The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

Like millions of other Americans, I recall very well where I was on 11 September 2001. I also remember the major events which followed: the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Nine years later, those military reactions to the attacks on that day in September are ongoing. I've read a lot of articles and watched a plethora of documentaries, but I’ve always had various lacunae in my knowledge of terrorism and our responses. Ergo I thought I’d do some reading on the subject and began with Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. It has provided the best look I’ve seen at the events which led to 9/11 and gives a much fuller view of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda than I have previously witnessed.

The story begins in November 1948 with Sayyid Qutb, a middle-aged Egyptian writer, coming to America amidst a crisis of faith. When he returned to Egypt a couple years later, he did so having become radicalized. In America he saw only what he recognized as depravity and would go on to write screeds decrying the materialism of the West, individual freedoms, etc. He saw America as a "spiritual wasteland" which celebrated sexuality and relegated religion to the backwaters. Qutb serves as a suitable entry point because his views would form the basis of radical Islam as we know it today. One idea of his that became especially important was takfir or essentially the bit of thinking that certain Muslims aren't "true" Muslims and that they can be killed despite injunctions against this in the Quran. This would later be used to justify suicide bombings.

For the rest of the book, the dramatis personae are led by Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaeda right hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri, Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia, and John O'Neill of the FBI. The lives of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are traced from their childhoods. Osama bin Laden grew up in a wealthy Arabian family. His father, Mohammed, created a vast construction empire and was legendary in the country for building roads which helped fuel the modernization of Saudi Arabia. al-Zawahiri grew up in a middle-class suburb of Cairo where he witnessed the increasing secularization of his country and the heavy hand brought down on dissidents.

Al-Zawahiri became a follower of Qutb and dreamt of turning Egypt into an Islamic state early in his life. He eventually became part of al-Jihad which was dedicated to this cause. Bin Laden began his terrorist career fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda was formed in the twilight years of that conflict with the goal of being a mobile Islamic fighting force, going wherever it was needed. Wright portrays their relationship as having its tensions. Al-Zawahiri's focus was Egypt where he wanted to instigate a swift coup while bin Laden was generally anti-Communist. Al-Jihad eventually fell apart and al-Zawahiri was essentially forced to partner with bin Laden if his dreams of an Islamic Egypt were to be kept alive. Bin Laden had access to money while al-Zawahiri was an organizer and leader.

Following the lives of these two men was very interesting on a couple levels. Firstly is that al-Zawahiri's life also gives us a very brief summary of Egypt's recent history with a more in-depth look at some of the more violent highlights. Wright also does a good job of giving background on Saudi Arabian society and its ruling family. There wasn't much to the country until the 1950s when the oil started flowing. The Saud family became legendary for their extravagant lifestyles and adoption of various elements of Western culture. Prince Turki formerly headed Saudi intelligence and was responsible for trying to keep bin Laden contained and, eventually, attempted to secure his return to Saudi Arabia. What these tales do is give the reader a broader understanding of the Middle East generally which I greatly appreciated.

Secondly, the story of bin Laden's life reveals him to be less than an inhuman monster. I've spent so many years hearing comparisons to Hitler and hearing about his long reach that bin Laden is almost a caricature to me. The book follows him from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, to Sudan, and back to Afghanistan. Wright portrays him as being something of an opportunist. The efforts of Saudis who'd gone to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets were largely ineffective yet bin Laden loved to claim divine victory for his side and give his troops and himself more credit than they deserved. Indeed, most Afghan fighters saw them as a nuisance. Bin Laden took on multiple wives and we learn about his marital problems including those which were the result of his self-imposed ascetic lifestyle. I always thought of bin Laden as being an extremely rich financier but, as the books make clear, he wasn't that rich and, while in Sudan, he even lost his fortune.

John O'Neill was the chief of the FBI's counterterrorism section and one of the few who took the threat of al-Qaeda seriously. As bin Laden evolves from having an anti-Communist view to one that targets America, Wright shows how government bureaucracies were slow to recognize the true threat that al-Qaeda posed as our embassy in Kenya was destroyed in 1998 and the USS Cole was bombed in 2000. The CIA withheld crucial information from the FBI that would have alerted them to the presence of al Qaeda in the U.S. In-fighting, posturing, and defending bureaucratic territory took precedence over finding the bad guys.

One thing that was on my mind reading The Looming Tower was a debate that I most commonly see played out among atheists. (Mind you, Wright does not involve himself in this argument.) One the one hand, you have arguments from the likes of Richard Dawkins and "Imagine No Religion billboards that essentially portray religion as the sine non qua of terrorism. On the other side you have people like Scott Atran who is an atheist but sees religion's role in terrorism as a minor one. At one of the Beyond Belief conferences he said: "I think that religion is basically a neutral vessel. It has done everything you can imagine, and its contrary. And there is nothing intrinsic about religion, for the good or the bad." Atran has done a lot of research on terrorism and, while I haven't read his work in detail, he seems to come down on the side that people become terrorists because they become morally offended, not because they read the Quran and suddenly have a revelation that they need to become a suicide bomber. Today's terrorists are usually well-educated young men. They see people like themselves being killed on Al Jazeera and talk about it with a small group of friends, say, at a soccer club. The complaining is done in an echo chamber until the anger reaches a boiling point and some of them actually commit terrorist acts.

And so I readThe Looming Tower always keeping an eye on this debate. How much did religion have to do with the story? While Wright doesn't address this, he does quote the actors involved and looks at the ideological underpinnings of al-Qaeda.

On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to Atran's side. Sure, being religious doesn't mean you're going to become violent. And Wright points out examples of how many people didn't respond to bin Laden's fatwa to fight in Afghanistan. Indeed, many who did weren't specifically motivated by religion. On the other, religion surely plays a part in the story. Qutb was very specific in citing Islam as the answer to materialism/modernization/the West. For him it was a specific version of a specific religion that had all the answers and could provide the best way of life for people. al-Zawahiri thought that Egypt had become too modern and wanted it to "return" to Islam – his version of it, anyway. Bin Laden? Same thing. (And more, of course.)

While it is true that there are many factors involved here and that removing religion doesn't mean that peace and harmony would prevail in the world, religion is omnipresent in Wright's story. To simply say that religion is an empty, neutral vessel is to ignore the reality that it will be filled up quickly. I just don't see how one can say that religion has either no role or one so inconsequential that it can basically be ignored when discussing terrorism. At the very least, religion can act as a rallying point around which other more secular grievances can gather. Similarly, to say that there would be no terrorism if there was no religion seem equally reckless to me.

Getting back to The Looming Tower, I have to say that it was an engrossing read. It provides a lot of background material essential to understanding our times and really puts al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden into perspective. It also made me wonder if our government has corrected the institutional problems that prevented law enforcement and intelligence agencies from tackling al-Qaeda within our borders. Despite being four years old, Wright’s interviews and exhaustive investigations contribute to a book that still holds up and remains, as near as I can tell, the definitive book on the subject.