But I was wrong. The human comedy in The Looming Tower is very illuminating. Bin Laden, for example, emerges not as the fearless jihadist and scourge of the Soviets but as a laggard and faintheart with a tendency to call in sick before battle and, if pressed into service, to pass out during it due to his blood pressure. The “nap” he took during the battle of the Lion’s Den in 1987 is spoken of by awed al-Qaeda types as evidence of his cool under fire, but it seems more likely he just fainted. In Afghanistan, the local lads were hard and brave, the Arab volunteers they dismissed as “useless”.
Had the Americans funded the mujahedeen directly, the Afghan resistance of the 1980s might have remained a conventional war of liberation against the Soviet invaders. But Zbigniew Brzezinski, facing the Congressional oversight of post-Watergate Washington, chose instead to run the operation through third parties and plumped for the Saudis’ Prince Turki and the ISI. And next thing you know, a more or less straightforward nationalist resistance had become jihad central. The deeply sinister Prince Turki (full disclosure: he’s not big on me, either – “The arrogance of Mark Steyn knows no bounds”) used bin Laden’s money to attract to Afghanistan a bunch of freaks and misfits from the Arab world and beyond, and their natural tendency to self-glorification did the rest: from the Soviet point of view, the Lion’s Den was an inconsequential tactical retreat; to Osama’s boys, living in the heightened pseudo-religiosity of jihadism, it was an exhilarating victory, a moment when (as Wright puts it) “reality knelt before faith”. When the Soviet empire fell apart a few years later, the bin Laden crowd genuinely believed it was they who had inflicted the fatal blow with their famous triumph at this rinky-dink no-account nickel’n’dime skirmish the Commies had barely noticed. So their thoughts naturally turned to what they might do for an encore. And, having taken down one superpower, they figured the next move was pretty obvious.
Wright’s book is a marvellously vivid recreation of a kind of sustained unreality. My talk-radio pal Hugh Hewitt calls it a “genealogy of jihad”, and I think that’s a very good way of putting it: The Looming Tower is a family tree, the chain connecting some weirdsmobile in Cairo with another in Riyadh and then Islamabad and then Hamburg and London and pretty much everywhere. One thing it demolishes is the lazy leftist trope that the “root cause” is poverty. The penniless yak herds aren’t the problem. The very first words of the very first chapter are:
In a first-class stateroom on a cruise ship bound for New York…
It’s 1948 and inside the first-class stateroom is Sayyid Qutb, the first of a grand parade of privileged middle-class westernized Muslims for whom a mis-wired encounter with the modern world is enough to make them hot for jihad. There’s a sad inevitability when al-Qaeda’s head honchos are ready to give up on 9/11 because they haven’t any Muslim westerners who can pull it off, and just at that moment a Hamburg engineering student called Mohammed Atta shows up. In the jihad, somebody always shows up, somebody middle-class and prosperous and educated and perfectly assimilated except for an urge to self-detonate on the London Underground.
It’s tempting to think history might have turned out a little differently had that drunken floozy on the ship not come on to Sayyid late one night or the nurse in George Washington University Hospital not been showing quite so much cleavage. But reading of Qutb’s sojourn in America in the late 1940s you begin to wonder whether the girl really did come on to him or if the nurse truly disclosed to him the particulars of what she sought in a lover. His disgust at the lasciviousness of America is vaguely reminiscent of the old joke about the spinster who complains that the young man across the street strips naked in full view every night: when the cop says he can’t see anything, she explains you have to climb up on the wardrobe and crane your neck up over the skylight. If you’re looking for it as assiduously as Qutb was, you’ll find it everywhere.
The title of Wright’s book comes from the Koran’s fourth sura, the one Osama quoted in a speech on the eve of 9/11:
In an Islamist grievance culture, the tower doesn’t have to be that tall to loom. The tragedy in Wright’s book is that across little more than half a century a loser cult has metastasized, eventually to swallow almost all the moderate, syncretic forms of Islam. What was so awful about Sayyid Qutb’s experience in America that led him to regard modernity as an abomination? Well, he went to a dance in Greeley, Colorado:
The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips…
In 1949, Greeley, Colorado, was dry. The dance was a church social. The feverish music was Frank Loesser’s charm song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”. But it was enough to start a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri in Egypt to bin Laden in Saudi Arabia to the mullahs in Iran to the incendiary “Yorkshiremen” on the London Underground in July last year. And it’s a useful reminder of how much we could give up and still be found decadent and disgusting by the Islamists. A world without “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” will be very cold indeed.
According to Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Skeikh, Naseem Mithoowani, Ali Ahmed and Daniel Simard, the authors of Maclean’s Magazine: A Case Study Of Media-Propagated Islamophobia, the above is “Islamophobic” because of the following assertions:
1. The root causes of terrorism are Islam and Muslims in generaclass="underline" a Muslim’s encounter with a basic manifestation of Western civilization is sufficient to fill them with hatred and cause them to become terrorists (“hot for jihad”). Further, such Muslims are not an isolated case: there is a “grand parade” of them.
2. It is very easy to find a Muslim university student from a prosperous and educated background ready and willing to engage in an act of terrorism against the West.
3. Western Muslims actively look for what they perceive as acts of immorality. Therefore they are bound to find imagined signs of immorality and then to resort to terrorism
4. The events of 9/11 were directly inspired by the Quran.
5. There exists a “culture” of grievance in Islam and in Muslims; Muslims do not need much provocation or ignition to resort to acts of terrorism
6. A violent and extremist brand of Islam / Muslims has “metasized” [sic] and “swallowed” up all the moderate forms of Islam and of Muslims. Therefore, there are barely any moderate Muslims or moderate forms of Islam.
7. Muslims despise Western culture: looking at dances and music fills them with rage / hatred which drives them to commit acts of terrorism.
8. Basic manifestations of Western culture, such as a church social event, causes Muslims to develop a world-wide terrorist network.
THE ISLAMOPHOBE RESPONDS: