January 21st, 2008Osama bin Laden
Osama 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 Muhammed Awad bin Laden was a wealthy businessman with close ties to the Saudi royal family. Osama bin Laden was born the only son of Muhammed bin Laden’s tenth wife, Hamida al-Attas. Osama’s parents divorced soon after he was born. Osama’s mother then married Muhammad al-Attas. The couple had four children, and Osama lived in the new household with three stepbrothers and one stepsister.
----------Advertisements------------Bin Laden was raised as a devout Sunni Muslim. From 1968 to 1976 he attended the “élite” secular Al-Thager Model School. Bin Laden studied economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University. Some reports suggest bin Laden earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979, or a degree in public administration in 1981.Other sources describe him as having left university during his third year,] never completing a college degree, though “hard working.”At university, bin Laden’s main interest was religion, where he was involved in both “interpreting the Quran and jihad” and charitable work.
In 1974, at the age of seventeen, bin Laden married his first wife Najwa Ghanem at Latakia. Bin Laden is reported to have married four other women and divorced two, Umm Ali bin Laden and Umm Abdullah. Bin Laden has fathered anywhere from 12 to 24 children.
