“A PATHETIC STICK-IN-THE-MUD WHO WOULD FALL ILL BEFORE BATTLE.” That would be Osama Bin Laden, as described by Dexter Filkins, based on his reading of Lawrence Wright’s new book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” which receives a rave review. There is a lot of surprising detail about Bin Laden in the book. (He’s only 6 feet tall, and he was a permissive father.) Filkins highlights some sharp material about Sayyid Qutb:

[L]ike so many others who followed him, Qutb seemed simultaneously drawn to and repelled by American women, so free and unselfconscious in their sexuality. The result is a kind of delirium:

“A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid,” Qutb wrote, “but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”

It wasn’t much later that Qutb began writing elaborate rationalizations for killing non-Muslims and waging war against the West. Years later, Atta expressed a similar mix of obsession and disgust for women. Indeed, anyone who has spent time in the Middle East will recognize such tortured emotions.