LRB: Pythagoras

Other Lives
by M.F. Burnyeat

review of
Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching and Influence by Christoph Riedweg trans. Steven Rendall · Cornell, 216 pp, £9.95
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: A Brief History by Charles Kahn · Hackett, 193 pp, £10.95

It is hard to let go of Pythagoras. He has meant so much to so many for so long. I can with confidence say to readers of this essay: most of what you believe, or think you know, about Pythagoras is fiction, much of it deliberately contrived. Did he discover the geometrical theorem that bears his name? No. Did he ponder the harmony of the spheres? Certainly not: celestial spheres were first excogitated decades or more after Pythagoras’ death. Does he even deserve credit for his most famous accomplishment, analysing the mathematical ratios that structure musical concordances? Possibly, but there is little reason to believe the stories about his being the first to discover them, and compelling reason not to believe the oft-told story about how he did it. Allegedly, as he was passing a smithy, he heard that the sounds made by the hammers exemplified the intervals of fourth, fifth and octave, so he measured their weights and found their ratios to be respectively 4:3, 3:2, 2:1. Unfortunately for this anecdote, recently rehashed in the article on Pythagoras in Grove Music Online, the sounds made by a blow do not vary proportionately with the weight of the instrument used.
My problem is that to convince you of such deflationary truths I have to give an account which inevitably is less exciting than, for example, the following extract from Bertrand Russell’s well-known History of Western Philosophy (1946):
Pythagoras . . . was intellectually one of the most important men that ever lived, both when he was wise and when he was unwise. Mathematics, in the sense of demonstrative deductive argument, begins with him, and in him is intimately connected with a peculiar form of mysticism. The influence of mathematics on philosophy, partly owing to him, has, ever since his time, been both profound and unfortunate.
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Or this from Roger Penrose in The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2005):
Although mathematical truths of various kinds had been surmised since ancient Egyptian and Babylonian times, it was not until the great Greek philosophers Thales of Miletus (c.625-547 BC) and Pythagoras of Samos (c.572-497 BC) began to introduce the notion of mathematical proof that the first firm foundation stone of mathematical understanding – and therefore of science itself – was laid. Thales may have been the first to introduce this notion of proof, but it seems to have been the Pythagoreans who first made important use of it to establish things that were not otherwise obvious. Pythagoras also appeared to have a strong vision of the importance of number, and of arithmetical concepts, in governing the actions of the physical world.
Both writers are wildly wrong, but Russell had a good excuse. He was voicing the received scholarly opinion of his time, mediated to him through the writings of John Burnet and F.M. Cornford, Russell’s one-time colleague at Trinity College, Cambridge. And that scholarly opinion was itself the codification, with properly footnoted sources, of a millennia-long tradition about Pythagoras and mathematics.
What happened between Russell and Penrose was the publication in 1962 of a very great work of scholarship, Walter Burkert’s Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaus und Platon (revised version translated into English as Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, 1972). The effect of Burkert’s book was to destroy for ever the alluring picture of Pythagoras as a mystical mathematician, a picture which has been endlessly recycled from antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond. Mystic, yes – or at least the leader of a religious cabal which believed in transmigration of the soul and was disciplined enough to take political power in several cities of southern Italy. But mathematician, no. Not at any rate if, with Russell and Penrose, we think of a mathematics based on deductive proof, as opposed to the fanciful numerology recorded in Aristotle’s On the Beliefs of the Pythagoreans, of which the following is an example:
Marriage, they said, is five, because it is the union of male and female, and according to them the odd is male and the even female, and five is the first number to be generated from the union of the first even number, two, and the first odd number, three; for the odd is for them (as I said) male and the even female.
Burkert is listed in Penrose’s bibliography, but in Penrose’s text Pythagoras still leads us along the road to reality with mathematical proof as his guide to understanding. The Burkert revolution has had zero effect on his impressive book.
I sympathise with Penrose. The problem is not just that beloved historical traditions die hard. Lore and Science is as dense a work of classical scholarship as you could fear to meet. To deconstruct the Pythagoras tradition, Burkert has to unravel so many obscure sources that his pages groan with footnotes citing ancient authors whom even specialists may not have heard of. The going is tough, the effect unremittingly negative. I have a vivid memory of the week, way back in 1978, when I struggled through my first reading of the book, so gripped that I stayed in bed, scribbling notes, all day every day. I had been brought up on a strong version of the Cambridge interpretation deriving from Cornford. Thanks to Burkert, I could no longer accept a word of that. But I hardly knew what to believe instead. The following week I was due to give my first ever lecture on Pythagoreanism. Had the two books under review been in the shops back then, I would have rushed to devour them. For both are written to answer the question: what now remains, in the wake of Burkert, to be said about Pythagoras and his followers?
The first thing to notice is how short both books are: each fewer than two hundred pages to compare with Burkert’s 535. There’s much less to say about Pythagoras now than there was when I was young. The textbook we studied then was The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts by G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven (1957), in which Raven (my undergraduate tutor) devotes 40 pages to Pythagoras and his early followers. In the revised second edition of this now standard work (Kirk, Raven and Schofield, 1983), Raven’s account of early Pythagoreanism is replaced by a mere 24 pages of entirely new material, written by Malcolm Schofield and much indebted to ‘Burkert’s . . . masterpiece of postwar classical scholarship’. I recommend it to anyone who wants to see the scraps of evidence, in Greek plus translation, from which must derive any up-to-date picture of Pythagoras and the ideas of the movement he founded.
Christopher Riedweg’s book is dedicated to Burkert, while Charles Kahn thanks Burkert for ‘superlative’ comments on the manuscript he sent to the publisher. Whenever Pythagoreanism comes up for scholarly study, the Burkert revelation is now everywhere, the anxiety of his influence omnipresent – but with different effects on different writers. Riedweg seems confused by it, both affirming and denying the break with tradition. Kahn, like Schofield, remains cool and collected. The difference shows in the heading of Kahn’s fifth chapter, ‘The New Pythagorean Philosophy in the Early Academy’.
That little word ‘new’ testifies that Kahn has managed to let go, for it accepts from Burkert that the origins of the traditional picture of Pythagoras are to be sought, not during the sixth century BC, when he lived and fought his political battles, not during the fifth century, when democratic forces ousted his followers from power in various cities of southern Italy, but late in the fourth century. That was when Speusippus and Xenocrates, the dominant figures in Plato’s Academy, sought to devise ancient authority for certain aspects of their late master’s philosophy. Theirs was a conscious construction whereby Pythagoras became the apostle of mathematics and a highly mathematising philosophy, full of anticipations of Platonic metaphysics. But instead of denigrating or dismissing it for the fictive construction it was, Kahn hails it as a new Pythagorean philosophy, a way of thinking that deserves to be tracked through the centuries from Ptolemy’s Harmonics through Copernicus to Kepler.
Riedweg half-agrees with this, and has a parallel section in his book entitled ‘Pythagoras as an Idea in the Middle Ages and Modernity – A Prospect’, beginning:
Had Pythagoras and his teachings not been since the early Academy overwritten with Plato’s philosophy, and had this ‘palimpsest’ not in the course of the Roman Empire achieved unchallenged authority among Platonists, it would be scarcely conceivable that scholars from the Middle Ages and modernity down to the present would have found the Presocratic charismatic from Samos so fascinating. In fact, as a rule it was the image of Pythagoras elaborated by Neopythagoreans and Neoplatonists that determined the idea of what was Pythagorean over the centuries (my italics).
Fine, but a reader who asks Riedweg, ‘What, then, did Pythagoras really stand for earlier, before the Academy set to work?’, gets a muddled, muddling answer. Legends are retold. Pythagoras’ golden thigh is put on display once more, alongside his gift of bilocation (he was seen simultaneously in two different cities). During a visit to the temple of Hera in Argos where, ages before, the Greeks had dedicated the booty they brought home from their victory over Troy, Pythagoras recognised among the exhibits the shield he had carried when, in a previous incarnation as the warrior Euphorbus, he was killed by Menelaus. After drinking at a well in Metapontum, he correctly predicted that an earthquake would occur in three days’ time.
Not that Riedweg buys into all this, but he does encourage his readers to marvel at a man around whom such legends grew. And in his anxiety not to let go he will defend the indefensible: for example, that Pythagoras invented the word ‘philosophy’ and was the first to make ‘cosmos’ mean ‘world-order’.
More important, in answer to the question I began from, ‘What did Pythagoras himself contribute to mathematics?’, Riedweg refers us to this passage from the opening book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics:
Contemporaneously with these philosophers [the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus] and before them, the Pythagoreans devoted themselves to mathematics; they were the first to advance these studies, and having been brought up in them, they supposed their principles to be the principles of all things.
‘They were the first to advance these studies’: it sounds conclusive, and has been endlessly cited as proof that the Pythagoreans (if not Pythagoras himself) were the founders of ancient Greek mathematics. But it is no such thing.
First, a mundane point of translation. Aristotle has set out to survey the contributions of earlier thinkers who discussed the question, ‘What are the fundamental principles of reality?’ He began with Thales, who said that all is water, then he went on to others who proposed other material principles, climaxing with the theory that all is atoms and the void. Now comes the sentence just quoted, with the key verb proa’gein translated as ‘advance’. This, the rendering that has prevailed in vernacular translations since the Renaissance (a time of enthusiastic Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism), seems to credit the Pythagoreans, if not with founding Greek mathematics, at least with being the first to raise standards to a high level.
But proa’gein simply means ‘bring forward’ – bring forward in any way one can bring something forward, which might include bringing forward a witness to testify in court. The medieval translators of Aristotle use verbs like producere or adducere, ‘to bring forward’ or ‘adduce’. The meaning then is that the Pythagoreans were the first to make mathematics bear witness in the metaphysical debate, or the first to adduce the principles of mathematics as the principles of all things. The point of saying they were the first is that in the next chapter Aristotle will discuss Plato’s contribution to metaphysics as a second, and somewhat different, mathematising account of the fundamental principles of reality. Exactly that contrast between a first (Pythagorean) and a later (Platonic) version of the thesis that the principles of mathematics are the principles of all things is what Aquinas provides in his commentary on the Metaphysics (c.1270-72). On this medieval, pre-Renaissance understanding of the passage, absolutely nothing is said about the history of mathematics itself. It is about mathematical, or pseudo-mathematical, contributions to the history of metaphysics, at least some of it in the style of the stuff about marriage quoted above.
The next question is: which Pythagoreans does Aristotle have in view when he introduces their contribution to the metaphysical debate? And how would he know what they thought? We are informed that the first Pythagorean to write and publish a book ‘On Nature’ was Philolaus (of Croton or Tarentum), born c.470 BC, which implies publication some time in the second half of the fifth century, fifty years or more after Pythagoras’ death. One of Burkert’s key achievements was to match up Aristotle’s reports on Pythagorean cosmology with the solid evidence of Philolaus’ book, of which a fair number of fragments remain for us too to study.
There were some enthralling ideas in this book. One was a revolutionary proposal to move the Earth. Not indeed to move it around the Sun, but Philolaus’ hypothesis of a central Fire around which circle Earth, a Counter-Earth we can never see, the Sun, Moon, the five known planets, and finally the outermost circle of the fixed stars, was a radical innovation on the standard geocentric scheme. Cicero’s and Plutarch’s reports of it excited Copernicus.
Another of Philolaus’ proposals, equally innovatory at the time, was to locate thought and reason in the brain instead of the heart, as was commonly believed; according to him, the heart is rather the seat of life and sensation. The idea that thought goes on in the brain was accepted by Plato, but long resisted by Aristotle, the Epicureans and Stoics. The crucial importance of the brain was only established beyond dispute in the third century BC, by Hellenistic doctors whose vivisections ranged from pigs to human prisoners in the jails of Ptolemaic Egypt. (Naturally, all that pain was inflicted for the sake of future human welfare.)
But there was also numerological fancy in Philolaus: ‘He called the number seven “motherless”,’ says a late source, ‘for it alone has neither the nature to generate nor the nature to be generated.’ This is confirmed and explained by Aristotle, though he does not expressly name Philolaus:
Since seven neither generates any of the numbers in the decad [the numbers one to ten] nor is generated by any of them, they [the Pythagoreans] called it Athena. For two generates four, and three generates nine and six, and four generates eight, and five generates ten, while four and six and eight and nine and ten are generated, but seven neither generates any of them nor is generated from any. Just this is the character of Athena, who is motherless and always virgin.
Philolaus intrigues because of his ability to combine innovative contributions to Presocratic physics with traditional Pythagorean number symbolism. So far as we can tell, the combination is unique, without parallel or predecessor. Certainly, none of his innovative ideas in physics can be traced back to the founding father of the movement, Pythagoras himself. And when it comes to mathematics properly so called, while Philolaus wrote about the ratios involved in dividing a musical scale, there is no sign that his conclusions were backed by mathematical proof.
Our information about ancient Greek achievements in mathematics begins, as Penrose rightly says, with Thales of Miletus, well before Pythagoras. Thales is credited with the discovery of several elementary geometrical theorems; one source expressly comments on the archaic vocabulary in which he announced that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal to one another. The story gathers pace in the second half of the fifth century, when Hippocrates of Chios (not to be confused with the famous doctor Hippocrates of Cos) showed how to square a lune, i.e. how to determine the area of a curvilinear figure shaped like a crescent moon. Hippocrates’ ‘quadrature of lunes’ is the earliest extant deductive proof in Greek mathematics, immediately recognisable as the ‘real thing’. He was also the first to compose an Elements: that is, a deductive treatise such as Euclid produced two centuries later in which theorems are inferred from definitions and other types of first principle laid down at the start. Oenopides of Chios was known for mathematical work on the ecliptic and may have been the first to require that only ruler and compass be used in the solution of simple problems. Theodorus of Cyrene was the first to prove, case by individual case, the irrationality of the square roots of the prime numbers from 3 to 17, while his pupil Theaetetus of Athens early in the fourth century produced the first general theory of irrationality and the first general account of the construction of the five regular solids (cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron).
This is powerful, mainstream mathematics, a far cry from the numerology of marriage. Yet not one of the names just mentioned is that of a Pythagorean, not one comes from southern Italy. Still, there is one name that prompts a question. Why would Theodorus begin his proofs with the irrationality of √3 if not because the irrationality of √2 was already known? Who, then, discovered this, the first and most elementary case of irrationality?
The simple answer is that no one knows. Numerous books (Penrose’s included) will tell you that the discovery was felt by the Pythagoreans as a great shock, for it threatened their attempt to explain the world in terms of whole-number ratios on the model of the musical concords. Ancient testimony to this claim is non-existent. All there is is a late story, found in the Neoplatonist Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras (fourth century ad), that divinity drowned at sea the Pythagorean who made the discovery public, in breach of the ban (itself of dubious historicity) on divulging to outsiders any detail of what took place within the school.
Enter now the first Pythagorean to be credited with a significant mathematical discovery, Hippasus of Metapontum in southern Italy. Date uncertain, the best estimate being that he was active around 450 BC in the generation before Theodorus. Now, according to the same late compilation by Iamblichus, Hippasus was the first to show how to construct a dodecahedron and to publish his discovery – in punishment for which he was drowned at sea. For all that sea travel in antiquity was a hazardous undertaking, with shipwreck a common occurrence, some scholars unite the two drowning stories and suppose that Hippasus’ punishment was for revealing both the fact of irrationality and the construction of the dodecahedron; it has even been suggested that he discovered irrationality in the course of working on the dodecahedron. Readers who prefer history to supernatural drama may be comforted to learn (on the not entirely reputable authority of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, a pupil of Aristotle and the leading music theorist of the fourth century BC) that Hippasus performed experiments with free-swinging metal discs of equal diameter and varying thickness which could validly verify the ratios of fourth, fifth and octave.
Be that as it may, the next candidate for a Pythagorean mathematician is Archytas of Tarentum in southern Italy. The founder of mathematical mechanics (later advanced by Archimedes), and of mathematical optics (later advanced by Euclid, Archimedes and Ptolemy), he also contributed to mathematical harmonics. A formal deductive proof has come down to us beginning, as do proofs in Euclid later, with a statement of the theorem to be proved: ‘A superparticular ratio cannot be divided into equal parts by a mean proportional placed between them.’ This shows that the tone, which has the superparticular ratio 9:8, cannot be divided equally, and hence that there is no true ‘semitone’. Last, but very far from least, in geometry he devised an amazing solution (drawing on earlier work by Hippocrates of Chios) to the problem of how to duplicate a cube. This was truly a giant.
But Archytas is a contemporary of Plato, whom in 361 BC he was able to rescue from virtual imprisonment by Dionysius II, tyrant of Syracuse. (As a leading politician in democratic Tarentum, seven times elected general, he could command both a ship to go to the rescue and the international clout to induce Dionysius to let Plato go.) Splendid as Archytas’ mathematical achievements are, they tell us nothing at all about Pythagoras two centuries earlier.
Not only is Archytas the first clearly attested important Pythagorean mathematician. He is also the last. By his time most of the Pythagorean communities had been broken by their political opponents. The death toll was high. The survivors, including Philolaus, fled to mainland Greece. Philolaus settled in Thebes, where he taught Simmias and Cebes, the two characters with whom in Plato’s Phaedo Socrates discusses immortality and transmigration of the soul:
Once, they say, he was passing by when a puppy was being whipped. He took pity and said: ‘Stop, do not beat it; for it is the soul of a friend I recognised when I heard it give tongue.’
‘He’ is Pythagoras, as described by a contemporary philosopher-poet, Xenophanes of Colophon. This is evidence as near the original as one could hope to find. Even if it is evidence only about what ‘they say’ (what more than second-hand stories could one expect from a man who set nothing down in writing?), there is independent early confirmation that Himself, as Pythagoras was called by the faithful, did teach that both before our birth and after our death our soul has other lives to live in a variety of animal bodies. Here at last we see through the mists of fiction to something that approximates historical fact.
Now, however many readers of this essay believe that their soul will survive death, rather few, I imagine, believe that it also pre-existed their birth. The religions that have shaped Western culture are so inhospitable to the idea of pre-existence that you probably reject the thought out of hand, for no good reason. Be patient. There are more exotica to come:
Abstain from beans. Eat only the flesh of animals that may be sacrificed. Do not step over the beam of a balance. On rising, straighten the bedclothes and smooth out the place where you lay. Spit on your hair clippings and nail parings. Destroy the marks of a pot in the ashes. Do not piss towards the sun. Do not use a pine-torch to wipe a chair clean. Do not look in a mirror by lamplight. On a journey do not turn around at the border, for the Furies are following you. Do not make a detour on your way to the temple, for the god should not come second. Do not help a person to unload, only to load up. Do not dip your hand into holy water. Do not kill a louse in the temple. Do not stir the fire with a knife. One should not have children by a woman who wears gold jewellery. One should put on the right shoe first, but when washing do the left foot first. One should not pass by where an ass is lying.
The list could be continued, on and on. Item one, ‘Abstain from beans,’ is the best known, its rationale much disputed in antiquity; one suggestion was that it is through bean blossoms that souls return to earth for their reincarnation. Item two puts paid to the widespread idea that the Pythagoreans were always strict vegetarians. Collectively, these injunctions were known as a ’kou’smata, ‘things heard’, implying that they were transmitted by word of mouth. A number of the prescriptions have parallels in ancient cult practice. But the important thing to my mind is the sheer quantity of the rules that constrain a Pythagorean life, and the minute scrupulosity they enforce.
Other a ’kou’smata were cast in indicative rather than imperative mood:
What are the isles of the blest? Sun and Moon. Pythagoras is the Hyperborean Apollo. An earthquake is a mass meeting of the dead. The purpose of thunder is to threaten those in Tartarus, so that they will be afraid. The sea is the tears of Cronus. The Pleiades are the lyre of the Muses, and the planets are Persephone’s dogs. The ring of bronze when it is struck is the voice of a daemon trapped within it.
Add these indicatives to those imperatives and one realises that the world the followers of Pythagoras inhabit is a world full of taboos and threatening forces. All the more reason to try to escape the cycle of reincarnation, with the aid of the Hyperborean Apollo, and reach the isles of the blest.
But meanwhile, there is the politics of our present life: ‘Three hundred of the young men, bound to each other by oath like a brotherhood, lived segregated from the rest of the citizens, as if to form a secret band of conspirators, and brought the city under their control.’ That is how, according to a Roman historian of the first century BC drawing on earlier historiographical sources, Pythagoras in the sixth century got to dominate the city of Croton, which soon came, with the aid of comparable cabals in other cities, to dominate much of southern Italy. Read in today’s world, his account may well make us shiver.
The story becomes the more chilling when one reflects that there might be a connection between the discipline required for successful conspiracy and the apparently arbitrary discipline imposed by a ’kou’smata. (This is a topic on which Riedweg, drawing from modern sociological studies of charisma and sectarian religion, has useful things to say in a chapter ominously entitled ‘The Pythagorean Secret Society’.) The more arbitrary the discipline, the more it works to reinforce belief in the cause. For only the truth of the belief and the righteousness of the cause could justify the hardship of submission. It is no accident that organisations like the Church of Scientology often insist that newly recruited acolytes cut themselves off from all contact with their families. The cost of ‘disconnection’, as this is called, is so terrible that membership of the church had better be a gain of unmatchable value.
All those years ago, when as an undergraduate I was studying the Cambridge interpretation of Pythagoreanism with John Raven, there came a knock on my door. Three young men of about my age came in to speak about the work of the Plymouth Brethren. In the course of our conversation, one of them said, in his quiet-spoken way, that his favourite pastime was bird-watching, but he had been persuaded to sell his binoculars to help finance the work of the Brethren. He was telling me how much the cause meant to him. I heard only the cruelty of a sect out to bind him by making him give up his most precious possession. For the more he sacrificed, the more he would need, psychologically, to believe in the cause.
I do not mean that the Plymouth Brethren are insincere, or that Pythagoras did not believe in his cause as whole-heartedly as his followers were disciplined to do. Let it be the case that Pythagoras sincerely believed, and got his followers to believe, that he was the Hyperborean Apollo and that, as Euphorbus, he had fought Menelaus during the Trojan War. That only makes it all the more clear that he belongs to the history of politically intrusive religious movements, not to the history of philosophy or science. Even less does he deserve his traditional place in the history of mathematics.
M.F. Burnyeat has returned to Robinson College, Cambridge after ten years as senior research fellow in philosophy at All Souls. He is the author of The Theaetetus of Plato, among other books.

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LRB: Al-Qaida's Original Targets

The Original Targets
by James Meek
review of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida’s Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright · Allen Lane, 470 pp, £25.00
In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13. Zawahiri, the partner in terror of Osama bin Laden, had them stripped naked; he showed that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. The court found the boys guilty. Zawahiri had them shot, filmed their confessions and executions, and put video copies out to warn other potential traitors. His Sudanese hosts were so outraged that they expelled Zawahiri and his group immediately.
It does not exonerate Zawahiri that the boys really had, as Lawrence Wright explains, tried to kill him: Ahmed by telling Egyptian spies exactly when Zawahiri was going to come to treat him for malaria; the other boy, Musab, by twice trying to plant a bomb. The assassination attempts were part of the Egyptian government’s ruthless efforts to destroy Zawahiri and his organisation, al-Jihad, after al-Jihad came close to killing the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. ‘Ruthless’, in this instance, is a merited adjective. The way Egyptian intelligence recruited the boys – both were sons of senior al-Jihad members, and Musab’s father was the al-Qaida treasurer – was to drug them, anally rape them, then show them photos of the abuse and blackmail them. The boys were trapped; the photos could have led to their execution by al-Jihad as surely as their subsequent betrayal.
The story does more than illuminate the sheer vileness of the conflict that has been underway for decades between the death-loving hardcore of Islamic revolutionaries and the allies of European and American governments in the Islamic world. It underlines the centrality of Egypt to the origins and perpetuation of the conflict. read more
One of the darker choruses of this excellent work of journalism is the success that three of those allied governments, the Saudi Arabian, Pakistani and Egyptian, have had in diverting the fundamentalist warriors away from their original prime target – them – and towards the West. It’s been a remarkable feat; not only have the rulers of those three countries deflected Islamic revolutionaries by simultaneously repressing them, making concessions to them, and rechannelling their anger abroad, but they have gained additional support from the very Western countries which are now experiencing the consequences of that anger.
Wright argues convincingly that, although bin Laden would subsequently claim America had always been his enemy, he was ready at one stage to turn his ire on the venality, concupiscence and hypocrisy of the ruling royal family of his native Saudi Arabia. Why did the Saudi authorities give him such latitude in the late 1980s to criticise their ally, the United States? Because it was preferable to his attacking them. The Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan would not have become the breeding grounds of narrow-minded Islamic radicals they were, and are, without the passive and active support of branches of the Pakistani government. Why has there been such support? Partly because those Pakistani officials wanted to keep Iran and Russia out of Afghanistan, partly because some of them are fundamentalist Muslims themselves, but also because it deflects the tip of the jihadi spear away from Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi towards Kabul, New York and London.
The long and brutal struggle between Islamic revolutionaries and governments in Egypt, going back to the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood by Hasan al-Banna in 1928 and on through the execution of Sayyid Qutb in 1966, was a crucible for the theorising which led to the events of 11 September 2001. The prisons of Egypt became a networking venue for jihadis. It was there that the Egyptian jailers made their investment of cruelty in Zawahiri which he would later pay back a thousandfold. It is clear from Wright’s work that the struggle in Egypt, not the wider world, took precedence for the doctor; that Zawahiri may have believed the narrow, Nile-confined geography of populated Egypt made it hard for insurgents to operate; but that he put the goal of Islamic revolution there to one side, in favour of closer co-operation with bin Laden, only when he had no choice.
It was after an attack on Egyptian interests in 1995 – a suicide bombing at the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan, just after al-Jihad was expelled from Sudan – that Zawahiri first established the theological underpinning of suicide attacks. Eighteen people, including two suicide bombers in a truck, died. Zawahiri justified the attack by arguing that, since the Egyptian government was un-Islamic, and everyone who worked in the embassy worked for that government, they all deserved to die; innocent Muslim bystanders or children caught up in the explosion were sad but necessary collateral damage.
The Islamic prohibition on suicide was tougher to overcome, since the Prophet himself had foretold eternal damnation for one of his warriors after he killed himself rather than suffer the pain of battle wounds. Zawahiri reached back into distant history for the case of a group of Muslim martyrs who had been offered a choice by their idolatrous captors of renouncing their faith, or dying. They chose death. Their apparent breach of God’s word was accepted by other Muslims at the time as heroic martyrdom, because it was for the sake of God’s word that they died. ‘With such sophistry,’ Wright remarks, ‘Zawahiri reversed the language of the Prophet and opened the door to universal murder.’
Zawahiri finally set Egypt aside to concentrate on bin Laden’s war against America only in 1997, when Egypt as a whole turned against his methods in revulsion. The catalyst was an attack by a group of Zawahiri allies on tourists at Luxor. A small group of jihadis in police uniforms crippled any tourists within range by shooting them in the legs, then strolled from injured person to injured person, finishing them off with shots to the head. Some of the dead were mutilated with knives; one Swiss woman saw her father’s head being cut off. A flyer reading ‘No to tourists in Egypt’ was found inside the eviscerated body of a Japanese man. Most of the 62 victims were Swiss; others included four Egyptians and three generations of a British family – grandmother, mother and five-year-old daughter.
Wright gives prominence to the life of Qutb, whose Milestones had enormous influence on the Islamic revivalist movement. Published in 1964, it is a contradictory, self-referential, anti-semitic tract that calls for war against the non-Islamic world to establish a universal Islam, following which the conquered – or, as Qutb puts it, liberated – will be free to believe what they wish. Qutb insists that the world – not only the non-Islamic world, but the Islamic world itself – is in a state of Jahiliyyah, or defiance of God’s sovereignty. In the jahili world, instead of the ideal synthesis of worship and governance that God provides through the Koran, men blasphemously worship and are governed by each other. The most subversive aspect of Milestones, from the point of view of secular, multicultural governments and peoples, is its insistence that personal belief in and worship of God is insufficient to avoid Jahiliyyah. You can be as devout as you like, but if you tolerate and obey jahili institutions, you are defying God. It is a strong prescription, especially when you consider that Qutb greatly admired the scientific and cultural achievements of jahili Europe, and believed a future Islamic civilisation would surpass them.
Qutb wrote Milestones after spending a period in the US, from 1948 to 1950, during which his proud, sensitive, shy, classical-music-loving personality was assailed by what he saw as the lewd heartiness of America’s women and the materially rich, spiritually poor lives of its people in general. He was propositioned by a scantily clad, drunk young woman in his stateroom on the crossing out; scandalised by a nurse in Washington who told him what she looked for in a lover; shocked by a feminist teacher in Colorado who declared that there was no moral element to sexual relations; repelled by a minister who delighted in the libidinousness of a church dance; disgusted by the crude violence of American football; appalled to see a black man being beaten in the street; horrified by the ‘primitive Negro’ sounds of jazz; and dismayed by prodigious drinking at student parties. He saw the abundance of churches as a sign of hypocrisy rather than piety. ‘The soul has no value to Americans,’ he wrote. ‘There has been a PhD dissertation about the best way to clean dishes, which seems more important to them than the Bible or religion.’
Wright is not the first to have identified the origins of 9/11 in Qutb’s issues with sex in Greeley, Colorado, in 1949. But there is enough evidence even in Wright’s own book to suggest that his characterisation of Qutb’s influence – ‘the story of al-Qaida had really begun in America, not so long ago’ – is a little glib. The Muslim Brotherhood already had a million members and supporters when Qutb left for the US, and the movement’s founder, al-Banna, was no stranger to the concept of Jahiliyyah. The notion that the doom of the Twin Towers was an arc which began in America as well as ending there is hard to resist for an American storyteller, even if it is only partly true. Yet there is no doubt that Qutb influenced bin Laden and Zawahiri; Zawahiri’s uncle was Qutb’s pupil and protégé, and, at the trial which led to his execution, his lawyer. Qutb’s death had a profound effect on the teenage Zawahiri.
Alongside a detailed account of bin Laden’s early years, Wright delves deep into the life of Zawahiri, the devout, bookish, middle-class Cairo lad who helped form his first Islamic revolutionary cell in 1966, when he was 15 years old. The cell became one of the building blocks of al-Jihad (also known as Islamic Jihad).
Al-Jihad was one of three underground groups dedicated to the overthrow of the secular Egyptian government and the establishment of an Islamic state. The largest, oldest and most moderate, mixing politics with violence, was the Muslim Brotherhood, whose founder al-Banna was assassinated, probably by the Egyptian government, in 1949. In the 1970s, a second organisation, the Islamic Group, emerged as a force on Egyptian campuses; the socialist and secular nationalist fashions of the previous decade yielded, beards sprouted, and women students veiled up. The Islamic Group came to be led by Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, blind since childhood. Sheikh Omar and Zawahiri met and plotted together in prison. Their clandestine organisations were similar: small, suspicious of the Muslim Brotherhood, ready to use extreme violence, striving for an Islamic Egypt under Sharia law. In fact, they found co-operation difficult, partly because of personal jealousies, partly because Sheikh Omar’s was ultimately a more tolerant route to global Islam than Zawahiri’s. Yet Sheikh Omar trod an ominous trail which prefigured Zawahiri’s subsequent descent into gore. At one point he issued a fatwa justifying the murder of Christians, to make it possible for his young foot-soldiers to fund their jihad by killing and robbing Coptic businessmen with a clear conscience. In 1993, in New York, his followers detonated a massive van bomb in the basement car park of the World Trade Center, gouging a 200 foot-wide crater and killing six people, but failing to topple the structures. Sheikh Omar was subsequently arrested and jailed in the US; he had been applying for political asylum in America, while at the same time issuing a fatwa permitting his followers to rob banks and kill Jews, and making speeches in Arabic denouncing Americans as ‘descendants of apes and pigs’.
For all the hideous moments recorded in this book – the image of a woman struggling underneath the fallen engine of a Boeing on a Manhattan street is particularly haunting – the most intriguing and in some ways chilling mystery remains the fate of the fourth remarkable Islamic revolutionary leader at the centre of this history, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. It is known that this Palestinian religious scholar studied with Sheikh Omar in Cairo; it is known that he inspired bin Laden; it is known that he aroused the jealousy of Zawahiri. What remains unknown to this day is who was responsible for his assassination in Peshawar in 1989. The murder of Azzam – who, with bin Laden’s financial support, turned the international effort to defeat the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan into a pan-Islamic jihad – marked a turning point in the saga of the Islamic revolutionaries.
Azzam was a devout Muslim who had contempt for secularists. He helped found Hamas as an Islamic Palestinian counterweight to Yasir Arafat’s secular PLO. To drum up support for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan he issued a fatwa declaring jihad in Afghanistan a religious duty for every able-bodied Muslim. Saudi Arabia’s chief cleric backed him up with a fatwa of his own. Azzam toured the world, preaching of divine miracles on the battlefield – of the perfumed corpses of martyrs and birds turning aside Soviet bombs. He was a hero to young Arabs. It was Azzam who popularised the lurid rewards awaiting the martyr in Paradise which later lay at the heart of al-Qaida; Azzam who, on 11 August 1988, with the Soviets already beaten in Afghanistan, called the meeting which formally created an organisation called al-Qaida.
At that stage, however, al-Qaida could have been anything; Azzam’s vision of the future of jihad after Afghanistan differed subtly from bin Laden’s and profoundly from Zawahiri’s. Azzam’s idea was for a wide guerrilla war to win back lands which Islam had once held, from Soviet Central Asia to Bosnia and even Spain. He feared that the mujahidin would instead begin to fight against each other, that Muslim would fight against Muslim. He opposed Zawahiri’s dreams of fomenting a cycle of terror and repression in Egypt. He didn’t want to kill women and children. He was worried about the dark, heretical doctrine that Zawahiri had seized on in Afghanistan – takfir, or excommunication.
In a Kuwaiti-backed Red Crescent hospital in Peshawar, which became his base during the years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Zawahiri fell in with other Arab doctors who had been influenced by an outbreak of takfir heresy in Egypt in the 1970s. Essentially, takfir is a means to justify the killing of anyone who disagrees with the takfiri’s own narrow interpretation of Islamic right conduct. Zawahiri and the other takfiris got round the explicit Koranic prohibition on killing anyone, except as punishment for murder, by pointing out that the Prophet said anyone could be killed for turning away from Islam. According to Qutb, anyone co-operating with jahili institutions was turning away from Islam; therefore anyone living in Jahiliyyah was fair game. Democracy was jahili, for example; ergo, anyone who voted could be – no, should be – executed.
Azzam, who had done more than either bin Laden or Zawahiri to further the Islamic cause in Afghanistan, and who opposed takfir, nonetheless fell victim to it. There is no evidence that Zawahiri had a hand in his murder; Wright doesn’t suggest that he did. He says this of the day Azzam died: ‘Earlier that Friday, on the streets of Peshawar, Azzam’s main rival, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been spreading rumours that Azzam was working for the Americans. The next day, he was at Azzam’s funeral, praising the martyred sheikh, as did his many other jubilant enemies.’
It is possible to see the events of 9/11 as a synthesis of all these ideas: the application of Zawahiri’s takfir and suicide heresies to Qutb’s Jahiliyyah America, by men holding dear Azzam’s vision of the martyrs’ reward, their prime target influenced by the obsessions of Sheikh Omar’s followers. Yet of all the countries in the jahili world, why America? The answer seems to lie in the quixotic mind of bin Laden himself.
What would the stern moralist Qutb, or for that matter a psychoanalyst, have to say about the family history of Osama bin Laden? He is one of 54 children whom his fantastically wealthy, self-made father had by 22 wives. His father found his mother, Alia – wife number four – in a small Syrian village, and married her when she was 14. When he was still a small boy, Osama’s father divorced Alia, and ‘gave’ her to one of his employees to marry. Shortly afterwards, Osama’s father died in a plane crash. When he was 17, the young bin Laden went to the same village where his father found Alia, and met and married his first wife, Najwa, who was also 14. He solemnly resolved to practise polygamy, eventually taking four wives.
Though Wright never avoids bin Laden’s responsibility for the deaths of thousands of civilians, his portrait of the master terrorist is oddly engaging. Where Zawahiri comes across as a cold, treacherous, jealous exploiter of others, bin Laden is vain, naive, generous and idealistic – which, combined with the fact that he is a mass murderer, makes him the more sinister character.
Most of the few thousand Arabs who went to Afghanistan for jihad never actually took part in the fight against the Soviets. Bin Laden desperately wanted to, and did, but his early efforts to form and lead an Arab legion into battle were embarrassing failures. Azzam and others tried to persuade him to abandon his legion and let his fighters be dispersed across the front, but bin Laden was stubborn in his desire to be at the head of his own cohort of Arab warriors. This allowed him to make absurd claims about his leading role in defeating the Soviet superpower when, in a skirmish near Tora Bora in the spring of 1987, he and his Arabs scored a single victory.
Not that bin Laden was a coward. He and his fighters were under mortar and napalm bombardment for weeks on end. There are different accounts of the final battle, which ended in local Soviet retreat, but bin Laden was close enough to the Russians for the bullets to whistle past and the rocket-propelled grenades to explode by his head as he stuck his finger in the bag of salt he carried for his low blood pressure, and sucked it. It was bin Laden’s Egyptian military expert, Abu Ubaydah, who masterminded the tactical side of the victory. This didn’t matter; it was enough to allow bin Laden to bask in the glory of a great jihadi, taking the battle to Jahiliyyah, ready to embrace martyrdom. He convinced his fellow Saudis when he returned home; he convinced himself.
The familiar narrative of bin Laden’s course after Afghanistan has it that he genuinely believed he and his band of irregulars had spearheaded the defeat of a superpower; that he urged the Saudi government to put him at the head of a similar, larger host of local mujahidin to wage jihad against Saddam Hussein when the Iraqi dictator invaded Kuwait; that he was deeply offended by his government’s curt rejection of his plan, and outraged when they invited hundreds of thousands of jahili American troops to the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia to do the job instead; and that he vowed from that moment to defeat the Americans as he had defeated the Russians.
Wright does not contradict this version. But the picture that emerges from his account is of a more indecisive, whimsical bin Laden, ill-informed about the reality of America, conscious of a world of injustice and full of a sense of his own destiny but uncertain at what point the two would meet – the archetypal rebel without a cause. He had Zawahiri, who wanted his money and network, to shape his aims. The cadre that formed the future leadership of al-Qaida stemmed from a bodyguard Zawahiri gave bin Laden when he first spoke vaguely against America in the late 1980s.
In 1989, al-Qaida seemed to be taking shape as the well-organised, takfiri Arab jihadist elite force bin Laden and Zawahiri wanted. It had a training camp near Khost in Afghanistan. New recruits swore an oath of loyalty to bin Laden, vowed secrecy, and signed up for a salary of up to $1500 a month, with a free return flight home, a month’s holiday each year and private healthcare. Yet three years later, in a way that suggests bin Laden had no commitment to anything resembling Azzam or Zawahiri’s vision, it had changed. Bin Laden and al-Qaida were in Sudan; Afghanistan had descended into civil war and Saudi Arabia was unwelcoming. Bin Laden seemed to find peace, and to transform himself into a Sudanese country gentleman. He bred horses. He entertained visitors at a guesthouse in Khartoum, slaughtering a lamb daily. He took his sons picnicking by the banks of the Nile. He dressed in the Sudanese way and carried a Sudanese walking-stick with a V-shaped handle. He grew prize sunflowers. He acquired vast tracts of land in exchange for building roads, and hoped to turn Sudan into a world granary. He preached peace in the Khartoum mosque. He was 34 years old. ‘He kept members of al-Qaida busy working in his burgeoning enterprises, since there was little else for them to do. On Fridays after prayers, the two al-Qaida soccer teams squared off against each other,’ Wright says. ‘Al-Qaida had become largely an agricultural organisation.’
And yet it was at the end of 1992 that al-Qaida, under bin Laden’s direction, took the first small step in its global terrorist campaign against the US, the campaign that would escalate through the attacks on US embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen to the conflagration in New York nine years later. What eventually tipped bin Laden towards war against America, when he had seemed so close to settling into a bucolic idyll in Sudan? As background, Wright offers the sense among the jihadis that America was the centre of Christianity, and that the Christian world had been winning the battle of faiths since the Islamic host began to be beaten back from the gates of Vienna on 11 September 1683. He points out that the al-Qaida men didn’t make a clear distinction between America the country and a more conceptual America, the wellspring of all that was modern, materialist, secular and therefore un-Islamic. Yet neither of these was new in 1992.
Bin Laden was certainly angry that US troops did not seem to be leaving Saudi Arabia, as had been promised. Wright suggests that what finally made him lean towards action was his paranoid misreading of a minor American military deployment, barely noticed at the time by the Western public, when a small number of US troops stopped off in Yemen, where bin Laden’s father was born, on their way to provide security for aid workers in Somalia.
To bin Laden, this was a step too far in America’s attempt to encircle his stamping ground. His war on America began with mutual ignorance, misunderstanding, the blood of innocents and bad religion. Reassured by his imam, Abu Hajer, that it was theologically sound to attack US troops, al-Qaida set off bombs in two hotels in Aden. They were the wrong hotels. An Australian tourist and a Yemeni hotel worker were killed. Abu Hajer came up with a 13th-century precedent to justify their deaths. The untouched US soldiers moved on to Somalia as planned. Because the troops left Yemen after the bombs, bin Laden was able to convince himself that al-Qaida had driven them out. It was Afghanistan all over again. And because no Americans were hurt, America did not even realise it had been attacked. So the great struggle began, amid al-Qaida rejoicing: ‘At a time when the United States had never heard of al-Qaida, the mission to Somalia was seen as a thankless act of charity, and Sudan was too inconsequential to worry about.’
Wright devotes much of the latter part of The Looming Tower to the story of John O’Neill, the senior FBI agent who saw the danger of bin Laden early, wanted to arrest him and put him on trial when colleagues in the CIA would have preferred simply to kill him, and who died in the World Trade Center when it was attacked in 2001. As late as 1999, O’Neill’s was a lonely voice in his own organisation when he warned of the menace al-Qaida posed to the American homeland. ‘He was insecure, deceptive and potentially compromised,’ Wright says. ‘He was also driven, resourceful and brilliant. For better or worse, this was the man America depended on to stop Osama bin Laden.’
For all O’Neill’s foresight, I get the feeling that Wright chose to follow the thread of his tragedy more for the sake of a readable, oppositional narrative than because O’Neill genuinely sat facing bin Laden across the chessboard of global terrorism, his counter-terror counterpart. Poignant as the irony of O’Neill’s death in the WTC was, it came about because he had left the FBI to take on the job of security chief there. And in any case Wright’s own account makes it clear that America could not depend on any single man or woman to stop Osama bin Laden: it was a task which, inescapably, depended on the co-operation of several organisations and hundreds of people. Bin Laden’s American opposite number was not a man, it was an institution, and the failure of that institution, as Wright makes eloquently clear, was more spectacular than any of O’Neill’s achievements.
As a rule I am sceptical of the ‘they were warned, and yet they did nothing’ school of history. History, and journalism, do an excellent job of highlighting the telegrams and faxes and emails which land on the desks of those in power, making accurate yet strangely ignored predictions of some dire event which subsequently occurs. History, and journalism, do a poor job of recording the thousands of telegrams, faxes and emails which arrive on those same desks at the same time, warning of dire events that never happen.
Yet in the case of 9/11, the failures of US intelligence were so grotesque that scepticism is overcome. Some joint work by the NSA, the CIA, and Malaysian and Saudi intelligence surveilled a group of known al-Qaida operatives meeting in Kuala Lumpur as early as 1999. Had the meeting been bugged, not only 9/11 but the plan to blow up the USS Cole in Aden would have been thwarted. As it was, however, the CIA ended up with the names and photographs of the al-Qaida terrorists who would fly one of the hijacked planes on 9/11. Yet inter-agency rivalry and suspicion meant that they did not pass the information on to the FBI or the State Department.
An FBI agent working with the CIA asked if he could tell the FBI that one of the al-Qaida men, Khaled al-Mihdhar, had an American visa and might travel to the US. He was told he could not. The CIA learned that another of the men, Nawaf al-Hazmi, flew into Los Angeles in January 2000. Later the CIA learned that Mihdhar was with him. They were there to learn how to fly large jets. Still the CIA told the FBI nothing.
A year later, in the spring of 2001, a CIA agent called Tom Wilshire noted the link between Hazmi and another al-Qaida man who went by the nom de geurre of Khallad. They had been photographed together in Malaysia. Wilshire knew by this time that Khallad was one of bin Laden’s bodyguards and had masterminded the attack on the USS Cole. He also knew Hazmi was in the US. He asked if he could tell the FBI. His CIA superiors never got back to him.
Up to this point, the overcrowded in-tray theory of intelligence failures might just about have spared those involved from complete shame and disgrace. But it was in the summer of 2001 that the barriers between the CIA and the FBI reached truly absurd proportions: both agencies knew how important the material was, but the CIA refused fully to share it. The issue came to a head at a meeting between the two sides in New York on 11 June, when the CIA showed the FBI three of the photographs from the Kuala Lumpur meeting and asked if the Bureau agents recognised any of them. But they refused to say who the men were, or that some of them were already in the US, and they did not show the FBI the picture of the one man they would certainly have recognised, Khallad. The two sets of agents started to scream at each other. ‘The FBI agents knew that clues to the crimes they were trying to solve were being dangled in front of their eyes,’ Wright says.
Eventually, one of O’Neill’s most important FBI partners, Ali Soufan, one of the few US intelligence agents who spoke Arabic, was shown the photographs. It was 12 September 2001, and he knew O’Neill was dead. When it dawned on him that the CIA had known for more than eighteen months that two of the hijackers were in the US, he retched from the horror of it.
Long before these events, the US intelligence establishment (together with the British) deafened itself to revolutionary Islam’s loud message that it intended to change the world. Two prevailing narratives – of the West v. Soviet Communism, and of Israel v. the Arab world – overwhelmed understanding of another emerging one, in which most of Europe and most of America, together with the Soviet bloc and the secular intelligentsia of developing countries, were on the same side. Although this is not what it explicitly sets out to do, Wright’s book supports the conclusion that the direct struggle between revolutionary, counter-Enlightenment Islam and the post-Enlightenment world began some time before the Cold War ended – specifically, in 1979. That was the year of Iran’s revolution, in which, significantly, Islamic revolutionaries overcame not only the pro-American Shah but also their leftist counterparts; the Soviet Union sent troops to Afghanistan to protect its leftist regime against Islamic rebels; and the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam, was seized by a band of Islamic fundamentalists. It took Saudi forces more than two weeks to overcome the four to five hundred insurgents involved, who had demanded that Saudi Arabia isolate itself culturally and politically from the West, remove the royal family, expel all Westerners and stop selling oil to the US. Before the battle ended, women among the insurgents shot the faces off their dead male comrades to stop them being recognised. It was the first fortnight of the new Islamic year, the year 1400, the dawn of Islam’s 15th century. The rest of the world was still operating according to a different calendar.
James Meek’s fourth novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, will be published in 2008.

A Picture of me

Photos by Valera Meylis

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Something Interesting

Poem du jour

It's such a relief to see the woman you love walk out the door some nights
for it's ten o'clock and you need your eight hours of sleep
and one glass of wine has been more than enough
and, as for lust - well, you can live without it most days
and you are glad, too, the Ukrainian masseuse you see every Wednesday
is not in love with you, and has no plans to be, for it is the pain
in your back you need relief from most, not that ambigious itch,
and the wild successes of your peers no longer bother you
nor do your unresolved religious cravings or the general injustice
of the world, no, there is very little, in fact, that bothers you these days
when you turn first to the obituaries, second to the stock market,
then, after a long pause, to the book review, you are becoming
a good citizen, you do your morning exercises, count
your accumulated small blessings, thank the Lord
that there's a trolley just outside your door your girlfriend
can take back home to her own bed and here you are
it is morning you are alone every little heartbeat
is yours to cherish the future is on fire with nothing
but its own kindling and whatever is burning in its flames
it isn't you and now you will take a shower and this is it.

--michael blumenthal