“People are not born terrorists. Nor do they become terrorists in a single stroke,” Jean Sasson suggests early on in “Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World.”

Thus she offers us, if not an apologia, at least an excuse for reading this double memoir of Osama bin Laden’s first wife, Najwa, and his fourth-born son, Omar.

The exercise is as compelling as it is repelling — for Sasson (who has lived or traveled in the Middle East for more than 30 years) has taken great care in assembling what was told to her by Najwa and Omar, presenting their words shrewdly, along with maps, statistics and her own intermittent commentary.

Whether or not we care if Osama bin Laden was serious, religious and conscientious as a child, and fond of zucchini stuffed with marrow, it is hard to turn from Najwa, the woman who tells us these things—for hers is a world at once exotic and alluring but also difficult and confining and, over time, ineffably sad. (“I trusted my husband too, too much,” she laments.)

It is hard to turn as well from Omar, the son chosen to be his father’s second-in-command, but who walks away, crushed that his father “hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”

Sasson — whose previous work has centered on “the lives of women who have lived through dramatic, even dangerous, times” — gained access to the bin Ladens, mother and son, after Omar sent an inquiry to Sasson via a publisher’s Web site.

“Truthfully, my initial reaction was not positive,” she writes — but she changed her mind when she was “struck with the thought that Omar’s story would be the first book by a real bin Laden. It would be the only story to tell the truth of life in the home of the infamous terrorist.”

Najwa came aboard at the request of her son, with “limits to the topics she agreed to discuss.”

If, as she tells it, she spent her life in isolation, never privy to her husband’s outside life, then the prodigious amount Najwa does share here is a treasure trove.

She was not yet 16 when she married 17-year-old Osama, a cousin she had known all of her life, and, from her observations here, dearly loved.

When, not long after, the couple moved to Saudi Arabia, all of Najwa’s girlhood pursuits, including school, were left behind: “I suppose,” she told Sasson, “one might say that Najwa Ghanem bin Laden is an artist without paints, a cyclist without a bicycle, and a tennis player without a ball, a racket, or a court.”

Many children followed (in all, Najwa bore seven sons and four daughters) with Osama moving his family numerous times, taking more wives and, over time, relocating them all to remote spots where life, particularly for the women and children, was hard.

Both Najwa and Omar tell of living, even when in large cities, without air conditioning, refrigeration, modern medicine or toys — all items Osama considered “Western” or frivolous. (His boys did grow up, though, with guns and horses, Osama himself partial to fast cars, and the occasional game of soccer.)

Yet Najwa was happy in her marriage, for a long time — and apparently enjoyed, like the cherished first wife in Kipling’s “Just So” story “The Butterfly That Stamped,” a special place in her husband’s estimation. Hard as it is for a Western reader to reconcile the subservient life she led, it was the life she knew and, in large measure, expected — and it was, without question, fascinating.

Omar’s life, however, deviated greatly from the norm — as he did what sons in his culture are taught not to do: He defied his father.

“I believed that the United States was an evil nation with an evil agenda to kill Muslims,” Omar told Sasson. “I had been taught since childhood that Americans were determined to murder me because I was Muslim.”

Omar also grew up knowing his father had plans “to destroy the West,” plans one suspects the young Omar may have embraced, had he been less sensitive, and his father more loving.

But Omar began to question his father’s beliefs and intentions (he was, he claims, never given specifics), and decided to leave: “I was not leaving . . . to look for happiness. I was searching only for peace.”

There are some “myth-busters” here — as the revelation that Osama bin Laden does not, as is generally thought, suffer from kidney disease and require dialysis although he is, according to wife and son, prone to kidney stones. And he is not left-handed, his son Omar says, but favors his left side because his right eye is “imperfect” (due to a childhood injury in which metal flew into his right eye).

The fearful moment that was 9/11 doesn’t come till close to the end of “Growing Up bin Laden,” and is foreshadowed by the car bombings at the U. S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi on Aug. 7, 1998.

On that earlier day, Omar was still with his father: “The breath left my body,” he told Sasson. “I studied my father’s face; in my life, I had never seen him so excited and happy.”

By 9/11, Omar was long gone. His mother, at his constant urging, had left two days before, with three of her children. It is a portion of the book that can be read only with chills.

“A weird wail, followed by an excited voice, woke me from a deep sleep,” Omar recalls. “I was at my grandmother’s house in Jeddah when my uncle came crashing into my room, his voice high, his words confusing. ‘Look what my brother has done! Look what my brother has done! He has ruined all our lives! He has destroyed us!’ ”

Remembering that “Growing Up bin Laden” is Najwa’s and Omar’s tale, told on their terms and in their words, helps keep a firm perspective here. The book does not humanize Osama bin Laden, nor does it excuse Najwa and Omar for staying with him as long as they did.

Its dedication is to “every innocent person who has suffered pain or lost their life in terror attacks throughout the world, and the families who continue to suffer and mourn them.”

Its most riveting section is a series of glossy photographs of Osama bin Laden — and of his children by Najwa — over many years. Sadly, there is not, nor can there be, a photograph of Najwa as she is still Osama bin Laden’s wife, and may not be seen publicly by others.

Growing Up bin Laden:

Osama's Wife and Son Take Us

Inside Their Secret World

By Najwa bin Laden, Omar bin Laden and Jean Sasson

St. Martin's Press

334 pages, $25.99

Karen Brady is a retired News columnist.