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September 10, 2007
I See a Darkness: The Looming Tower
In December of 2001, I took my mother to see the first Lord of the Rings movie. Though it was my idea to see the film, it was her cash that purchased the ticket, and so she was not only baffled, but also irritated, when I had to leave the theater in tears a couple of minutes before the end credits.
There was some precedent for this; I was the kid who cried at E.T. At Harry and the Hendersons. But I found it impossible to articulate to her, or even to myself, exactly what I found so upsetting about The Fellowship of the Ring's climactic Hobbit-hunt. Was it the surround-sound thunder of the hordes of orcs? The bloodlust on their faces? The flash of spears through chests, the thwack of axes on armor, the pornography of violence? Or was it the fact of having allowed myself to be transported, for a couple of hours, to Middle Earth, when I'd been trying so hard since September to stay rooted in this one?
In my mother's car, afterward, I tried to describe what it had been like that morning in Washington. How I'd lingered outside the Kennedy Center a few minutes after the start of business at the dot-com where I was working, drinking in the richness of my coffee and the blueness of the day. How, when the "What-the-f--k?" email from my editor hit my inbox, I felt sure there had been an accident or mistake. How we gathered in the clips room to watch CNN, and how even the atheists among us kept saying "Oh, my God" when the second plane hit. How, when a phoned-in voice reported an explosion at the Pentagon, maybe a quarter-mile from where we stood, it seemed inevitable: everything we'd grown up counting on had ended for good.
I tried to explain what it was like watching the debris cascade off the first flaming tower, telling myself it was helicopters pouring water, as on a forest fire. And then recognizing jumpers. Realizing I was seeing thousands of souls (twenty thousand I thought) being snuffed out. I tried to tell the woman who brought me into the world what it was like to walk home through streets silent save for the cell-phone calls that had made it through, and scanning the skies with a half-million others, convinced we were all about to die. But of course my mom had her own experience, and I couldn't really put mine into words.
Or maybe I didn't want to. I still don't like to talk about it, and I'm afraid as I type these sentences that writing about it, letting it out, will make me forget, or that my cadences will paper over the memories, replace what I felt then with what I know now. I'm terrified to let them go, all the people who died that day. And so I never say the date, or the numbers that have come to stand for it, and I never talk about it.
I guess the strategy is working, because even now sometimes my heart will stop when I hear a plane coming in low overhead, or look out my kitchen window here in Brooklyn and see the towers of light reaching up toward forever. And because when I finished The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 last month, I cried as though I was back there in the parking lot of that movie theater. Or back there on the streets of D.C.
2. Looking through the wreckage
Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer-Prize winning book, which originated in The New Yorker, unfolds as a series of profiles. Like several other accounts of Al-Qaeda, it locates the origins of Islamist terrorism in an Egyptian writer named Sayyid Qutb. Though far from sympathetic to Qutb, Wright meticulously maps the coordinates of his radicalization: postwar American materialism, Egyptian corruption and repression, and a stern theological literalism. Qutb's brand of Islamism is not treated as exceptional; rather, it is situated alongside Marxism and other religious fundamentalisms as a response to modernity.
He was opposed not to modern technology but to the worship of science, which he believed had alienated humanity from natural harmony with creation. Only a complete rejection of rationalism and Western values offered the slim hope of the redemption of Islam.Wright extends the same imaginative inhabitation to each new figure he investigates. Qutb cedes the stage to fellow Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, one the most contemptible people I've ever had the misfortune to read about. And Al-Zawahiri gives way to Osama bin Laden (who, intriguingly, is the least interesting figure in the book), and to FBI agent John O'Neill, one of the first Americans to take him seriously.
This character-driven approach has its virtues. Through the figure of Bin Laden, Wright delivers a comprehensive account of the history of modern Saudi Arabia, a culture which went from stallions to F-15s almost literally overnight. The profile of FBI investigator Ali Soufan reminds us of all the values that Qutb missed in his account of liberal democracy. And O'Neill's story hints none too subtly at the extent of the CIA's responsibility for the attacks of Sept. 11; the agency appears, however passively, to have shielded Al-Qaeda operatives from the FBI, in hopes of "flipping" one of them. As the book darts back and forth from Tora Bora to Washington, it develops the sickening propulsion of a thriller.
And yet, as Wright's novelistic talents and exhaustive reportage drive the book forward, the sweeping claims of the title remain unfulfilled. The extent of Al-Qaeda's activities in post-USSR Afghanistan and Pakistan remain as obscure as its origins in Saudi Arabia and Egypt are clear. And despite bin Laden's stated agenda, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the history of terrorism associated with it, appear only as tangents to the story Wright wants to tell. Thus his portrayal of Al-Qaeda seems incomplete.
Which doesn't mean it's not damning. Al-Qaeda, as The Looming Tower presents it, is a far cry from Sayyid Qutb's Islamism. Al-Zawahiri and bin Laden have created neither an intellectual movement nor a political platform nor a set of theological propositions nor a proper ideology. Al-Qaeda is instead a form of nihilist scream therapy, a sexually dysfunctional death-cult. The President's frequent equation of Islamist terrorism and Nazism comes to seem narrowly accurate; a cloud of Freudian self-hatred envelops the leaders of each group. More broadly, though, the comparison begs the questions that matter. For example: What about all those followers?
3. "No justice, no peace"
In essence, Lawrence Wright has written the definitive Great-Man history of Al-Qaeda, and in so doing has provided a valuable service. We need faces for our evil, as we need them for our grief. But to say of The Looming Tower that there is no better book on Al-Qaeda may be a way of saying that we need more books on Al-Qaeda.
Those books would do well to resist the organization's skillful manipulations of mass media, which posit bin Laden and al-Zawahiri as world-historical figures. In reality - and I say this with all spleen intended - bin Laden and al-Zawahiri would be nothing more than an inept and morally bankrupt cable-access act, were it not for the legions of young men they and their henchmen have persuaded to die for them. Like Wright, I'm intrigued that these two privileged men would choose to live as outlaw demagogues. But I'm far more interested in the psychology of the converts who end up hijacking planes and blowing up women and children in Baghdad squares... if only because I want to believe they can be reached.
Students of history will remind us that Al-Qaeda has presided over fewer deaths, at this point, than have many heads of state. And were we to succeed in regarding human lives as digits on a printout, removed from context and connection, the events of September 11 might become commensurable with the other tragedies that surround us. But The Looming Tower does demand that we make a distinction...that we rationalists stop imagining that Al-Qaeda can be explained away. According to the book, Al-Qaeda's ascetics, rejecting Islam's intellectual and mystical legacies (and thus fully two-thirds of its theological content) have arrived at a hatred of life. I don't mean "our way of life." (However serious they may once have been, Al-Qaeda's political grievances have decayed into afterthoughts). I mean life in all its variety: pleasure, anxiety, grief, frivolity... For bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri, being-in-the-world is some kind of hoax being perpetrated on mankind by a (paradoxically) omniperfect God. It is the duty of the faithful not to be taken in by God's creation, but rather to reject the world and everything in it, and to kill anyone who gets in the way. This is the farthest mankind can fall.
And so for someone like me, committed to Wittgenstein's idea that the existence of anything at all is miraculous, The Looming Tower presents a bracing challenge. The malice and madness portrayed in this book aren't special effects. They're real, they're here, and if we value life, we're going to have to find smarter ways to fight them than conforming to caricatures of Western imperialism, or speechifying mistily about "hearts and minds." We're going to have to find a way to be their opposite.
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:50 AM ~
comments: 5 ~ Links to this post
And since a good post deserves good feedback, I just want to challenge you on one point. I also read (and was very glad I read) "The Looming Tower", but I don't see how you can conclude from this book or anything else that Al Qaeda's ascetic leaders "have arrived at a hatred of life". Can you help me understand how you arrived at this?
I am not looking to apologize or sympathize with Al Qaeda (believe me, I'm not -- as a New York Jew I have no illusions that Osama Bin Laden is anything but my mortal enemy, the enemy of everything I stand for, a man who would like to kill me AND my children). But I know that it's self-destructive to misunderstand (or underestimate) your enemy, and I think your characterization misses the point. I also don't see where "The Looming Tower" supports it, since it presents Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri as earnest human beings dedicated mainly to political causes that affect Muslims). As an alternative to your characterization of Al Qaeda's leaders as "nihilists" caught up in a "death cult", I'd suggest that they are represent just more of the same self-serving, violence-loving instinct that has powered every human war since the beginning of time. The sad truth about the attack of 9-11 is that it seems to have been a goal-oriented public relations gesture designed to give Islamic extremists a new rallying point, and whatever you think about this I don't see how it adds up to "nihilism" or a "death cult". It seems more to me like business as usual on a planet that has always loved (and, often, rewarded) war and violence.
Sorry for long comment, just thought I'd ask to see if you could explain your thoughts on this further.
Levi @ September 10, 2007 11:04 AMThe rejection of "rationalism and Western values" in Islam really is not all that different from evangelism in the US – right down to similar tactics of violence surrounding abortion clinics.
It could be, I believe, that Islamic terrorism is an extreme symptom of a much larger world-wide problem.
Thanks for the good feedback. Again, I want to emphasize that my "transparency" section was meant to show that I'm not reading this book from a very objective place. Still, I should note that I was expending a lot of energy trying to, as I say, "explain away" Al-Qaeda, without recourse to the concept of "evil," until I read this book and decided that my efforts were futile.
I said some of this in my email to you, but I wanted to back it up with some material from Lawrence Wright. The Looming Tower has a great deal to say on Wahabbism/Salafism/takfir, which are constituent elements of what I call "the death cult." By which I mean "the same self-serving, violence-loving instinct..." minus any life-affirming ideal of what such violence might bring about in the world. Nazism would be another example. As Pynchon might put it, Al-Qaeda seeks "the zero." This is a recurring theme in the book, and is made particularly explicit in the chapter called "The Base." And the thanatopic drive of the mature bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are what I found nauseating, rather than just enraging (as, say, I find the behavior of our president).
Broadly speaking, the portrait of al Zawahiri (who, we're led to believe, is the "brains" of the operation) suggested to me less a set of political commitments (al-Qaeda's are neither actionable,
coherent, nor, frankly, consistent, with al-Zawahiri wanting to take over Egypt, and bin Laden not seeming to give much of a shit about anything other than the Arabian peninsula or whatever country will have him, with both paying lip-service to the Palestinian cause while focusing 0% of their energies or attentions on terrorism within Israel) than an acting out of personal pathology revolving around humiliation (AAZ's prison experiences), shame, feelings of powerlessness, etc. That is, these guys fit the profile of self-dramatizing thugs rather than of ideologues.
In pp 124-5 we read: "The Quran explicitly states that Muslims shall not kill anyone, except as punishment for murder. ...There is a well-known saying of the Prophet that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, or for marital infidelity, or for turning away from Islam. The pious Anwar Sadat was the first modern victim of the reverse logic of takfir. ...Anyone who voted was an apostate and his life was forfeit. So was anyone who disagreed with their joyless understanding of Islam--including the mujahideen leaders they had ostensibly come to help, and even the entire population of Afghanistan, whom they regarded as infidels because they were not Salafists."
Soon thereafter, we see Zawahiri give up his life's goal of taking control of Egypt in favor of bringing about the apocalypse via "an ocean of blood." For more on his and bin Laden's political pliability, see 127-128 and 131-132. Notes from a transitional meeting between Zawahiri's al-Jihad and bin Laden's al-Qaeda "disagreement is present; weapons are plenty."
Zawahiri's foremost concern seems to be proximity to power; he has proven himself willing to jettison whatever principles stand in the way of his being, if you will, bin Laden's Dick Cheney.
Bin Laden's asceticism, even early on, borders on the extreme. He seems like a self-denial junkie, as Wright notes again and again his tendency not to eat, or to eat crumbs from other meals. But his attraction to the "ocean of blood" really seems to take hold when he makes common cause with the Taliban, whose "unclean things" include "cinematography, anything that produces the joy of music...chess...tapes, computers, VCRs, televisions, anything that propagates sex and is full of music, wine...nail polish, firecrackers, statues, sewing catalogues" and "pictures." What else is left of life?
Thus Bin Laden takes to the cave, "the last pure place." No wonder he feels "the pervasive sense of dispossession that characterized the modern Muslim world." He has dispossessed himself of everything! "In his own miserable exile," Wright tells us, "he absorbed the misery of his fellow believers; his loss entitled him to speak for theirs; his vengeance would sanctify their suffering"--even, presumably, the suffering he himself caused, putting Muslims to death in New York. Thanks but no thanks, Mr. bin Laden.
At the apogee of this psychodramatic orgy of self-denial, bin Laden makes his declaration of war on the U.S. Wright cannily notes that the war is open-ended; that, short of "withdrawing from any kind of intervention against Muslims 'in the whole world,'" the U.S. is fair game, as far as bin Laden is concerned. Such a withdrawal is an impossibility, and bin Laden knows it. Politics has an end. Pathology doesn't.
By contrast, Sayyid Qutb and Abdullah Azzam, who originally ran the Afghan opertion are models of "earnestness and dedication." Wright's bin Laden is a boob and a dilettante. And the author's righteous condescension to bin Laden wore off on this reader.
I had been interpreting bin Laden's descent into the extreme rejection of all that I call "life" as somehow catalyzed by Islam, until I read about the theologian who reminds us that al-Zawahiri has left out the rationalist and mystical strains of Islam, which comprise 2/3 of the religion. Violent Islamism thus comes to mirror violent Christianity, or violent Judaism (e.g., the book of Judges). You may call such violence human nature; I happen to
think that these jackasses are too weak to make peace with the basic mutability and unpredictability of life, and the inevitability of
suffering in-the-world. That would mean that we disagree in our premises. Which I'm happy to do, respectfully. Still, I find my pacifism stretched thin by an enemy who can't be voted out of office, whose demands can't be met, who only negotiates by the sword, and who refuses to countenance my existence, or the existence of any other human being who doesn't see things his way.
Thanks again.
I don't think the Al Qaeda mindset is as exceptional in recent world history as it's often made out to be. I guess my problem with characterizations like "death cult" is that they turn the enemy into a cartoon. You are right to compare Al Qaeda to Hitler's Nazis, and the Japanese were also a death cult in World War II. The Russian Revolution in 1915 was an absolute orgy of violence, and so had been the French Revolution 120 years earlier. My main point is that, really, Al Qaeda follows familiar historical patterns, and I'm concerned that all this "mythologizing" only strengthens their image.
But, like I said, I don't mean to psychoanalyze. I enjoy hashing this stuff out, anyway.
Another way of putting what I was trying to say about Al Qaeda being nothing new is to say that you can find it all in Nietzsche, can't you?
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