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#1 I was the fourth of five sons born to my parents. My father was a businessman who imported construction machinery from Europe and sold it to the Saudi-American oil giant Aramco, a little way up the coast. My parents were conservative Sunni Arabs in a very conservative Kingdom, where women went covered on the rare occasions they left home.

#2 I had a very conservative Muslim identity as a child, but I was also aware of the struggles in Afghanistan against the Russians, and the call to jihad that had lured thousands of Arabs to the foothills of the Himalayas.

#3 I was a huge fan of the mosque, and the books and articles I would read there would later become the foundation of my career as a journalist. In 1990, just a month before my twelfth birthday, Saddam Hussein's army invaded Kuwait. The American presence offered me reassurance that Saddam would be stopped.

#4 I lost my mother when I was young, and I was drawn to the radical teachings of Sayyid Qutb, the founding father of modern jihad. I finished his book In the Shade of the Koran in two years, and it made a deep impression on me.