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    Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia
    Unavailable
    Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia
    Unavailable
    Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia
    Audiobook6 hours

    Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia

    Written by Carmen Bin Ladin

    Narrated by Shohreh Aghdashloo

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Osama bin Laden's former sister-in-law provides a penetrating, unusually intimate look into Saudi society and the bin Laden family's role within it, as well as the treatment of Saudi women.

    On September 11th, 2001, Carmen bin Ladin heard the news that the Twin Towers had been struck. She instinctively knew that her ex-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. Carmen bin Ladin, half Swiss and half Persian, married into and later divorced from the bin Laden family and found herself inside a complex and vast clan, part of a society that she neither knew nor understood. Her story takes us inside the bin Laden family and one of the most powerful, secretive, and repressed kingdoms in the world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateApr 1, 2005
    ISBN9781594831560
    Unavailable
    Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia

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    Reviews for Inside the Kingdom

    4/5

    242 ratings19 reviews

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    • 4/5
      on Friday, December 19, 2008


      Finished it last night (Dec.18) . Guess what I loved her conclusion, the last chapter and she has given me a sentence I want to remember cause I totally agree with it.

      They will use our tolerance to infiltrate our society with there intolerance.
      This is so true. The Netherlands is well known for its tolerance but it slowly is giving away because we have let so many people into our country who now want us to change and do not like all the freedoms we have!

      Now about the book. I've read more books about women in Islamic culture and her life is very mild compared to the others. I think is interesting because she is one of the rich ones , her link to the Osama family , although you hardly hear anything about the main person of that horrible family, and of course the Princes.

      Like Rosie i am also going to search for some more info on google now.

      Which prince is now in power for instance. Is it the one she mentioned the more conservative one? Abdallah? I see the one reigning is called Abdulah

      ? 8.5

    • 4/5
      Makes me shudder to think that a woman could be so much at the mercy of a man & to be considered his property. The portrayal of women in the Saudi community is sobering. It was suggested that to understand Bin Laden one had to look at the the whole culture there. This book does a good job of putting one into that life. Carmen was very lucky to be rich enough to escape with her children. I agree with Marlene who was impressed by Carmens' quote " They will use our tolerance to infiltrate our society with their intolerance." Frightening.
    • 3/5
      This is a very descriptive book about the life of a Persian woman marrying into Saudi Arabia's limiting culture. Even though she was rich and associated with a priviledged family, her existence in her husband's country was still incredibly stifling. She also comments on her experience and expectations with her brother-in-law, Osama. The book was a unique perspective on the culture.
    • 4/5
      I would like to recommend this book. I found it a very interesting, balanced, non-sensationalist account of Carmen Bin Ladin's life in Saudi Arabia as a wife of one of the Bin Ladin brothers. Osama is mentioned from time to time, and the origins of the Saudi Islamic fundamentalism are clearly explained, but is not the main point of the book. The point of the book is to communicate the conditions and laws women have to live under in Saudi Arabia.
    • 4/5
      It was very interesting to hear a first person account of what went on in Saudi Arabia. It is also interesting to hear how she escaped that life. What is crazy to think about is the extraordinary wealth she had and the silliness of some of her decisions. I mean, she is human, and we all do dumb things, but she glosses over her mistakes without culpability. It made her a bit unlikable.
    • 5/5
      Simple and clear and I did enjoy
      Thanks for your bravery
    • 5/5
      Enlightening facts about how women are viewed and treated in the middle east.
    • 5/5
      An honest look at middle eastern world a real eye opener . I feel as she is my friend or neighbor.
    • 4/5
      Very interesting perspective of life within Saudi Arabia, from the perspective of the former wife of Islam bin Laudin, in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
    • 5/5
      This book is fascinating. It is wonderfully well written, honest, and offers a real look at the life of women inside Saudi Arabia during the late 70s and 80s. It is really not about Osama binladen but the larger context of Saudi culture which gave rise to extremist views.
    • 5/5
      Well, this memoir was electric and personal. If you want to know the skinny on living in Saudi Arabia, download this. Wow!
    • 5/5
      This was a fascinating account of life in Saudi Arabia in the 80s. It is truly unbelievable how women live there. It is 1000 yrs away from my life.
    • 5/5
      The progress of each stage was so exact that anyone can understand the way she could accept each devastating change. Incremental changes are always hard to make creditable. She did a great job. Anyone could have fallen victim as she did. Only someone strong beyond measure could raise against and survive.
    • 5/5
      I think everyone should be required to read or listen to the conclusion of this book to understand middle eastern culture and the rise of Osama Bin Laden. Well written & I love who they chose to narrate!
    • 5/5
      Carmen was educated, westernized, self-confident, not particulary religious; she married into a very rich and powerful family; and in their private life her husband treated her pretty much as an equal. Thus when she reports on her experiences as a woman in Saudi Arabia, you know that she is reporting on the best possible experience any Saudi Arabian woman could ever possibly have. That is what makes her story so shocking. This is as good as it ever gets, and other than an escape to the West, there doesn't seem to be any hope for it ever getting any better.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This was a very interesting look into life in Saudi Arabia. Having lived in a Muslim country, much of the information was not as new to me as I would have thought it would be. Still, some aspects of the Saudi lifestyle were different from the lifestyle in Qatar, where we lived.I think that some of the elements of life in Saudi would be shocking to an outsider--wearing an abaya, needing an exit visa, women having to be separate from men, luxurious clothing, separate marriage ceremonies--but I was already familiar with all of that, and quite honestly, in Qatar none of that is any big deal.Saudi is stricter than Qatar, however, and I found it very interesting to hear the stories about the stricter religious order and also to gain insight into what life would be like when you are married into the culture. Being half Persian, I would be surprised if Saudi was really as much of a shock to Carmen as she seems to lead us to believe.The countries are very different, but she would be familiar with some aspects of Islam just from her visits to Iran in her childhood.I found that Carmen sometimes repeated herself, but it did not bother me too much--it just served to reinforce her point.The book seemed to tease that it was going to provide more information about Osama than it actually did. I think that I came to that conclusion because Osama was mentioned so quickly in the book and his life was summarized right from the start. The book is truly about Carmen, her husband, and her daughters though....a wonderful story in itself but I felt the Osama name was used simply to draw in more readers.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 3/5
      The author was Osama Bin Ladin's sister-in-law. A New York Times review of the book reads: "If you want to beat Osama, you've got the start by listening to Carmen."

      Well, the book does nothing of the sort -- spill the beans on Osama that is. Instead it is an exposé of her restricted life, behind the veil, married into the Bin Laden clan.

      This is a quick read, compared to Jean Sasson's 'Princess Sultana' (3-book) series, which expounds in greater detail the lives of women in Saudi Arabia, the religious fundamentalism that pervades the country, and told from the perspective of a member of the Al-Saud royal family.
    • 5/5
      I'm not a Biblical scholar or an authority on the history of the English language although both subjects are of interest to me. This is not a book for those looking to discredit Bible translation as a way to discredit Christian faith. Obviously, the author has a great deal of respect for those that took on this task. However, he doesn't shrink from telling all the "dirty laundry" associated with the translation and the acceptance of the KJV. If we think politics and religion get all mixed up today, we only have to read this to find that there is nothing new in the world.All in all, I found this book interesting, easy to read (except for a few places), and enlightening.
    • 3/5
      So, I'm trying to catologue my books (because what if the house burned down? How would I know what to tell the insurance company???), and I was going through one of the bookcases and found this book. It actually belongs to my mother, and I was supposed to read it and mail it back to her YEARS ago. Which I am now going to do. But I thought I'd better read it fast. Carmen Bin Ladin is not a talented writer, but she is competent, and her story is sort of fascinating to a western sensibility. (In a completely horrid way, of course). Bottom line is that wearing the veil - and all that goes with it - turns women into ciphers. Scared ones. Since I always pretty much suspected this, it was interesting to see it confirmed. Part of me kept thinking, Hello? You married a Saudi guy, and didn't expect this kind of misery? and part of me kept responding, Oh, leave her alone. She was young, she was in love. And I give her full credit for fighting successfully for custody of her daughters. Well done, Carmen! They're beautiful and they sound terrific