Postmortem

A remarkable history of the men and ideas behind America's deadliest terrorist attack

In the fall of 1949, in the remote college town of Greeley, Colo., an Egyptian exchange student named Sayyid Qutb experienced a crisis of faith that would reverberate half a century later. Not much happened in Greeley on Sunday evenings, and international students often would visit one of the town's many churches for a potluck dinner and, sometimes, a dance afterward. It was at such a Sunday evening church dance, with a minister playing serenades on a Victrola, that Qutb realized he was in the midst of wickedness.

"The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone," Qutb wrote in his journal. "Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips, and the atmosphere was full of love."

Qutb was not immune to the torments of the flesh. But he was a Muslim, and he resolved to purify himself through rigid adherence to a centuries-old, well-established strain of Islam unpolluted by Western ideas and influence, unpolluted above all by sexuality.

Lawrence Wright tells this bizarre story early in his remarkable book, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," because it foreshadows the psychological and spiritual struggle of so many Muslims in the latter part of the century, one that would lead many to a fear of the modern world and lead a handful of sociopaths to perpetrate a catastrophe.

Until 9/11, few Westerners had heard of Sayyid Qutb (the last name is pronounced ka-TUB), but the shy, bookish Egyptian would go on to become a principal figure in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and the spiritual font for radical Islam. A political prisoner who was tortured and eventually executed in Gamal Abdel Nasser's jails, Qutb would become the inspiration, in particular, for a young Egyptian physician of radical views, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who himself would be tortured in Egypt's jails.

The story of al-Qaeda and 9/11 thus is far more than a multiple hijacking carried off by 19 Arab Muslims trained half a world away and financed by a charismatic Saudi prince named Osama bin Laden. In Wright's masterly hands, it is the culmination of all that preceded it: the spread of an Islam committed to sanitizing the faith; the attraction of jihad for thousands of young Muslims, first against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then the United States anywhere and everywhere; the struggle against Israel; the first Persian Gulf War; and, not least, the failure of the FBI and CIA to put their differences aside and confront an enemy whose designs were never secret.

Such a summary hardly does justice to what Wright, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has achieved -- indeed, it does an injustice. Many fine books have been written about 9/11. None, so far, compares with "The Looming Tower." Wright's research has been prodigious -- in his acknowledgments, he says he interviewed 600 people, some of them dozens of times, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, Europe, the United States. His notes fill 78 legal pads, adding up to 3,900 pages. But Wright is more than a mere researcher. "The Looming Tower" is a tour de force of reporting, a propulsive narrative combined with acute psychological instincts and almost cinematic pacing.

Wright spreads before us a huge canvas, but "The Looming Tower" is built principally on four pillars. Two are known the world over -- Osama bin Laden and his indispensable guide Ayman al-Zawahiri. Another is Prince Turki al-Faisal, former head of Saudi intelligence who, Wright reports, gave the U.S. advance information about al-Qaeda's plans.