This was an assigned reading for Professor Patel’s NES 3550 class (Middle Eastern Politics), but I would recommend it to anyone interested in Islam, the Middle East, or the global war on terror. Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower is a well researched and thorough work that traces both the ideological and organizational history of al-Qaeda. Wright explores how radical Islamist organizations, influenced by the early writings of Qutb and other radical Islamist scholars, transferred their grievances from the reactionary regimes of their own countries to the United States. A great read that exposes many popular myths about the al-Qaeda organization and reveals just how close U.S. intelligence services came to stopping the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
