I read The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the rise of al-Qaeda and the events that led to the September 11 attacks, soon after it came out in 2006. And while the multifarious facts (so many facts!) may not all have stuck with me permanently, the book’s essence imprinted itself on my brain.
I think about it most often when I’m travelling. In Cairo for work three years ago, it floated into my mind unbidden as I sat in a taxi in thick, honking traffic, and for a few moments I felt distinctly queasy. It’s almost a physical thing: the feeling Wright gives you that the clock might, at some point, have been turned back; that we could have avoided all this mess, this endless bloody mayhem.
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