Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia | 
 enlarge | Author: Carmen Bin Ladin
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy Used: $0.47
You Save: $13.48 (97%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  101 reviews
Sales Rank: 42382
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.8 x 0.7
ISBN: 0446694886
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.42092
EAN: 9780446694889
ASIN: 0446694886
Publication Date: June 13, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: A used copy. Pages are somewhat worn. Cover worn with some creases. Worn edges and corners. Binding solid and tight.
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Product Description
The New York Times bestseller by Osama bin Laden's sister-in-law that provides a penetrating look inside the Bin Laden family, Saudi society, and the treatment of Saudi women is now in paperback with a new chapter. In 1974, Carmen, half-Swiss and half-Persian, married into the Bin Laden family. She was young and in love, an independent European woman hurled into a society she neither knew nor understood. Her story takes us inside the Bin Laden family and a power structure in which men regularly subjugate their wives. It also tells of the author's own personal battle to keep custody of her three daughters after her 1988 separation from her husband. INSIDETHEKINGDOM dares to pull off the veil that conceals one of the most secretive countries in the world, revealing the intrigues and conflicts within its most infamous family.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 96 more reviews...
 Women's Lives in Saudi Arabia May 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was drawn to Carmen Bin Laden's memoir, Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia when I was doing research about the country of Saudi Arabia. I was pleased to find a fascinating story of a woman trying to protect her children from the fall-out after the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and raise them to be educated free-thinkers instead of grooming them to become chattel in a severe culture.
Young and deeply in love, this half-Swiss and half-Persian girl married into the vast Bin Laden family. With her European upbringing, she was not prepared for her several years of married life in the male-dominated Muslim world, where "women are no more than house pets." The harsh treatment of Saudi women seems almost criminal, and Carmen doesn't hide the fact that money, status, and location all play an important role in determining how a woman is treated treated. In Saudi Arabia, sequestered Muslim wives are oppressed and treated like second class citizens. It's not only the men who expect women to stay "under wraps," uneducated, and out of the public eye; the older Saudi women often force young women to adopt codes of behavior that turn them into pieces of property. Money, on the other hand, can buy a woman a temporary reprieve, a trip to Europe and America, where an almost unfettered life can be led, but when she returns behind the veil, life becomes frightening.
Not wanting her three young children to be subjected to this upbringing, Carmen fights her way out of a painful marriage and makes a life for her family in Europe and America. Just when things seem to be leveling out, the horror of 9/11 occurs and Carmen has to fight the stigma attached to her married name of Bin Laden.
This painful memoir will be quick to read and difficult to put down, but you may find yourself returning to read again about life Inside the Kingdom.
by Rhonda Esakov
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
Saudi Arabia: When The Taliban Goes Hollywood April 27, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
In this book, Osama Bin Laden's sister-in-law Carmen Bin Laden gets a final word in edgewise, and it is quite a word indeed. It exposes what she describes as the crude opulence, emotionally shallow, debauched, harsh and often ignorance, overly rich Saudi royal family. According to her description, the desert kingdom drips in waste, gaudiness, opaqueness, mean-spiritedness, internecine snipping and betrayal, and is grounded in utter and base religious hypocrisy. In short, Saudi Arabia, like the Taliban, is a cult-like religiously based state -- only richer.
The book is about the author's plight to save her three daughters from a life of a slow "death by religious constriction." She succeeds in painting a graphic picture of a society that values appearances over its own pious beliefs, one still rooted in the nomadic desert tribal mentalities and still driven by primordial desert tribal fears.
As one would expect, there is very little here about Osama that we did not already know: For instance, that he is a very tall, not particularly intelligent, but very pious, a very wealthy religious warrior and the "nth" son of one of the richest and most powerful construction company magnates in Saudi Arabia. During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S supported him and his cause, and a large majority of Saudis still support his extremist views. Even in the post-911 world, he remains an iconic, a very much revered and protected religious hero in a nation where being a successful religious warrior amounts to a lot.
The book shows that Osama Bin Laden and those like him do not spring, fully formed, from the desert sand. But that they are carefully nurtured by the workings of an opaque and intolerant medieval society, that, until this day remains very much closed to the outside world.
In its essential outline it is not unlike Harsi Ali's "The Caged Virgin," for it too is as much an expose on how religion becomes a self-enforcing form of mental enslavement on women, even as it is used as the foundation for a decadent, oppressive and a rigidly inhuman social order. Saudi women never become legal adults in Saudi society. They have few meaningful legal rights. The Bin Laden women were kept shut in their homes like pets kept by their husbands. The certainty of their inferiority and subservient status is bred into their bones as it is done to blacks in America.
The intelligence and energy of women in Saudi Arabia can only be expressed through religion. They live only through, and for, their faith, which as it turns out is also the primary instrument of their oppression. Yet, most lack the courage or the will to resist the oppressive social order religion imposes upon them. The result is that their personalities are completely annihilated. They become dependent for their survival on their ability to manipulate their husbands. A disobedient woman dishonors her family and can be killed legally. Yet, because Islam is their way of life, these women do not chafe at the restrictions they live under: They embrace them. It is a willing form of self-enslavement. While there is little new here, it does come with a personal touch and much passion. Four stars
Four Stars
 An unveiling of women's roles in Saudi Arabia April 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Carmen Bin Laben's book is an insightful look at life for women in Saudi Arabia. The book provides an insider's view of life in this Arab nation beyond what the news media or other reports might disclose. Carmen narrates just how much in conflict the thoughts, traditions, and religious life of Saudi Arabia are with those held in Europe or the United States. As a male reader, the book was slow in parts because of the ongoing references to her motherhood and attachment to her children. The book also enticed the reader with a glimpse of her infamous brother-in-law, Osama, but never fully delivered any insights beyond what might be gleaned from other writing about him. Overall, a worthwhile read for understanding the life of women in this Arab nation. The reader will find Bin Laden's book of more value if they have read an Introduction to Islam prior to undertaking her story.
Don't miss this one........ January 29, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a very interesting, well written book that will give you a lot of insight into what it's like be a female living in Saudi Arabia. In spite of wealth, it is definitely not much fun to be a woman in that society. This is the story of an attractive, intelligent young woman who was raised in Western Europe, who then met, fell in love with and married one of Bin Laden's many brothers who was also living in Western Europe. This of course happened before 9-11. At first they lived in Europe and then the US and all went well until he took her back to his home in Saudi Arabia to live. As it turns out, the Saudis are almost as repressive as the Taliban. Very revealing! I recommend it.
Nicely done January 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Interesting and fast read. Carmen goes over what it was like to live in Saudi Arabia and how opressive it is for women to live there. She tells it like it is neither overdoing it or glamourizing it. In a way, she tells it like an outside observer might without playing herself to be a victim.
I definitely reccomend this book. It is not too in depth and is suitable for teenagers to read.
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