Ad Links Buy a link » Michael Skube, Correspondent 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.

The fourth is dead and forgotten. John O'Neill -- chief of counterterrorism at the FBI until he was run off -- is the tragic figure in this story, a head-butting man who knew that al-Qaeda and bin Laden intended a terrorist attack on an unprecedented scale, but stepped on too many bureaucratic toes. After he was forced out of the Bureau, O'Neill went to work as head of security for World Trade Centers, where he died on Sept. 11.

Wright is a fabulous reporter, and one who does not shrink from interpretation: "The bureau was a timid bureaucracy that abhorred powerful individuals. It was known for its brutal treatment of employees who were ambitious or who fought conventional wisdom. O'Neill was right about the threat of al-Qaeda when few cared to believe it. Perhaps, in the end, his capacity for making enemies sabotaged his career, but those enemies also helped al-Qaeda by destroying the man who might have made a difference."

By now this is well-known, along with the incompetence of the CIA. But it was only coming to light around the time the reportage that forms the bulk of this book began appearing in The New Yorker. What wasn't so well-known was the critical role of Zawahiri, who, in American eyes, was nothing more than Osama's Tonto. Yet he has been in some respects the more significant figure in a symbiotic relationship. If Osama is the face of al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is its thinker and planner.

It was Zawahiri, Wright reports, who gave suicide -- which the Prophet Mohammad forbade -- a theological basis. Wright interprets Zawahiri's re-reading of the Prophet: Anyone "who gives his life in pursuit of the true faith ... is to be regarded not as a suicide who will suffer the punishment of hell but as a heroic martyr whose selfless sacrifice will gain him extraordinary reward in Paradise."

He was a physician, but no cruelty troubled him. Wright tells a story of Egyptian boys planted by the authorities in the organization Zawahiri headed before al-Qaeda. When they were found out, "Zawahiri had the boys stripped naked to determine whether they had attained puberty. The helpless boys confessed everything. ... Zawahiri had the boys shot. To make sure he got his point across, he videotaped their confessions and their executions and distributed the tapes as an example to others."

Gruesome as this is, Wright gives Zawahiri and, especially, bin Laden a human dimension. Who knew that bin Laden was not 6-foot-6, as the Western media reported in the wake of 9/11, but only six feet tall? Or that he lost his shirt in Sudan, and was tossed out with his fortune much diminished? Or that he wasn't much of a warrior in the mujahideen fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan? He has three wives and yet at an early age he adopted squeamish views about sex.

But the above, too, does not do justice to the breadth of Wright's reportage. Sometimes one has to wonder how he could have transcribed a conversation so fully and faithfully. But, more often than not, his sources are clearly documented. Another quibble: He simply is wrong in implying that anti-Semitism was relatively mild among Arab Muslims before the 1930s, when Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as leeches and subhuman. It was ingrained well before Hitler, and anyone who studies the popular press at the turn of the century can see it.

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