Product Description
The New York Times bestseller by Osama bin Laden's sister-in-law that provides a penetrating look inside the Bin Laden family, Saudi society, and the treatment of Saudi women is now in paperback with a new chapter. In 1974, Carmen, half-Swiss and half-Persian, married into the Bin Laden family. She was young and in love, an independent European woman hurled into a society she neither knew nor understood. Her story takes us inside the Bin Laden family and a power structure in which men regularly subjugate their wives. It also tells of the author's own personal battle to keep custody of her three daughters after her 1988 separation from her husband. INSIDETHEKINGDOM dares to pull off the veil that conceals one of the most secretive countries in the world, revealing the intrigues and conflicts within its most infamous family.
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 The lifestyles of women living in Saudi Arabia. ( kmquigg )
As the author Carmen relates, life in Saudi Arabia is not good. In fact, it is almost as if the men marry the women and then have them as pets for the rest of their life. A man can divorce a woman very easily. A man can marry other women if he pleases. In this male dominated society, women turn to religion for their salvation. If they don't, they face a difficult life living among their peers. Carmen Bin Laden relates the story of her nine year marriage to one of Osmana's brothers. Her husband was more liberal in his thinking than other Saudi males. However, as he gets older, he reverts to his old beliefs and there is a split in her family. Bin Laden eventually frees herself of him and raises her three daughters in Switzerland.
There are several great books about the life of Arab women in Saudi Arabia and other countries. Bin Laden's is of interest because this is the richest family in Saudi Arabia with many males raised and educated in the West. Even with that, this family still treats its women with low regard. An interesting tale.
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Not professionally written, but: so? ( oscarsdaddy )
I read this with interest and, while not exactly perfectly written, it wasn't real bad, and I hold that to the professional editors anyway, especially when written by a foreigner, even one partially educated in the US. Some may argue that it was a ploy to earn money, again: so what? Her husband totally deserted his children and she was left with three to raise on her own. The thing I take most from this sad story is her concern more for the welfare of her children and with what poor future was in store for them if she remained in a hostile environment. I still wonder if her being so outspoken about Saudi Arabia is that great for her and her children's welfare. The only thing I can say concerning how bad the countries in general are, especially against the western world, is that extremist/ elitists are no better just because they have a different name, be it Christian or any other organized man-made religion. With the history of the United States concerning what they did to the Natives that lived here, slavery, televangilism, and a few other things we politely don't think or talk about, it makes me shudder every time I hear someone speak about how this "nation" was founded on Christian principles. Brother, if that is Christianity, I do not care to have anything to do with that!
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 Women's Inside View ( rozdesignz )
Incredible! A women's first hand account of the life in the Saudi Kingdom. Sometimes here in the West we just seem so far removed from these issues portrayed in this book and need to realize our culture could change just as rapidly. [9/11 our example]
My personal stance has always been as a Christian believer, LORD never send me to Saudi Arabia. I still hold firm to this and also have a heart for the women of Saudi Arabia, that have not experienced 'Freedom' as we know it today in the West.
Thank you Carmen for taking us on a journey to the uttermost parts of the earth and giving us a birds eye view of this ancient, closed, religious culture. Your bravery in writing your memoirs are exceptional.
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Women's Lives in Saudi Arabia
I was drawn to Carmen Bin Laden's memoir, Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia when I was doing research about the country of Saudi Arabia. I was pleased to find a fascinating story of a woman trying to protect her children from the fall-out after the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and raise them to be educated free-thinkers instead of grooming them to become chattel in a severe culture.
Young and deeply in love, this half-Swiss and half-Persian girl married into the vast Bin Laden family. With her European upbringing, she was not prepared for her several years of married life in the male-dominated Muslim world, where "women are no more than house pets." The harsh treatment of Saudi women seems almost criminal, and Carmen doesn't hide the fact that money, status, and location all play an important role in determining how a woman is treated treated. In Saudi Arabia, sequestered Muslim wives are oppressed and treated like second class citizens. It's not only the men who expect women to stay "under wraps," uneducated, and out of the public eye; the older Saudi women often force young women to adopt codes of behavior that turn them into pieces of property. Money, on the other hand, can buy a woman a temporary reprieve, a trip to Europe and America, where an almost unfettered life can be led, but when she returns behind the veil, life becomes frightening.
Not wanting her three young children to be subjected to this upbringing, Carmen fights her way out of a painful marriage and makes a life for her family in Europe and America. Just when things seem to be leveling out, the horror of 9/11 occurs and Carmen has to fight the stigma attached to her married name of Bin Laden.
This painful memoir will be quick to read and difficult to put down, but you may find yourself returning to read again about life Inside the Kingdom.
by Rhonda Esakov
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
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Saudi Arabia: When The Taliban Goes Hollywood ( paulocal )
In this book, Osama Bin Laden's sister-in-law Carmen Bin Laden gets a final word in edgewise, and it is quite a word indeed. It exposes what she describes as the crude opulence, emotionally shallow, debauched, harsh and often ignorance, overly rich Saudi royal family. According to her description, the desert kingdom drips in waste, gaudiness, opaqueness, mean-spiritedness, internecine snipping and betrayal, and is grounded in utter and base religious hypocrisy. In short, Saudi Arabia, like the Taliban, is a cult-like religiously based state -- only richer.
The book is about the author's plight to save her three daughters from a life of a slow "death by religious constriction." She succeeds in painting a graphic picture of a society that values appearances over its own pious beliefs, one still rooted in the nomadic desert tribal mentalities and still driven by primordial desert tribal fears.
As one would expect, there is very little here about Osama that we did not already know: For instance, that he is a very tall, not particularly intelligent, but very pious, a very wealthy religious warrior and the "nth" son of one of the richest and most powerful construction company magnates in Saudi Arabia. During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S supported him and his cause, and a large majority of Saudis still support his extremist views. Even in the post-911 world, he remains an iconic, a very much revered and protected religious hero in a nation where being a successful religious warrior amounts to a lot.
The book shows that Osama Bin Laden and those like him do not spring, fully formed, from the desert sand. But that they are carefully nurtured by the workings of an opaque and intolerant medieval society, that, until this day remains very much closed to the outside world.
In its essential outline it is not unlike Harsi Ali's "The Caged Virgin," for it too is as much an exposé on how religion becomes a self-enforcing form of mental enslavement on women, even as it is used as the foundation for a decadent, oppressive and a rigidly inhuman social order. Saudi women never become legal adults in Saudi society. They have few meaningful legal rights. The Bin Laden women were kept shut in their homes like pets kept by their husbands. The certainty of their inferiority and subservient status is bred into their bones as it is done to blacks in America.
The intelligence and energy of women in Saudi Arabia can only be expressed through religion. They live only through, and for, their faith, which as it turns out is also the primary instrument of their oppression. Yet, most lack the courage or the will to resist the oppressive social order religion imposes upon them. The result is that their personalities are completely annihilated. They become dependent for their survival on their ability to manipulate their husbands. A disobedient woman dishonors her family and can be killed legally. Yet, because Islam is their way of life, these women do not chafe at the restrictions they live under: They embrace them. It is a willing form of self-enslavement. While there is little new here, it does come with a personal touch and much passion. Four stars
Four Stars
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