Talking with Lawrence Wright

"Islam and the West have clashed in the past and have not clashed. There is nothing inevitable about it."

This was Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, in a long distance interview I did for the Daily Star Egypt last month. Wright studied and taught at the American University in Cairo from 1969-71 as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war.

Wright came to Cairo after a "very, very consequential walk across the street" in New York in 1969 when he went to the United Nations "thinking I'd get a job there [instead of going to Vietnam]. They gave me a list of American institutions abroad and [the office of] one was across the street: the American University in Cairo."

He talked about the openness of Ayman al-Zawahiri's relatives who are still in Cairo, two of the 600 or so interviews he did for The Looming Tower. "It wasn't that difficult [to talk to them]. Once I made contact with his cousin and his uncle they were extremely gracious to me. They gave me a great deal of time."

His early New Yorker stories that preceded the book actually helped his credibility in the eyes of Islamists he hoped to interview, many of whom it turns out read the magazine. "When I was working on the al-Zawahiri piece, a large part of it published in The New Yorker in 2002, I had spoken to a lot of Zawahiri's friends, people who had been in prison with him, people that had been in al-Jihad with him. And quite to my surprise they liked that article a lot. They understood that I didn't agree with them or sympathize with their aims, but they felt seen and heard I think. And my access actually improved after that."

My Cairo phone line was pretty faint talking to Wright, at home in Austin, TX, but it all luckily it all came through. At the end of the conversation he said that what citizens in the States, in Egypt and throughout the Middle East need to do is look back to the Cold War. "If you look at what was happening as a prelude to the end of the Cold War, citizens had really taken matters into their own hands through sister city projects, citizens exchanges, even, you know, bass fishing clubs were doing exchanges, and network news anchors in Moscow and New York were exchanging places. Basically, [citizens] had made a declaration to take things into their own hands. You don't see that happening now. And that, I think, is a vital step for reconciliation."

Before that he substituted any idea of a clash of civilizations for "a clash of identity within civilizations that feel threatened."

"I think it's wrong to think of it as a clash between civilizations, because Islam is not really a civilization but a religion that exists in civilizations all over the world...

... In Belgium for example the number one name for a child born today is Mohammed, which isn't that surprising because Mohammed is the most popular name in the whole world right now. But if you were someone of Flemish ancestry, you must be saying to yourself, where is this going? What is happening to my country's history and language, our precious place in the world? And if you're Mohammed you're probably thinking, they speak for someone else; Mohammed isn't one of them. And it's very likely that Mohammed has been to Morocco, or may not even speak Arabic. But he's really lost. It's not surprising that he goes off to this mosque and associates with other angry and alienated young men and that Islam becomes more than a religion; it becomes a complete identity."

The full interview is here.