Lawrence Wright, author of one of our principal texts this semester, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, spoke recently at the American University in Cairo, where he had been a graduate student and later a teacher in the 1970s. He predicted the movement would fail and disappear for three reasons: it has too many enemies, most of the people it kills are fellow Muslims, and it has no vision for the future:
“For many of the young men who are drawn to join it, Al-Qaeda is not really a terror organization. It’s a suicide machine. It is fueled by the despair that is such a feature of their lives because of political, economic, social, and psychological reasons. Al-Qaeda offers them a chance to feel powerful in the world. All they have to do is die.” Political oppression and the absence of civil society are other factors, “aggravated,” Wright said, “by a sense of paralysis that feels especially acute when much of the world is enjoying economic growth and the blessings of democratic reform.”
Source: AUC Today (alumni publication of the American University in Cairo), Spring 2008, 9.
UPDATE, May 28: See Wright’s article in The New Yorker, “The Rebellion Within” (June 2, 2008, 37ff.) where Wright claims the movement is “disintegrating” (p. 53), riven with internal divisions.
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I think the problem of Al-Qaeda is not the threats posed by Al-Qaeda itself but the popular death-culture created as result of its terrorist activities. I agree with Wright that it will soon die out but worry that its impact will last for a quite long time.
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