The ox belonged to Awadh Aboud Bin Laden. Around the turn
of the twentieth century, he lived in the desert village of Gharn
Bashireih, in a deep canyon called Wadi Rakiyah. The gorge cut a path
of fifty miles through a region of southern Arabia, in modern Yemen,
called the Hadhramawt, which means “Death Is Among Us.” It was an accurate name; the land was mostly sand and rocks, baked by cyclical
droughts. Barren clay bluffs rose on each side of Rakiyah’s chasm.
Camels, donkeys, and goats strayed among thornbushes and scrub trees.
There were perhaps forty villages scattered in the canyon’s depths; its
population was no greater than ten thousand people.
Awadh’s house and the small patch of ground he farmed lay near a
four-story rectangular turret built from mud bricks by two Bin Laden
brothers, Ali and Ahmed, who probably lived during the early nineteenth
century, judging by the genealogies kept by their descendants. This Bin
Laden family fort rose from the highest point in Gharn Bashireih, shadowed
by the canyon’s western wall. By Awadh’s lifetime, the turret, which
had been used as a home by the two brothers, was eroding into a ruin; it
looked like a sand castle washed over by the tide. Clusters of newer mudbrick
homes encircled the hillside below the tower, forming a defensive
apron. Around the village spread ten or twenty acres of flat farmland, divided
into tiny plots of about ten yards by fifty yards, which various Bin
Ladens owned. Farming was a precarious vocation dependent upon brief
seasonal rains. After each storm, villagers rushed out to capture floodwaters
and channel them into their fields. If they succeeded, they might
grow wheat or other staple crops for a few months. If they failed, they
might face famine.
Awadh Bin Laden made his fateful decision to borrow a plow ox from
an Obeid tribesman after one of these cyclical rains. The Obeidis were
a powerful clan who patrolled the empty plateaus above Rakiyah’s canyon
and also farmed in the valley. There was, of course, no system of insurance
or collateral associated with such an ox loan. When the animal died
suddenly under Awadh’s yoke, his creditor, whose name was Bilawal,
made what the Bin Laden family’s oral history holds to be an outrageous
demand: forty silver riyals. This smacked of extortion, but while there
were perhaps several hundred Bin Ladens in the village, “they were so
poor they could not stand by” Awadh, said Syed Bin Laden, who still lives
in Gharn Bashireih.
The Bin Ladens belonged to the Kenda tribe, which traced its origins
to pre-Islamic Arabia and became a powerful federation in southern
Hadhramawt by the seventeenth century. It had been known then as a
tribe of rulers and sheikhs, but perpetual warfare gradually dissipated its
strength and scattered its members. By Awadh’s time, the Kenda no longer
functioned as an organized group with recognized leaders and armed
militias. The Bin Ladens had become merely a family clan of perhaps
four to five hundred people, clustered defensively in an ancestral fortressvillage, struggling for survival. They were in no position to sustain warfare against rival groups.
The Bin Ladens divided themselves into four branches, each of
which traced itself to the generation of the turret builders, Ahmed and
Ali, who were two of four brothers, the others being Mansour and Zaid.
Each of these brothers fathered a line of descendants who, by Awadh’s
lifetime, acted together as an extended family within the wider Bin
Laden clan.
Awadh belonged to Ali’s branch. The family’s oral genealogy holds that Ali was Awadh’s great-great grandfather. Little is recalled about the intervening generations except that Awadh was the only child of his father, Aboud. He therefore inherited all of Aboud’s land in Gharn Bashireih. This proved to be a very meager estate, however, and as it turned out, it was not enough to help Awadh forestall his ox creditor. At first, in lieu of forty silver riyals, which he did not have, Awadh negotiated to provide Bilawal with a lien on the several acres he farmed. Bilawal agreed to accept half of the profits from Awadh’s harvests until the debt was paid. If the rains had returned, Awadh might have worked
himself out of difficulty and the subsequent history of his branch of the
Bin Laden family might have turned out quite differently. As it happened,
however, a drought hit Rakiyah. Awadh could offer his creditor no
profits in the ensuing months, which angered Bilawal. By one Bin Laden
family account, Bilawal threatened to kill Awadh unless he either came
up with the cash he owed or turned over full title to his land.
Awadh decided to abandon his ancestral village. He was a bachelor,
free to travel. The drought had deepened steadily since the ox’s demise.
Emigration was a common survival strategy in the Hadhramawt, even
without the spur of a tribal death threat. Awadh packed his belongings
and set out across the high plateau for a neighboring canyon known as
Wadi Doan, about a day and a half ’s ride by camel or donkey. There he
would begin again.