Muhammad bin Laden

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Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden (* 1908 - September 3, 1967 ) was a Saudi building contractor. He was the father of Osama bin Laden .

Life

Muhammad bin Laden belonged to the Arab Kinda tribe , which has around 100,000 members. He came from a village called ar-Ribat in Wadi Dau'an in the region Hadramaut in Yemen . Like many other people, he had left the area because of a catastrophic drought in the early 1930s. After a short stay in Ethiopia , he settled in the city of Jeddah on the Red Sea in 1931 , which from the following year belonged to the newly created Kingdom of Saudi Arabia . Despite his later social advancement, Muhammad bin Laden was not fully accepted throughout his life in Saudi Arabian society due to his origins - a flaw that may also affect his sons.

In Jeddah he initially hired himself as a porter, in 1931 he founded the Saudi Binladin Group (SBG) or Binladin Organization there . Originally a pure construction company, the SBG developed into an extensive conglomerate in the field of engineering, real estate, sales, communication and publishing.

Muhammad bin Laden was Saudi Minister for Civil Engineering for several years. For many years he was the official and sole contractual partner for the kingdom's holy sites and, until 1967, was also responsible for restorations of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem .

Muhammad bin Laden married for the first time late. He had a total of 54 children from 22 wives, including 25 sons and 29 daughters. Among his children in the West, in addition to Osama, Salim bin Laden , Bakr bin Laden and Yeslam bin Laden , who was married to Carmen Dufour bin Laden , are known. As a devout Muslim, Muhammad bin Laden adhered to the rule of being married to a maximum of four women at the same time. However, among bin Laden's marriages there are said to have been many time marriages ( mut'a ) in which the man marries his lover for the sake of form. Therefore, the exact number of his wives and children and thus also the half-siblings of Osama bin Laden can hardly be determined.

He was killed in a plane crash in Saudi Arabia on September 3, 1967, when his Beechcraft plane crashed into Hamis Musayt's landing approach.

In the West, the Muhammad bin Ladens company became known through sponsoring the Williams Formula 1 team in the 1979 and 1980 world championships . Alan Jones won the drivers' championship in 1980 with the bin Laden lettering on the racing car.

With 5000 employees in 2000, the UBS is one of the largest employers in the UK. The company later also entered the oil business.

Origins of family wealth

The economic rise of Muhammad bin Laden was closely related to the origins of the exploitation of the Saudi Arabian oil reserves by the American oil industry. In 1933, the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (renamed Arabian-American Oil Company or ARAMCO in 1944 ) for the first time received corresponding concessions from the Saudis; from 1938 on, oil wells could be tapped that made a profit. In the years that followed, many contracts to expand the country's infrastructure did not come from the Saudi government, but directly from the Americans, and accordingly went to US companies such as Bechtel . Ultimately, however, the Saudis demanded that more Arabs be included in the award of contracts, whereupon the Americans encouraged the establishment of local companies from the early 1940s, which were to receive smaller contracts as suppliers.

When Muhammad bin Laden worked for ARAMCO in Dhahran on the Persian Gulf in the 1940s , he used their funding program to obtain American contracts for his construction company. Also because he took great risks in doing so, he was quickly able to become an industry leader. The expanding company empire, which gradually gained a foothold in other branches of the economy, was brought together in 1950 under the umbrella company Saudi Binladin Group (SBG) based in Jeddah.

During the reign of King Ibn Saud from 1932 to 1953, Muhammad bin Laden managed to establish excellent contacts with the Saudi royal family . Allegedly, the fact that he had constructed a ramp for the royal palace in Jeddah on which the disabled Ibn Saud could be driven to his bedroom on the second floor by car played a role. Against the background of the onset of the oil boom in the 1950s, bin Laden received a series of lucrative contracts through dumping prices that further increased his reputation. He was responsible for the construction of further royal palaces, part of the expansion of the Saudi Arabian road network and the capital Riyadh, as well as the renovation of important sacred sites. Muhammad bin Laden became one of the wealthiest men in Saudi Arabia. The good relations with the royal family were strengthened during the reign of Ibn Saud's sons Saud (1953–1964) and Faisal (1964–1975). Under Faisal, bin Laden temporarily served as an honorary minister for public buildings.

His son Osama described Muhammad bin Laden in a TV interview broadcast in 1999 as one of the "founders of the infrastructure of Saudi Arabia". However, he attached particular importance to the finding that his father had led the renovation and modernization of the three most important mosques in the Islamic world in the 1950s and 1960s, namely the Al-Haram mosque in Mecca, the Prophet's mosque in Medina and the al -Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem , and that he had worked in part without financial gain.

The shares of the Saudi Binladin Group are still family-owned to this day. Under the management of Osama bin Laden's brothers Salim (1972–1988) and Bakr (since 1988), the SBG grew into a conglomerate with numerous holdings in transnational companies. In addition to its core business in the construction industry, the group also operates in the automotive, telecommunications and agricultural sectors and has extensive real estate holdings as well as shares in banks and investment companies. The various corporate divisions and foreign representations are usually headed by other brothers of Osama bin Laden. Due to the non-transparent accounting practice in Saudi Arabia, the total assets of the SBG today can hardly be precisely quantified, but are estimated at several billion US dollars . Despite the strain of Osama bin Laden's activities since the early 1990s, the family and company continue to have good contacts with the Saud family. In Saudi Arabia, many orders to the UBS do not come from the government bureaucracy, but come directly from the king's environment.

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  1. ^ Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower , pp. 70-2. Bergen, Holy War Inc. , pp. 59-61.
  2. ^ A b Transcript of "Usamah Bin-Ladin, the Destruction of the Base". June 10, 1999, accessed May 24, 2019 .
  3. ^ Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 , New York: Vintage, 2007, p. 82.
  4. ↑ Steve Coll: Young Osama. How he learned radicalism, and may have seen America . In: The New Yorker . December 4, 2005 ( online ).
  5. ↑ Wallace Stegner, “Discovery! The Story of Aramco Then ", Chapter 7, Saudi Aramco World 20.1 (January / February 1969), pp. 12-21 ( online ).
  6. ^ Wright, The Looming Tower , pp. 73-7. Thomas C. Barger, "Birth of a Dream", Saudi Aramco World 35.3 (May / June 1984) ( online ).
  7. ^ Wright, The Looming Tower , pp. 73-7. Bergen, Holy War Inc. , pp. 61-2. Barger, Birth of a Dream ( online ).
  8. ^ Wright, The Looming Tower , pp. 70-82. Bergen, Holy War Inc. , pp. 61-2.
  9. ↑ Bergen, Heiliger Krieg Inc. , pp. 65–6. Report about the Bin Laden Family from French intelligence sources, undated. Saudi Binladin Group website .
personal data
SURNAME Load, am Muhammad
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Muhammad Awad
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jeminite building contractor, Osama bin Laden's father
DATE OF BIRTH 1908
DATE OF DEATH 3rd September 1967