My Trip to Al Qaeda: Six Questions for Lawrence Wright by Scott Horton

[Jefferson23]

September 6, 6:51 AM, 2010

Author Lawrence Wright has gained acclaim for his penetrating studies of Arab terrorists, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Al Qaeda. His work, regularly featured in The New Yorker, has included The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, and the screenplay for The Siege, a 1998 film that forecast America’s reaction to a terrorist attack with uncanny precision. Wright’s one-man play about his personal experiences in writing The Looming Tower and related works, entitled My Trip to Al Qaeda, will premier on HBO on Tuesday, September 7 at 9 p.m. in a film directed by Alex Gibney. I put six questions to Wright about his new film.

1. My Trip to Al Qaeda chronicles your journeys deep into the Arab world, to Cairo and Jeddah. Would it be fair also to describe it as an internal voyage—Larry Wright struggles with his need to be analytically objective on one hand, and yet also deal with his rage over the stubborn stupidity of Al Qaeda leaders, their acts of barbarity against innocents, their perversion of religion, as well as a measure of rage against American political leaders who betrayed the nation’s values in the name of a struggle against terrorism?

Lawrence WrightWhile I was researching The Looming Tower I never intended to play a role other than that of the objective reporter. But, like all Americans, I was grieving and angry because of the attacks. Sometimes those feelings erupted with a heedless intensity that caught me by surprise. There were some awful moments; in particular, I recall a furious argument with one of the leaders of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood after I had heard one too many lectures from Islamist propagandists. Even more disturbing, I suppose, were times when I felt a sense of fellowship with people I knew had blood on their hands. For me, it was a journey into a land of moral complexity, one that often left me grasping for certainties that weren’t readily at hand.

2. What drove you to develop this as a one-man play, rather than a more conventional format, like a polemical essay?

In 1991, I saw Anna Deveare Smith perform her one-woman show, “Fires in the Mirror,” about the Crown Heights riot, and I was riveted. I’ve always loved theater, but I never imagined it could be married to journalism. Then, a few years later, David Hare, the British playwright, asked to use a line I had written in The New Yorker for his one-man show about Jerusalem, “Via Dolorosa” (he wound up deciding not to use it). Both of those precedents were in my mind when I decided to do this play.

remainder: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/09/hbc-90007512