The questions were asked all over America and much of the rest of
the world on September 11, 2001: How could this have happened? Who
are these people? Why do they hate America so much? What do
they hope to gain by slaughtering innocent people?

Lawrence Wright, who taught for two years at the American
University in Cairo, has done the best job yet of providing
answers. His book is a searching examination of the lives and
personalities of the main players, Americans as well as Arabs; a
study of the political and religious ideas that motivated them, and
a tale of a globe-spanning cat-and-mouse game between terrorists
and those whose job it was to thwart them. His cast of characters
is of Dickensian size and Dostoyevskyan complexity; the list of
principal figures in his endnotes bears 86 names.

Among the Arabs, Wright focuses on Osama bin Laden and his chief
deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The reader gets a chilling sense of the
religion-based fanaticism that drives them both and still threatens
the world today. The most interesting of his American portraits is
of John O'Neill, a spy-hunter who may be fairly described as a
driven fanatic of a different sort, a handsome womanizer turned
Christian religious zealot who, by a weird twist of fate, died in
the World Trade Center on September 11th.

Wright makes clear that the driving force behind bin Laden and Al
Qaeda has two mainsprings: the fundamentalist conviction that Islam
is the only true religion and that all who reject it or follow
other religions are enemies of God and must be eliminated; and a
pervasive resentment that the decadent, infidel west has so far
outstripped the once-dominant Islamic world in science, living
standards, the arts and civilization in general. America is indeed
the "great Satan" to the Islamic zealot, the heart and soul of
opposition to all that they hold sacred.

Wright also makes clear that the main reason Islamic nations are so
mired in backwardness is the suffocating grip of their religion on
daily life. Theirs is a world, in Wright's words, where "reality
knelt before faith."

It is clear from Wright's research that the fundamentalists who
created Al Qaeda are extremists who have twisted many clear tenets
of the Koran to their own sinister uses --- e.g., the Koran's
explicit prohibitions on suicide and on the killing of
noncombatants. Their leaders decreed, for instance, that anyone who
rejects or opposes Islam, even innocent bystanders, is ipso facto
an apostate and should be killed, and that suicide bombers are
glorious martyrs for the cause rather than sinners. To the western
reader, this is chilling stuff. To moderate Moslems it is doubtless
heresy.

Shifting to the American side of the drama, Wright's major emphasis
is on the paralyzing interagency wars, idiotic rules and
personality conflicts that prevented the sharing of vital
information about the 9/11 conspiracy among the FBI, the CIA and
the National Security Agency. Time after time he cites cases where
important links in the chain of evidence were deliberately withheld
from people who wanted and needed them and who might have been able
to use them to thwart the developing tragedy. It is a tale not just
of bureaucratic bungling, but of willful refusal to cooperate that
resulted in the deaths of 2,749 innocent people. The reader does
not know whether to explode in rage or simply weep.

The scope of Wright's research is vast. He delves deeply into the
lives and writings of fundamentalist Islamic scholars like Sayyid
Qutb, who preceded the rise of Al Qaeda. He explores the movement's
roots in resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its
nonstop rage at the United States for our support of Israel. Some
of the points he makes have been made before, by scholars like
Bernard Lewis, and the tale of American bureaucratic turf wars was
told in the U.S. Senate's 9/11 commission report. But seldom have
all the threads been brought together with such cogency and urgency
as in this book.

There is one other theme that lurks behind Wright's text without
being really emphasized: the danger posed by fanaticism of any sort
--- religious, political, personal. Eric Hoffer sounded that note
in his 1950 classic THE TRUE BELIEVER. Wright never states it
outright, but it is a clear subtext of his masterly and important
book.