Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia

This book should be required reading for every American girl/woman and husband. My wife and I devoured it. This Persian/Swiss woman who married into the most powerful family in Saudi Arabia - the Bin Ladens; tells a great tale of her life behind the Abaya (female body/face covering) and offers great insights into the world of the Bin Ladens and Islam. Her story covers the breadth of her experience being married to Osama Bin Laden's half brother and even her contact with OBL himsef. An amazing tale of love, family, stultifying tradition, history, and divorce.

Inside the Kingdom garnered much favourable verbiage from the international press upon its debut: "Shady business dealings, power struggles...Carmen reveals the intimate secrets of the most powerful clan in Saudi Arabia"; "... makes a fiery case against the oppression and fanaticism....of Saudi society..."; "...her struggle to cope with rules and strictures as suffocating as the desert climate."

Perhaps the media didn't read the same book as I. In any case, the hype raised my expectations and ruined for me what otherwise might have been an interesting personal chronicle.

While I don't mean to belittle Carmen bin Ladin's emotional distress or her very real concern for the safety of her daughters, this is little more than a gossipy memoir from a poor little rich girl who marries a handsome young man she barely knows and has difficulty adjusting to life with the in-laws. Her failing marriage and determination to retain custody of her children would interest no one, if not for the fact that her husband's brother is the infamous Osama bin Ladin.

This book has nothing new about Saudi Arabia or the conditions under which women there live and nothing particularly revealing about Osama bin Ladin, beyond a few cameo appearances in the role of tyrannical husband. Carmen also fails to convey any sense of depth to her marriage and personal relationship with her husband, Yeslam, who comes across as a remote stick figure. Perhaps for legal reasons she is being careful.

While she devotes several admiring pages to her father-in-law, the 22-times married Mohamed, the anecdotes are all second hand; he was already dead when Carmen came to Saudi Arabia.

There are brief hints and glimpses into the lives of other women - her friends and sisters-in-law --but Carmen never gets below the surface. "Saudi women don't open their lives to each other", she says. A pity! It might have been a better book if they had.

I listened to the audio version and found it very easy to listen to (as opposed to some CDs where I find the written version to be superior to the oral one). As mentioned, the author is a sister-in-law of Osama Bin Laden. While the author does make a few comments on Osama, she mostly focuses on life for the Saudi woman. The audio/book will mostly appeal to those who haven't heard very much description of life for women in Saudi Arabia. For those who are familiar with the female Saudi lifestyle with its narrow and rigid restrictions, the ideas will be not so novel.

The fact that Carmen Bin Ladin has a notorius brother-in law called Osama is a motivation to read this book.
Carmen who is half Swiss and half Persian was raised in the west and, on marriage, became part of a culture she neither knew or understood.

Carmen flourished in her western education and freedoms for women and determined to protect her daughters from the restriction in a Saudi society riddled with hyprocracy and contradiction. Her husband was a powerful influential man and through him, Carmen gained an intimidate knowledge of a poweerful, secretive kingdom. This was most unusual for a woman.

Her unravelling of life in this Saudi kingdom is an eye opener to her struggles with a backward-looking view of religion and an education that fosters intolerance. Her struggle with the scorn for what is foreign and the non-muslim is captivating. The book really highlights Carmen's fight to be true to herself and to give her daughters priceless freedom of thought.

I purchased what I thought were two different books by Carmen Bin Ladin - "Inside the kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia" and "The veiled Kingdom". The first was a hard cover and the second a paper back . However, they were the same book under different names!

Dr Ken Williams

This book opened my eyes to the plight of women in Saudi Arabia - even wealthy women. I passed it on to all the women in my family because I found it interesting and very educational.