The Veiled Kingdom

Author(s): Carmen Bin Ladin

Location(s): Saudi Arabia

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Era(s): 2001

On September 11th 2001, Carmen Bin Ladin heard the news on the radio that the Twin Towers had been struck. She instinctively knew that her brother-in-law was involved in these horrifying acts of terrorism, and her heart went out to America. She also knew that her life and the lives of her family would never be the same again.

In 1974 Carmen, half Swiss and half Persian, married into the Bin Laden family and found herself inside a complex and vast clan, part of a society that at that point she neither knew nor understood. Determined to protect her daughters from the inevitable restrictions within a society riddled with hypocrisy and contradiction, in 1985 Carmen moved back to her home country, Switzerland. Carmen’s story takes us inside one of the most powerful, secretive and repressive kingdoms in the world and the Bin Laden family’s role within it, and she is one of the few women to have acquired, through her husband, intimate knowledge of the inner workings of this society.

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