The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda’s Road to 9/11
by Lawrence Wright
Penguin Press ₤20, 480 pages

I was an occasional visitor to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. Its capital, Riyadh, was reminiscent of Houston with mosques and without the charm. A kind of consumerism had gripped the place, but with an Islamic flavour: the women in the shopping malls were mostly covered, and the stores closed for prayers. In shiny new office blocks, young men sat behind empty desks and transmitted an air of profound ennui.

Into this dreary society, made more cynical perhaps by the worldly excesses of many of its leaders, was launched a myth. The myth was of the Arab Afghans, of the doughty fighters from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries who repelled a superpower in Afghanistan.

Their leader, Osama bin Laden, son of a Saudi construction magnate, was hailed as a legendary figure. In fact, as this brilliant book by Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker makes clear, the Arab Afghans were a sideline in the fighting, occasionally a liability to their Afghan allies and set apart mainly by their obsession with dying.

When the fighters returned, the myth was amplified by the young Saudis who found in their intense religiosity a refuge from daily tedium. In a country of an austere state-sponsored religious puritanism, young men were left with very limited life choices. “Exposed to so few alternative ways of thinking even about Islam, they were trapped in a two-dimensional spiritual world; they could only become more extreme or less so,” he writes.

The Saudi dimension of al-Qaeda is just one element in the story, described here with the aid of hundreds of interviews, of how a strand of rigid militant Islam gave rise to a death cult now seen as the predominant security challenge to the west. Egyptians are prominent too, starting with Sayyid Qutb who travelled to the US in 1948, knew the west and grew to despise it, and including Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s chief ideologue.

But this is more than a fascinating personal history, it also describes the contorted intellectual journey that has taken place among some Muslims that allows a holy book that appears to condemn suicide and the killing of innocents to be used to justify catastrophic terrorism.

The Koran says that the murderer of one innocent will be judged “as if he had murdered all mankind”. It also states that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, marital infidelity or turning away from the faith.

But al-Qaeda justifies the killing of innocents through the doctrine of takfir: that apostates can - in fact, must - be killed along with Islam’s other enemies. These can include heretics, Shiite Muslims, Israelis and Americans. If practising Sunni Muslims are killed among them, they have just been lucky enough to win a short cut to heaven.

The horrific consequences of an ideology where individuals assume the right to decide who deserves to die have been most tragically illustrated in Algeria, where 100,000 people have died.

A takfiri group, the Groupe Islamique Arme, started out by killing non-Muslims such as priests, nuns and diplomats. They then expanded their list of targets. Those with voting cards could be legitimately slaughtered because Islam and democracy are supposedly incompatible; so was anyone associated with the government, including schoolteachers.

This was their defining declaration: “There is no neutrality in the war we are waging. With the exception of those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserve to die.” According to Wright, even bin Laden worried, at least about the image it was creating for the jihad.

The taboo against suicide is even more profound: those who kill themselves are condemned to hell and to be forever in the act of dying in the way they took their own lives.

But the sophistry of Zawahiri turned the prohibition on its head, using the example of early Christians and a small group of early Muslims who chose to be killed rather than recant their beliefs. Anyone who gives his life in pursuit of the true faith is thus not to be regarded as a suicide but as a heroic martyr.

The other part of Wright’s book describes the history of the few Americans who recognised early the threat posed by al-Qaeda. It is a story of missed opportunities, of bureaucratic and personal infighting, of orders that made it harder to share information among intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Even if everything had worked perfectly, there is no guarantee that 9/11 would have been thwarted. But Wright’s book reinforces the sense that, had things been different, it could have been.

The tragedy is epitomised in the life and death of John O’Neill, the FBI executive described here as “an adulterer, a philanderer, a liar, an egotist and a materialist”, but whose ultimately fruitless battle against al-Qaeda came to dominate his life. Retired from the bureau, disillusioned and seeking his own form of spiritual solace, he died when the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11.