"Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who had written excited dispatches from the front lines of the Afghan war, was back in Jeddah, working as the deputy editor of the English-language daily Arab News. He still believed in political Islam, but he had never espoused violence and he especially opposed Muslims killing other Muslims. This was what divided the world of Islam: those who believed in letting others live and those who didn’t. Osama bin Laden had been Jamal’s friend; they had spent time together in Peshawar and in Afghanistan. Jamal had been one of the first to interview the tall, lanky, rich Saudi. In 1995, Khashoggi, acting as a kind of unofficial intermediary for Bin Laden’s family back in Saudi Arabia, had tried to persuade Bin Laden to publicly renounce his campaign against the Saudi establishment and denounce violence inside the kingdom. The violent sahwa was just beginning. Bin Laden, who was living in Sudan by then, running a training camp for militants, refused. Jamal left, exasperated. After 9/11, Jamal described Bin Laden as living in a fantasyland of terror. He wrote a mea culpa on his personal website, saying the kingdom wasn’t even trying to understand what had led fifteen Saudis to become hijackers."