Content area
Full Text
THE LOOMING TOWER: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006, 469 pages, $27.95.
Why did 9/11 happen? Government agencies, mass media outlets, and a presidential commission have offered various explanations in such detail that the basic facts of the tragedy have become common wisdom in America. These explanations, however, focus primarily on what happened and how it happened. In The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright digs further.
Wright's compelling narrative traces the evolution of radical Islamic fundamentalism, from Arab resentment of American support for Israel to the competing radical Islamic movements in the jails of Cairo to the final deadly combination of money, motive, opportunity, and bureaucratic indifference that enabled Al-Qaeda to murder thousands of innocent victims in the space of a few hours.
Wright begins in 1948 with the tale of Sayyid Qutb, an angry, middle-aged Egyptian scholar whose brief hiatus in the United States reinforced his resentment of Western materialist values. Qutb's sojourn took him to California, New York City, and Washington, D.C., but he spent much of his time as a graduate student in Greeley, Colorado, where he observed Americans' paradoxical embrace of Christianity, racism, hedonism, and greed. Qutb left America in 1950, full of hatred for what he viewed as a "spiritual wasteland," and returned to Egypt. Wright tells...