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

I took away from this book a new picture of terrorists, finding out terrorists are generally well educated and are not always deeply religious. This is surprising. They all seem, however, to be expatriots, living away from the countries of their ancestors. What else? Bin Laden's father was blinded by a teacher at school; after the incident, his father never returned to school and was illiterate for his entire life. O'Neill, one of the senior figures at the FBI who was in search for Bin Laden, left the agency on August 22 and reported to his new job, head of security for the Twin Towers. He was on the job on September 11 and was killed. I never quite figured out what motivated the terrorists. But most used the text of a book written many hundreds of years after the Koran as their basis for action. The Koran itself states explicitly that suicide will result in a trip to Hell. Murder in the Koran is prohibited. The terrorists, thus, are not following the Koran, but those who have interpreted and elaborated on it.

I recently read “Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11” by Mitchell Zuckoff, which I gave a 5-star rating. Zuckoff recommended this book to anyone who wanted to learn more about Muslim fundamentalism and the road to 9/11. Although written by two different authors with different styles, the two books together act like a diptych. Therefore, I highly recommend reading both books.

I learned a lot from this book, starting as early as 1948, which was surprising to me. It describes how Qutb laid the foundation for fundamentalist Islamic ideology in the late 1940s. It connects major developments in the 20th century familiar to us and explains their influence on the Arabic world and Islam as a whole, which went unnoticed by the West. The anti-Semitic thoughts from the early 20th century passed on to the Arabic world, especially when the Jews were granted their own state in the middle of the Arabic world after World War II. Anti-colonialism, the Cold War, and the discovery of oil on the Arabic peninsula had a dramatic influence on Arabs and the countries they lived in. Add to that corruption, nepotism, and the opportunism from the West during the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, and a poisonous cocktail is being brewed before our eyes.

The last part of the book is about the founding of Al Qaeda and the bombing of the two embassies in East Africa and the attack on the USS Cole. It becomes painfully clear that rivalry and distrust between the FBI and CIA stopped the agencies from sharing vital information. It's hard to say whether 9/11 could have been prevented if all agencies had worked together, and the book never draws this conclusion. However, it is obvious that somehow, somewhere, all the information was available within several government agencies. So there was a fair chance of unraveling the 9/11 conspiracy.

The book stops at the events of 9/11. As it was written in 2006, it does not cover the death of Osama bin Laden.

Finally, this book made me think. We all know what the US (or the West as a whole) did after 9/11. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of privacy, and the far-reaching powers given to organizations like the NSA to gather information by any means. It is understandable when reading this story, but on the other hand, it becomes obvious that the issue was not so much a lack of intelligence but more the way it was used.

5 stars for this Pulitzer Prize winning book

A brilliant backstory to the global phenomena that shook the world to its core and ultimately, for better or for worse, shifted the entire political spectrum in many countries. This Pulitzer-prize winning book deserves all the acclaims it gets. Mostly when people talk about terrorists and Jihad, they only discuss the result - the bombings, the beheadings, the hijackings - but very few people care about going into the details of how these attacks happened in the first place. Although it remains a big mystery to me, Lawrence manages to shine some lights on some of the key figures in this global Jihad and what ultimately motivated them to take on this deadly course. A page-turner for sure and a must-read for anyone who is as ignorant about Jihad as I was till sometime ago.