English Class & More on that Osama bin Laden Book

So my Arab friend and I were talking the other day and I told him I'd gone to my mom's fifth-grade classroom that afternoon to grade a few papers. 

Me:  "English papers.  They had to mark the prepositional phrases."

Him: "English?"  (laughter)  "'They have to take English although they are English speakers?'

Me:  "Of course! You took Arabic!"

Him: "Yes, but written Arabic is different from how we talk. Our accents are different than standard Arabic so we have to learn to write it."

Me:  "So we have to learn to write properly."  (And speak properly as well, but I don't know that I told him this.)

Him: "I thought you'd just write the way you speak since you talk the same way that you write. Right?"

Well as I noted on my "Saying Stuff All Wrong" post, that is not always true!  What did he think? We just naturally knew how to write complete sentences? Knew how to make subjects and verbs agree?  When to use "is" and when to use "are"?  I even find myself saying "Me and Michael went to visit my grandparents," but I'd never write it that way as "Michael and I went..." is proper English.

Know what I mean? 

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I'm almost finished Growing up bin Laden and I've found reading Najwa's and Omar's perspectives very interesting! Of course one never knows how much of it is true (and how much of it is Jean Sasson's sensationalism), but nevertheless it's been fascinating to hear some of the stories of bin Laden family life from insiders' points of view. 

Several times I've found myself feeling sorry for OBL's wives and children. Truly they seem innocent pawns in this mad man's life.  Omar recalls a time Robert Fisk came to Afghanistan to interview his father. Omar went along with his father and remembered Mr. Fisk asking if he were happy.  Omar said he never recalled being asked how he felt and gave an answer "I am happy" that he thought Fisk wanted rather than honestly telling him what a "most miserable" life he lead.  Truly the months the family lived on Tora Bora - the mountain given to Osama by an Afghan leader - were truly awful. Can you imagine living on top of a mountain without modern conveniences such as electricity and running water and even worse very little heat in those notoriously-harsh Afghan winters? 

Omar always loved animals yet was sickened when he realized the puppies his brothers and he loved were being used to test how weaponized gas affected something living subjected to it!  He recalls a time in Sudan when a friend had a baby monkey that he later heard was crushed by someone following his father's orders.  He remembers a friend being raped and photographed by the men who raped him and then the friend was killed because they blamed the young man for this crime rather than the true perpetrators - some of his father's own friends!  So many awful stories that make me feel very sad for his children!  

I remember in Sudan when the boys eager to make friends of the neighborhood children, almost made the double mistake of playing with Christians and girls!  Thankfully the hawkish security guards Osama employed caught them before they could do such a dastardly deed.

I guess it shouldn't have been such a shock, but it was saddening how Osama fired up his trainees by telling them how much America hated Islam and wanted to kill Muslims. He told them this so much that they were wanting to make the preemptive strike so the Americans would be destroyed first.  Even Omar who had never met Americans and had heard this America-hates-Islam speech his whole life, thought it was true, though he didn't have his father's zeal for bloodshed. He was tired of war and wanted a peaceful, normal life. He craved his father's love and attention.

One of the many things I found disturbing is when Omar said mentally disabled children in Kandahar were often chained to trees or in chairs. I can understand having to restrain a person in a chair, but chained to a tree like a guard dog? Argh!

I'm at the point in the book where Osama has just been asked by the head Taliban ruler to leave Afghanistan after three and a half years.  Osama ended up playing "the Muslim card" by asking the leader if he could at least stay one more year and a half since Sudan had let him stay for five years. He said it was better to allow him, a Muslim, to do this than let the infidel West influence the Mullah's decision.  So Mullah Omar reluctantly agreed and Osama was given permission to stay eighteen months more.  I'll have to read the final pages to see what happened during this time. Omar said if Afghanistan expelled them, their father would seek refuge for them in parts of either Pakistan or Yemen.

Since the last wives/children total in this post, Osama divorced one wife (the second one, Khadijah; it seems she asked for the divorce and Osama agreed; he even let her take their three children with her back to Saudi Arabia -- I think they were the fortunate ones),  and had four more children.

Siham had Sumaiya.

Khadijah had Aisha prior to the divorce.

Najwa had Bakr (whom all called Ladin except Osama) and Rukhaiya.

Najwa is pregnant with another and Omar is wanting to get his mother out of Afghanistan for the birth partly because her health seems poor.  Eleventh child and she is past forty so ...