63232.fb2 The Bin Ladens - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 3

The Bin Ladens - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 3

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

THERE IS NO uniform system for transliteration between English and Arabic. The spellings of Arabic-originated place-and proper names relied upon in these pages are to some extent arbitrary, typically chosen to employ the simplest or most common forms. Occasionally, to avoid changing the original text in a quoted document, names may be spelled inconsistently. The Bin Ladens themselves offer an acute case. It is not unusual for family members to render their names in two different spellings in the same English-language document, even in official court filings. “Binladin” has been one common formulation; it is the preferred English spelling for the family’s flagship company, the Saudi Binladin Group. Yet “Binladen,” “Bin Ladin,” “Bin Laden,” and even “Benladin” are sometimes employed. I chose “Bin Laden” as the primary form because that is most familiar to American readers and also because when the family’s name is written in Arabic script, it appears as two words. For the first names of Mohamed’s children, I relied upon the spellings in English-language shareholder documents submitted by the family to a U.S. federal court.