Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment - movies, theatre, music - is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socialising presence of women.


The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
My first book of 2007. Although it's in hardback (it was published here in August last year), I have been carting it around in my bag since taking receipt before Christmas. It's one of those books that makes you wish your train would be delayed. One of those books that, even though your eyes were starting to fall asleep on the sofa when you decided to go up to bed, you force yourself to read a few more pages before going to sleep. And one of those books that, conversely, you wish would never end. Written in the clear-headed, fact-checked but occasionally poetic style of a New Yorker staffer (which Wright is), The Looming Tower traces the events of September 11, 2001 back to their source, and although written from an American perspective, avoids the usual sullen wound-licking and attempts to understand the motives of al-Qaeda.

The quote above is about Saudi Arabia, where Osama bin Laden grew up, a well-off, privileged young man, but one whose father earned his money and status through hard work (he was a builder by eventual royal appointment in the kingdom, who lived a frugal lifestyle despite his wealth). But the roots of al-Qaeda must be traced back to Egypt, and the father of the radical Islamic movement Sayyid Qutb: a middle-class, educated civil servant and writer who learned his hatred of America while studying there in the 1940s. It was modernity he took exception to ("secularism, rationality, democracy, subjectivity, individualism, mixing of the sexes, tolerance, materialism") and returned radicalised to Egypt, a country still under the yoke of Western colonialism. After Nasser took control in a military coup against the bloated ruling class in 1952, Qtub hoped for "a just dictatorship", but Nasser moved the country towards a socialist, secular society and Qtub's cohorts in the Shia law-favouring Muslim Brotherhood turned against the leader they had helped to put in place.

Qtub ended up in prison after a failed assassination attempt on Nasser, and it was here, brutalised, tortured and horrified at the Muslim guards' treatment of other Muslim prisoners, that he wrote his apocalyptic manifesto, Ma'alim fi a'Tariq (Milestones), which, among other assertions based on his own dark reading of the Quran, stated that any Muslim serving Nasser was not a true Muslim. Thus, did he make enemies of anyone who didn't agree with him and set the clock back to the days of the Prophet Mohammed, before which the world existed in "a period of ignorance and barbarity", jahiliyya. When Qutb was hanged on August 29, 1966, the book seems to say, al-Qaeda was effectively born. "My words will be stronger if they kill me," he said.

Wright carefully takes us from this point to the day the Twin Towers fell. charting the growth of al-Qaeda and giving a vivid insight into the incompetence, delusion and in-fighting that hallmarked its early years during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, when bin Laden and his closest cohorts would camp out in the path of Soviet missiles, inviting martyrdom. The Mujahideen were not impressed by what they saw as these rich Saudi thrillseekers. It is amusing, but also chilling, to read of bin Laden's first fatwa against America (which, after all, as Wright points out, had never been a colonial power, and Saudi Arabia had never been colonised; it was also a deeply religious country, and about as fond of the Russians as he was in the late 70s and early 80s): "What is required," he told his followers in 1989, the "hero" returned from vanquishing the Russians singlehandedly, "is to wage an economic war against America. We have to boycott all American products." I've tried this. Can't be done. It's amazing to think that the future public enemy number one was advocating the boycott of Campbell's soup and Jolly Green Giant sweetcorn in 1989. Seven years later, he declared war on America from his cave, the industrially-excavated Lion's Den, in Afghanistan - and made good on that declaration two years later. "Any American we see," he said in 1989, "we should notify of our complaints. We should write to American embassies."

If only America and its allies hadn't felt the need to enter the Gulf to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in order to protect its oil interests, thus stationing its troops inside friendly Saudi Arabia, September 11, 2001 might have just seen a flood of angry letters arriving on its shores, signed "Osama". As it was, the methodology of al-Qaeda (which means "the base") grew into murderous jihad and you cannot fault Bin Laden's logic for hitting America the way he did. He reasoned that "two or three sharp blows" would cause this great country, defeated in Vietnam and thus phobic about the sight of troops in body bags, to "flee in panic" from its Middle Eastern outposts. "It cannot stand against warriors of faith who do not fear death," he worked out.

The Looming Tower makes no excuses for bloodthirsty, crazed terrorism, but neither does it let America off the hook. You might argue that the real villain of the piece is macho office politics, the kind that allowed personality clashes between the CIA and the FBI and childish retention of information that might otherwise have alerted the authorities to the presence of known al-Qaeda operatives inside the United States after 1999, bent on making a big statement. Until reading this book, I never quite understood the difference between the CIA and the FBI. Now I do. The former gathers intelligence outside the US, the latter prosecutes criminals within. Thus, the former doesn't like to share with the latter, for fear of the latter compromising the former's sources by taking intelligence to court as evidence in a federal prosecution. You can understand the logic, but not taken to the extreme that led to this devastating outcome. John O'Neill, philandering FBI chieftan played by Harvey Keitel in US miniseries The Road to 9/11, is painted as a thwarted hero. If anyone could have joined the dots, given the facts, it was him. Bin Laden's would-be nemesis, he perished in the Twin Towers, symbolically, having retired from the Bureau and been handed a lucrative semi-retirement private security job at the doomed building in Manhattan. You couldn't make it up.

I actually believe it is a dereliction of duty not to be interested in all this stuff. Al-Qaeda want to kill us and, some might say, with good reason. It seems clear to me, as an atheist who has never read the Quran, that this ancient text, like the Bible, can be interpreted in many different ways, and there lies the problem. This book paints extremists like the Taliban in an unforgiving light, and for good reason (their regime in Afghanistan was barbaric and, frankly, ludicrous, putting men in prison until their beards grew to a suitable length, that sort of thing). It also has bin Laden down as a master of public relations and spin, stage-managing his appearances before the media as brilliantly, albeit on a budget, as any Stalin or Hitler. Because he is not a head of state, what will happen when, as seems like, his kidneys kill him off? His arch collaborator Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of al-Jihad and "al-Qaeda's ideological leader" seems the obvious man to take over - albeit his whereabouts are unknown. He is, after all, the one who in 1995 "reversed the language of the Prophet and opened the door to universal murder" when he cleverly rubber-stamped the once forbidden act of suicide, using his great theological intellect to excuse suicides from the eternal damnation previously thought to be their fate, so long as they died "in pursuit of true faith." Not having a faith, I find all of this mind-boggling, but that which we do not understand we can have no hope of defeating. The leaders of this movement are all intelligent, educated men who relish a theological debate over lamb and flatbread. They are not savages. It would be easier if they were.

So, The Looming Tower has multiplied my knowledge of so many pressing issues. It does not linger long on the destruction of the World Trade Center, although there are gory details that had passed me by, like firemen being killed instantly when people jumping from the building landed on them. Rather, it's all about how we got here, a subject in which many political leaders seemed uninterested at the time, hell-bent instead upon vengeance. How do you defeat an enemy with no country?

Of course, all of this assumes that al-Qaeda actually flew planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, which may not be the case. That's another entry, I think.