The long war.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright (Knopf, 480 pp., $27.95)

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WHATEVER may cause Islamic terrorism, it is certainly not Islam. That is a central message of The Looming Tower, an often riveting but flawed contribution to the surfeit of post-9/11 analyses and histories of Osama bin Laden's international terror network.

At its best--which is often, but not often enough--this book by The New Yorker's Lawrence Wright provides a welcome departure from the arid, encyclopedic tendencies of this overcrowded field. Generally, this is a coherent, exhaustively researched history of the essential characters and events that have shaped the new global order. When he lets the facts sing, Wright's work reads like an engrossing novel. But he peppers the account with analytical pauses that are erratic and reflective of dubious conventional wisdom--the world according to Richard Clarke, Michael Scheuer, and the 9/11 Commission. For all its promise, The Looming Tower disappoints.

Wright is especially effective in tracing the long-entrenched roots of both al-Qaeda and the America-centric hatred through which it united what had been dispersed and parochial jihadist movements. The seed is a post-World War II visit to the U.S. by Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, the patriarch of modern political Islam (which is to say, jihadist terrorism). Qutb's American experience and scathing critiques of the West as morally bankrupt, sex-crazed, materialistic, and anti-Islamic remain central to the jihadist narrative. (Bin Laden, despite hailing from a well-to-do, well-traveled family, has probably never been in the U.S. or Europe.)

Until his "martyr's" death by execution in 1966, Qutb--as successor to Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna--plotted relentlessly against Nasser's regime and its animating idea of secular Arab nationalism. His competing antidote for the ills of the Muslim world was radical Islam, stressing a concept that serves as Wright's leitmotif: takfir. Roughly equating to Islamic excommunication, it is the notion that the faithful may legitimately claim for themselves the power to declare their fellow Muslims traitorous apostates. Takfir comes to justify, in the radical mind, the murder of anyone who does not accept the "pure" version of Islam that courses through Sunni Wahhabism--the regnant theology of Saudi Arabia, where the royal family has long maintained a tenuous truce with religious authorities. Qutb profoundly influenced two of the book's three central figures: bin Laden and his eventual Qaeda deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The evolution of the 20-year bond between these two men is Wright's principal and most fascinating focus. Both are scions of families prominent in the modern history of the Middle East. Bin Laden's legendary Yemeni father, Mohammed, is key to understanding the Saudi regime's indulgence of its bete noire, Osama. Through talent and grit, Mohammed rose to become the kingdom's chief builder, linking his clan inextricably to both the Saudi royal family (which he once bailed out financially) and Islam's most revered sites. Zawahiri, a trained physician, was born into a family renowned in medicine, religion, and Egyptian politics. One uncle was a student and confidant of Qutb, while another was the rector of Cairo's al-Azhar University, as close an analogue as there is to papal status in Islam.

Zawahiri, older and more intellectual but decidedly less charismatic than bin Laden, began when he was only 15 to form the cells that would become al-Jhad, the terror organization narrowly dedicated to supplanting Egypt's secular government with a sharia state. Even then, he exhibited a penchant for alienating such natural allies as the Muslim Brotherhood (which he decried for its occasional willingness to work within the political system) and the infamous "Blind Sheikh," Omar Abdel Rahman (whose reckless bloodlust he believed undermined the cause, and whose U.S. followers bombed the World Trade Center in 1993).

Wright strongly suggests that the drift of both Zawahiri and bin Laden from regional jihadist goals to an epic clash of civilizations was driven by shame. Implicated tangentially in the conspiracy that resulted in Sadat's 1981 murder, Zawahiri is beset by the infamy of having turned state's evidence after being tortured in Egypt's notorious prisons. (With a transparent nod to the mainstream canard that terrorists are created not by doctrine but by such state abuse, Wright confusingly intimates that the torture radicalized Zawahiri--even though he elsewhere recounts that Zawahiri was a "committed revolutionary" for many years before his incarceration, and later concludes that "torture did not so much change Zawahiri as purify his resolve.")

Bin Laden, always pious and seamlessly radicalized in his early teens through exposure to the Muslim Brotherhood, emerged as a jihadist financier in the mid-1980s when the Afghan mujahiddin's jihad against the Soviets attracted thousands of Arab would-be warriors. His actual appearance on the battlefield, however, was delayed for five years, supposedly because he bowed to disapproval from his mother--a hint of cowardice the image-conscious bin Laden has airbrushed by lying about his past, claiming to have gone immediately to Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded in 1979, when in fact he was finally cajoled to the front around 1984.

It was Afghanistan that brought bin Laden and Zawahiri together. Bin Laden rapidly rose to prominence, thanks to the personal fortune he willingly staked and also to his Saudi government contacts--particularly Turki al-Faisal, the then-intelligence chief (and a college friend of Bill Clinton at Georgetown), who coordinated Saudi support for the mujahiddin to the tune of up to half a billion dollars a year. Originally drawn into the jihad under the tutelage of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam (another jihadist powerhouse with whom Zawahiri could not get along), bin Laden soon eclipsed his mentor in influence. The "Services Bureau" (Makhtab-al-Khadamat) he co-founded with Azzam in 1984 was the foundation for al-Qaeda.

The relationship between bin Laden and Zawahiri is complex--confounding even Wright, who swerves between flatly declaring, "They were not friends but allies," and deducing that they do have a "friendship" that is "complicated by the fact that one [bin Laden] placed his life in the hands of the other." It is, in any event, a marriage of convenience. Bin Laden is a big-picture dreamer--dedicated and able, but wanting in day-to-day management skills. Zawahiri has the management skills, but they were not matched by money and contacts, which bin Laden had in abundance.

The bulk of the story deals with the odyssey by which both men gravitated from comparatively modest designs to an all-out war seeking to destroy the U.S. and herald a worldwide caliphate. In the telling, Wright deftly dismantles myths great and small. Bin Laden is neither the giant nor the Croesus of lore: He's a bit over six feet tall, and his fortune was vastly depleted by al-Qaeda's years in Hassan al-Turabi's Sudan (which bin Laden came to see as more an extortion racket than a safe haven for jihadists). The Arab fighters were, for the most part, an incompetent drain on the Afghan mujahiddin. It was the 1998 East African embassy bombings that put al-Qaeda (by then relocated to Afghanistan and nearly penniless) on the map; before that, for all bin Laden's bravado (including two high-profile declarations of war), the organization was plotting energetically but had accomplished little.

It is in its own myth creation that Wright's history stumbles. As the prism for explaining the U.S. response to al-Qaeda, Wright chooses to inflate beyond all proportion the FBI's John O'Neill, the book's third principal figure. Between 1995 and 2001, O'Neill was a top Bureau counterterrorism official. A sharp-elbowed infighter who was deeply patriotic and deeply flawed (personally and professionally, as Wright copiously recounts), O'Neill took a private security job at the World Trade Center in late summer 2001, when his government career was fading. On 9/11, he was killed, heroically trying to save lives. In a book about "al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11," O'Neill should be an interesting bit player. He was far from a central character, and he was very far from being unique among government officials in the belief that al-Qaeda would attack the U.S. massively.

Wright's recounting of American security efforts is unsatisfying in other ways, too. While he makes much of the fact that the CIA, NSA, and State Department frustrated the FBI here and there, he fails to note that President Clinton (who was being investigated by the FBI) could easily have interceded to end these disputes--but chose not to. Wright has also bought wholesale the view of Clinton counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke that, pre-9/11, al-Qaeda was less of a priority for the Bush administration than it had been for its predecessor--something Wright reports, without a hint of irony, immediately after noting that the Clinton administration failed to respond at all to the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole. And the author reaffirms--confusingly--the 9/11 Commission's duplicitous account of the bureaucratic "wall" that prevented the sharing of information between criminal and national-security investigators (he describes it as a regulation the Bureau misinterpreted, rather than what it was: a Clinton Justice Department directive that prioritized hypothetical privacy concerns over public safety).

These are relatively small points. When it comes to Islamist doctrine, however, Wright does not merely bowdlerize its centrality to al-Qaeda's savage campaign; he affirmatively contorts it. On display here is the all-purpose, politically correct Weltanschauung: The religion of peace has been wantonly hijacked by terrorists. When Wright returns repeatedly to takfir, he discusses it as a "heresy" within Islam--though, as Bernard Lewis has explained, heresy is itself a concept foreign to Islam. But if takfir is intramurally controversial, that is only because it provides a justification for killing Muslims. This glides past the elephant in the room: Islam regards non-Muslims as lesser beings. (Even Wright concedes, in passing and without analysis, that, for example, non-Muslims are deemed unfit to enter Mecca and Medina.) Justifying their killing requires no similar casuistry. To circumvent the inconvenience of injunctions in the Koran and other Islamic teachings that clearly support killing of infidels and apostates during jihad, Wright simply ignores them--reporting instead the more benign scriptures (which actually came earlier in time, and were thus superseded by the more bellicose suras of Mohammed's Medina period). Again without irony, the author goes so far as to claim that prior to World War II "there was little precedent in Islam for ... anti-Semitism," right before recalling "the time when the Prophet Mohammed had subjugated the Jews of Medina." Wright also resorts to psychobabble: Top 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta's "turn to terror," we are told, probably "had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations." This makes explicit the suggestion Wright made implicitly regarding Qutb: These guys are levying war not because they believe, with some justification, that their religion commands it; they simply can't relate to women.

The Looming Tower is a good read for those seeking historical details about al-Qaeda and its prime movers. For explanations, better to look elsewhere.

Mr. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.