As the 9/11 anniversary approaches, we’re going to be besieged by pundits offering platitudes about where Bin Laden came from and why the Saudis had nothing to do with it. Some academics will say that Bin Laden was just backlash from Afghanistan. Uriya Shavit, a fluent Arabic speaker, has put this to rest by tracing how Saudi conspiracy theories and a few radical Islamist professors laid the groundwork for Bin Laden’s intellectual rise.