The Looming Tower

Where did September go?

I went to San Francisco for a business conference. While on the plane, I read Lawrence Wright's book "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11." It was a fascinating story about how Al-Qaeda evolved and the personal histories of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

"Not content to cleanse its own country of the least degree of religious freedom, the Saudi government set out to evangelize the Islamic world, using the billions of riyals at its disposal through the religious tax -- zakat -- to construct hundreds of mosques and colleges and thousands of religious schools around the globe, staffed with Wahhabi imams and teachers. Eventually, Saudi Arabia, which constitutes only 1 percent of the world Muslim population, would support 90 percent of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam.

Music disappeared in the Kingdom. Shortly after the 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Umm Kalthoum and Fayrouz, the songbirds of the Arab world, were banished from the Kingdom's television stations, which were already dominated by bearded men debating fine points of religious law. There had been a few movie theaters in Saudi Arabia before the mosque attack, but they were quickly shut down. A magnificent concert hall was completed by Riyadh in 1989, but it never hosted a single performance. Censorship smothered art and literature, and intellectual life, which had scarcely had the chance to blossom in the young country, withered. Paranoia and fanaticism naturally occupy minds that are closed and fearful.

For the young, the future in this already joyless environment promised even less than the present. ... Despair and idleness are dangerous companions in any culture, and it was inevitable that the young would search for a hero who could voice their longing for a change and provide a focus for their rage."