Getting to Know Osama

A couple of weeks ago the NYTBR featured Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 on its cover. It was one of those reviews that compel even a librarian to run to the nearest bookstore and pay full price. (My rationalization for this reckless behavior is that the independent booksellers are good guys too and need our support.) I also rationalized this unnecessary expense (Why so guilty about the purchase of a hardcover book for $25? It's not like I wouldn't spend it on a belt.) by the prospect of a long plane trip, always the best venue for cracking open a nice new hardback. (Maybe this is what bookstores have that we don't have--it's not the coffee; it's the crack of the new book.)

I boarded Swiss Air flight LX52 to Athens and started making the acquaintance of the man who changed our world. Having closed the book just before landing in Boston yesterday, I can say that the NYTBR got this one right, (encouraging because I was also taken with their front page pick the following week, newbie Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics.) Wright's book is so compelling because he examines not just the movement, but the men, (and they are all men. Women are only bit players in this production.)

Wright starts with radical Islam's spiritual father Sayyid Qutb, whose loneliness as a foreign student in 1940's America is palpable. Wright tracks the evolution of medical doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri's leadership of al-Jihad, the radical Islamic group that he hoped would take over his native Egypt until Zawahiri allied with Bin Laden to take over the world. Although the book belongs to the Arabs, Wright does well by the FBI's brilliant, profane John O'Neill who knew the threat that al-Qaeda posed, (and ironically died on 9/11 in the North Tower,) but who could not disentangle the bureaucratic web that kept U.S. government agencies from making use of their own intelligence. (FBI requests for intelligence were so routinely denied that agents in the Washington office started holding the phone receiver to a recording of Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall when CIA operatives began their "I can't share that information" speech.)

Any book about al-Qaeda is a book about Osama Bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was created when the Russians invaded Afghanistan and Osama, using the personal fortune earned in his family's construction business, funded young Arabs who would come to the aid of their Muslim brothers in fighting the Communists. How al-Qaeda grew to attract men capable of planning and executing the African embassy bombings, the destruction of the USS Cole, and 9/11, despite the fact that both suicide and the slaughter of innocents is expressly proscribed in the Quran, is Wright's story.

When Osama's favorite wife of 27 years left him just before 9/11, (Osama choose to have four wives, like the prophet.) she said she married a rich Saudi teenager, not an exiled ascetic who kept his family living in caves with hardly enough to eat. Although Wright doesn’t see him as especially intelligent, (the only one of the bin Ladens not to attend university abroad) the book makes it clear that Osama put his money where his mind is, on a declaration of war on America and its allies, with the prize an Islamist empire with no national boundaries, and no separation between church and state. (And that, unlike his need for weekly dialysis, is not just an urban legend.)