It’s been said that Americans learn their geography by fighting wars. Otherwise we remain oblivious to most of the rest of the world. The same could be said of our education in the world’s religions.
Thus the importance of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95), a scrupulously researched and well-written account of the rise of radical Islam in the Middle East. It is the story of a movement; but it is also the story of men, Arab and American, and bureaucracies, the CIA and the FBI, that could not communicate with one another.
It begins, brilliantly, with an official of the Egyptian Ministry of Education, who would become much, much more.
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