THE LOOMING TOWER

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Introduction

This is surely the most thorough account available of "Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11". It is also the most readable, a remarkable feat given that it presents a welter of individuals and incidents. An appendix identifying the "principal characters" takes up eight pages; another eight pages needed to list the number of jihadists, scholars, antiterrorist officials, and others Wright interviewed (Bergen, 2006). The result is a splendid example of what dogged historical reconstruction can achieve. A bonus is Wright's discussion of how he worked to use, and not be used by, partisan sources, which provides wise counsel to any reporter or historian. Osama bin Laden is the principal protagonist in the account, but scarcely less prominently portrayed are those who influenced him, including the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb and the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, as well as members of his inner circle, from Ayman al-Zawahiri to many lesser lights. Wright also works in those individuals who confronted al Qaeda, from Saudis such as Prince Turki al-Faisal to the handful of U.S. security officials whose poor cooperation lost what chance there might have been to prevent the 9/11 attacks (Griffin & Falk, 2010).

Discussion

Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower is a masterful account of the events that culminated in al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. To relate the story as fully as possible, the author, in addition to using available published sources, interviewed over five hundred people. Wright readily admits that The Looming Tower is not the final accounting. At the time of writing, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's leaders, were in hiding, and the principal governments involved, notably Saudi Arabia and the United States, had information that has not been made available to Wright or any other investigator of the events of 9/11.

The title The Looming Tower comes from the Quran. After the terrorist attack, in a tape belonging to a member of an al-Qaeda cell, bin Laden urged the future highjackers to embrace martyrdom and recited a passage from the Quran's fourth surah: “Wherever you are, death will find you, / even in the looming tower” (Jandora, 2006). In 1996 Osama bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian, openly declared war on the United States. Until then, American authorities had largely ignored him, and there was only one FBI agent assigned to bin Laden threat prior to that year. Hardly anyone in the American government took him seriously.

Wright begins his narrative with Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian educator who visited the United States in 1948. He became convinced that there was a clash of civilizations between Islam and materialistic cultures, both capitalist and communist (Kristol & Kagan, 2009). Even contemporary Islam was straying, and Qutb envisioned a restoration of a purer Islam, the Islam of the Prophet Muhammad, who died in 632 CE (ibid). Wright refers to this attitude as the “paradise lost” syndrome. Convicted of involvement in plots against the secular Egyptian ...