"The Looming Tower"
Wherever you are, death will find you,This is a highly readable account, published just the other month, of the historical currents that culminated in the Unpleasantness at the World Trade Center five years ago. I had read a bit about Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian writer and activist whose two years stateside in the late 1940s filled him with revulsion and, apparently, deep sexual anxiety, and set him, as it were, on fire for the Prophet, but Wright's account fleshes out his intellectual contribution to the modern revival of aggressive, fundamentalist Islam. This founding father of the modern movement, hanged in Egypt forty years ago this Tuesday, was made of subtler stuff than this century's disciples, but his view of the west was not significantly finer-grained than Dubya's picture of the "evildoers," and his intellectual heirs are persuasively scary as Wright presents them: Koranic literalists (save when a tactical deviation is required to violate an apparent injunction against the killing of bystanders) whose aim is the extermination of all competing systems of thought planetwide, in this respect not unlike our homegrown Christian "dominionists," who are fortunately as yet still marginalized in our culture—as Sayyid Qutb's followers once were in theirs. I am put in mind of Eric Hoffer's observation that extremists at either end of a political spectrum resemble one another far more than they do the mutually despised middle.
even in the looming tower
From the intellectual roots of the movement the author moves to the early lives of bin Laden and his sometime associate al-Zawahiri; to the ambiguous and, so to say, co-dependent relationship between the House of Saud and its protector/customer the US of A; to the dragons' teeth sown in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, and then, late in the book, to the thin network of Americans in the various law enforcement bureaucracies who began in the 1990s to be alarmed at the instrument they saw taking shape and who attempted to sound the alarm to those alphabet-soup agencies—FBI, CIA, NSA—whose resistance to the message was a compound of one part don't-rock-the-boat to three parts fierce institutional rivalry and loathing for one another. None of the major agency players had the entire picture, and they didn't have the entire picture collectively, but each possessed, and jealously hoarded, a sufficient number of pieces of the puzzle to have assembled a vividly urgent warning. The hero of this part of the narrative is John O'Neill, a hard-drinking, philandering, abrasive FBI agent who for years is Ahab to Moby bin Laden, and who Richard Clarke attempts to have succeed him at the NSC. Essentially forced out of government, O'Neill accepts a gig in August 2001 as chief of security for the World Trade Center and...you can guess the rest.
Highly informative, competently presented. You may wish to await the trade paperback, but your understanding of the catastrophic origin of our present plight will be immeasurably enhanced by your perusal.
cordially,
