My Digest

'Everybody has a cartoon of themselves,' suggests David Remnick, the editor of a magazine famous for them. 'Mine is: I write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time.'

As New Yorker cartoons go, the image wouldn't appear to hold much promise of a punch line, but Remnick doesn't mind it, and it contains, after all, a certain amount of truth. 'I'm not the slowest writer that you know,' he admits, adding with characteristic wryness: 'For better or for worse, by the way. AJ Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.'

Remnick, who was for many years the New Yorker's star reporter, covering - in the tradition of AJ Liebling - an almost alarming range of subjects with grace and dexterity, has edited the magazine for the past eight years and quietly, seriously, changed its fortunes. He is the fifth editor in the New Yorker's 81-year history and, by reputation - as his thumbnail self-portrait implies - its least eccentric.

So many memoirs have now been written about the distinguished publication that Harold Ross, its founder and first editor, has gone down in history as a maddening, well-connected workaholic who sacrificed three marriages to his literary invention. It is widely known that his successor, William Shawn, was neurotic, nuanced, almost pathologically shy, and that Robert Gottlieb, a gifted interloper, possessed a museum-worthy collection of plastic purses. In more recent memory, Tina Brown hired big-name writers at vast expense, threw celebrity-strewn bashes to promote the magazine (all of which resulted in a rumoured loss of up to $20m annually) and was supposed to have rejected any story that couldn't hold her attention on the StairMaster.

It could be said that Brown's methods were not eccentric but merely attuned to the demands of Eighties and Nineties culture. Equally, Remnick's non-partying ethic and commitment to world affairs might be thought the only appropriate way forward for a post-9/11 magazine. Remnick, who was hired by Brown, has never been critical of her tenure, and is inviolably modest about his own contribution. 'My background is as a reporter and foreign correspondent, but it's hard to separate what one's natural inclinations are from the times,' he tells me. 'My time as editor has been overlapped by a crisis - a prolonged, labyrinthine, tragic, seemingly non-ending crisis - that involves the prehistory of 9/11, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, fraught histories between the United States and almost everyone.' Remnick's colleague Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestselling books The Tipping Point and Blink, says, similarly, that 'we live in a suddenly serious time, where people have an appetite for intelligent, thoughtful explanations of consequential topics'.

Yet how can Remnick's editorial strategy be considered inevitable when no one else is doing what he does? However frequently Graydon Carter may address the bungles of the Bush administration in his letters from the editor in Vanity Fair, he feels compelled, more often than not, to feature a cover star in a bikini. Meanwhile, on another floor of the Conde Nast building, the New Yorker puts Seymour Hersh's investigations of national security on the cover and has the highest subscription renewal rate of any magazine in the country. It has a circulation of over 1m, and although it is privately owned and such figures are not publicly available, it is thought to be turning a profit of around $10m.

Celebrity culture is far from over; if you wrote a plan for a magazine and said you thought you could make a profit by publishing 8,000-word pieces on the future of various African nations, hefty analyses of the pension system and a three-part series on global warming, hordes of people would laugh in your face. So how has Remnick done it? Before I met him, I asked this of an acclaimed New York journalist, who said: 'If you can work that out, you will have the scoop of the century. No one knows.'

Remnick is well aware of the apparent mystery, which is why no focus group is ever involved in an editorial decision. As he puts it, it doesn't take a genius to work out that one hundred per cent of his readers are not going to get home from work, put their keys down and say: You know, honey, what I need to do now is read 10,000 words on Congo. 'So you throw it out there, and you hope that there are some things that people will immediately read - cartoons, shorter things, Anthony Lane, Talk of the Town. And then, eventually, the next morning on the train, somebody sees this piece, and despite its seeming formidableness, they read it.'

You might say that what looks at first like common sense is David Remnick's most winning eccentricity.

We meet at the New Yorker offices in Times Square on an obscenely hot day in August. Remnick extends a courtly, ironic offer of rehydration: 'Coffee? Water? Drip?' His glass box of an office is decorated with original cover art and scattered photographs - a portrait of AJ Liebling sitting under an apple tree; Dean Rohrer's wonderful image of Monica Lewinsky as the Mona Lisa. On his desk is a rare book about Jean-Luc Godard, in French.

He has just returned from Arkansas, where he met Bill Clinton for a long profile he is writing, and he spent the end of last week editing a cover story on Hizbollah by John Lee Anderson with an exceptionally fast turnaround. Another reporter calls from the Middle East as I arrive. Yet here is Remnick, blithe and witty as anything, behaving more or less as Fred Astaire would, if only a role had been scripted for him by Philip Roth.

Reporting, a new collection of Remnick's writing from the New Yorker, has just been published. It reveals not only the scope of his interests - he is as lucid about the PLO as he is touching about Solzhenitsyn, as excruciatingly accurate about Tony Blair as he is compelling on the subject of Mike Tyson's trainer - but also the deceptive straightforwardness of his style.

Remnick won a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Lenin's Tomb, in 1994, and the great pleasure of that book, which gives a kaleidoscopic account of the fall of the Soviet Union, was that you felt party to the open mind of a reporter (originally at the Washington Post) who followed his instincts at every turn. He didn't mind telling you, for instance, that his wife's family had been interned in camps in the country to which they were now returning; if he saw someone handing out flyers in the street, he would delve deeply into their purposes; he was not shy of doorstepping ancient members of the KGB. In that first book, as in his others - a follow-up about Russia called Resurrection; a collection of pieces entitled The Devil Problem; a story about Muhammad Ali called King of the World; and Reporting - simply turned sentences open up vistas of complication. Yet the quality that Remnick shows most in conversation is his capacity for self-deprecation. He opens a profile of Katharine Graham, the imperious proprietor of the Washington Post and his sometime boss, with a story about his own involvement in the Post's historic interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in 1988:

'As the junior man in the bureau, I was given the task of finding the hairdresser. I would not insist that Moscow was short on luxury in those days, except to note that I did not so much find a hairdresser as create one. At one of the embassies, I found a young woman who was said to own a blow-dryer and a brush. I rang her up and explained the situation. Gravely, as if we were negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, I gave her an annotated copy of Vogue, a mug shot of Mrs Graham, and a hundred dollars.

"You're on," she said.

'Apparently, the interview went well. It was featured, with a photograph, in the next day's edition of Pravda. Mrs Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. A nice full head of hair, and well combed. I felt close to history.'

In a piece about Tony Blair written just before the last election, Remnick witnesses, behind the scenes, the Prime Minister's utter humiliation at the hands of Little Ant and Little Dec. In a profile of Al Gore he reveals that Gore employs a private chef who still addresses him, years after his presidential defeat, as 'Mr Vice-President'. He gets to hang out with the famously publicity-shy Philip Roth in his most feverishly creative period; he visits Solzhenitsyn and his wife as they prepare to return to Russia. Yet in a preface to the book, Remnick alerts the reader to the fact that most of his subjects are public figures who do their best not to let their guard down. Why offer the warning? To suggest we'll never find out about them?

'No,' he replies, 'so that you'll find out about them in a different way.' With politicians, 'you've got press secretaries, and you've got a very, very self-conscious actor, who's performing in public and the course of whose career is dependent on how he's going to appear to some degree. And he's very experienced at it. And any question you ask him, he's heard, and he has a little tape loop in his head. So when something like Ant and Dec comes along,' - Remnick grins broadly and looks up to the skies in gratitude - 'Happy birthday. The gods of non-fiction have provided an unscripted scripted moment!'

Remnick pauses for a moment to tell a story about the glorious predictability of journalism. 'There was a wonderful thing Slate did years ago, when it was just getting started, called the Hackathlon. It was Michael Specter, Malcolm Gladwell and I forget who else.' (Specter and Gladwell are both old friends of Remnick's from the Washington Post, and both now colleagues at the New Yorker.) 'Each day there would be an event. You had to write a 500-word lede [an American term for an article's opening paragraph] in the Vanity Fair style to a Richard Gere profile: Ready, begin. Then you had to do an Economist situationer on Tanzania - first 400 words. Then maybe a Rolling Stone lede to a ... you know: Mick Jagger is angry. Period. Paragraph. Very Angry. Period. The limo is late. You know, one of those. And then maybe a New Yorker thing on the history of sand. I don't remember the specifics.'

Remnick leans in with a smile of utter glee, and goes on: 'Specter beat Gladwell. He came from behind, but his lede on the Richard Gere, comparing the colour of his hair to his grey cashmere sweater, was just so brilliant that he overwhelmed him in the Hackathlon. I mean, he could do nothing else in his career and his New York Times obituary would read: "Michael Specter, winner of the 1997 Slate Hackathlon, died today of complications of a hernia operation. He was 98."'

David Remnick was born in 1958 and grew up in Hillsdale, New Jersey, where his father was a dentist and his mother an art teacher. The extent of his early gifts, to hear others tell it, borders on the embarrassing. Richard Brody, a close friend Remnick met at Princeton, remembers a story Remnick told him at the time about his activities in high school.

'He was interested in journalism already, and in literature and poetry,' Brody tells me. 'So he interviewed poets, and put together a collection of those interviews for a small literary magazine, and I think some of them were collected in a book. So even in high school he had not only the idea, but let's say the lack of false modesty to go ahead and do something which many people much older would not have dared to do. '

Brody and Remnick found that they shared a love of Bob Dylan, a Jewish upbringing in the suburbs, and 'a literary school of sorts'. As Brody puts it: 'There was a whole generation of Jewish American writers - when Saul Bellow won his Nobel Prize, I guess when we were all freshmen or about to enter school. There were people like Philip Roth and Norman Mailer and Bernard Malamud and Joseph Heller. We sort of had a canon of fathers. I think we weren't postmodernists, temperamentally. We had read our Thomas Pynchon and our John Barth, but that wasn't what excited us. We were excited by the late flowering, among the children of Jewish immigrants, of the late 19th-century novel.'

(Remnick, still an enduring fan of Roth, tells me that he would have published Roth's latest novel, Everyman, in its entirety in the magazine, but Roth's agent wouldn't allow it.)

When he left Princeton with a degree in Comparative Literature, Remnick got a job at the Washington Post, where his early days were occupied by covering the night-cop beat, or doing celebrity interviews for the Style section, or writing about sport. In 1987, the Post decided it needed a second person in Moscow, and, as Remnick now recalls, 'Nobody else wanted to go. It's cold, in those days if you wanted a box of coffee, you had to order it from Denmark. Nowadays there are rich people and stores and all kinds of stuff. (It's still cold - pace global warming.) So I got to go - I was 28, 29 - and it was the best kind of foreign story: really exciting, constantly changing, intellectually fascinating, ethnically various. It was heaven for a reporter.' Before he left he married Esther B Fein, a reporter for the New York Times, who also filed stories from Russia.

'When we were at the Post he was a kind of legendary figure and I was a little underling,' remembers Malcolm Gladwell. 'People have forgotten that - and this is not by any means an exaggeration - David was the great newspaper reporter of his generation. And had he never been anything but a newspaper reporter he would be, right now, the best. At the Washington Post there was one day when he had three stories on the front page, which I don't think has ever been repeated. He was in a league by himself. So the idea that he would have a second act where he would outperform his first act is kind of unbelievable.'

When Remnick was offered the editorship of the New Yorker, he had never edited anything before - with the exception, as he likes to remind people, of his school magazine. The decision to abandon writing - which, for the most part, he has (he now only writes two long pieces a year, plus commentary in the magazine) - was made on the basis of 'a very simple calculation': 'I had about two days - a day - I had seconds to decide, actually. Where could I make the bigger contribution? The ability to affect this magazine and its place in the culture - now, I may cock it up as an editor, I don't know, but the capacity for potential was greater doing this.'

Tina Brown left on a Wednesday in 1998. Remnick, who had written over 100 pieces for the magazine in the six years he'd been there, and who was, as Brown put it, 'a key member of my dream team', consulted on all kinds of editorial matters, was offered the job the following Monday, and took over straightaway, rallied by a five-minute ovation from his colleagues. 'And then Tina was gone and the magazine had to come out the next week - and the week after that, and on and on,' says Remnick now, looking amusingly baffled. 'And I was an absolute novice. And the only saving grace is that there were these people around who were so good.'

It wasn't easy. There have been times, even recently, when his instinct has failed him. He came out in favour of the war in Iraq, for instance, on the grounds of concern about weapons of mass destruction, and says now that 'I was wrong about that, totally wrong, as events proved very quickly.' The job, as Robert Gottlieb once memorably described it, is 'like sticking your head into a pencil sharpener'. To make matters worse, in some quarters Schadenfreude kicked in early; a profile of Remnick in the New York Times took offence at his choice of interview venue - a formica-topped table in a coffee shop, which was seen to suggest that the 'buzz' of the Tina years had fizzled out on the spot.

Michael Specter, Remnick's close friend of 20 years, tells me that a couple of months after Remnick took over, they went to Paris. 'We took a walk and he said, "The worst thing is, everybody comes up to me and says: 'Oh my God! You must be enjoying it so much!' And I just want to say: 'Yeah, it's like enjoying cancer!'" Because it was really scary, and I think it was a lot to take on that job, never having been an editor, when the magazine was financially in trouble. '

In a profile he wrote many years ago of the legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee, Remnick remarked: 'Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it's about inspiring the enlisted.' It's a notion Remnick has clearly kept in mind in his own work as General. Asked to illustrate his editorial methods, Remnick reaches for a baseball analogy: Joe Torre, the manager of the Yankees, 'gives players the confidence they need to play their best, then he gets the hell out'. He adds: 'I don't believe in swagger. I think it's infantile.'

The magazine's editorial director, Henry Finder, says drily that Remnick 'has something very scarce in this city: an aura of sanity. He exudes a sort of calm that most New Yorkers get to experience only with prescription medication. As an editor, I think that aura of equipoise turns out to be very helpful, because you have so many people here who are professional neurotics, always acting out, drama queens, who have one form of craziness or another. And I think he sees it as his job to be... sane.

When I ask Malcolm Gladwell what he thinks the legend of Remnick's tenure will be, he says: 'How exactly things got so effortless.'

Specter says he'd like some sort of atomic clock so he could 'divide 24 by Remnick time' and work out how he fits everything in. (Remnick himself has minted the immortal dictum: 'There are only 30 hours in the day - and that's if you're lucky enough to change time zones.') It's not just the work: he has a family too. Remnick and Esther Fein have two teenage sons and a seven-year-old daughter. He does his fair share of ferrying to music lessons and little league games. Asked to explain how he manages to balance these things, Remnick shrugs and says he doesn't do anything other than spend time with his family and work. 'It's not like I build toy ships, or travel to Tahiti. I don't go surfing. I don't know: what do people do?'

He admits that certain pleasures have largely fallen by the wayside. 'My son said to me - we were reading one night, he his book for school and I a stack of manuscripts - and he said: "You don't read anything with covers any more."' Remnick cringes. 'Dombey and Son immediately came down from the shelf!'

Yet there are other things he seems to make time for, somehow. Specter says the only person he knows who watches more television than Remnick is his own ex-wife, Alessandra Stanley, the TV critic for the New York Times. He remembers calling Remnick when one of their old favourites, the BBC version of John le Carre's Smiley's People, came out on DVD. 'I said, "Are you watching it?" He said, "Yes." He was writing a piece. He said: "I'm giving myself three hours of writing, one hour of Smiley." And I just thought, Jesus Christ. I watch three hours of Smiley, then I have lunch, then I write for a couple of minutes. '

I tell Specter how proudly Remnick told me of his triumph in the Hackathlon, and that I wondered afterwards what he meant by extolling such bare-faced bad writing. 'If you do it to change the world, you can get really bummed out,' replies Specter. 'The Hackathlon was a celebration of the fact that it's a day job.' He thinks for a second and laughs. 'I think he's happy when we do well. But he was much more excited about the Hackathlon than he was about any science writing or global health award I've ever received.'

'The things about him that I wish ...' Specter goes on, a little awkwardly. 'He's an incredibly good friend. I mean, he's a better friend than he is an editor. And he's very funny. My daughter thinks he's hilarious. She said: "You know, David's the coolest of your friends, Dad." Then she said: "Actually, he's not cool, but he's the best of them."'

Sunday September 10, 2006

The first time the world took notice of Maggie Gyllenhaal, she was wearing heels and a pencil skirt and sashaying into an office with her hands manacled to a steel rod stretched across her shoulders. She was in the habit of stapling documents together with her chin and picking them up with her lips before expertly placing a cube of sugar in her adoringly sadistic boss's coffee. Yet it wasn't just beautifully choreographed masochism that made Gyllenhaal's performance in Secretary so gripping (though that was unusual enough); it was the gentleness she brought to it, the round-faced, sweetheart-lipped smile, and above all the conviction that this, however apparently violent or sexy or perverse, was a plain old-fashioned love story.

Since that moment four years ago, Gyllenhaal has become known as a maverick in a way that has generally only been applied to directors. She is more maverick than muse, making personal and unpredictable choices, and taking charge of them without throwing her weight around in the manner of an actor-turned-producer. Both she and the filmmakers she has worked with speak of the movies they have made together as intense collaborations. For Secretary, for example, she sat down with the director, Steven Shainberg, and went through the script line by line over the course of an entire month. Gyllenhaal laughs as she recalls that on the first day of shooting their new film, World Trade Center, Oliver Stone tried to tell her where to stand, and quickly learned the error of his ways: 'I said: "Well, do I have to start at the desk?" And he said: "Oh, you're a Do-I-Have-To?!"'

The director Laurie Collyer tells me that she thinks 'so much sets Maggie apart, from the physical to her values. I think celebrity culture breeds conformity and Maggie is truly nonconformist, truly finding her own way. Even just the way she dresses - I know it sounds really superficial, but it all represents something: she's her own person. She's a very self-possessed woman. I think she's very much in control of her own career, too.'

Gyllenhaal, who at 28 has a quirky look that would have appealed to Charlie Chaplin or DW Griffith (she has the zaniness of Mabel Normand, the baby face of Mary Pickford and the seductive quality of Clara Bow), spent the early part of her career being turned down for parts because she wasn't conventionally pretty or sexy enough. 'I was tough on the outside - "You must have a boring idea of what beautiful or sexy is" - but on the inside that's a hard thing to hear,' she later said. After Secretary, people were desperate to cast her, but told her that she didn't 'mean enough money-wise', which made her think: 'What can I do to make myself mean enough money-wise that I can do whatever I want?'

So in the past few years, Gyllenhaal has increased her marquee value with some big Hollywood films like Mona Lisa Smile, with Julia Roberts; she has done some grit like Collyer's forthcoming Sherrybaby, in which she does a harrowing turn as a drug-addicted mother. And she's long done quirkier things - Donnie Darko, the film that made her brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, famous; a John Waters production, Cecil B DeMented; Spike Jonze's Adaptation.

She has learnt something new, she says, with each one. 'I think what happened to me was I was so lucky to have made Secretary so young,' she says. 'It's unusual to be given an opportunity to express yourself as an actress that young, and that thoroughly. I came to feel like: this is the way to do it. I guess I always like to work in a way where, really, truly, anything is acceptable. So that you might walk into a scene where your husband's in the hospital and you might feel nothing. It's possible. And that would scare a lot of directors because it's hard to acknowledge the way human beings really behave. All these movies I've made over the past few years I'm proud of because I look at them and I think: that was a real, live conversation I was having there - with the other actors, with the director. It looks alive.'

This autumn, all four of the films she's so proud of are being released in the US: Oliver Stone's blockbuster; Trust the Man, a romantic comedy co-starring Julianne Moore and directed by Moore's husband Bart Freundlich; Collyer's Sherrybaby; and Stranger Than Fiction, in which she plays Will Ferrell's love interest, directed by Marc Forster, who made Monster's Ball. What with that, a recent engagement to Peter Sarsgaard and a baby coming in October, Gyllenhaal is at the peak of her strength.

When I meet her in a hotel in New York, Gyllenhaal is curled up on a sofa, bare feet tucked under her, gloriously round belly cloaked in a dark brown shift dress. She is here to speak about Stone's film, in which she plays Allison, the pregnant wife of Will Jimeno, one of two Port Authority police officers pulled out of the World Trade Center alive. This is the second 9/11 movie Gyllenhaal has appeared in during the past year and, true to maverick form, her politically outspoken remarks on the occasion of the first, The Great New Wonderful, unleashed a barrage of criticism. She was quoted at the time as saying that the US was 'responsible in some way' for the attacks. Immediately, families of survivors, firefighters, policemen all expressed outrage. There were so many complaints sent to her fan site that it had to be shut down.

Gyllenhaal, who is a politically active Democrat (she drove people to the polls in Florida during the last presidential election), went on to explain her views: 'It is always useful as individuals or as nations to ask how we may knowingly or unknowingly have contributed to this conflict,' she said. 'Not to have the courage to ask these questions is to betray the victims of 9/11.'

In the midst of this she met Allison Jimeno, and said she'd drop out of the Oliver Stone project if Jimeno was offended by her remarks. 'I wanted to tell them the absolute truth of what I meant,' Gyllenhaal said. 'If they didn't want me to play Allison after that, I wouldn't have.'

Meeting the Jimenos, she says now, was 'very intense'. 'Will is much more gregarious than Allison, but I kind of had my focus on her, and I could feel - and I don't know if she would acknowledge this or agree with this - that there were places where her heart was still broken.'

Michael Pena, who played Will Jimeno, is said to have moved in with the family, he was so devoted to portraying them accurately. Gyllenhaal says that 'with Allison and me it was a very different thing. We just spent time together. And it wasn't that important to me to be just like her, but when I watched the movie, there was this gentle thing that Allison has that I did not know was in my performance. I thought: "Oh, I seem so much more like Allison than I anticipated."' Shortly after she took off the prosthetic belly she wore to play Allison, Gyllenhaal discovered she was actually pregnant.

For all the cast, it seems, the subject was one they needed to digest. Gyllenhaal, who was born in Manhattan, raised in Los Angeles, and had lived in New York since she was 17, was in Paris when the planes hit. She had recently wrapped Secretary, she had split up with her boyfriend of five years, she just wanted to leave the country. But when the towers fell, all she could think of was getting back. 'Which is unusual, I think,' she adds, 'A lot of people left.'

It's often thought that because she grew up in the film industry, Maggie Gyllenhaal had a predictable set of advantages. But Gyllenhaal's parents were, on the whole, far more interested in politics than glamour, and if there was anything she must have taken for granted when she was young, it was a certain outspokenness of intellect. Her father is Stephen Gyllenhaal, a film and TV director who adapted Graham Swift's novel Waterland and made Paris Trout, which starred Dennis Hopper. Her mother is Naomi Foner, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter who frequently collaborates with her husband (her first husband was the distinguished historian Eric Foner). The pair have been happily married for 29 years - Naomi Foner was six months pregnant with Maggie at the wedding, and three years after Maggie was born they had Jake. In 1993 they made A Dangerous Woman together - both Maggie and Jake had supporting roles as children - and in 1995 Losing Isaiah, in which Jessica Lange rescued Halle Berry's crack baby at birth.

Certainly, the family trade was appealing enough for both siblings to enter into it, and now both of them are more celebrated than either of their parents. Jake, now best known for Brokeback Mountain, postponed university and embarked on a successful career while his elder sister finished her English degree at Columbia University. He drew a great deal of attention as the star of Donnie Darko, in which Maggie had a small supporting role as his character's sister; it was released a year before Secretary, in the period when Maggie was being given the charming advice about not being beautiful or sexy enough. She has admitted that it was unnerving to watch her brother scale such heights before her, but these days no question is more guaranteed to make her hackles rise than one about sibling rivalry. 'I'm so bored with that question,' she says every time she is asked, followed by: 'I don't feel competitive with him any more.'

Perhaps it's more interesting to think about the family as a whole, and the possible anxiety of its influence. Gyllenhaal says she has become closer to her parents in the past few years. 'I definitely went through a period where I made a separation and needed to be really independent,' she tells me.

Gyllenhaal is more reluctant to talk about her family-to-be. She and Sarsgaard, who announced their engagement last April, are impressively matched on the basis of their work alone (not to mention the fact that their child is destined to have a surname with more consecutive vowels than any in the history of moviemaking). Sarsgaard, who was the violent killer in Boys Don't Cry, has built up an impressive body of work in the past few years - in Kinsey, in Sam Mendes's Jarhead, in the much-lauded independent The Dying Gaul. They are planning a fairy-tale wedding after the baby is born.

Asked whether impending motherhood has changed the way she feels about things, or about herself, she replies, with a sweet sort of certainty: 'I've been feeling - and I know it's so hard when I have a big belly, it's a provocative state to be in - I've been feeling like my job, in the midst of doing press, is to keep my baby out of it - is to protect my baby. And I guess it's practice, maybe, for being a mother. I do have enough instinct to know that it's sort of a dangerous world.'

One thing she gained in her youth was a sanguine knowledge of how hard the business was, and how fleeting the attention can be. She arrived on the scene a steely minded sceptic.

'I knew the difference in my parents' lives and some of their friends' and colleagues' when they had made a movie that was very successful versus when they had made a movie that wasn't,' she says. 'You intuit that stuff as a kid. I'm sure there are things that I completely take for granted that I learnt from my parents about this world of making movies that has probably been both helpful and hurtful. I don't have that kind of blinding sparkle of: "Hollywood! It's so amazing!"'

On the other hand, she adds, 'Some of it I've also experienced as sparkly and glamorous. You know, when Secretary came out, I felt like a queen. It was amazing, I got swept up in it for a little while - going to this event and that event, and then at a certain point I realised: "Oh, this is not happening because all of these people love me. This is happening because there's, like, a business behind it, and they're trying to sell the movie."'

Gyllenhaal's closest friends are not in the movie business. Two of them are academics, and one is a photographer, which is, she says, 'very nice'. 'At first I didn't like mixing those worlds, but they're so understanding of the weird stuff I have to do in my job, and having someone come over with three racks of clothes, and I get to pick whatever I want to wear to a premiere. I used to be so embarrassed, and I just realised: my friends love me, and they understand that silly stuff.'

What's silly is the embarrassment of riches - not the clothes themselves, of course. Gyllenhaal is as much a New York style icon as she is a movie star. She is photographed going out for coffee, picking up her dry cleaning, her hair often up in a Heidi plait around her head. Unusually in her profession, she is comfortable about her body. She's frequently seen in the front row of Marc Jacobs's fashion shows or actually flown in by Jacobs himself just to see his new lines for Louis Vuitton in Paris. Two years ago she was the face of Miu Miu and, typically, has an edgy approach to Forties screwball glamour. For the World Trade Center premiere last month, she wore a stunning, midnight-blue Zac Posen gown that had been specially made for her, and golden, pregnancy-defying heels.

I'm sure that if anyone can keep the silly stuff from encroaching, she can, but I wonder if in the end she'll feel that Hollywood offers her enough that's more than silly. She laughs, and by way of reply she tells a story.

'My friend, who is very smart and is a producer, told me that he was sitting at a table at some silly award lunch and someone got up to introduce someone who was getting an award. She said: "This is the only person in this room who has a degree in semiotics." And, like, four people at my friend's table said: "I have a degree in semiotics!"

'So yes, there are some unintellectual people in Hollywood,' she smiles, 'but there are some really interesting, smart, thoughtful people making movies, too.'

The taxi driver squints uncomfortably. 'It's like fire there,' he warns ominously, as I pass him the address on the eastern limits of Sao Paulo.

We cut through block after block of grimy, graffiti-clad housing. Ahead, ragged shantytowns cling to the hilltops; behind us a trail of abandonment stretches back towards the city centre, in the form of empty warehouses and cracked windows. As we begin the descent towards our final destination, the driver looks nervously into his rear-view mirror. A police car's flashing siren ushers us to a standstill.

Under the gaze of their Taurus revolvers we are hauled out of the vehicle, told to place our hands on the car roof and given an invasive frisk down. When we are finally sent on our way, after a 10-minute interrogation, the driver is apologetic. 'I had to pull over,' he mumbles. 'If you don't, they open fire.'

Welcome to the periferia of Sao Paulo; the impoverished outskirts of one of the world's largest cities, where hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the megalopolis in search of gold-paved streets have been abandoned to their own dismal fate.

We have come to Jardim Santo Andre to meet 23-year-old Maria Dinauci de Lima, until four months ago a happily married mother of two from Ceara, in the northeast. When Sao Paulo exploded into violence in May, temporarily bringing her adoptive city to a standstill, she found herself at the epicentre of the storm.

The driver drops us at the entrance to the shantytown where she lives, alongside a concrete, pollution-stained housing estate. Reluctant to go any further, he directs us vaguely down a series of dirt tracks which lead out on to a sprawling urban wasteland. The area was once a landfill site, but now houses thousands of immigrants fleeing poverty in the northeast. Multicoloured political propaganda clings to the drab houses, makeshift constructions of plywood and cardboard. To our right a fetid swamp dribbles through the community, a muddy stream of excrement. It has taken us just over two hours to get here from the glamorous centre of Sao Paulo, but the contrast is so great it seems as if we have made the journey from Liverpool Street to the West Bank.

Maria is changing the nappy of her four-month-old son when we arrive. She climbs the concrete steps that lead to her small house and directs us into her sparsely decorated bedroom. A neatly made double bed and two cots are her only furniture apart from a new TV, from which President Lula - himself a northeastern immigrant to Sao Paulo - is waxing lyrical about his attempts to aid Brazil's dispossessed.

'I didn't even know what was going on in Sao Paulo,' she remembers, seemingly confused by our interest in her husband's death. 'I just heard shots and everyone here started shutting their doors. I closed mine, too, I was so scared. But I never thought it had to do with him.'

She soon found out from neighbours that, in fact, it did. Maria left her house in panic and headed for the hospital, where she was barely able to recognise her 29-year-old husband, Lindomar Lino da Silva, the owner of a hairdressing salon. He had been shot twice in the forehead, at point-blank range.

'When I got there,' she says, her sobs mixing with the unknowing giggles of her two children, 'he was still warm.'

Sao Paulo has, in just over four months, been transformed into a city of fear. The four-day offensive in May by local gangsters temporarily turned one of the world's great financial capitals into a virtual ghost town. Armed criminals went on the rampage in both the city and the interior of the state, touting automatic rifles and machine guns, hunting down policemen and prison officers and hurling petrol bombs at public buildings. Hundreds of buses were set alight, leaving the streets virtually empty and the transport system in chaos.

In a matter of days, 23 law enforcement officers were gunned down across the state of Sao Paulo - more than in the whole of 2005. And when the attacks began to subside on 15 May, the police reaction began.

Human rights groups have since demanded a thorough investigation into police actions after nearly 200 people died in suspicious circumstances that week. Many believe that a systematic revenge campaign was sparked by the attacks - that, stunned by the assault on their colleagues, members of Sao Paulo's police force took to the streets with the intention of exterminating the new enemy.

A few days after the attacks I am confronted by a furious policeman at the entrance to one Sao Paulo prison unit.

'All you journalists do is defend the vagabundos [crooks],' he shouts, with thick gobbets of spit flying from his mouth. 'People go on and on about masked men killing people - what else can we do?' he asks, in heavy Sao Paulo slang. 'Tem que matar mesmo, meu!' ('You've got to kill them, bruv.')

The violence was unprecedented in scale, even for a city like Sao Paulo, renowned for its high crime rate. So bloody were the attacks that politicians, media outlets and academics alike have, in its wake, begun describing the start of an 'urban guerrilla war'. It is a drastic and problematic conclusion - yet one which is in many ways borne out by numerical comparisons with official war zones. During the recent 34-day conflict between Israel and Hizbollah, just over 1,000 civilians are thought to have been killed in Lebanon. In Iraq, 117 British soldiers have been killed since the country was invaded in 2003, while 23 have been killed since the beginning of August in Afghanistan. In Sao Paulo, the figures are no less startling. According to coroners' reports, at the height of May's violence at least 492 people died of gunshot wounds in Sao Paulo state in just over a week.

Among the dead was Maria's husband Lindomar, who one neighbour (too scared to make any type of statement) believes he saw being executed by a military policeman. The distinction between war and organised crime means little to Maria, perched on the bed she once shared with her husband. 'All I know,' she says, with an air of resignation, 'is that I'm on my own now and I have to raise these two alone.'

To understand the recent wave of violence in Brazil's economic capital you must visit the so-called 'Park of Monsters'. Located in Taubate - an unremarkable town in the interior of Sao Paulo best known until now for its manufacturing industry - the Parque dos Monstros is the birthplace of the group behind May's attacks: a crumbling sky-blue prison complex, number 746 Marechal Deodoro Avenue. These days the tiled roof of a picturesque white chapel peeks over the barbed-wire perimeter fence, offering little hint of the bloodletting from which Brazil's most feared crime group was born.

It was mid-morning on 31 August 1993 and, here at Taubate's Casa de Custodio (Custody Centre), a now legendary football match between two rival prison gangs was about to commence. The atmosphere was tense as the convicts limbered up in the jail yard.

Even before the whistle was blown, the slaughter began. Geleiao, the hulk-like captain of a team known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital, or PCC) grabbed the head of an opponent and snapped his neck, killing him almost instantly. His team-mate Cesinha pulled out a cut-throat razor and slit the throats of several others. In the ensuing fight, more lives were lost.

With the dusty pitch now clogged with blood, the prisoners looked for a way to defend themselves against reprisals from the prison guards. Their solution was safety in numbers. When the guards arrived the remaining prisoners grouped together behind Geleiao and his team mates, fearful of the inevitable punishment.

The PCC - a sprawling criminal association that claims to fight for the rights of Sao Paulo's prisoners - was born. Geleiao and Cesinha, who came to be known as the group's fundadores (founders), had taken the first steps in creating a Frankenstein-like criminal faction which, 13 years on, would control most of the prison system in Sao Paulo as well as large tracts of the city. It took its name from Geleiao's football team, the First Command of the Capital.

For the following eight years the PCC remained relatively unknown in Brazil, despite gradually taking root in much of Sao Paulo's prison system, through its brutal rule of law. Those who signed up were spared. Those who resisted were often subjected to the most brutal beatings or simply killed.

Then in 2001, the so-called 'mega-rebellions' began. It was 8 February and simultaneous riots broke out in 20 jails across the state. When the dust settled at least 20 prisoners had lost their lives - beheaded, burnt or mutilated, as members of rival factions such as the PCC and the lesser-known Seita Satanica (Satanic Sect), jostled for dominance.

Even then, Brazilian authorities shied away from admitting the existence of what is now described as Brazil's largest, most dangerous crime faction - so powerful, in fact, that its leadership are said to enjoy personal visits from high-class prostitutes, even behind bars.

In 2002, the director of DEIC, Sao Paulo's organised crime squad, declared that the group had been almost completely dismantled by the police. 'We have the PCC crying, to our surprise,' he told reporters. By May this year, however, it was the security forces, not the PCC, who were in tatters.

News of the attacks spread like wildfire across Brazil, stamped on to the front page of every newspaper and with rolling, 24-hour television news reports providing frantic updates about what the media branded 'Brazilian terrorism'. Parts of Sao Paulo lay completely abandoned, with a 95 per cent reduction in traffic in some of its busiest thoroughfares as residents took refuge in their own homes and bus companies pulled their fleets off the streets. It was as if a hurricane had battered the city, leaving its stunned population stranded indoors, watching the violence unfold on television, accompanied by the kind of cinematic, spine-chilling soundtrack which the country's sensationalist news programmes so enjoy.

Virtually overnight the PCC became a household name. Its leader, Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, or Marcola, a convicted bank robber under lock and key in the Presidente Bernardes maximum security prison, 590km from Sao Paulo, became a South American bogeyman enveloped in a thick mist of fear and mystery.

Television screens flashed up black and the first hypnotic whirls of the Chemical Brothers' 'Block Rockin' Beats' kicked in. Rapidly, the camera panned across a prison yard before a grisly sequence of images was thrust on to the screen: first a decapitated head sandwiched between two bloodied ankles. Then dozens of other corpses, each with the vague glaze of death stamped on their face. Finally came more mutilated bodies and gun-wielding gang members, waving PCC flags from the rooftops of burning prison units.

I have been invited to watch a short film produced by members of the police force about the PCC. Family viewing it is not. For five minutes the film takes you on a Dantesque tour of the Sao Paulo prison system, introducing you to its inmates - both the living and the dead.

The PCC's reputation as a ruthless, bloodthirsty mob is not without basis. Frequent shows of mind-boggling brutality mean the group is famed, above all else, for its muscle. But the PCC is far more sophisticated than many government officials have been prepared to admit: a highly organised criminal network, made up of prisoners and drug traffickers, it even has a team of lawyers, as well as tentacles that stretch right across South America. Its sprawling, Mafia-like chain of command makes dismantling the group a complex task. Orders come from inside Sao Paulo's decaying prison system, where the omnipresence of mobile phones and corrupt lawyers means the ruling council is able to issue instructions even while under guard.

Outside, a second tier of faction leaders known as torres (towers) act as the representatives of the PCC's incarcerated bosses, controlling their lucrative drug-distribution points which are scattered across the state of Sao Paulo. Beneath them come the pilotos (pilots), who co-ordinate the activities of the group's 'soldiers'. Finally, at the bottom of the pile, are the so-called 'Bin Ladens' - criminals who owe favours to the faction and can be called up as a kind of reserve force for specific missions.

The PCC's expertise too often gives it the edge over the authorities. Among the party's collaborators are master criminals such as the Chilean kidnapper Mauricio Norambuena, also being held in Presidente Bernardes's 160-cell maximum-security compound.

The PCC has no lack of funds or weapons. Investigators believe its 'business interests' (principally drug trafficking and lucrative robberies or kidnappings) stretch well into the millions. It is thought to have been involved in the snatch of R$165m (£40m) from a bank in the northeastern port of Fortaleza in August 2005, while earlier this month Paraguayan police seized 591 machine guns and rifles on the border with Brazil, which they believe were partly destined for the PCC in Sao Paulo.

The PCC's sheer size has given it a virtual monopoly on drug trafficking within the prison system. Some estimates say that around 80 per cent of Sao Paulo's prison population either sympathise with or are full-blown members of the organisation, paying a monthly subscription fee of around R$150 (£38). Such prisoners see membership as a form of protection from prison guards and rival factions and, perhaps, a way of fighting for better jail conditions.

Yet while the PCC undoubtedly basks in its reputation for violence, it is also keen to paint itself as a revolutionary guerrilla group, modelling itself on the struggles of Che Guevara. It has its own set of 16 'laws' and is divided into independent cells that can be activated by jailed leaders with one simple phone call. Those who have met the group's well-spoken leader, Marcola, describe him as an intelligent, chillingly poetic man, whose reading list is said to include Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Machiavelli's The Prince and Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist

And like all guerrilla groups worth their salt, the PCC even boasts its own marketing department, which seeks to portray the group not as a criminal faction but as either a human rights group fighting to improve the lives of Sao Paulo's 142,000-strong prison population, or a rebel army leading a revolucao dos pobres (revolution of the poor).

One man accused of being at the forefront of this marketing campaign is Ivan Raymondi Barbosa, a former police investigator who himself spent five months in a Sao Paulo jail (he was implicated in an international smuggling ring) and who now heads an NGO called Nova Ordem. Nova Ordem, he claims, is engaged in the battle against torture and violence in the state's hellish prison system. Authorities, however, are investigating its links to the PCC. Brazil's media describes Nova Ordem as the political wing of the faction, something Barbosa rejects. 'Nova Ordem is here is to defend the whole prison population,' he says. 'It is for everyone - not just the PCC.'

What is clear is that Nova Ordem carries considerable clout with what is described as Brazil's largest criminal organisation. Back in May, when the first round of PCC attacks were halted, one of the key negotiators was Iracema Vasciaveo, Nova Ordem's legal representative, who was flown into Presidente Bernardes with high-ranking members of the Sao Paulo government to meet with Marcola.

We meet Barbosa at the group's HQ in a smart office block in Sao Paulo. He is charming, talkative and clad in thick gold jewellery (one stamped with the group's initials, NO).

'We want to draw attention to corruption and physical abuse in prisons,' he says. 'The abuse is so reminiscent of concentration camps that, in slang, prisons are referred to as Alemanha, or "Germany".'

He clicks open an archive of photos on his desktop and begins a gory tour through a series of images that he says were smuggled out of high-security prisons using mobile phones. First a deformed, swollen hand appears, with a thick line of stitches running across it. The guards, Barbosa claims, set dogs on the prisoner. Next appears a man's back, with a series of bullet wounds. Again, he says, the guards were responsible.

'They [the prisoners] aren't asking for beef with cheese and tomato sauce, but they do want dignity,' says Barbosa, who is said to have come into contact with Marcola during his time as a prisoner at the Avare prison.

Outwardly at least, both Nova Ordem and the PCC claim to fight such human rights abuses. Their respective political agendas - against prison violence, abusive searches of visiting relatives and solitary confinement - are almost identical, as are their catchphrases.

The PCC - in a nod to Rio de Janeiro drug faction the Comando Vermelho, in many ways the grandfather of Brazilian organised crime - employs the strapline Paz, justica e liberdade (Peace, justice and liberty). Nova Ordem, on the other hand, uses the red, white and blue colours of the French revolution on its eagle-shaped logo. It is, Barbosa explains, an allusion to the revolution's famous battle cry: 'Liberte, egalite, fraternite'.

On the other side of town, in the library of Sao Paulo's public prosecutor, 42-year-old Marcio Christino laughs off the idea that the PCC has anything to do with peace, justice or liberty. A playful, chubby-faced attorney, Christino has been doing battle with the PCC since 2001 - during which time he has come into regular contact with Marcola. He views the idea that the PCC has a genuine political agenda as pure fantasy. 'This is an image they want to sell to justify what they do,' he says.

In trying to secure convictions against members, Christino claims to have heard more than 30,000 hours of phone-tap conversations between PCC operatives.

'There isn't one minute, not even 30 seconds of any talk about prison conditions. They talk about four things: coke - how much came in, how much went out; death, money and sex.'

Rather than an attempt to form an alternative, leftist state, he sees the attacks as a reaction against police action designed to crack down on the group's criminal enterprises.

'When they feel the police are squeezing too much they react,' he says.

Christino's understanding of the PCC is as impressive as his contact book. He has recorded a four-hour video interview with Geleiao (now a sworn enemy of Marcola), and is in charge of a vast archive of evidence against the faction. Yet despite his scorn for the group, he does concede that Brazilian jails - under-funded, under-staffed and often massively overcrowded - provide the PCC with the ideal recruiting ground.

Overcrowding is perhaps the biggest problem. A recent Human Rights Watch report pointed out that: 'Severe overcrowding and institutionalised violence - such as beatings, torture and even summary executions - are chronic and widespread in Brazilian prisons.'

Faced with the barbarity of both criminal factions and prison guards, many offenders look to the PCC for support - sometimes even before they are sent to jail. Aware that sooner or later they are likely to go to prison, many teenage offenders decide it is safer to go in with at least some connection to the group.

With little sign of prison reform and with drugs and arms continuing to pour through Brazil's sparsely policed borders (a recent report claimed that if Brazil's entire border protection force was to line up along its western frontier, each officer would have to cover 10km) many in Sao Paulo see only one possible solution: defence. Desperate to protect itself from this previously little-known enemy, Sao Paulo's wealthy are silently stockpiling an arsenal of their own.

It is 30 August 2006, the eve of the anniversary of the foundation of the PCC, and a group of six policemen, armed with rifles, huddle nervously inside the entrance to our hotel. Sao Paulo police have warned of another 'mega attack' to mark the faction's birthday.

As we drive into the city that evening, through a series of heavily manned police road blockades, the sky is illuminated with the red flicker of sirens. We have been told to expect a repeat of May's violence. Instead, what we find is a security showcase.

In an air-conditioned conference centre on the south side of Sao Paulo, business executives and security experts are busy hobnobbing over cappuccinos and shortbread, surrounded by stall after stall of cutting-edge security technology. The International Security Conference and Exposition is a roll call of the world's top protection companies. The North American EADS Defence and Security is there promoting 'global responses' to 'homeland security' threats, while Bosch has also put in an appearance, peddling top-of-the-range surveillance monitors to, among others, the Brazilian Security Secretary. Sao Paulo's multi-million pound defence industry has boomed since the beginning of the year, with organisers claiming the city will spend more than $1bn protecting itself in 2006. The reason?

'In one word,' deadpans Mauricio dos Santos, a Bosch sales representative, 'the PCC.'

The fear that has taken hold of Sao Paulo is not hard to grasp. Threats of new attacks appear in the Brazilian media on an almost daily basis. Sometimes they come in the form of reports of 'police intelligence' indicating the chance of further violence. Occasionally, however, they come directly from the PCC's very own propaganda division.

On 12 August, members of the faction kidnapped 30-year-old Guilherme Portanova, a television reporter from Globo, Brazil's largest media network. His captors demanded the television station transmit a video and, at 12.30pm the following day, the channel yielded. Normal programming was interrupted as a hooded spokesperson for the gang appeared on screen, against a white backdrop daubed with the phrase 'Peace and Justice' in black spray paint.

'The Brazilian penal system is in truth a true human deposit where human beings are thrown as if they were animals,' the man said, quoting almost word for word a recent human rights report on the state of Rio de Janeiro's youth detention centres, themselves dominated by other drug factions. 'All we want is to not be massacred and oppressed. We want measures to be taken, since we are not prepared to remain with our arms crossed with what is happening in the prison system.'

Finally, as the four-minute video drew to a close, the PCC's representative issued a stark warning: 'Our fight is with the governors and the police,' he said. 'Don't mess with our families and we won't mess with yours ...'

Several weeks later another journalist - this time from a rival broadcaster - was badly assaulted in Sao Paulo. At the time, press reports made no link to the PCC, but The Observer understands that police believe this was another attempt to terrorise the country's media and force the PCC's message on to the airwaves once again.

Back in Barbosa's smoke-filled office, I ask if and when he believes Sao Paulo will see more PCC attacks. He furrows his brow at the question and lets out a dismissive chuckle, as though the 'if' part of the question has completely missed the point.

'Today, tomorrow, in half an hour,' he says. 'It is uncontrollable.'

Several weeks later I am handed a copy of the PCC's most recent piece of propaganda, a tatty manifesto on A4 paper being distributed a few blocks from my hotel by a group of homeless people.

'The First Command of the Capital notifies in the name of the truth that ... we will give our lives if necessary,' brags its opening line. 'We will go to the final consequences in this war for justice.' Further down it adds: 'We are in favour of peace but we also have the disposition for war.'

'What is the PCC going to do next?' asks Barbosa. 'I don't know. I'm scared of a civil war.'

'No physical, documentary, or analytical evidence provides a convincing explanation of why [Muhammad] Atta and [Abdulaziz al] Omari drove to Portland, Maine, from Boston on the morning of September 10, only to return to Logan on Flight 5930 on the morning of September 11'
The 9/11 Commission Report

1

On 11 September 2001, he opened his eyes at 4am, in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta's last day began.

What was the scene of this awakening? A room in a hotel, of the type designated as 'budget' in his guidebook - one up from 'basic'. It was a Repose Inn, part of a chain. But it wasn't like the other Repose Inns he had lodged at: brisk, hygienic establishments. This place was ponderous and labyrinthine, and as elderly as most of its clientele. And it was cheap. So. The padded nylon quilt as weighty as a lead vest; the big cuboid television on the dresser opposite; and the dented white fridge - where, as it happened, Muhammad Atta's reason for coming to Portland, Maine, lay cooling on its shelf... The particular frugality of these final weeks was part of a peer-group piety contest that he was laconically going along with. Like the others, he was attending to his prayers, disbursing his alms, washing often, eating little, sleeping little. (But he wasn't like the others.) Days earlier, their surplus operational funds - about $26,000 - had been abstemiously wired back to the go-between in Dubai.

He slid from the bed and called Abdulaziz, who was already stirring, and perhaps already praying, next door. Then to the bathroom: the chore of ablution, the ordeal of excretion, the torment of depilation. He activated the shower nozzle and removed his undershorts. He stepped within, submitting to the cold and clammy caress of the plastic curtain on his calf and thigh. Then he spent an unbelievably long time trying to remove a hair from the bar of soap; the alien strand kept changing its shape - question-mark, infinity symbol - but stayed in place; and the bar of soap, no bigger than a bookmatch when he began, barely existed when he finished. Next, as sometimes happens in these old, massive and essentially well-intentioned and broad-handed hotels, the water gave a gulp and then turned in an instant from a tepid trickle to a molten blast; and as he struggled from the stall he trod on a leaking shampoo sachet and fell heavily and sharply on his coccyx. He had to kick himself out through the steam, and rasped his head on the shower's serrated metal sill. After a while he slowly climbed to his feet and stood there, hands on hips, eyes only lightly closed, head bowed, awaiting recovery. He dried himself with the thin white towel, catching a hangnail in its shine.

Now, emitting a sigh of unqualified grimness, he crouched on the bowl. He didn't even bother with his usual scowling and straining and shuddering, partly because his head felt dangerously engorged. More saliently, he had not moved his bowels since May. In general his upper body was impressively lean, from all the hours in the gym with the 'muscle' Saudis; but now there was a solemn mound where his abdominals used to be, as taut and proud as a first-trimester pregnancy. Nor was this the only sequela. He had a feverish and unvarying ache, not in his gut but in his lower back, his pelvic saddle, and his scrotum. Every few minutes he was required to wait out an interlude of nausea, while disused gastric juices bubbled up in the sump of his throat. His breath smelled like a blighted river.

The worst was yet to come: shaving. Shaving was the worst because it necessarily involved him in the contemplation of his own face. He looked downwards while he lathered his cheeks, but then the chin came up and there it was, revealed in vertical strips: the face of Muhammad Atta. Two years ago he had said goodbye to his beard, after Afghanistan. Tangled and oblong and slightly off-centre, it had had the effect of softening the disgusted lineaments of the mouth, and it had wholly concealed the frank animus of the underbite. His insides were seized, but his face was somehow incontinent, or so Muhammad Atta felt. The detestation, the detestation of everything, was being sculpted on it, from within. He was amazed that he was still allowed to walk the streets, let alone enter a building or board a plane. Another day, one more day, and they wouldn't let him. Why didn't everybody point, why didn't they cringe, why didn't they run? And yet this face, by now almost comically malevolent, would soon be smiled at, and perfunctorily fussed over (his ticket was Business Class), by the doomed stewardess.

A hypothesis. If he stood down from the planes operation, and it went ahead without him (or if he somehow survived it), he would never be able to travel by air in the United States or anywhere else - not by air, not by train, not by boat, not by bus. The profiling wouldn't need to be racial; it would be facial, merely. No sane man or woman would ever agree to be confined in his vicinity. With that face, growing more gangrenous by the day. And that name, the name he journeyed under, itself like a promise of vengeance: Muhammad Atta. In the last decade, only one human being had taken obvious pleasure from setting eyes on him, and that was the Sheikh. It happened at their introductory meeting, in Kandahar - where, within a matter of minutes, the Sheikh appointed him operational leader. Muhammad Atta knew that the first thing he would be asked was whether he was prepared to die. But the Sheikh was smiling, almost with eyes of love, when he said it. 'The question isn't necessary,' he began. 'I see the answer in your face.'

Their Coglan Air commuter flight to Logan was scheduled to leave at six. So he had an hour. He put on his clothes (the dark blue shirt, the black slacks) and settled himself at the dresser, awkwardly, his legs out to one side. Two documents lay before him. He yawned, then sneezed. While shaving, Muhammad Atta, for the first time in his life, had cut himself on the lip (the lower); with surprising speed the gash had settled into a convincing imitation of a cold sore. Much less unusually, he had also nicked the fleshy volute of his right nostril, releasing an apparently endless supply of blood. He kept having to get up and fetch more tissues, leaving after him a paper trail of the staunched gouts. The themes of recurrence and prolongation, he sensed, were already beginning to associate themselves with his last day.

Document number one was displayed on the screen of his laptop. It was his last will and testament, composed in April 1996, when the thoughts of the group had turned to Chechnya. Two Moroccan friends, Mounir and Abdelghani, both devout, had been his witnesses, so he had included a fair amount of formulaic sanctimony. Any old thing would do. 'During my funeral, I want everyone to be quiet because God mentioned that he likes being quiet on occasions when you read the Koran, during the funeral, and also when you are crawling.' Crawling? Had he mistyped? Another provision stared out at him, and further deepened his frown: 'The person who will wash my body near my genitals must wear gloves on his hands so he won't touch my genitals.' And this: 'I don't want pregnant women or a person who is not clean to come and say goodbye to me because I don't approve of it.' Well, these anxieties were now academic. No one would say goodbye to him. No one would wash him. No one would touch his genitals.

There was another document on the table, a four-page booklet in Arabic, put together by the Information Office in Kandahar (and bound by a grimy tassel). Each of them had been given one; the others would often produce their personal copy and nod and sway and mutter over it for hour after hour. But Muhammad Atta wasn't like the others (and he was paying a price for it). He had barely glanced at the thing until now. 'Pull your shoelaces tight and wear tight socks that grip the shoes and do not come out of them.' He supposed that this was sound advice. 'Let every one of you sharpen his knife and bring about comfort and relief of his slaughter.' A reference, presumably, to what would happen to the pilots, the first officers, the flight attendants. Some of the Saudis, they said, had butchered sheep and camels at Khaldan, the training-camp near Kabul. Muhammad Atta did not expect to relish that part of it: the exemplary use of the box-cutters. He pictured the women, in their uniforms, in their open-necked shirts. He did not expect to like it; he did not expect to like death in that form.

Now he sat back, and felt the approach of nausea: it gathered round him, then sifted through him. His mind, inasmuch as it was separable from his body, was close to the 'complete tranquillity' praised and recommended by Kandahar. A very different kind of 33-year-old might have felt the same tranced surety while contemplating an afternoon in a borrowed apartment with his true love (and sexual obsession). But Muhammad Atta's mind and his body were not separable: this was the difficulty; this was the mind-body problem - in his case fantastically acute. Muhammad Atta wasn't like the others, because he was doing what he was doing for the core reason. The others were doing what they were doing for the core reason, too, but they had achieved sublimation, by means of jihadi ardour; and their bodies had been convinced by this arrangement and had gone along with it. They ate, drank, smoked, smiled, snored; they took the stairs two at a time. Muhammad Atta's body had not gone along with it. He was doing what he was doing for the core reason and for the core reason only.

'Purify your heart and cleanse it of stains. Forget and be oblivious to the thing which is called World.' Muhammad Atta was not religious; he was not even especially political. He had allied himself with the militants because jihad was, by many magnitudes, the most charismatic idea of his generation. To unite ferocity and rectitude in a single word: nothing could compete with that. He played along with it, and did the things that impressed his peers; he collected citations, charities, pilgrimages, conspiracy theories, and so on, as other people collected autographs or beermats. And it suited his character. If you took away all the rubbish about faith, then fundamentalism suited his character, and with an almost sinister precision.

For example, the attitude to women: the blend of extreme hostility and extreme wariness he found highly congenial. In addition, he liked the idea of the brotherhood, although, of course, he thoroughly despised the current contingent, particularly his fellow pilots: Hani (the Pentagon) he barely knew, but he was continuously enraged by Marwan (the other Twin Tower) and almost fascinated by the pitch of his loathing for Ziad (the Capitol)... Adultery punished by whipping, sodomy by burial alive: this seemed about right to Muhammad Atta. He also joined in the hatred of music. And the hatred of laughter. 'Why do you never laugh?' he was sometimes asked. Ziad would answer: 'How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine?' Muhammad Atta never laughed, not because people were dying in Palestine, but because he found nothing funny. 'The thing which is called World.' That, too, spoke to him. World had always felt like an illusion - an unreal mockery.

'The time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short.' Ah yes, the virgins: six dozen of them - half a gross. He had read in a news magazine that virgins, in the holy book, was a mistranslation from the Aramaic. It should be raisins. He idly wondered whether the quibble might have something to do with sultana, which meant a) a small seedless raisin, and b) the wife or concubine of a sultan. Abdulaziz, Marwan, Ziad, and the others: they would not be best pleased, on their arrival in the Garden, to find a little black packet of Sunmaid Sultanas (average contents 72). Muhammad Atta, with his two degrees in architecture, his excellent English, his excellent German: Muhammad Atta did not believe in the virgins, did not believe in the Garden. (How could he believe in such an implausibly, and dauntingly, priapic paradise?) He was an apostate: that's what he was. He didn't expect paradise. What he expected was oblivion. And, strange to say, he would find neither.

He packed. He paused and stooped over the dented refrigerator, then straightened up and headed for the door.

In its descent the elevator, with a succession of long-suffering sighs, stopped at the 12th, the 11th, the 10th, the ninth, the eighth, the seventh, the sixth, the fifth, the fourth, the third and the second floors. Old people, their faces flickering with distrust, inched in and out; while they did so, one of their number would press the open-doors button with a defiant, marfanic thumb. And at this hour, too: it was barely light. Muhammad Atta briefly horrified himself with the notion that they were all lovers, returning early to their beds. But no: it must be the sleeplessness, the insomnia of age - the dawn vigils of age. Their efforts to stay alive, in any case, struck him as essentially ignoble. He had felt the same way in the hospital the night before, when he went to see the imam... Consulting his watch every 10 or 15 seconds, he decided that this downward journey was dead time, as dead as time could get, like queuing, or an interminable red light, or staring stupidly at the baggage on an airport carousel. He stood there, hemmed in by pallor and decay, and martyred by compound revulsions.

Abdulaziz was waiting for him in the weak glow and piped music of the lobby. Wordless, breakfastless, they joined the line for checkout. More dead time passed. As they fell into step and proceeded through the last of the night to the car park, Muhammad Atta, in no very generous spirit, considered his colleague. This particular muscle Saudi seemed as limply calf-like as Ahmed al Nami - the prettyboy in Ziad's platoon. On the other hand, Abdulaziz, with his softly African face, his childish eyes, was almost insultingly easy to dominate. He had a wife and daughter in southern Saudi Arabia. But this was like saying that he had a flatbed truck in southern Saudi Arabia, so little did it appear to weigh on him. He had also, incredibly, performed certain devotional duties at his local mosque. And yet it was Abdulaziz who carried the knife, Abdulaziz who was ready to apply it to the flesh of the stewardess.

When they reached their car Abdulaziz said a few words in praise of God, adding, with some attempt at panache, 'So. Let us begin our "architectural studies".'

Muhammad Atta felt his body give an involuntary jolt. 'Who told you?' he said.

'Ziad.'

They loaded up and then bent themselves into the front seats.

Abdulaziz wasn't supposed to know about that - about the target code. 'Law' was the Capitol. 'Politics' was the White House. In the discussions with the Sheikh there had been firm concurrence about 'architecture' (the World Trade Center) and 'arts' (the Pentagon), but they had disagreed about an altogether different kind of target, namely 'electrical engineering'. This was the nuclear power plant that Muhammad Atta had seen on one of his training flights near New York. Puzzlingly, the Sheikh withheld his blessing - despite the presumably attractive possibility of turning large swathes of the eastern seaboard into a plutonium cemetery for the next 70 millennia (that is, until the year 72001). The Sheikh gave his reasons (restricted airspace, no 'symbolic' value). But Muhammad Atta sensed a moral qualm, a silent suggestion that such a move could be considered exorbitant. It was the first and only indication that, in their cosmic war against God's enemies, there was any kind of upper limit. Muhammad Atta often asked himself: was the Sheikh prepared to die? In the course of their conversations it had emerged that, while plainly reconciled to eventual martyrdom (he would have it no other way, and so on), the Sheikh felt little personal attraction to death; and he would soon be additionally famous, Muhammad Atta prophesied, for the strenuousness with which he eluded it.

These meetings and discussions - with the Sheikh and, later, with his Yemeni emissary, Ramzi Binalshibh - now lost weight and value in Muhammad Atta's mind, tarnished by Ziad's indiscipline, by Ziad's promiscuity (and if Abdulaziz knew, then all the Saudis knew). He thought back to his historic conversation with Ramzi, on the telephone, in the third week of August.

'Our friend is anxious to know when your course will begin.'

'It will be more interesting to study "law" when Congress has convened.'

'But we shouldn't delay. With so many of our students in the US...'

'All right. Two branches, an oblique stroke, and a lollipop.'

Ramzi called him back and said, 'To be clear. The 11th of the ninth?'

'Yes,' confirmed Muhammad Atta. And he was the first person on earth to say it - to say in that way: 'September the 11th.'

He had cherished the secret until 9 September. Now, of course, everyone knew: the day itself had come. He was impatient for his talk on the phone with Ziad, scheduled for 7am at Logan. Ziad was still claiming that he hadn't yet decided between 'law' and 'politics'. It looked like 'law'. As a target, the President's house had lost much of its appeal when they established, insofar as they could, that the President wouldn't be in it. At that moment the President was readying himself for an early-morning run in Sarasota, Florida, where Muhammad Atta had been taught how to fly, at Jones Aviation, in September 2000.

It was during the drive to Portland International Jetport that the headache began. In recent months he had become something of a connoisseur of headaches. And yet those earlier headaches, it now seemed, were barely worth the name: this was what a headache was. At first he attributed its virulence to his misadventure in the shower stall, but then the pain pushed forward over his crown and established itself, like an electric eel, from ear to ear, then from eye to eye - and then both. He had two headaches, not one; and they were apparently at war. The automobile, a Nissan Altima, was brand-new, factory-fresh, and this had seemed like a mild bonus on 10 September, but now its vacuum-packed breath tasted of seasickness and the smell of ships below the waterline. Suddenly his vision became pixelated with little swarms of blind spots. So it was then asked of him to pull over and tell an astonished Abdulaziz to take the wheel.

There seemed to be a completely unreasonable weight of traffic. Americans, already about their business... Tormenting his passenger with regular glances of concern, Abdulaziz otherwise drove with his usual superstitious watchfulness, beset by small fears, on this day. Muhammad Atta tried not to writhe around in his seat; on his way to the car park, 10 minutes earlier, he had tried not to run; in the elevator, 10 minutes earlier still, he had tried not to groan or scream. He was always trying not to do something.

It was 5.35am. And at this point he began to belabour himself for the diversion to Portland: a puerile undertaking, as he now saw it. His group was competitive not only in piety but also in nihilistic elan, in nihilistic insouciance; and he had thought it would be conclusively stylish to stroll from one end of Logan to the other with less than an hour to go. Then, too, there was the promise, itchier to the heart than ever, of his conversation with Ziad. But his reason for coming to Portland had been fundamentally unserious. He wouldn't have done it if the internet, on 10 September, had not assured him so repeatedly that it was going to be a flawless morning on 11 September.

And he didn't solace himself with the thought that this was, after all, 11 September, and you could still get to airports without much time to spare.

'Did you pack these bags yourself?'

Muhammad Atta's hand crept towards his brow. 'Yes,' he said.

'Have they been with you at all times?'

'Yes.'

'Did anyone ask you to carry anything for them?'

'No. Is the flight on time?'

'You should make your connection.'

'And the bags will go straight through.'

'No, sir. You'll need to recheck them at Logan.'

'You mean I have to go through all this again?'

Whatever else terrorism had achieved in the past few decades, it had certainly brought about a net increase in world boredom. It didn't take very long to ask and answer those three questions - about 15 seconds. But those dead-time questions and answers were repeated, without any variation whatever, hundreds of thousands of times a day. If the planes operation went ahead as planned, Muhammad Atta would bequeath more, perhaps much more, dead time, planet-wide. It was appropriate, perhaps, and not paradoxical, that terror should also sharply promote its most obvious opposite. Boredom.

As it happened, Muhammad Atta was a selectee of the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (Capps). All it meant was that his checked bag would not be stowed until he himself had boarded the aircraft. This was at Portland. At Logan, a 'Category X' airport like Newark Liberty and Washington Dulles, and supposedly more secure, three of his muscle Saudis would be selected by Capps, with the same irrelevant consequences.

Muhammad Atta and Abdulaziz submitted to the checkpoint screening. Their bags were not searched; they were not frisked, or blessed by the hand wand. Abdulaziz's childish rucksack, containing the boxcutters and the mace, passed through the tunnel of love. Just before boarding, another gust of nausea gathered about Muhammad Atta, like a host of tiny myrmidons. He waited for them to move on, but they did not do so, and, instead, coagulated in his craw. Muhammad Atta went to the men's room and released a fathom of bilious green. He was still wiping his foul mouth as he walked out on to the tarmac and climbed the trembling metal steps.

Coglan 5930 was not only late it was also an open-propeller 19-seater, and it was full. Excruciatingly, he had to wedge himself in next to a fat blonde with a scalp disease and, moreover, a baby, whose incredulous weeping (its ears) she attempted and failed to slake with repeated applications of the breast. Between heartbeats, when he was briefly capable of consecutive thought, he imagined that the blonde was the doomed stewardess.

The plane leapt eagerly into the air, with none of the technological toil that would characterise the ascent of American 11.

He had gone to Portland, Maine, for his quid pro quo with the imam.

The hospital, where he lay dying, was a blistered medium-rise, downtown: one more business among all the other businesses. Inside, too, Muhammad Atta had no sense of entering an atmosphere of vocational care - just the American matter-of-factness, with no softening of the voice, the tread, no softening of the receptionists' minimal smiles ... Directed to the ward, he moved through the moist warmth of half-eaten or untouched dinners and the heavier undersmell of drugs. The imam was asleep in his bed, recessed into it, as if an imam-sized channel had been let into the mattress. His lips, Muhammad Atta noticed, were dark grey, like the lips of dogs. Dead time passed. Then the imam awoke to Muhammad Atta's unsmiling stare. He sighed, without restraint. The two of them went back a way: to the mosque in Falls Church, Virginia.

'You have a citation for me?' asked the imam, unexpectedly alert.

'It's from the traditions. "The Prophet said: 'Whoever kills himself with a blade will be tormented with that blade in the fires of Hell... He who throws himself off a mountain and kills himself will throw himself downward into the fires of Hell for ever and ever... Whoever kills himself in any way in this world will be tormented in that way in Hell.'"'

'Always there are exceptions. Remember we are in the lands of unbelief,' said the imam, and went on to list the crimes of the Americans.

These were familiar to his visitor, who regarded the grievances as real. Depending on how you tallied it, America was responsible for this or that many million deaths. But Muhammad Atta was not persuaded of a moral equivalence. Certain weapons systems claimed to be precise; power was not precise. Power was always a monster. And there had never been a monster the size of America. Every time it turned over in its sleep it entrained disasters that would have to roll through villages. There were blunderings and perversities and calculated cruelties; and there was no self-knowledge - none. Still, America did not expend ingenuity in its efforts to kill the innocent.

'Is it an enemy installation?' the imam was sharply asking.

Muhammad Atta gave no reply. He just said, 'Do you have it?'

'Yes. And you will need it.'

The imam's hand, to Muhammad Atta's far from sympathetic gaze, looked and sounded like the foreclaw of a lobster as it rattled up against the laminate of his bedside table. Its cupboard opened, drawbridge-wise. The thing within exactly resembled a half-empty eight-ounce bottle of Volvic.

'Take it, not on waking, but when you feel your trial is near. Now. You were kind enough to say you would describe your induction.'

Here was the quid pro quo: he wanted to be told about the Sheikh. Just then the imam abruptly turned on to his side, facing Muhammad Atta, and for a moment his posture repulsively recalled that of a child starting to warm to a bedtime story. But this lurch was only part of a larger manoeuvre of the imam's. He edged himself backwards and upwards, so that a few stray hairs, at least, rested on the pillow. Muhammad Atta had unthinkingly assumed, earlier on, that he would give the imam a reassuring, even an idealised portrait of the Sheikh - the long-fingered visionary on the mountaintop who yet, in his humility and openness, remained a simple warrior of God. Now he recomposed himself. Never in his life had he spoken his mind. The smell of drugs was particularly strong near the yellow sink, half a yard from his nose.

'I had several meetings with him,' he said, 'at the al Faruq camp in Kandahar. And at Tarnak Farms. He casts the spell of success on you - that's what he does. When he talks about the defeat of the Russians... To hear him tell it, it wasn't the West that won the Cold War. It was the Sheikh. But we badly need that spell, don't we? The spell of success.'

'But the successes are real. And this is only the beginning.'

'His hopes of victory depend,' said Muhammad Atta, 'on the active participation of the superpower.'

'What superpower?'

'God. Hence the present crisis.'

'Meaning?'

'It comes from religious hurt, don't you think? For centuries God has forsaken the believers, and rewarded the infidels. How do you explain his indifference?'

Or his enmity, he thought, as he left the bedside and the ward. He considered, too, that it could go like this, subconsciously, of course: if prayer and piety had failed, had so clearly failed, then it might seem time to change allegiance, and summon up the other powers.

At Logan, he and Abdulaziz were the only passengers at the carousel supposedly serving the commuter flight from Portland. And the carousel was silent and motionless. Staring at a carousel with actual baggage going round on it suddenly seemed a fairly stimulating thing to do. Meanwhile, the eels or stingrays in his head were now having a fight to the death in the area just behind his ears.

Sometimes for moments on end he could step back from the pain and just listen to it. This was music in its next evolutionary phase, beyond the atonal. And he realised why he had always hated music; all of it, even the most emollient melody, had entered his mind as pain. Using every reserve, he continued to stare at the changeless slats of black rubber for another 30 seconds, another minute; then he turned on his heel, and Abdulaziz followed.

'Did you pack these bags yourself?'

'What bags? As I took the trouble to explain...'

'Sir, your bags will be on our next flight. I still need to ask the security questions, sir.'

Americans - the way they called you sir. They might as well be calling you bub.

'Did you pack these bags yourself?'

Oh, the misery of recurrence, like the hotel elevator doing its ancient curtsy on every floor, like the alien hair on the soap changing its shape through a succession of different alphabets, like the (necessarily) monotonous gonging inside his head. It had occurred to him before that his condition, if you could call it that, was merely the condition of boredom, unbounded boredom, where all time was dead time. As if his whole life consisted of answering those same three questions, saying, 'Yes' and 'Yes' and 'No'. 'And did anyone ask you to carry anything for them?'

'Yes,' said Muhammad Atta. 'Last night, at the Lebanese restaurant, a waiter asked us to take a heavy clock-radio to his cousin in Los Angeles.'

Her smile was flat and brief. 'That's funny,' she said.

They made their way to Gate 32 and then retreated from it, into the mall. With a flip of the hand he told Abdulaziz to go and look for his countrymen. Muhammad Atta took a seat outside a dormant coffee shop and readied himself for the call to Ziad. Ziad: the Beiruti beach boy and disco ghost, the tippler and debauchee, now with his exaltations and prostrations, his chanting and wailing, his rocking and swaying... To discountenance Ziad, to send him to his death with a heart full of doubt: this was the reason for the journey to Maine.

Back in Germany, once, Ziad had said that the brides in the Garden would be 'made of light'. In bold contrast, then, to the darkness and heaviness of their terrestrial sisters, in particular the heaviness and darkness of Aysel Senguen - Ziad's German Turk, or Turkish German. Muhammad Atta had seen Aysel only once (bare legs, bare arms, bare hair), in the medical bookstore in Hamburg, and he had not forgotten her face. Ziad and Aysel were his control experiment for the life lived by sexual love; and for many months the two of them had peopled his insomnias. He knew that Aysel had come to Florida in January (and had scandalously accompanied Ziad to the flight school); he was also obscurely moved by the fact that a letter to her was Ziad's last will and testament. And he kept wondering how their bodies conjoined, how she must open herself up to him, with all her heaviness and darkness...

Muhammad Atta had decided that romantic and religious ardour came from contiguous parts of the human being: the parts he didn't have. Yet Ziad, as the obliterator of 'law' (and the obliterator of United 93), was duly poised for mass murder. Only roughly contiguous, then: Ziad could say he was doing it for God, and many would believe him, but he couldn't say he was doing it for love. He wasn't doing it for love, or for God. He was doing it for the core reason, just like Muhammad Atta.

'All is well at Newark Liberty?'

'All is well. We're in the sterile area. Did you see your precious imam?'

'I did. And he gave me the water.'

'The water? What water?'

'The holy water,' said Muhammad Atta, with delectation, 'from the Oasis.'

There was a silence. 'What does it do?' said Ziad.

'It absolves you of what the imam called the "enormity", the atrocious crime, of the self-felony.'

There was another silence. But that wasn't quite true any more. Muhammad Atta thought he might be getting more out of this conversation if there hadn't been a mechanised floor-sweeper, resembling a hovercraft, with an old man on it, beeping and snivelling around his chair.

'I'm preparing to drink the holy water even as I speak.'

'Does it come in a special bottle?'

'A crystal vial. God said, "All those who hate me love and court death." You see, Ziad, you are the trustee of your body, not its owner. God is its owner.'

'And the water?'

'The water is within you and preserves you for God. It's a new technique - it began in Palestine. Your hell will burn with jet fuel for eternity. And eternity never ends, Ziad - it never even begins. So there may be some delay before you get those brides of light. Perhaps you should have settled for your German nudist. Goodbye, Ziad.'

He hung up, redialled, and had a more or less identical conversation with Marwan, minus the theme of Aysel. In the case of Marwan (the other half of 'architecture', and just across the way, now, at United), different considerations obtained. The emphasis of their rivalry was not jihadi ardour so much as nihilistic insouciance. So the two of them exchanged yawning boasts, in code, about how low down, and at what angle, they would strike, and coolly agreed that, if there were F-15s over New York, they would crash their planes into the streets... Finally, dutifully, he called Hani ('arts'), the only Saudi pilot, with whom he shared no history, and not much hatred. Muhammad Atta hoped that he hadn't decisively undermined Ziad, who, after all, was a Saudi short (or two Saudis short, if you discounted the punklike Ahmed). No. He believed that he could safely rely, at this point, on the fierce physics of the peer group.

A peer group piously competitive about suicide, he had concluded, was a very powerful thing, and the West had no equivalent to it. A peer group for whom death was not death - and life was not life, either. Yet an inversion so extreme, he thought, would quickly become decadent: hospitals, schools, nurseries, old people's homes. Transgression, by its nature, was helter-skelter, and always bound to escalate. And the thing would start to be over in a generation, as everyone slowly and incredulously intuited it: the core reason.

Perhaps the closest equivalent, or analogy, the West could field was the firefighters. Muhammad Atta had studied architecture and engineering. The fire that would be created by 3,000 gallons of jet fuel, he knew, could not be fought: the steel frame of the tower would buckle; the walls, which were not intended to be weight-bearing, would collapse, one on to the other; and down it would all come. The fire could not be fought, but there would be firefighters. They were called the 'bravest', accurately, in his view; and, as the bravest, they took on a certain responsibility. The firefighters were saying, every day: 'Who's going to do it, if we don't? If we don't, who else is going to risk death to save the lives of strangers?'

As he sat for another few moments on the tin chair, as he watched the mall awaken and come into commercial being, filling up now with Americans and American purpose and automatic self-belief, he felt he had timed it about right. (And his face had timed it about right.) Because he couldn't possibly survive another day of the all-inclusive detestation - of the pan-anathema. This feeling had been his familiar since the age of 12 or 13; it had come upon him, like an illness without a symptom. Cairo, Hamburg, even the winter dawn over Kandahar: they had all looked the same to him. Unreal mockery.

Muhammad Atta took the bottle from his carry-on. The imam said it was from Medina. He shrugged, and drank the holy Volvic.

Boarding began with First Class. And if Muhammad Atta ever found anything funny, he might have smiled at this: Wail and Waleed, the brothers, the two semiliterate yokels from the badlands of the Yemeni border, shuffling off to their thrones - 2A and 2B. Then Business. He led. Abdulaziz and Satam followed.

He hadn't even reached his seat when it hit him. It came with great purity of address, replacing everything else in his stretched sensorium. Even his headache, while not actually taking its leave, immediately stepped aside, almost with a flourish, to accommodate the new guest. It was a feeling that had abandoned him for ever, he thought, four months ago - but now it was back. With twinkly promptitude, canned music flooded forth: a standard ballad, a flowery flute with many trills and graces. The breathy refrain joined the simmer of the engines; yet neither could drown the popping, the groaning, the creaking, as of a dungeon door to an inner sanctum - the ungainsayable anger of his bowels.

So now he sat gripping the armrests of 8D as the Coach passengers filed by. Why did there have to be so many of them, always another briefcase, another backpack, always another buzzcut, another whitehair? He waited, rose, and with gruelling nonchalance, his buttocks clenched, sauntered forward. All three toilets claimed to be occupied. They were not occupied, he knew. A frequent and inquisitive traveller on American commercial jets, Muhammad Atta knew that the toilets were locked, like all the other toilets (this was the practice on tight turnarounds), and would remain locked until the plane levelled out. He pressed a flat hand against all three: again, the misery of recurrence, of duplication. He tried, but he couldn't abstain from a brief flurry of shoving and kicking and rattling. As he returned to 8D he saw that Abdulaziz was looking at him, not with commiseration, now, but with puzzled disappointment, even turning in his seat to exchange a responsible frown with Satam. Strapped in, Muhammad Atta managed the following series of thoughts. You needed the belief-system, the ideology, the ardour. You had to have it. The core reason was good enough for the mind. But it couldn't carry the body.

To the others, he realised, he was giving a detailed impersonation of a man who had lost his nerve. And he had not lost his nerve. Even before the plane gave its preliminary jolt (like a polite cough of introduction), he felt the pull of it, with relief, with recognition: the necessary speed, the escape velocity he needed to deliver him to his journey's end. American 11 pushed back from Gate 32, Terminal B, at 7:40. There was the captain and the first officer; there were nine flight attendants, and 76 passengers, excluding Wail, Walid, Satam, Abdulaziz, and Muhammad Atta. American 11 was in the air at 7:59.

Now he obliged himself to do what he had always intended to do, during the climb. He had a memory ready, and a thought-experiment. He wanted to prepare himself for the opening of female flesh; he wanted to prepare himself for what would soon be happening to the throat of the stewardess - whom he could see, on her jump-seat, head bowed low, with a pen in her hand and a clipboard on her lap.

In 1999, his return ticket from Afghanistan had put him on an Iberia flight from the UAE to Madrid. They had just levelled out when he became aware of an altercation in the back of the plane. Swivelling in his seat, he saw that perhaps 15 or 16 men, turbaned and white-robed, had crowded into the aisle and were now on the floor, humped in prayer. You could hear the male flight attendant's monotonous and defeated remonstrations as he backed away. 'Por favor, senors. Es ilegal. Senors, por favor!' Minutes later the captain came on the PA, saying in Spanish, English and Gulf Arabic that if the passengers didn't return to their seats he would most certainly return to Dubai. Then she appeared. Even Muhammad Atta at once conceded that here was the dark female in her most swinishly luxurious form: tall, long-necked, herself streamlined and aerodynamic, with hair like a billboard for a chocolate sundae, and all that flesh, damp and glowing as if from fever or even lust. She came to a halt and gave a roll of the eyes that took her whole head with it; then she surged forward with great scooping motions of her hands, bellowing - 'VAMOS ARRIBA, CONOS!' And the kneeling men had to peer out at this seraph of breast and haunch and uniformed power, and straighten up and scowl, and slowly grope for their seats. Muhammad Atta had felt only contempt for the men crooked over the patterned carpet; but he would never forget the face of the stewardess - the face of cloudless entitlement - and how badly he had wanted to hurt it.

And yet - no, it wasn't going to work. For him, the combination, up close, was wholly unmanageable: the combination of women and blood. So far, he thought, this is the worst day of my life - probably the worst day. In his head the weary fight between the vermin was finished; one was dying, and was now being disgustingly eaten by the other. And his loins, between them, were contriving for him something very close to the sensations of anal rape. So far, this was the worst day of his life. But then every day was the worst day, because every day was the most recent day, and the most developed, the most advanced (with all those other days behind it) towards the pan-anathema.

The plane was flattening out. He waited for the order. This would be given by the captain, when he turned off the fasten-seatbelts sign.

'We have some planes,' said Muhammad Atta, coolly. 'Just stay quiet, and you'll be OK. We are returning to the airport. Nobody move. Everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. '

He had stepped through the region of inexpressible sordor, and gained the cockpit. Here, in the grotto of the mad clocksmith, was more cringing flesh and more blood - but manageably male. Now he disengaged the computer and prepared to fly by direct law.

It was 8.24. He laughed for the first time since childhood: he was in the Atlantic of the sky, at the controls of the biggest weapon in history.

At 8.27 he made a grand counter-clockwise semicircle, turning south.

At 8.44 he began his descent.

The core reason was, of course, all the killing - all the putting to death. Not the crew, not the passengers, not the office-workers in the Twin Towers, not the cleaners and the caterers, not the men of the NYPD and the FDNY. He was thinking of the war, the wars, the war-cycles that would flow from this day. He didn't believe in the devil, as an active force, but he did believe in death. Death, at certain times, stopped moving at its even pace and broke into a hungry, lumbering run. Here was the primordial secret. No longer closely guarded - no longer well kept. Killing was divine delight. And your suicide was just a part of the contribution you made - the massive contribution to death. All your frigidities and futilities were rewritten, becoming swollen with meaning. This was what was possible when you turned the tides of life around, when you ran with beasts, when you flew with the flies.

First, the lesser totems of Queens, like a line of defence for the tutelary godlings of the island.

When he came clattering in over the struts and slats of Manhattan, there it was ahead of him and below him - the thing which is called World.

Cross-streets, blocks, districts, shot out from underneath the speedlines of the plane. He was glad that he wouldn't have to plough down into the city, and he even felt love for it, all its strivings and couplings and sunderings. And he felt no impulse to increase power or to bank or to strike even lower. It was reeling him in. Now even the need to shit felt right and good as his destination surged towards him.

There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. 'The passengers died instantly.' Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was 33. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporisation; perhaps this was true even for the wall-shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood.

American 11 struck at 8.46.40. Muhammad Atta's body was beyond all healing by 8.46.41; but his mind, his presence, needed time to shut itself down. The physical torment - a panic attack in every nerve, a riot of the atoms - merely italicised the last shinings of his brain. They weren't thoughts; they were more like a series of unignorable conclusions, imposed from without. Here was the hereafter, after all; and here was the reckoning. His mind groaned and fumbled with an irreconcilability, a defeat, a self-cancellation. Could he assemble the argument? It follows - by definition - if and only if. And then the argument assembled, all by itself... The joy of killing was proportional to the value of what was destroyed. But that value was something a killer could never see and never gauge. And where was the joy he thought he had felt - where was that joy, that itch, that paltry tingle? Yes, how gravely he had underestimated it. How very gravely he had underestimated life. His own he had hated, and had wished away; but see how long it was taking to absent itself - and with what helpless grief was he watching it go, imperturbable in its beauty and its power.

Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended.

It was mid-October 2001, and night was closing in on the border city of Peshawar, in Pakistan, as my friend - a reporter and political man of letters - approached a market stall and began to haggle over a batch of T-shirts bearing the likeness of Osama bin Laden. It is forbidden, in Sunni Islam, to depict the human form, lest it lead to idolatry; but here was Osama's lordly visage, on display and on sale right outside the mosque. The mosque now emptied, after evening prayers, and my friend was very suddenly and very thoroughly surrounded by a shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood: the young men of Peshawar.

At this time of day, their equivalents, in the great conurbations of Europe and America, could expect to ease their not very sharp frustrations by downing a lot of alcohol, by eating large meals with no dietary restrictions, by racing around to one another's apartments in powerful and expensive machines, by downing a lot more alcohol as well as additional stimulants and relaxants, by jumping up and down for several hours on strobe-lashed dancefloors, and (in a fair number of cases) by having galvanic sex with near-perfect strangers. These diversions were not available to the young men of Peshawar.

More proximately, just over the frontier, the West was in the early stages of invading Afghanistan and slaughtering Pakistan's pious clients and brainchildren, the Taliban, and flattening the Hindu Kush with its power and its rage. More proximately still, the ears of these young men were still fizzing with the battlecries of molten mullahs, and their eyes were smarting anew to the chalk-thick smoke from the hundreds of thousands of wood fires - fires kindled by the multitudes of exiles and refugees from Afghanistan, camped out all around the city. There was perhaps a consciousness, too, that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, over the past month, had reversed years of policy and decided to sacrifice the lives of its Muslim clients and brainchildren, over the border, in exchange for American cash. So when the crowd scowled out its question, the answer needed to be a good one.

'Why you want these? You like Osama?'

I can almost hear the tone of the reply I would have given - reedy, wavering, wholly defeatist. As for the substance, it would have been the reply of the cornered trimmer, and intended, really, just to give myself time to seek the foetal position and fold my hands over my face. Something like: 'Well I quite like him, but I think he overdid it a bit in New York.' No, that would not have served. What was needed was boldness and brilliance. The exchange continued:

'You like Osama?'

'Of course. He is my brother.'

'He is your brother?'

'All men are my brothers.'

All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother - by definition. Osama is not my brother.

Religion is sensitive ground, as well it might be. Here we walk on eggshells. Because religion is itself an eggshell. Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses. This is of course not so in the East, where, we acknowledge, almost every living citizen in many huge and populous countries is intimately defined by religious belief. The excuses, here, are very persuasive; and we duly accept that 'faith' - recently and almost endearingly defined as 'the desire for the approval of supernatural beings' - is a world-historical force and a world-historical actor. All religions, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even Buddhist. But we are not hearing from those religions. We are hearing from Islam.

Let us make the position clear. We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad - a unique and luminous historical being. Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, he remains a titanic figure, and, for Muslims, all-answering: a revolutionary, a warrior, and a sovereign, a Christ and a Caesar, 'with a Koran in one hand', as Bagehot imagined him, 'and a sword in the other'. Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived. And always a man, as he always maintained, and not a god. Naturally we respect Muhammad. But we do not respect Muhammad Atta.

Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.

So, to repeat, we respect Islam - the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination. More, we regard the Great Leap Backwards as a tragic development in Islam's story, and now in ours. Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta.

I will soon come to Donald Rumsfeld, the architect and guarantor of the hideous cataclysm in Iraq. But first I must turn from great things to small, for a paragraph, and talk about writing, and the strange thing that happened to me at my desk in this, the Age of Vanished Normalcy.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say. The original idea, the initiating 'throb' (Nabokov), encounters certain 'points of resistance' (Updike); and these points of resistance, on occasion, are simply too obdurate, numerous, and pervasive. You come to write the next page, and it's dead - as if your subconscious, the part of you quietly responsible for so much daily labour, has been neutralised, or switched off. Norman Mailer has said that one of the few real sorrows of 'the spooky art' is that it requires you to spend too many days among dead things. Recently, and for the first time in my life, I abandoned, not a dead thing, but a thriving novella; and I did so for reasons that were wholly extraneous. I am aware that this is hardly a tectonic event; but for me the episode was existential. In the West, writers are acclimatised to freedom - to limitless and gluttonous freedom. And I discovered something. Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer can no longer proceed. The shadow, in this case, was not a fear of repercussion. It was as if, most reluctantly, I was receiving a new vibration or frequency from the planetary shimmer. The novella was a satire called The Unknown Known

Secretary Rumsfeld was unfairly ridiculed, some thought, for his haiku-like taxonomy of the terrorist threat:

'The message is: there are known "knowns". There are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.'

Like his habit of talking in 'the third person passive once removed', this is 'very Rumsfeldian'. And Rumsfeld can be even more Rumsfeldian than that. According to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, at a closed-door senatorial briefing in September 2002 (the idea was to sell regime-change in Iraq), Rumsfeld exasperated everyone present with a torrent of Rumsfeldisms, including the following strophe: 'We know what we know, we know there are things we do not know, and we know there are things we know we don't know we don't know.' Anyway, the three categories remain quite helpful as analytical tools. And they certainly appealed very powerfully to the narrator of The Unknown Known - Ayed, a diminutive Islamist terrorist who plies his trade in Waziristan, the rugged northern borderland where Osama bin Laden is still rumoured to lurk.

Ayed's outfit, which is called 'the "Prism"', used to consist of three sectors named, not very imaginatively, Sector One, Sector Two and Sector Three. But Ayed and his colleagues are attentive readers of the Western press, and the sectors now have new titles. Known Knowns (sector one) concerns itself with daily logistics: bombs, mines, shells, and various improvised explosive devices. The work of Known Unknowns (sector two) is more peripatetic and long-term; it involves, for example, trolling around North Korea in the hope of procuring the fabled 25 kilograms of enriched uranium, or going from factory to factory in Uzbekistan on a quest for better toxins and asphyxiants. In Known Knowns, the brothers are plagued by fires and gas-leaks and almost daily explosions; the brothers in Known Unknowns are racked by headaches and sore throats, and their breath, tellingly, is rich with the aroma of potent coughdrops, moving about as they do among vats of acids and bathtubs of raw pesticides. Everyone wants to work where Ayed works, which is in sector three, or Unknown Unknowns. Sector three is devoted to conceptual breakthroughs - to shifts in the paradigm.

Shifts in the paradigm like the attack of 11 September 2001. Paradigm shifts open a window; and, once opened, the window will close. Ayed observes that 11 September was instantly unrepeatable; indeed, the tactic was obsolete by 10am the same morning. Its efficacy lasted for 71 minutes, from 8.46, when American 11 hit the North Tower, to 9.57, and the start of the rebellion on United 93. On United 93, the passengers were told about the new reality by their mobile phones, and they didn't linger long in the old paradigm - the four-day siege on the equatorial tarmac, the diminishing supplies of food and water, the festering toilets, the conditions and demands, the phased release of the children and the women; then the surrender, or the clambering commandos. No, they knew that they weren't on a commercial aircraft, not any longer; they were on a missile. So they rose up. And at 10.03 United 93 came down on its back at 580mph, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 20 minutes from the Capitol.

I found it reassuringly difficult, dreaming up paradigm shifts. And Ayed and his friends in sector three find it difficult too. Synergy, maximalisation - these are the kinds of concept that are tossed from cushion to floormat in Unknown Unknowns. Here, a comrade argues for the dynamiting of the San Andreas Fault; there, another envisages the large-scale introduction of rabies (admixed with smallpox, methamphetamine and steroids) to the fauna of Central Park. A pensive silence follows. And very often these silences last for days on end. All you can hear, in Unknown Unknowns, is the occasional swatting palm-clap, or the crackle of a beetle being ground underfoot. Ayed feels, or used to feel, superior to his colleagues, because he has already had his eureka moment. He had it in the spring of 2001, and his project - his 'baby', if you will - was launched in the summer of that year, and is still in progress. It has a codename: UU: CRs/G,C.

Ayed's conceptual breakthrough did not go down at all well in Sector Three, as it was then called; in fact, it was widely mocked. But Ayed used a family connection, and gained an audience with Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Islamist cleric who briefly ruled Afghanistan - an imposing figure, in his dishdash and flipflops. Ayed submitted his presentation, and, to his astonishment, Mullah Omar smiled on his plan. This was a necessary condition, because Ayed's paradigm shift could only be realised with the full resources of a nation state. UU: CRs/G,C went ahead. The idea was, as Ayed would say, deceptively simple. The idea was to scour all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country, and then unleash them on Greeley, Colorado.

As the story opens, the CRs have been en route to G,C for almost five years, crossing central Africa, in minibuses and on foot, and suffering many a sanguinary reverse (a host of some 30,000 Janjaweed in Sudan, a 'child militia', armed with pangas, in Congo). On top of all this, as if he didn't have enough to worry about, Ayed is not getting on very well with his wives.

Those who know the field will be undismayed by the singling out of Greeley, Colorado. For it was in Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, that Islamism, as we now know it, was decisively shaped. The story is grotesque and incredible - but then so are its consequences. And let us keep on telling ourselves how grotesque and incredible it is, our current reality, so unforeseeable, so altogether unknowable, even from the vantage of the late Nineties. At that time, if you recall, America had so much leisure on its hands, politically and culturally, that it could dedicate an entire year to Monica Lewinsky. Even Monica, it now seems, even Bill, were living in innocent times.

Since then the world has undergone a moral crash - the spiritual equivalent, in its global depth and reach, of the Great Depression of the Thirties. On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies. All this should of course be soberly compared to the feats of the opposed ideology, an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse. I will spell this out, because it has not been broadly assimilated. The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution. And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million. And it all goes back to Greeley, Colorado, and to Sayyid Qutb.

Things started to go wrong for poor Sayyid during the Atlantic crossing from Alexandria, when, allegedly, 'a drunken, semi-naked woman' tried to storm his cabin. But before we come to that, some background. Sayyid Qutb, in 1949, had just turned 43. His childhood was provincial and devout. When, as a young man, he went to study in Cairo, his leanings became literary and Europhone and even mildly cosmopolitan. Despite an early - and routinely baffling - admiration for naturism, he was already finding Cairene women 'dishonourable', and confessed to unhappiness about 'their current level of freedom'. A short story recorded his first disappointment in matters of the heart; its title, plangently, was Thorns. Well, we've all had that; and most of us then adhere to the arc described in Peter Porter's poem, 'Once Bitten, Twice Bitten'.But Sayyid didn't need much discouragement. Promptly giving up all hope of coming across a woman of 'sufficient' moral cleanliness, he resolved to stick to virginity.

Established in a modest way as a writer, Sayyid took a job at the Ministry of Education. This radicalised him. He felt oppressed by the vestiges of the British protectorate in Egypt, and was alarmist about the growing weight of the Jewish presence in Palestine - another British crime, in Sayyid's view. He became an activist, and ran some risk of imprisonment (at the hands of the saturnalian King Farouk), before the ministry packed him off to America to do a couple of years of educational research. Prison, by the way, would claim him soon after his return. He was one of the dozens of Muslim Brothers jailed (and tortured) after the failed attempt on the life of the moderniser and secularist, Nasser, in October 1954. There was a short reprieve in 1964, but Sayyid was soon rearrested - and retortured. Steelily dismissing a clemency deal brokered by none other than the young Anwar Sadat, he was hanged in August 1966; and this was a strategic martyrdom that now lies deep in the Islamist soul. His most influential book, like the book with which it is often compared, was written behind bars. Milestones is known as the Mein Kampf of Islamism.

Sayyid was presumably still sorely shaken by the birth of Israel (after the defeat of Egypt and five other Arab armies), but at first, on the Atlantic crossing, he felt a spiritual expansion. His encyclopedic commentary, In the Shade of the Koran, would fondly and ramblingly recall the renewal of his sense of purpose and destiny. Early on, he got into a minor sectarian battle with a proselytising Christian; Sayyid retaliated by doing a bit of proselytising himself, and made some progress with a contingent of Nubian sailors. Then came the traumatic incident with the drunken, semi-naked woman. Sayyid thought she was an American agent hired to seduce him, or so he later told his biographer, who wrote that 'the encounter successfully tested his resolve to resist experiences damaging to his identity as an Egyptian and a Muslim'. God knows what the episode actually amounted to. It seems probable that the liquored-up Mata Hari, the dipsomaniacal nudist, was simply a woman in a cocktail dress who, perhaps, had recently drunk a cocktail. Still, we can continue to imagine Sayyid barricading himself into his cabin while, beyond the door, the siren sings her song.

He didn't like New York: materialistic, mechanistic, trivial, idolatrous, wanton, depraved, and so on and so forth. Washington was a little better. But here, sickly Sayyid (lungs) was hospitalised, introducing him to another dire hazard that he wouldn't have faced at home: female nurses. One of them, tricked out with 'thirsty lips, bulging breasts, smooth legs' and a coquettish manner ('the calling eye, the provocative laugh'), regaled him with her wish-list of endowments for the ideal lover. But 'the father of Islamism', as he is often called, remained calm, later developing the incident into a diatribe against Arab men who succumb to the allure of American women. In an extraordinary burst of mendacity or delusion, Sayyid claimed that the medical staff heartlessly exulted at the news of the assassination, back in Egypt, of Hasan al-Banna. We may wonder how likely it is that any American would have heard of al-Banna, or indeed of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he founded. When Sayyid was discharged from George Washington University Hospital, he probably thought the worst was behind him. But now he proceeded to the cauldron - to the pullulating hellhouse - of Greeley, Colorado.

During his six months at the Colorado State College of Education (and thereafter in California), Sayyid's hungry disapproval found a variety of targets. American lawns (a distressing example of selfishness and atomism), American conversation ('money, movie stars and models of cars'), American jazz ('a type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies - their desire for noise and their appetite for sexual arousal'), and, of course, American women: here another one pops up, telling Sayyid that sex is merely a physical function, untrammelled by morality. American places of worship he also detests (they are like cinemas or amusement arcades), but by now he is pining for Cairo, and for company, and he does something rash. Qutb joins a club - where an epiphany awaits him. 'The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone,' he wrote; 'the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.' You'd think that the father of Islamism had exposed himself to an early version of Studio 54 or even Plato's Retreat. But no: the club he joined was run by the church, and what he is describing, here, is a chapel hop in Greeley, Colorado. And Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, was dry

'And the air is full of lust.' 'Lust' is Bernard Lewis's translation, but several other writers prefer the word 'love'. And while lust has greater immediate impact, love may in the end be more resonant. Why should Qutb mind if the air is full of love? We are forced to wonder whether love can be said to exist, as we understand it, in the ferocious patriarchy of Islamism. If death and hate are the twin opposites of love, then it may not be merely whimsical and mawkish to suggest that the terrorist, the bringer of death and hate, the death-hate cultist, is in essence the enemy of love. Qutb:

'A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, 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.'

In his excellent book, Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman has many sharp things to say about the corpus of Sayyid Qutb; but he manages to goad himself into receptivity, and ends up, in my view, sounding almost absurdly respectful - 'rich, nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt'. Qutb, who would go on to write a 30-volume gloss on it, spent his childhood memorising the Koran. He was 10 by the time he was done. Now, given that, it seems idle to expect much sense from him; and so it proves. On the last of the 46 pages he devotes to Qutb, Berman wraps things up with a long quotation. This is its repetitive first paragraph:

'The Surah [the sayings of the Prophet] tells the Muslims that, in the fight to uphold God's universal Truth, lives will have to be sacrificed. Those who risk their lives and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God, are honourable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.'

Savouring that last phrase, we realise that any voyage taken with Sayyid Qutb is doomed to a leaden-witted circularity. The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of his philosophy is steadily colonised by a vast entanglement of bitternesses; and here, too, we detect the presence of that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified early on by Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred - the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th (when the 'last' Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the 20th. And most astounding of all, in Qutb, is the level of self-awareness, which is less than zero. It is as if the very act of self-examination were something unmanly or profane: something unrighteous, in a word.

Still, one way or the other, Qutb is the father of Islamism. Here are the chief tenets he inspired: that America, and its clients, are jahiliyya (the word classically applied to pre-Muhammadan Arabia - barbarous and benighted); that America is controlled by Jews; that Americans are infidels, that they are animals, and, worse, arrogant animals, and are unworthy of life; that America promotes pride and promiscuity in the service of human degradation; that America seeks to 'exterminate' Islam - and that it will accomplish this not by conquest, not by colonial annexation, but by example. As Bernard Lewis puts it in The Crisis of Islam

'This is what is meant by the term the Great Satan, applied to the United States by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Satan as depicted in the Qur'an is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer, 'the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men' (Qur'an, CXIV, 4, 5).

Lewis might have added that these are the closing words of the Koran. So they echo.

The West isn't being seductive, of course; all the West is being is attractive. But the Islamist's paranoia extends to a kind of thwarted narcissism. We think again of Qutb's buxom, smooth-legged nurse, supposedly smacking her thirsty lips at the news of the death of Hasan al-Banna. Far from wanting or trying to exterminate it, the West had no views whatever about Islam per se before 11 September 2001. Of course, views were then formulated, and very soon the bestseller list was a column of primers on Islam. Some things take longer to sink in than others, true; but now we know. In the West we had brought into being a society whose main purpose, whose raison d'etre, was the tantalisation of good Muslims.

The theme of the 'tempter' can be taken a little further, in the case of Qutb. When the tempter is a temptress, and really wants you to sin, she needs to be both available and willing. And it is almost inconceivable that poor Sayyid, the frail, humourless civil servant, and turgid anti-semite (salting his talk with quotes from that long-exploded fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), ever encountered anything that resembled an offer. It is more pitiful than that. Seduction did not come his way, but it was coming the way of others, he sensed, and a part of him wanted it too. That desire made him very afraid, and also shamed him and dishonoured him, and turned his thoughts to murder. Then the thinkers of Islam took his books and did what they did to them; and Sayyid Qutb is now a part of our daily reality. We should understand that the Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract, too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.

Qutb has perhaps a single parallel in world history. Another shambling invert, another sexual truant (not a virgin but a career cuckold), another marginal quack and dabbler (talentless but not philistine), he too wrote a book, in prison, that fell into the worst possible hands. His name was Nikolai Chernyshevsky; and his novel (What Is To Be Done?) was read five times by Vladimir Lenin in the course of a single summer. It was Chernyshevsky who determined, not the content, but the emotional dynamic of the Soviet experiment. The centennial of his birth was celebrated with much pomp in the USSR. That was in 1928. But Russia was too sad, and too busy, to do much about the centennial of his death, which passed quietly in 1989.

In The Unknown Known my diminutive terrorist, Ayed, is not a virgin (or a Joseph, as Christians say), unlike Sayyid, on whom he is tangentially based. He is, rather, a polygamist, confining himself to the sanctioned maximum of four. On top of this, he indulges himself, whenever he has enough spare cash, with a succession of 'temporary wives'. The practice is called mutah. In her justly celebrated book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi tells us that a temporary marriage can endure for 99 years; it can also be over in half an hour. The Islamic Republic is very attentive to what it calls 'men's needs'. Before the Revolution, a girl could get married at the age of 18. After 1979 the age requirement was halved.

In Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, VS Naipaul looks at some of the social results of polygamy, in Pakistan, and notes that the marriages tend to be serial. The man moves on, 'religiously tomcatting away'; and the consequence is a society of 'half-orphans'. Divorce is in any case unarduous: 'a man who wanted to get rid of his wife could accuse her of adultery and have her imprisoned'. It is difficult to exaggerate the sexualisation of Islamist governance, even among the figures we think of as moderate. Type in 'sex' and 'al-Sistani', and prepare yourself for a cataract of pedantry and smut.

As the narrative opens, Ayed is very concerned about the state of his marriages. But there's a reason for that. When Ayed was a little boy, in the early Eighties, his dad, a talented poppy-farmer, left Waziristan with his family and settled in Greeley, Colorado. This results in a domestic blow to Ayed's self-esteem. Back home in Waziristan, a boy of his age would be feeling a lovely warm glow of pride, around now, as he realises that his sisters, in one important respect, are just like his mother: they can't read or write either. In America, though, the girls are obliged to go to school. Before Ayed knows it, the women have shed their veils, and his sisters are being called on by gum-chewing kaffirs. Now puberty looms.

There is almost an entire literary genre given over to sensibilities such as Sayyid Qutb's. It is the genre of the unreliable narrator - or, more exactly, the transparent narrator, with his helpless giveaways. Typically, a patina of haughty fastidiousness strives confidently but in vain to conceal an underworld of incurable murk. In The Unknown Known I added to this genre, and with enthusiasm. I had Ayed stand for hours in a thicket of nettles and poison ivy, beneath an elevated walkway, so that he could rail against the airiness of the summer frocks worn by American women and the shameless brevity of their underpants. I had him go out in all weathers for evening strolls, strolls gruellingly prolonged until, with the help of a buttress or a drainpipe, he comes across a woman 'quite openly' undressing for bed. Meanwhile, his sisters are all dating. The father and the brothers discuss various courses of action, such as killing them all; but America, bereft of any sense of honour, would punish them for that. The family bifurcates; Ayed returns to the rugged borderland, joins 'the "Prism"', and courts his quartet of nine-year-old sweethearts.

As Ayed keeps telling all his temporary wives, 'My wives don't understand me.' And they don't; indeed, they all want divorces, and for the same embarrassing reason. With his paradigm-shift attack on America now in ruins, and facing professional and social disgrace, Ayed suddenly sees how, in one swoop, he can redeem himself - and secure his place in history with an unknown unknown which is sure to succeed. For this he will be needing a belt

Two years ago I came across a striking photograph in a news magazine: it looked like a crudely cross-sectioned watermelon, but you could make out one or two humanoid features half-submerged in the crimson pulp. It was in fact the bravely circularised photograph of the face of a Saudi newscaster who had been beaten by her husband. In an attempted murder, it seems: at the time of his arrest he had her in the trunk of his car, and was evidently taking her into the desert for interment. What had she done to bring this on herself? In the marital home, that night, the telephone rang and the newscaster, a prosperous celebrity in her own right, answered it. She had answered the telephone. Male Westerners will be struck, here, by a dramatic cultural contrast. I know that I, for one, would be far more likely to beat my wife to death if she hadn't answered the telephone. But customs and mores vary from country to country, and you cannot reasonably claim that one ethos is 'better' than any other.

In 1949 Greeley was dry... It has been seriously suggested, by serious commentators, that suicide-mass murderers are searching for the simplest means of getting a girlfriend. It may be, too, that some of them are searching for the simplest means of getting a drink. Although alcohol, like extramarital sex, may be strictly forbidden in life, there is, in death, no shortage of either. As well as the Koranic virgins, 'as chaste', for the time being, 'as the sheltered eggs of ostriches', there is also a 'gushing fountain' of white wine (wine 'that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason'). The suicide-mass murderer can now raise his brimming 'goblet' to an additional reward: he has the power, post mortem, to secure paradisal immortality for a host of relations (the number is a round 70, two fewer, curiously, than the traditional allotment of houris). Nor is this his only service to the clan, which, until recently, could expect an honorarium of $20,000 from Iraq, plus $5,000 from Saudi Arabia - as well as the vast prestige automatically accorded to the family of a martyr. And then there is the enticement, or incitement, of peer-group prestige.

Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion. Paul Berman's best chapter, in Terror and Liberalism, is mildly entitled 'Wishful Thinking' - and Berman is in general a mild-mannered man. But this is a very tough and persistent analysis of our extraordinary uncertainty. It is impossible to read it without cold fascination and a consciousness of disgrace. I felt disgrace, during its early pages, because I had done it too, and in print, early on. Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.

After the failure of Oslo, and the attendant consolidation of Hamas, the second intifada ('earthquake') got under way in 2001, not with stonings and stabbings, like the first, but with a steady campaign of suicide-mass murder. 'All over the world,' writes Berman, 'the popularity of the Palestinian cause did not collapse. It increased.' The parallel process was the intensive demonisation of Israel (academic ostracism, and so on); every act of suicide-mass murder 'testified' to the extremity of the oppression, so that 'Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt'. And when Sharon replaced Barak, and the expected crackdown began, and the Israeli army, with 23 casualties of its own, killed 52 Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin, the attack 'was seen as a veritable Holocaust, an Auschwitz, or, in an alternative image, as the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Wehrmacht's assault on the Warsaw Ghetto. These tropes were massively accepted, around the world. Typing in the combined names of "Jenin" and "Auschwitz"... I came up with 2,890 references; and, typing in "Jenin" and "Nazi", I came up with 8,100 references. There were 63,100 references to the combined names of "Sharon" and "Hitler".' Once the redoubled suppression had taken hold, the human bombings decreased; and world opinion quietened down. The Palestinians were now worse off than ever, their societal gains of the Nineties 'flattened by Israeli tanks'. But the protests 'rose and fell in tandem with the suicide bomb attacks, and not in tandem with the suffering of the Palestinian people'.

This was because suicide-mass murder presented the West with a philosophical crisis. The quickest way out of it was to pretend that the tactic was reasonable, indeed logical and even admirable: an extreme case of 'rationalist naivete', in Berman's phrase. Rationalist naivete was easier than the assimilation of the alternative: that is to say, the existence of a pathological cult. Berman assembles many voices. And if we are going to hear the rhetoric of delusion and self-hypnosis, then we might as well hear it from a Stockholm Laureate - the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago. Again erring on the side of indulgence, Berman is unnecessarily daunted by the pedigree of Saramago's prose, which is in fact the purest and snootiest bombast (you might call it Nobelese). Here he focuses his lofty gaze on the phenomenon of suicide-mass murder:

'Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists... Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb.'

Palestinian society has channelled a good deal of thought and energy into the solemnisation of suicide-mass murder, a process which begins in kindergarten. Naturally, one would be reluctant to question the cloudless piety of the Palestinian mother who, having raised one suicide-mass murderer, expressed the wish that his younger brother would become a suicide-mass murderer too. But the time has come to cease to respect the quality of her 'rage' - to cease to marvel at the unhingeing rigour of Israeli oppression, and to start to marvel at the power of an entrenched and emulous ideology, and a cult of death. And if oppression is what we're interested in, then we should think of the oppression, not to mention the life-expectancy (and, God, what a life), of the younger brother. There will be much stopping and starting to do. It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog. It is painful to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last for ever.

Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence. The suicide-mass murderer asks his prospective victims to contemplate their fellow human being with a completely new order of execration. It is not like looking down the barrel of a gun. We can tell this is so, because we see what happens, sometimes, when the suicide-mass murderer isn't even there - as in the amazingly summary injustice meted out to the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in London. An even more startling example was the rumour-ignited bridge stampede in Baghdad (31 August 2005). This is the superterror inspired by suicide-mass murder: just whisper the words, and you fatally trample a thousand people. And it remains an accurate measure of the Islamists' contortion: they hold that an act of lethal self-bespatterment, in the interests of an unachievable 'cause', brings with it the keys to paradise. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, stresses just how thoroughly and expeditiously the suicide-mass murderer is 'saved'. Which would you prefer, given belief?

'... martyrdom is the only way that a Muslim can bypass the painful litigation that awaits us all on the Day of Judgment and proceed directly to heaven. Rather than spend centuries mouldering in the earth in anticipation of being resurrected and subsequently interrogated by wrathful angels, the martyr is immediately transported to Allah's garden...'

Osama bin Laden's table talk, at Tarnak Farms in Afghanistan, where he trained his operatives before September 2001, must have included many rolling paragraphs on Western vitiation, corruption, perversion, prostitution, and all the rest. And in 1998, as season after season unfolded around the president's weakness for fellatio, he seemed to have good grounds for his most serious miscalculation: the belief that America was a softer antagonist than the USSR (in whose defeat, incidentally, the 'Arab Afghans' played a negligible part). Still, a sympathiser like the famously obtuse 'American Taliban' John Walker Lindh, if he'd been there, and if he'd been a little brighter, might have framed the following argument.

Now would be a good time to strike, John would tell Osama, because the West is enfeebled, not just by sex and alcohol, but also by 30 years of multicultural relativism. They'll think suicide bombing is just an exotic foible, like shame-and-honour killings or female circumcision. Besides, it's religious, and they're always slow to question anything that calls itself that. Within days of our opening outrage, the British royals will go on the road for Islam, and stay on it. And you'll be amazed by how long the word Islamophobia, as an unanswerable indictment, will cover Islamism too. It'll take them years to come up with the word they want - and Islamismophobia clearly isn't any good. Even if the Planes Operation succeeds, and thousands die, the Left will yawn and wonder why we waited so long. Strike now. Their ideology will make them reluctant to see what it is they confront. And it will make them slow learners.

By the summer of 2005, suicide-mass murder had evolved. In Iraq, foreign jihadis, pilgrims of war, were filing across the borders to be strapped up with explosives and nails and nuts and bolts, often by godless Baathists with entirely secular aims - to be primed like pieces of ordnance and then sent out the same day to slaughter their fellow Muslims. Suicide-mass murder, in other words, had passed through a phase of decadence and was now on the point of debauchery. In a single month (May), there were more human bombings in Iraq than during the entire intifada. And this, on 25 July, was the considered response of the Mayor of London to the events of 7 July:

'Given that they don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In an unfair balance, that's what people use.'

I remember a miserable little drip of a poem, c2002, that made exactly the same case. No, they don't have F-16s. Question: would the Mayor like them to have F-16s? And, no, their bodies are not what 'people' use. They are what Islamists use. And we should weigh, too, the spiritual paltriness of such martyrdoms. 'Martyr' means witness. The suicide-mass murderer witnesses nothing - and sacrifices nothing. He dies for vulgar and delusive gain. And on another level, too, the rationale for 'martyrdom operations' is a theological sophistry of the blackest cynicism. Its aim is simply the procurement of delivery systems.

Our ideology, which is sometimes called Westernism, weakens us in two ways. It weakens our powers of perception, and it weakens our moral unity and will. As Harris puts it:

'Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favourite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilisation... Pragmatism, when civilisations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right - about anything - seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".'

The opening argument we reach for now, in explaining any conflict, is the argument of moral equivalence. No value can be allowed to stand in stone; so we begin to question our ability to identify even what is malum per se. Prison beatings, too, are evil in themselves, and so is the delegation of torture, and murder, to less high-minded and (it has to be said) less hypocritical regimes. In the kind of war that we are now engaged in, an episode like Abu Ghraib is more than a shameful deviation - it is the equivalent of a lost battle. Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy.

There is another symbiotic overlap between Islamist praxis and our own, and it is a strange and pitiable one. I mean the drastic elevation of the nonentity. In our popularity-contest culture, with its VIP ciphers and meteoric mediocrities, we understand the attractions of baseless fame - indeed, of instant and unearned immortality. To feel that you are a geohistorical player is a tremendous lure to those condemned, as they see it, to exclusion and anonymity. In its quieter way, this was perhaps the key component of the attraction of Western intellectuals to Soviet Communism: 'join', and you are suddenly a contributor to planetary events. As Muhammad Atta steered the 767 towards its destination, he was confident, at least, that his fellow town-planners, in Aleppo, would remember his name, along with everybody else on earth. Similarly, the ghost of Shehzad Tanweer, as it watched the salvage teams scraping up human remains in the rat-infested crucible beneath the streets of London, could be sure that he had decisively outsoared the fish-and-shop back in Leeds. And that other great nothingness, Osama bin Laden - he is ever-living.

In July 2005 I flew from Montevideo to New York - and from winter to summer - with my six-year-old daughter and her eight-year-old sister. I drank a beer as I stood in the check-in queue, a practice not frowned on at Carrasco (though it would certainly raise eyebrows at, say, the dedicated Hajj terminal in Tehran's Mehrabad); then we proceeded to Security. Now I know some six-year-old girls can look pretty suspicious; but my youngest daughter isn't like that. She is a slight little blonde with big brown eyes and a quavery voice. Nevertheless, I stood for half an hour at the counter while the official methodically and solemnly searched her carry-on rucksack - staring shrewdly at each story-tape and crayon, palpating the length of all four limbs of her fluffy duck.

There ought to be a better word than boredom for the trance of inanition that weaved its way through me. I wanted to say something like, 'Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on aeroplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick to people who look like they're from the Middle East.' The revelations of 10 August 2006 were 13 months away. And despite the exposure and prevention of their remarkably ambitious bloodbath of the innocent (the majority of them women and children), the (alleged) Walthamstow jihadis did not quite strive in vain. The failed to promote terror, but they won a great symbolic victory for boredom: the banning of books on the seven-hour flight from England to America.

My daughters and I arrived safely in New York. In New York, at certain subway stations, the police were searching all the passengers, to thwart terrorism - thus obliging any terrorist to walk the couple of blocks to a subway station where the police weren't searching all the passengers. And I couldn't defend myself from a vision of the future; in this future, riding a city bus will be like flying El Al. In the guilty safety of Long Island I watched the TV coverage from my home town, where my other three children live, where I will soon again be living with all five. There were the Londoners, on 8 July, going to work on foot, looking stiff and watchful, and taking no pleasure in anything they saw. Eric Hobsbawm got it right in the mid-Nineties, when he said that terrorism was part of the atmospheric 'pollution' of Western cities. It is a cost-efficient programme. Bomb New York and you pollute Madrid; bomb Madrid and you pollute London; bomb London and you pollute Paris and Rome, and repollute New York. But there was the solace given us by the Mayor. No, we should not be surprised by the use of this sempiternal ruse de guerre. Using their bodies is what people do.

The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to 'a tolerable level' (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven't got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn't feel. To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an 'ism'. It is independence of mind - that's all. When I refer to the age of boredom, I am not thinking of airport queues and subway searches. I mean the global confrontation with the dependent mind.

One way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. The transitional period would be an unsmiling one, no doubt, with much stern work to be completed in the city squares, the town centres, and the village greens. Nevertheless, as the Caliphate is restored in Baghdad, to much joy, the surviving neophytes would soon get used to the voluminous penal code enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. It would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else - a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the only entertainment is the public execution. My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma - the community of believers. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his copious writings, often returns to this theme. He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that, so long as they observe all the formal pieties, then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please. 'Islam', as he frequently reminds us, 'isn't like that.' Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means 'submission' - the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations, and 14 centuries.

The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.

By the beginning of the 20th century the entire Muslim world, with partial exceptions, had been subjugated by the European empires. And at that point the doors of perception were opened to foreign influence: that of Germany. This allegiance cost Islam its last imperium, the Ottoman, for decades a 'helpless hulk' (Hobsbawm), which was duly dismantled and shared out after the First World War - a war that was made in Berlin. Undeterred, Islam continued to look to Germany for sponsorship and inspiration. When the Nazi experiment ended, in 1945, sympathy for its ideals lingered on for years, but Islam was now forced to look elsewhere. It had no choice; geopolitically, there was nowhere else to turn. And the flame passed from Germany to the USSR.

So Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-semitic, anti-

liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fuelled. The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis (pagan) and the Bolsheviks (atheist) sought to bring about was an earthly one, raised from the mulch of millions of corpses. For them, death was creative, right enough, but death was still death. For the Islamists, death is a consummation and a sacrament; death is a beginning. Sam Harris is right:

'Islamism is not merely the latest flavour of totalitarian nihilism. There is a difference between nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward. Islamists could smash the world to atoms and still not be guilty of nihilism, because everything in their world has been transfigured by the light of paradise...' Pathological mass movements are sustained by 'dreams of omnipotence and sadism', in Robert Jay Lifton's phrase. That is usually enough. Islamism adds a third inducement to its warriors: a heavenly immortality that begins even before the moment of death.

For close to a millennium, Islam could afford to be autarkic. Its rise is one of the wonders of world history - a chain reaction of conquest and conversion, an amassment not just of territory but of millions of hearts and minds. The vigour of its ideal of justice allowed for levels of tolerance significantly higher than those of the West. Culturally, too, Islam was the more evolved. Its assimilations and its learning potentiated the Renaissance - of which, alas, it did not partake. Throughout its ascendancy, Islam was buoyed by what Malise Ruthven, in A Fury for God, calls 'the argument from manifest success'. The fact of expansion underwrote the mandate of heaven. And now, for the past 300 or 400 years, observable reality has propounded a rebuttal: the argument from manifest failure. As one understands it, in the Islamic cosmos there is nothing more painful than the suspicion that something has denatured the covenant with God. This unbearable conclusion must naturally be denied, but it is subliminally present, and accounts, perhaps, for the apocalyptic hurt of the Islamist.

Over the past five years, what we have been witnessing, apart from a moral slump or bust, is a death agony: the death agony of imperial Islam. Islamism is the last wave - the last convulsion. Until 2003, one could take some comfort from the very virulence of the Islamist deformation. Nothing so insanely dionysian, so impossibly poisonous, could expect to hold itself together over time. In the 20th century, outside Africa, the only comparable eruptions of death-hunger, of death-oestrus, were confined to Nazi Germany and Stalinite Kampuchea, the one lasting 12 years, the other three and a half. Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama: such men only ask to be the last to die. But there are some sound reasons for thinking that the confrontation with Islamism will be testingly prolonged.

It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, with the Iraq War. The fatal turn, the fatal forfeiture of legitimacy, came not with the mistaken but also cynical emphasis on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction: the intelligence agencies of every country on earth, Iraq included, believed that he had them. The fatal turn was the American President's all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln ('Mission Accomplished') - every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.

We should parenthetically add that Tony Blair succumbed to it too - with a difference. In 'old' Europe, as Rumsfeld insolently called it, the idea of a political class was predicated on the inculcation of checks and balances, of psychic surge-breakers, to limit the corruption that personal paramountcy always entrains. It was not a matter of mental hygiene; everyone understood that a rotting mind will make rotten decisions. Blair knew this. He also knew that his trump was not a high one: the need of the American people to hear approval for the war in an English accent. Yet there he was, helplessly caught up in the slipstream turbulence of George Bush. Rumsfeld, too, visibly succumbed to it. On television, at this time, he looked as though he had just worked his way through a snowball of cocaine. 'Stuff happens,' he said, when asked about the looting of the Mesopotamian heritage in Baghdad - the remark of a man not just corrupted but floridly vulgarised by power. As well as the body language, at this time, there was also the language, the power language, all the way from Bush's 'I want to kick ass' to his 'Bring it on' - a rather blithe incitement, some may now feel, to the armed insurgency.

Contemplating this, one's aversion was very far from being confined to the aesthetic. Much followed from it. And we now know that an atmosphere of boosterist unanimity, of prewar triumphalism, had gathered around the President, an atmosphere in which any counter-argument, any hint of circumspection, was seen as a whimper of weakness or disloyalty. If she were alive, Barbara Tuchman would be chafing to write a long addendum to The March of Folly; but not even she could have foreseen a president who, 'going into this period', 'was praying for strength to do the Lord's will'. A power rush blessed by God - no, not a good ambience for precautions and doubts. At that time, the invasion of Iraq was presented as a 'self-financing' preventive war to enforce disarmament and regime change. Three and a half years later, it is an adventurist and proselytising war, and its remaining goal is the promotion of democracy.

The Iraq project was foredoomed by three intrinsic historical realities. First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule - for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it. Did no one whisper the words, in the Situation Room - did no one say what the scholars have been saying for years? The 'electoral policy' of the fundamentalists, writes Lewis, 'has been classically summarised as "One man (men only), one vote, once."' Or, in Harris's trope, democracy will be 'little more than a gangplank to theocracy'; and that theocracy will be Islamist. Now the polls have closed, and the results are coming in, region-wide. In Lebanon, gains for Hizbollah; in Egypt, gains for Sayyid Qutb's fraternity, the Muslim Brothers; in Palestine, victory for Hamas; in Iran, victory for the soapbox rabble-rouser and primitive anti-semite, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the Iraqi election, Bush and Blair, pathetically, both 'hoped' for Allawi, whose return was 14 per cent.

Second, Iraq is not a real country. It was cobbled together, by Winston Churchill, in the early Twenties; it consists of three separate (Ottoman) provinces, Sunni, Shia, Kurd - a disposition which looks set to resume. Among the words not listened to by the US Administration, we can include those of Saddam Hussein. Even with an apparatus of terror as savage as any in history, even with chemical weapons, helicopter gunships, and mass killings, even with a proven readiness to cleanse, to displace, and to destroy whole ecosystems, Hussein modestly conceded that he found Iraq a difficult country to keep in one piece. As a Sunni military man put it, Iraqis hate Iraq - or 'Iraq', a concept that has brought them nothing but suffering. There is no nationalist instinct; the instinct is for atomisation.

Third, only the sack of Mecca or Medina would have caused more pain to the Islamic heart than the taking, and befouling, of the Iraqi capital, the seat of the Caliphate. We have not heard any discussion, at home, about the creedal significance of Baghdad. But we have had some intimations from the jihadis' front line. In pronouncements that vibrate with historic afflatus, they speak of their joyful embrace of the chance to meet the infidel in the Land Between the Rivers. And, of course, beyond - in Madrid, in Bali (again), in London. It may be that the Coalition adventure has given the enemy a casus belli that will burn for a generation.

There are vast pluralities all over the West that are thirsting for American failure in Iraq - because they hate George Bush. Perhaps they do not realise that they are co-synchronously thirsting for an Islamist victory that will dramatically worsen the lives of their children. And this may come to pass. Let us look at the war, not through bin Laden's eyes, but through the eyes of the cunning of history. From that perspective, 11 September was a provocation. The 'slam dunk', the 'cakewalk' into Iraq amounted to a feint, and a trap. We now know, from various 500-page bestsellers like Cobra II and Fiasco, that the invasion of Iraq was truly incredibly blithe (there was no plan, no plan at all, for the occupation); still, we should not delude ourselves that the motives behind it were dishonourable. This is a familiar kind of tragedy. The Iraq War represents a gigantic contract, not just for Halliburton, but also for the paving company called Good Intentions. We must hope that something can be salvaged from it, and that our ethical standing can be reconsolidated. Iraq was a divagation in what is being ominously called the Long War. To our futile losses in blood, treasure and moral prestige, we can add the loss in time; and time, too, is blood.

An idea presents itself about a better direction to take. And funnily enough its current champion is the daughter of the dark genius behind the disaster in Iraq: she is called Liz Cheney. Before we come to that, though, we must briefly return to Ayed, and his belt, and to some quiet thoughts about the art of fiction.

The 'belt' ending of The Unknown Known came to me fairly late. But the belt was already there, and prominently. All writers will know exactly what this means. It means that the subconscious had made a polite suggestion, a suggestion that the conscious mind had taken a while to see. Ayed's belt, purchased by mail-order in Greeley, Colorado, is called a 'RodeoMaMa', and consists of a 'weight strap' and the pommel of a saddle. Ayed is of that breed of men which holds that a husband should have sex with his wives every night. And his invariable use of the 'RodeoMaMa' is one of the reasons for the rumble of mutiny in his marriages.

Looking in at the longhouse called Known Knowns, Ayed retools his 'RodeoMaMa'. He goes back to the house and summons his wives - for the last time. Thus Ayed gets his conceptual breakthrough, his unknown unknown: he is the first to bring martyrdom operations into the setting of his own home.

I could write a piece almost as long as this one about why I abandoned The Unknown Known. The confirmatory moment came a few weeks ago: the freshly fortified suspicion that there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder. For quite a time I have felt that Islamism was trying to poison the world. Here was a sign that the poison might take - might mutate, like bird flu. Islam, as I said, is a total system, and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire. But with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies.

In Twentieth Century the late historian JM Roberts took an unsentimental line on the Chinese Revolution:

'More than 2,000 years of remarkable historical continuities lie behind [it], which, for all its cost and cruelty, was a heroic endeavour, matched in scale only by such gigantic upheavals as the spread of Islam, or Europe's assault on the world in early modern times.'

The cost and cruelty, according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's recent biography, amounted, perhaps, to 70 million lives in the Mao period alone. Yet this has to be balanced against 'the weight of the past' - nowhere heavier than in China:

'Deliberate attacks on family authority... were not merely attempts by a suspicious regime to encourage informers and delation, but attacks on the most conservative of all Chinese institutions. Similarly, the advancement of women and propaganda to discourage early marriage had dimensions going beyond 'progressive' feminist ideas or population control; they were an assault on the past such as no other revolution had ever made, for in China the past meant a role for women far inferior to those of pre-revolutionary America, France or even Russia.'

There is no momentum, in Islam, for a reformation. And there is no time, now, for a leisurely, slow-lob enlightenment. The necessary upheaval is a revolution - the liberation of women. This will not be the work of a decade or even a generation. Islam is a millennium younger than China. But we should remind ourselves that the Chinese Revolution took half a century to roll through its villages.

In 2002 the aggregate GDP of all the Arab countries was less than the GDP of Spain; and the Islamic states lag behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality. (A recondite example: in terms of the ownership of telephone lines, the leading Islamic nation is the UAE, listed in 33rd place, between Reunion and Macau.) Then, too, there is the matter of tyranny, corruption, and the absence of civil rights and civil society. We may wonder how the Islamists feel when they compare India to Pakistan, one a burgeoning democratic superpower, the other barely distinguishable from a failed state. What Went Wrong? asked Bernard Lewis, at book length. The broad answer would be institutionalised irrationalism; and the particular focus would be the obscure logic that denies the Islamic world the talent and energy of half its people. No doubt the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male. But we can dwell on the memory of those images from Afghanistan: the great waves of women hurrying