Childhood
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In a 1998 interview, later televised on Al Jazeera, he gave his birth date as 10 March 1957. His father was Mohammed bin Laden, from Yemen. Before World War I, Mohammed had emigrated from Hadhramaut, on the south coast of Yemen, to the Red Sea port of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he began to work as a porter. Starting his own business in 1930, Mohammed built his fortune as a building contractor for the Saudi royal family during the 1950s. Though there is no definitive account of the number of children born to Mohammed bin Laden, it is generally put at 58. Mohammed bin Laden was married 22 times, although to no more than four women at a time per Sharia law. Osama was the only son of Mohammed bin Laden and his tenth wife, Hamida al-Attas, née Alia Ghanem, who was born in Syria.
Bin laden's parents divorced soon after he was born, according to Khaled M. Batarfi, a senior editor at the Al Madina newspaper in Jeddah who knew him during the 1970s. Bin Laden's mother then married a man named Muhammad al-Attas, who worked at the bin Laden company. The couple had four children, and bin Laden lived in the new household with three half-brothers and one half-sister. Bin Laden and his family moved to the Al-Musharifah neighborhood of Jeddah several years after he first enrolled at Al-Thager Model School.
Read more about this topic: Personal Life Of Osama Bin Laden
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power
Open; I would approach them, but they close.”
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“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
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““O what unlucky streak
Twisting inside me, made me break the line?
What was the rock my gliding childhood struck,
And what bright unreal path has led me here?””
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