Taking a Trip Through Terror

"The United States has now become a Middle Eastern country, and you're going to have to think very old thoughts." The controversial Egyptian playwright Ali Salem issued that warning to Lawrence Wright in the wake of September 11, 2001, while Mr. Wright was researching "The Looming Tower," his gripping book chronicling the rise of Al-Qaeda.

Mr. Wright, a writer for the New Yorker (where several excerpts from the book first appeared), has immersed himself in the very old thoughts, anxieties, and animosities that have fueled Islam's more virulent strains. He has become an enormously knowledgeable authority on Al Qaeda in the process — Mr. Salem is one of more than 600 people he interviewed for the book. And in "My Trip to Al-Qaeda," his deceptively low-key semistaged discussion, he tries to pass along the facts he has learned along with the dispiriting conclusions he has drawn.

He may look like a slightly wonkier version of Dennis Quaid — congenial and not easily ruffled, with a wry Southern drawl and a wide, eye-crinkling smile — but Mr. Wright, who keeps a copy of the script nearby throughout the 75-minute piece, is not much of an actor. Unlike Anna Deavere Smith (or, to a lesser extent, David Hare, who also explored Middle Eastern strife in a solo show, "Via Dolorosa"), he forgoes the oral-history route, resorting to only a smattering of halfhearted imitations. Instead, Mr. Wright and director Gregory Mosher convey character and plot through sharp-eyed reportage and the occasional slide or film clip.

But what characters and what a plot! "The Looming Tower," a chronicle of Al Qaeda's origins and of the American officials determined to stop its growing threat, would be impossible to retell in a homey, Chautauqua-style recounting. There's too much detail, too much rage, too much patient explication of the intricacies that have resulted in the metastisization of Islam.

So Mr. Wright instead engages in a bit of meta-journalism. Just as he told the story of Al Qaeda in his book, "My Trip to Al-Qaeda" tells the story of how he got the story. Like a good reporter, he covers the six central tenets of journalism: In addition to how and what, he touches upon who (those hundreds of sources), where (11 different countries), and when (over five years).

The sixth question, why he wrote "Looming," receives the most attention. Islamic extremism, particularly when it's directed toward America, has been on Mr. Wright's mind since well before the events of September 11. Three years earlier, he co-wrote the screenplay to the eerily prescient terrorists-in-New-York film "The Siege." That film (which is excerpted twice during "My Trip," effectively in one case and self-indulgently in another) was the most-rented video in America in the month after September 11, he says, making him "the first profiteer in the war on terror."

As that quote implies, Mr. Wright has his share of misgivings about his line of work. One of his best sources, a former henchman of Ayman al-Zawahiri, killed a 12-year-old girl with a car bomb in 1993; he attained political asylum in England and is now, of all things, a driving instructor. "Who am I when I am talking to Al Qaeda?" Mr. Wright asks. "Am I only a reporter? Or am I an American citizen in the presence of my enemy?" He's also not afraid to depict his own vanity: He describes a grandiose dream in which he himself is fingered as the mastermind of the events of September 11, 2001, a surreal inversion of the anti-American conspiracy theories he hears all over the Arab world.

Mr. Wright, who has taught English in Egypt and journalism in Saudi Arabia, holds Islam in high esteem. He speaks lyrically about the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, and about a group of Afghan museum employees painstakingly reconstructing the pre-Islamic antiquities that were destroyed by the Taliban. But with the exception of a brief and compelling epilogue in which he lambastes American policy for its curtailing of civil liberties — he was questioned by the FBI about phone conversations he believes were picked up via National Security Agency wiretaps — he blames the global prevalence of anti-American sentiment on an utter lack of hope among millions of young Arabs, a despondency exploited by the manipulations of corrupt clerics:

Perhaps Al Qaeda can best be understood as an engine that runs on the despair of the Muslim world, especially its young men, whose lives are so futile and unexpressed. Al Qaeda offers them a chance to make history. All they have to do is die.

This conclusion has been drawn many times by many commentators. (Less orthodox is Mr. Wright's comparison of the oil-rich but ideologically paralyzed Saudi Arabia, "nearly incapacitated by longing," to a hypnotized chicken he once witnessed as a boy.) Rarely, though, has this sentiment been conveyed as accessibly and yet with as much nuance as in this intensely engaging presentation.

Solo performers like Lisa Kron and Sarah Jones probably won't lose too much sleep over Mr. Wright's acting chops. But "My Trip to Al-Qaeda," like the book that inspired it, may well induce restless nights for anyone casting an uneasy eye across our shores. After hundreds of interviews in nearly a dozen nations, Mr. Wright still has no idea how to avert an increasingly menacing clash of ideologies. America, the Middle East, and the rest of the world need to join him in trying to find the answers — and "The Looming Tower" and "My Trip to Al-Qaeda" are two very good places to begin the search.

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