I think it is safe to say that the most significant event in my lifetime is Sept. 11, 2001. Yet while names like Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda are now household names, the American public at large knows very little about them, how Al-Qaeda works or much about the other founding members or their religious philosophy. Lawrence Wright tackles these issues in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.” Wright not only explains the attacks of that dreadful day but helps readers understand the men behind it that caused so much pain.One way to combat terrorism is to try to understand its causes; to understand why many in the Middle East hate Westerners so badly. An understanding may lead to dialogue, then to resolution, and hopefully peace. While completely condemning any act of terror, it is important to understand that the Middle East is a region that for most its modern history has been acted upon. For 600 years they were under the thumb of the Turks and when they finally broke free they never quite gained full autonomy as they fell under the influence of the British, French, Soviets and then eventually the Americans. Even when some nations did gain political freedom they were still culturally dominated by the West.One of the most successful groups formed to fight off imperialism was the Muslim Brotherhood created by Hassan al-Banna in 1928. While there is no denying the important of the Brotherhood to the history of the Middle East, Wright spends the beginning of his book exploring one of al-Banna’s rivals, Sayyid Qutb, who had a much larger influence on bin Laden. Like most Egyptian Islamists of his time, Qutb was radicalized by his hatred of the British Occupation and King Farouk’s inability to confront them. He came to hate the West with one exception, the United States. Qutb had come to America for education but eventually left after seeing what he considered debauchery of American culture, especially its women. Yet his real hatred of America came with their support for Israel, especially after the Arab world’s complete failure in the 1967 war against the Jewish nation. Qutb believed governments of the West, as well as Egypt’s, had failed and insisted the only answer was Islam. Wright when explaining Qutb’s analysis of capitalism said, “[it] attended only the material needs of humanity, leaving the spirit ...
