Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

¶ … Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright's book, the Looming Tower, published by Alfred Knopf in 2006. In Chapters 1 through 11, Wright make the complex workings of al-Qaeda easy to comprehend. The first half of the book traces the history of al-Qaeda back to post World War II, where the ideas of a jihad were but seeds of thought in Sayyid Qutb's mind. Wright does well to explore the main players' characters religious and political involvement. Political ideas coupled with religious persuasions help us to understand the aspirations of these men that help form the underground movement that we would later come to know as the Islamic fundamentalist movement.

Wright does well with his research in that we feel as though we get into the minds of these main players. We seem them as young boys that grew in their faith and radicalism. We see the men with their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Their lives are almost normal - almost. Wright's description of these men make them real to us and, as a result, we can come closer to understanding them.

As mentioned, the book begins with the beginning of what we have come to know as Islamic fundamentalism in late 1948. Wright goes back in time to Sayyid Qutb, a middle-class bureaucrat, who came up with the first ideas that would "beckon to a generation of rootless young Arabs who were looking for meaning and purpose in their lives and would find it in jihad" (10). Wright paints a powerful portrait of Qutb and his way of thinking noting, "In Qutb's passionate analysis, there was little difference between the communist and capitalist systems" (14). Qutb was passionate. In 1952, he worked for the Egypt government under Gamal Abdul Nasser and was appointed the position of editor of the Muslim Brothers magazine, Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin. The magazine was eventually shut down by the government for its critical editorials. In 1954, Qutb was charged with being a members of the Muslim Brothers' "secret apparatus" (28) that was responsible for an assassination attempt on Nasser. Qutb and other members of the Brotherhood were sentenced to life in prison but due to till health, he was moved to the prison hospital in 1955. While imprisoned, he wrote a "lucid, highly personal eight-volume commentary called in the Shade of the Quran (29). In addition, he was able to smuggle outside a manifesto entitled Milestones, which circulated underground for years in the form of letters. The book was published and then quickly banned in 1964. From prison, Qutb regenerated the secret apparatus and Saudi Arabia supplied the group with arms and money. Qutb was betrayed, however, and six months after he was released from prison, he was arrested again for a plot to overthrow the Egyptian government. He was sentenced to death by hanging for his radical views and accepted his fate with pride. His anger inspired Zawahiri and, in due course, influenced Osama bin Laden.

Qutb's death paved the way for more Rabie al-Zawahiri, a professor. His son, Ayman, grew up to be a rebellious, self-righteous man with "headstrong qualities that would invariably be associated with him in the future and that would propel him into conflict with nearly everyone he would meet" (37). Zawahiri was the perfect man to put Qutb's vision into action. At 15 years of age, he formed an underground cell "devoted to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamic state" (37). Zawahiri's cell grew in number and strength and, in 1973, the movement's plan was to kill the "main leaders of the country" (49). Upon Anwar Sadat's assassination, Zawahiri was arrested, though he denied any involvement in the incident. In prison, Zawahiri became a "violent and implacable extremist" (52). At the age of 34, Zawahiri was the "pious, bitter, and determined" (60) leader of an underground Islamist cell.