to pack up all of their items and leave, they were not told why however. "His older sons were to join their father and other brothers at an undisclosed location." Osama bin Laden also had multiple wives, "Osama’s wives, whose religious conservatism meant they could not speak to the male guards, dissected every scrap of news they overheard about 9/11, which had taken place while they were on the road."
ReplyDeleteThis post is very interesting, yet terrifying. Osama Bin Laden's goal of creating a "single Islamic state" is actually comparable to many other historical occurrences. For example, the Puritans left England in order to create a perfect Protestant state, and Adolf Hitler rose to power with the goal of creating an ethnically purified German nation. All of these examples are vastly different from one another, but the underlying principle is the same. Many people have the idea of creating a perfect society, and there are various measure that these people will take to achieve their goals. It's clear to see that this never turns out very well, and many people are killed when someone tries to create a "perfect" state.
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