Yemen — home to dreams of wealth and power Source: TIMES ONLINE Since my first visit to Hadhramaut in eastern Yemen, a cluster of buildings with a magnificent view down into this wadi had appeared on the edge of the high plateau. It turned out to be a brand new holiday resort.
Two thousand feet below was another clear sign that the globalised age was prising open even this remote corner of southern Arabia from which Osama bin Laden’s father had left for Saudi Arabia in 1930: a thin new ribbon of asphalt road along the wadi floor. Near the village of Sif, unlikely as a spaceship on a patch of stony ground, is a mansion built in the same Neo-Classical style and to almost the same scale as Buckingham Palace, which belongs to a member of the al-Amoudi family now resident in Saudi Arabia. Even more striking is a multistorey edifice painted a glorious patchwork of bright colours, a family mansion known as the Buqshan Palace. That the Wadi Doan should have generated such an entrepreneurial streak is surprising given that it produces nothing except some 35 tons a year of the best and most expensive honey in the world.
After bin Laden, the best-known Hadhrami name in Saudi Arabia is bin Mahfouz. The patriarch of the clan, Salim Ahmad bin Mahfouz, also hailed from the Wadi Doan and reportedly pawned his precious jambiyah (traditional dagger) to raise the cost of his passage to Jeddah by dhow in the 1930s. Starting out as a humble money-changer, he was making a gigantic personal fortune by the 1950s through the National Commercial Bank. His son Khaled inherited the bank, but his purchase in the 1980s of a 20 per cent stake in an institution notorious for arms trafficking and money laundering, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), sullied the family name. His charitable foundation, named Muwaffaq (Blessed Relief), was suspected of funnelling donations to al-Qaeda.
At the southernmost end of the Wadi Doan is al-Ribat, the bin Laden family’s home village. By the mid-1930s, the poor beekeeper Awad’s illiterate eldest son, Muhammad bin Laden, had already left it, first for a docker’s job in Mukalla and then to Ethiopia and finally to Saudi Arabia.
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