How it all began

JUST before Christmas 1948, a middle-aged Egyptian writer stepped off an ocean liner docked in New York Harbor and onto U.S. soil for the first time. He had come to escape the threat of persecution at home, but the next several months would bring a bitterness all their own.

The country’s unabashed materialism repelled him. Americans seemed “a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money,” and he longed, as he told a friend, for someone to talk to “about topics other than dollars, movie stars, brands of cars -- a real conversation on the issues of man, philosophy, and soul.” He found the food “weird,” the barbers incompetent, the racism appallingly pervasive, the religion empty and hypocritical and the women aggressive and promiscuous. “A girl looks at you,” he wrote, “appearing as if she were an enchanted nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”

These may have been little more than the observations of an embittered exile, but on Sept. 11, 2001, they would prove to have grand historic significance. The writer’s name was Sayyid Qutb, and his “lonely genius,” as Lawrence Wright puts it in “The Looming Tower,” would “unsettle Islam, threaten regimes across the Muslim world, and beckon to a generation of rootless young Arabs who were looking for meaning and purpose in their lives.” It was Qutb’s U.S. sojourn that convinced him that the West and Islam were fundamentally opposed -- a fundamental opposition that, half a century later, persuaded a generation of Muslim zealots to go to war against the West. “[T]o kill the Americans and their allies,” proclaimed a then little-known terrorist group called Al Qaeda in 1998, “is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

Wright’s magisterial, beautifully crafted narrative of the path to Sept. 11 traces this notion of global jihad through Egyptian student movements, Saudi mosques and Afghan training camps, through the murderous fatwas of radical clerics and finally into the heads and hearts of a wealthy young Saudi named Osama bin Laden and the martyrdom-obsessed young men he recruited to Al Qaeda’s ranks. But for Wright, a staff writer at the New Yorker, the story hinges less on ideas than it does on individuals -- both those behind Al Qaeda and those in the United States working to stop them. “[T]he tectonic plates of history were shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world,” he writes, “however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest.”

This focus on character, along with Wright’s five years of fierce on-the-ground reporting (he lists 560 interviewees), pays off. More-straightforward, analytical accounts often settle on dangerously simplistic explanations of terrorism’s causes: Islam is inherently violent, on the one hand, or America is being punished for supporting Israel, on the other. Wright, in contrast, untangles the anxieties, resentments, aspirations and ideals that have driven and defined radical Islamism. Israel’s victories over Arab armies in 1948 and 1967 “would shape the Arab intellectual universe more profoundly than any event in modern history,” mostly because they seemed to encapsulate the decline of the Arab world. In the face of humiliating powerlessness, unsettling change and stifling autocratic governments, fundamentalism “provided a dam against the overwhelming, raging river of modernity.”

At the same time, Wright manages to make the arch-villains of the Sept. 11 story scarily human. We learn, for example, what Bin Laden liked to watch on TV (“Bonanza”), what he discussed with his mother after school (his lunch), how he drove (“very fast”), what he read (Qutb) and what his classmates thought of the fundamentalist crowd he ran with (“only nerds”). After one of his four wives gave birth to a mildly retarded son, Wright relates, “bin Laden always insisted on including [that son], taking special care to make sure he was never left alone.” Given what came later, such banal detail is unsettling.

Although Bin Laden had been a devout fundamentalist since his youth, his real initiation to jihad came in the 1980s with the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He helped pay travel and living expenses for the Arab volunteers who fought alongside anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas. Most were posturing teenagers, their hapless brigades a motley assortment of aimless drifters and “pampered kids from the Persian Gulf” who would fire Kalashnikovs into the air, then “return home, boasting of their adventure.” But, as Wright notes, Bin Laden’s Afghan jihad “made no real difference in the tide of affairs,” and the performance of his men under fire was generally pathetic.

Still, when the Soviets finally left Afghanistan at the end of the decade, these Arab volunteers claimed much of the credit for driving a godless superpower out of a Muslim land -- a myth that fed Bin Laden’s megalomaniacal delusions. Casting about for a new focus for his zealotry, he joined with the Egyptian jihadi ideologue Ayman Zawahiri. This relationship was defining for both of them: “Zawahiri wanted money and contacts, which bin Laden had in abundance. Bin Laden, an idealist given to causes, sought direction; Zawahiri, a seasoned propagandist, supplied it.” Thus Al Qaeda was born, founded on the assumption that faith “is stronger than weapons or nations” and ready to do battle against the “distant enemy” -- America.

When Wright turns his attention stateside, he finds his main protagonist in John O’Neill, a swaggering, loud-mouthed FBI agent who, as the head of its counterterrorism unit, became so obsessed with Bin Laden that “his colleagues began to question his judgment.” For most Americans, within government and without, Al Qaeda was “too bizarre, too primitive and exotic” to take seriously. “Up against the confidence Americans placed in modernity and technology,” Wright observes, “the defiant gestures of bin Laden and his followers seemed absurd and even pathetic.”

O’Neill and a handful of his colleagues tried frantically to make everyone else grasp the danger, especially after Al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the U.S. destroyer Cole in 2000. One FBI agent, after being prevented by bureaucratic regulations from examining a suspected terrorist’s laptop (which might have revealed the 9/11 plot weeks before it happened), angrily and eerily told his superiors that he was just “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center.” But in most cases, these Cassandras had burned out by the time their unheeded warnings proved prescient. On the morning of Sept. 11, O’Neill had just started a lucrative new job as head of security at the World Trade Center.