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Volume 72, Issue 52,
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
News Author shares insights on Middle East Teaching, mentoring and student
interaction in the region
by JENNIFER EARLY
Author of the new 9/11 book The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright, shared how his experiences in the Middle East shaped his writing and research Monday with UH communication students and faculty. Wright's interest in the Middle East inadvertently developed in 1969 when he failed to gain employment at the United Nations in New York and was given the opportunity to travel to Cairo, Egypt as a teacher at the American University. "I walked in and the first thing I said to the class was, ‘Does anyone here speak English?' Someone said, ‘You do!' That began my teaching career. I really loved Cairo during that time," he said. "We were there when (Gamal Abdal) Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, and we were there when (Muhammad Anwar al) Sadat took over. It was a period of time that taught me about Muslim culture in a context we don't see now," Wright said. In 2003, Wright was invited by the editor of the English-language Saudi Gazette to travel to Saudi Arabia and mentor Saudi journalists. "I couldn't write about (Osama) bin Laden without going to Saudi Arabia. I had these kids I could send out on stories. I learned from them more and more about Saudi society. I told them all I was working on (The Looming Tower), and that I was (in Saudi Arabia) to research bin Laden. And they actually helped me," Wright said. Wright also discussed Saudi women's lack of rights, which include not being allowed to drive and being forced to secure a male spouse or guardian's written permission before traveling. Female reporters at the Saudi Gazette also dealt with submissive roles in Saudi Arabian society. "Nobody had ever seen women reporters. They worked in a little office called the Ladies Quarters. I had to make special arrangements for them to come up to the conference room. They'd never been in a newsroom before," Wright said. "It's odd because you'd think women would be a more progressive force in Saudi society." Wright's research on The Looming Tower began immediately following the 9/11 attacks when he came across an obituary of John O'Neill, former head of counterterrorism in the FBI's New York office, on the Washington Post Web site. "I was in Austin, and I was trying to find a way to write about 9/11. I couldn't fly. I couldn't get to New York. How could I get a story? And I found this obituary. It made (O'Neill) sound kind of like a villain. He had been forced out the bureau because one of his superiors leaked information to The New York Times. He took a job as head of security at the World Trade Center, and he died (9/11). He came from the world I wanted to write about. He would help the reader understand what went wrong in our effort to stop this attack," Wright said. When Wright was writing a screenplay for a movie, a friend taught him what he referred to as the "rubber band" theory. "If you set up a problem and you don't resolve it right away, you'll create a tension inside the reader's mind. Don't immediately say ‘and then this happened,'" he said. "It was like a rubber band -- it would stretch. The reader knows it's a powerful moment. The reader knows there's going to be something else. Subconsciously, the reader knows (they are) tied by this elastic to this moment and it's going to pay off in the future," Wright said. The Looming Tower is a detailed history of al-Qaeda,
the 9/11 terror group, which includes a step-by-step description of bin
Laden's attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa and the Cole destroyer. These
attacks left behind a trail of clues, and through interviews and retrieved
documents, Wright said, show how 9/11 could have been prevented if the
FBI, CIA and the National Security Agency had worked together and shared
vital information.
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