As the months went by I began to settle into my new life as Yeslam bin Laden's wife in Saudi Arabia. I started to think about the future. Musing about redecorating the house was a recurrent fantasy. I was enclosed there night and day, often for weeks at a time, and the decor was truly hideous. I tried to keep busy by reading and playing with our infant daughter Wafah.
One day, Yeslam's younger brother Osama came to visit. Back then he was a young student attending King Abdel Aziz University in Jeddah, respected in the family for his stern religious beliefs, and recently married to a Syrian niece of his mother's.
Osama was perfectly integrated into the family, although he didn't live in the neighbourhood where most of the Bin Ladens lived on the outskirts of Jeddah - at Kilometre Seven on the road towards Mecca, at the very edge of the desert. He was a tall man, despite the slightness of his build, and he had a commanding presence - when Osama stepped into the room, you felt it. But he was not strikingly different from the other brothers, just younger and more reserved.
That afternoon, I was playing with Wafah in the hallway when the doorbell rang. I, stupidly, automatically, answered it myself, instead of calling for the houseboy.
Catching sight of Osama and his (adult) nephew Mafouz, I smiled and asked them in. "Yeslam is here," I assured them, but Osama snapped his head away when he saw me and glared back towards the gate. "No, really," I insisted. "Come in." Osama was making rapid back-off gestures with his hand, waving me aside and muttering something in Arabic, but I truly didn't understand what he meant. Mafouz could see that I was seemingly lacking in the basics of social etiquette, and he finally explained that Osama could not see my naked face.
In Saudi culture, any man who might one day become your husband is not supposed to see you unveiled. The only men who may look at you are your father, brother and husband, or step-father. Osama was among those men who followed the rule strictly. So I retreated into a back room while my admirably devout brother-in-law visited my husband. I felt stupid and awkward.
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It was steaming hot, and a group of the Bin Laden brothers made plans for a day trip to the family country house in Taef, in the mountains, about two hours' drive from Jeddah. This was a vast house, built in the 1950s or 60s, devoid of any special charm, but it was a little cooler there, and it made for a change of routine. We women established ourselves in the female quarters with the children.
My second daughter Najia was a few months old, and Osama's wife, Najwah, had a son, Abdallah, who was about the same age. In this society of women I found Najwah's presence particularly unsettling, perhaps because she was so meek. She was constantly pregnant; by the time I left Saudi Arabia for good, she and Osama had had seven sons - and she was not yet 30. With drab clothes and downcast eyes, Najwah seemed almost completely invisible.
What could I talk about with a woman like this? What can you say to someone with whom you have nothing in common? There I was, thinking to myself, "What does this girl have in her life? She is pious ... religion is her entire world. She cannot listen to music ... she bears children and her husband doesn't let her out." She might smile at me, probably thinking to herself, "Poor woman, she will go to hell," and I was thinking, "Poor woman, she is living in hell." We had totally opposing convictions.
On one very hot day, Abdallah commenced howling, and kept it up for hours. He was thirsty and Najwah kept trying to feed him water with a teaspoon, but it was obvious he was far too small to manage to drink properly from a spoon. Najia was gulping water from her baby bottle constantly and I offered it to Najwah.
"Take it, he's thirsty," I told her, but Najwah wouldn't take the bottle. She was almost crying herself. "He doesn't want the water," she kept saying. "He won't take the spoon."
My mother-in-law, known to me always as Om Yeslam, had to explain that Osama didn't want the baby to use a bottle. (Following the Koran, Islamic scholars lay firm emphasis on the mother's duty to breastfeed their children; bottle-feeding is regarded by some Muslim people as a decadent western practice.) There was simply nothing Najwah could do about it. She was so sad, and so powerless - a drab little figure, very young, cradling her baby in the fold of her arm, watching him in such obvious distress. I couldn't stand it.
Even up at the Bin Ladens' house in the mountains, it was punishingly hot, perhaps 100 degrees outside, and a baby can dehydrate in a few hours at such temperatures. I couldn't believe someone would really let his tiny child suffer so much over some ridiculous dogmatic idea about a rubber teat. I couldn't just sit there and watch this happen. Surely my husband Yeslam could do something? I couldn't go over to the men's side of the house to appeal to him to intercede, but a sister could. I begged one of them to get Yeslam.
When Yeslam arrived, I railed at him. "Go and tell your brother that his child is suffering," I said. "The baby needs a bottle. This has to stop." But Yeslam came back shaking his head. He told me, "It's no use. This is Osama."
I just could not believe it. All the way back to Jeddah it haunted me. Osama could do as he wished with his wife and child: that was a given. His wife didn't dare disobey him: this was a given, too. Worse still, nobody would dare to intercede. Even Yeslam seemed to agree that Osama's rule over his household should be absolute. The force and command I had once seen in Yeslam, and admired, seemed to be dissipating in the hot Arabian air.
As Yeslam drove back down the hills, I sat in silence, veiled, my fists clenched, staring at the empty world outside. I felt suffocated. I'm sure Osama would not have wanted to lose his baby. It was not as if he didn't care about the child, but the baby's suffering was less important than a principle which he probably imagined stemmed from some seventh-century verse in the Koran. And his family was simply awed by Osama's zeal and intimidated into silence. For them, as for most Saudis, you simply could not be too excessive about your religious beliefs.
That is when I realised just how powerless I had become. If Yeslam were not there, and if I did not have a son to take on that role, my guardian - and the guardian of my daughters - would be one of Yeslam's brothers. I would be dependent for everything on that man. Men like Osama could one day rule over me and my children. There would be nothing whatsoever that I could do about it.
· Veiled Kingdom by Carmen bin Ladin is published by Virago. To order a copy for £8.99 (RRP £10.99) plus p&p, call the Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875.
