The woman he was marrying was not invited to the wedding:

In keeping with conservative Sunni tradition, the wedding celebrations were an all-male affair.

“The bride was deemed to have consented to the marriage by traveling to Afghanistan, so her presence was not required,” Jaba wrote in The Sunday Times after interviewing Ismail.

“The men celebrated with recitals of poetry and song, freshly slaughtered lambs and large dishes of rice.”

According to Abu Jandal, “songs and merriment were mixed with the firing of shots into the air.”

The negation of women in the extreme and even standard parts of this culture never fails to stun me.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

9 replies on “Bin Laden’s Last Wedding”

  2. wow. after a certain point, you konw, one should no longer be swtunned by the anti-woman features of some cultures, and one should no longer be stunned by the fac that slaery was practicd by most if not all cultures, and one should no longer be stunned by globalization. I mean one need merely look in one’s own driveway and note the volvo or the honda and conclude “wow man, much as I despire globalization and capitalism, I am a savvy shopper, so I will buy cheap, too. Oh wait, that makes ME the cause of globalization!~” As for women and nonwestern cultures, for many years I suspect one has been told that the culture of thewest with its focus on individual liberties and freedom and the central idea that “man is valuable” not the king or the state now expanded to all men are valuable and women, too, what with this women’s lib thing we’ve been having for about 150 years, what with the un charter and human rights of man and all the other western iinspired ideals, would sort of lead one to conclude, after noting nation after nation adopting those ideals or pretending to, that holy shit! we’re right! our western ideals of freedom, nonoppression etc. no matter how compromised in practice are in fact waaaaaaay beter than the human misery most cultures produce……then one would no longer be stunned all the time at how backward other clutures are with their oppressions of women, gays, minorities, and people in general. the west is best dude, didn’tyou get the memo like in college when they started with the greeks and all that crap? “yes they oppressed women and slaves, and only rich people enjoyed these rights and democracy and focus on the individual but the story of the west is the coninual epxansion of these rights out to everybody.” this is sort of what all western based colleges teach as the most basic feature of history culture and literature for the last 3000 years. maybe it’s time to stop being stunned and to say “well they basically got it right. Western culture and politics is great, other ones are backwards and suck.”

  3. I’m surprised they didn’t have some teen boys dress as women and dance only to get raped afterwards. If anyone’s seen the documentary about Bacha Bazi then you’ll understand what I mean.

  4. If we’re gonna talk about barbaric Muslim traditions, not being invited to your own wedding isn’t so bad.

    I read Infidel earlier this year. Ali describes their rituals in which the bride is not present for the ceremony. She is around in another room so that the groom can take her “maidenhead”. By “maidenhead,” I mean “mass of scar tissue from when her clitoris and labia were cut off and her vulva was sewn shut leaving a tiny opening for urine to trickle out of”. The groom will often have to cut open this “maidenhead” with a knife.

    In any case, the resulting blood soaked sheet is shown to the wedding party who then cheer. The bride can hear these cheers through the wall while she treats the wounds that will likely be reopened the next time her husband gets a bit randy.

  8. @5,

    Ali is from Somalia, which has a 95 percent prevalence of FGM, one of the highest in the world. There isn’t much data on the prevalence of FGM in the Near East, but it seems to be much lower than in Northeastern Africa. Yemen (a backwater by any measure) has a prevalence of 23 percent.

    Amazingly enough, not all Muslims are the same, not even the fundamentalist jagoffs.

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