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AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI, the man who would lead Qutb’s vanguard, grew up in a quiet middle-class suburb called Maadi, five miles south of the noisy chaos of Cairo. It was an unlikely breeding ground for revolution. A consortium of Egyptian Jewish financiers, intending to create a kind of English village amid the mango and guava plantations and the Bedouin settlements on the eastern bank of the Nile, began selling lots in the first decade of the twentieth century. The developers regulated everything, from the height of the garden fences to the color of the shutters on the grand villas lining the streets. Like Nathan Meeker, the founder of Greeley, the creators of Maadi dreamed of a utopian society, one that was not only safe and clean and orderly but also tolerant and at ease in the modern world. They planted eucalyptus trees to repel flies and mosquitoes, and gardens to perfume the air with the fragrance of roses, jasmine, and bougainvillea. Many of the early settlers were British military officers and civil servants, whose wives started garden clubs and literary salons; they were followed by Jewish families, who by the end of World War II made up nearly a third of Maadi’s population. After the war, Maadi evolved into a mélange of expatriate Europeans, American businessmen and missionaries, and a certain type of Egyptian—typically one who spoke French at dinner and followed the cricket matches.
The center of this cosmopolitan community was the Maadi Sporting Club. Founded at a time when the British still occupied Egypt, the club was unusual in that it actually admitted Egyptians. Community business was often conducted on the all-sand eighteen-hole golf course, with the Giza pyramids and the palmy Nile as a backdrop. As high tea was being served to the Brits in the lounge, Nubian waiters bearing icy glasses of Nescafé glided among the pashas and princesses sunbathing at the pool. High-stepping flamingos waded through the lilies in the garden pond. The Maadi Club became an ideal expression of the founders’ vision of Egypt—sophisticated, secular, ethnically diverse but married to British notions of class.
The careful regulations of the founders could not withstand the crush of Cairo’s burgeoning population, however, and in the 1960s another Maadi took root within this exotic community. Road 9 ran beside the train tracks that separated the tony side of Maadi from the baladi district—the native part of town, where the irrepressible ancient squalor of Egypt unfurled itself. Donkey carts clopped along the unpaved streets past peanut vendors and yam salesmen hawking their wares and fly-studded carcasses hanging in the butcher shops. There was also, on this side of town, a narrow slice of the middle class—teachers and midlevel bureaucrats among them—who were drawn by Maadi’s cleaner air and the nearly impossible prospect of crossing the tracks and being welcomed into the club.
In 1960 Dr. Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri and his wife, Umayma, moved from Heliopolis to Maadi. Rabie and Umayma belonged to two of the most prominent families in Egypt. The Zawahiri (pronounced za-wah-iri) clan was already on its way to becoming a medical dynasty. Rabie was a professor of pharmacology at Ain Shams University. His brother was a highly regarded dermatologist and an expert on venereal diseases. The tradition they established would continue in the next generation: a 1995 obituary in a Cairo newspaper for Kashif al-Zawahiri, an engineer, mentioned forty-six members of the family, thirty-one of whom were doctors or chemists or pharmacists scattered throughout the Arab world and the United States; among the others were an ambassador, a judge, and a member of parliament.
The Zawahiri name, however, was associated above all with religion. In 1929 Rabie’s uncle Mohammed al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri became the rector of al-Azhar, the thousand-year-old university in the heart of Old Cairo, which is still the center of Islamic learning in the Middle East. The leader of that institution enjoys a kind of papal status in the Muslim world. Imam Mohammed is remembered as the institution’s great modernizer, although he was highly unpopular at the time and eventually was driven out of office by student and faculty strikes protesting his policies. Rabie’s father and grandfather were al-Azhar scholars as well.
Umayma Azzam, Rabie’s wife, was from a clan that was equally distinguished, but wealthier and more political. Her father, Dr. Abdul Wahhab Azzam, was the president of Cairo University and the founder of King Saud University in Riyadh. Along with his busy academic life, he also served as the Egyptian ambassador to Pakistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. He was the most prominent pan-Arab intellectual of his time. His uncle had been a founder and the first secretary-general of the Arab League.
Despite their remarkable pedigrees, Professor Zawahiri and Umayma settled into an apartment on Street 100, on the baladi side of the tracks. Later they rented a duplex at Number 10, Street 154, near the train station. Maadi society held no interest for them. They were religious, but not overtly pious. Umayma went about unveiled, but that was not unusual; public displays of religious zeal were rare in Egypt then and almost unheard-of in Maadi. There were more churches than mosques in the neighborhood, and a thriving Jewish synagogue as well.
Children quickly filled the Zawahiri home. The oldest, Ayman and his twin sister, Umnya, were born on June 19, 1951. The twins were at the top of their classes all the way through medical school. A younger sister, Heba, born three years later, also became a doctor. The two other children, Mohammed and Hussein, trained as architects.
Obese, bald, and slightly cross-eyed, Ayman’s father had the reputation of being eccentric and absentminded, and yet he was beloved by his students and neighborhood children. He spent most of his time in the laboratory or in his private medical clinic. Professor Zawahiri’s research occasionally took him to Czechoslovakia, at a time when few Egyptians traveled because of currency restrictions. He always returned loaded with toys. He enjoyed taking the children to the movies at the Maadi Sporting Club, which were open to nonmembers. Young Ayman loved the cartoons and Disney films, which played three nights a week on the outdoor screen. In the summer, the extended family would go to the beach in Alexandria. Life on a professor’s salary was often tight, however, especially with five ambitious children to educate. The family never owned a car until Ayman was grown. Like many Egyptian academics, Professor Zawahiri eventually spent several years teaching outside of Egypt—he went to Algeria—to earn a higher income. To economize, the Zawahiris kept hens and ducks behind the house, and the professor bought oranges and mangoes by the crate, which he pressed on the children as a natural source of vitamin C. Although he was a druggist by training, he was opposed to consuming chemicals.
For anyone living in Maadi in the fifties and sixties, there was one defining social standard: membership in the Maadi Sporting Club. All of Maadi society revolved around it. Because the Zawahiris never joined, Ayman would always be curtained off from the center of power and status. The family developed the reputation of being conservative and a little backward—saeedis, to use the term applied to them, referring to people from a district in Upper Egypt, which informally translates to “hicks.”
At one end of Maadi, surrounded by green playing fields and tennis courts, was the private, British-built preparatory school for boys, Victoria College. The students attended classes in coats and ties. One of its best-known graduates was a talented cricket player named Michel Chalhub; after he became a film actor, he took the name Omar Sharif. Edward Said, the Palestinian scholar and author, attended the school, along with Jordan’s future king, Hussein.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, however, attended the state secondary school, a modest, low-slung building behind a green gate on the opposite side of the suburb. It was for kids from the wrong side of Road 9. The students of the two schools existed in different worlds, never meeting each other even in sports. Whereas Victoria College measured its educational achievements by European standards, the state school had its back to the West. Inside the green gate, the schoolyard was run by bullies and the classrooms by tyrants. A physically vulnerable young boy such as Ayman had to create strategies to survive.
As a child, Ayman had a round face, wary eyes, and a mouth that was flat and unsmiling. He was a bookworm who excelled in his studies and hated violent sports—he thought they were “inhumane.” From an early age he was known for being devout, and he would often attend prayers at the Hussein Sidki Mosque; an unimposing annex of a large apartment building, it was named after a famous actor who had renounced his profession because it was ungodly. No doubt Ayman’s interest in religion seemed natural in a family with so many distinguished religious scholars, but it added to his image of being soft and otherworldly.
He was an excellent student, and invariably earned the respect of his teachers. His classmates thought he was a “genius,” but he was introspective and often appeared to be daydreaming in class. Once, the headmaster sent a note to Professor Zawahiri saying that Ayman had skipped a test. The professor replied, “From tomorrow, you will have the honor of being the headmaster of Ayman al-Zawahiri. In the future, you will be proud.” Indeed, Ayman earned perfect grades with little effort.
Although others saw Ayman as serious nearly all the time, he would show a more playful side at home. “When he laughed, he would shake all over—yanni, it was from the heart,” said his uncle Mahfouz Azzam, an attorney in Maadi.
Ayman’s father died in 1995. His mother, Umayma Azzam, still lives in Maadi, in a comfortable apartment above an appliance store. A wonderful cook, she is famous for her kunafa—a pastry of shredded phyllo filled with cheese and nuts and drenched in orange-blossom syrup. She was a child of the landed upper class and inherited several plots of rich farmland in Giza and the Fayoum Oasis from her father, which provide her with a modest independent income. Ayman and his mother shared an intense love of literature; she would memorize poems he sent—often odes of love for her.
Zawahiri’s uncle Mahfouz, the patriarch of the Azzam clan, observed that although Ayman followed the Zawahiri medical tradition, he was actually closer to his mother’s side of the family—the political side. Since the first Egyptian parliament, more than 150 years ago, there have been Azzams in government, but always in the opposition. Mahfouz carried on the tradition of resistance, having been imprisoned at the age of fifteen for conspiring against the government. In 1945 Mahfouz was arrested again, in a roundup of militants following the assassination of Prime Minister Ahmed Mahir. “I myself was going to do what Ayman has done,” he boasted.
Sayyid Qutb had been Mahfouz Azzam’s Arabic teacher in the third grade, in 1936, and Qutb and his young protégé formed a lifelong bond. Later, Azzam wrote for the Muslim Brothers magazine that Qutb published in the early years of the revolution. He then became Qutb’s personal lawyer and was one of the last people to see him before his execution. Azzam entered the prison hospital where Qutb was preparing to die. Qutb was calm. He signed a power of attorney, awarding Azzam the authority to dispose of his property; then he gave him his personal Quran, which he inscribed—a treasured relic of the martyr.
Young Ayman al-Zawahiri heard again and again from his beloved uncle Mahfouz about the purity of Qutb’s character and the torment he had endured in prison. The effect of these stories can be gauged by an incident that took place sometime in the middle 1960s, when Ayman and his brother Mohammed were walking home from the mosque after dawn prayers. The vice president of Egypt, Hussein al-Shaffei, stopped his car to offer the boys a ride. Shaffei had been one of the judges in the roundup of Islamists in 1954. It was unusual for the Zawahiri boys to ride in a car, much less with the vice president. But Ayman said, “We don’t want to get this ride from a man who participated in the courts that killed Muslims.”
His stiff-necked defiance of authority at such an early age shows Zawahiri’s personal fearlessness, his self-righteousness, and his total conviction of the truth of his own beliefs—headstrong qualities that would invariably be associated with him in the future and that would propel him into conflict with nearly everyone he would meet. Moreover, his contempt for the authoritarian secular government ensured that he would always be a political outlaw. These rebellious traits, which might have been chaotic in a less disciplined man, were organized and given direction by an abiding mission in his life: to put Qutb’s vision into action.
“The Nasserite regime thought that the Islamic movement received a deadly blow with the execution of Sayyid Qutb and his comrades,” Zawahiri later wrote. “But the apparent surface calm concealed an immediate interaction with Sayyid Qutb’s ideas and the formation of the nucleus of the modern Islamic jihad movement in Egypt.” Indeed, the same year that Sayyid Qutb went to the gallows, Ayman al-Zawahiri helped form an underground cell devoted to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamist state. He was fifteen years old.
“WE WERE A GROUP OF STUDENTS from Maadi High School and other schools,” Zawahiri later testified. The members of his cell usually met in each other’s homes; sometimes they got together in mosques and then moved to a park or a quiet spot on the boulevard along the Nile. There were five of them in the beginning, and before long Zawahiri became the emir, or leader. He continued to quietly recruit new members to a cause that had virtually no chance of success and could easily have gotten them all killed. “Our means didn’t match our aspirations,” he conceded in his testimony. But he never questioned his decision.
The prosperity and social position enjoyed by the residents of Maadi, which had insulated them from the political whims of the royal court, now made them feel targeted in revolutionary Egypt. Parents were fearful of expressing their opinions even in front of their children. At the same time, clandestine groups such as the one Zawahiri joined were springing up all over the country. Made up mainly of restless and alienated students, these groups were small, disorganized, and largely unaware of one another. Then came the 1967 war with Israel.
After years of rhetorical attacks on Israel, Nasser demanded the removal of UN peacekeepers in the Sinai and then blockaded the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Israel responded with an overwhelming preemptive attack that destroyed the entire Egyptian air force within two hours. When Jordan, Iraq, and Syria joined the war against Israel, their air forces were also wiped out that same afternoon. In the next few days Israel captured all of the Sinai, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, while crushing the forces of the frontline Arab states. It was a psychological turning point in the history of the modern Middle East. The speed and decisiveness of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War humiliated many Muslims who had believed until then that God favored their cause. They had lost not only their armies and their territories but also faith in their leaders, in their countries, and in themselves. The profound appeal of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and elsewhere was born in this shocking debacle. A newly strident voice was heard in the mosques; the voice said that they had been defeated by a force far larger than the tiny country of Israel. God had turned against the Muslims. The only way back to Him was to return to the pure religion. The voice answered despair with a simple formulation: Islam is the solution.
There was in this equation the tacit understanding that God sided with the Jews. Until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of the region. Jews had lived safely—although submissively—under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice. After the war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.
The founding of the state of Israel and its startling rise to military dominance unsettled the Arab identity. In the low condition the Arabs found themselves in, they looked upon Israel and recalled the time when the Prophet Mohammed had subjugated the Jews of Medina. They thought about the great wave of Muslim expansion at the point of Arab spears and swords, and they were humbled by the contrast of their proud martial past and their miserable present. History was reversing itself; the Arabs were as fractious and disorganized and marginal as they had been in jahiliyyatimes. Even the Jews dominated them. The voice in the mosque said that the Arabs had let go of the one weapon that gave them real power: faith. Restore the fervor and purity of the religion that had made the Arabs great, and God would once again take their side.
The primary target of the Egyptian Islamists was Nasser’s secular regime. In the terminology of jihad, the priority was defeating the “near enemy”—that is, impure Muslim society. The “distant enemy”—the West—could wait until Islam had reformed itself. To Zawahiri and his colleagues that meant, at a minimum, imposing Islamic law in Egypt.
Zawahiri also sought to restore the caliphate, the rule of Islamic clerics, which had formally ended in 1924 following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire but which had not exercised real power since the thirteenth century. Once the caliphate was established, Zawahiri believed, Egypt would become a rallying point for the rest of the Islamic world, leading it in a jihad against the West. “Then history would make a new turn, God willing,” Zawahiri later wrote, “in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.”
NASSER DIED of a sudden heart attack in 1970. His successor, Anwar al-Sadat, desperately needing to establish his political legitimacy, quickly set about making peace with the Islamists. Calling himself the “Believer President” and “the first man of Islam,” Sadat offered the Muslim Brothers a deal. In return for their support against the Nasserites and the leftists, he would allow them to preach and to advocate, so long as they renounced violence. He emptied the prisons of Islamists, without realizing the danger they posed to his own regime, especially the younger Brothers who had been radicalized by the writings of Sayyid Qutb.
In October 1973, during the fasting month of Ramadan, Egypt and Syria stunned Israel with simultaneous attacks across the Suez Canal into the occupied Sinai and on the Golan Heights. Although the Syrians were soon beaten back and the Egyptian Third Army was rescued only by UN intervention, it was seen in Egypt as a great face-saving victory, giving Sadat a badly needed political triumph.
Nonetheless, Zawahiri’s underground cell began to grow—it had forty members by 1974. Zawahiri was now a tall and slender young man with large black glasses and a moustache that paralleled the flat line of his mouth. His face had grown thinner and his hairline was in retreat. He was a student in the Cairo University medical school, which was aboil with Islamic activism, but Zawahiri had none of the obvious attributes of a fanatic. He wore Western clothes—usually, a coat and tie—and his political involvement was almost completely unknown at the time, even to his family. To the few who knew of his activism, Zawahiri preached against revolution, which was an inherently bloody business, preferring a sudden military action designed to snatch the reins of government in a bold surprise.
He did not completely hide his political feelings, however. Egypt has always had a tradition of turning political misery into humor. A joke that his family recalls Zawahiri telling at this time concerned a poor woman who carried her plump little baby—in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, her go‘alos—to see the king pass by in his royal procession. “I wish that God would grant that you will be seen in such glory,” the woman prayed for her son. A military officer overheard her. “What are you saying?” he demanded. “Are you out of your mind?” But then, twenty years later, the same military officer saw Sadat passing by in a grand procession. “Oh, go‘alos—you made it!” the officer cried.
In his last year of medical school, Zawahiri gave a campus tour to an American newsman, Abdallah Schleifer, who later became a professor of media studies at the American University in Cairo. Schleifer was a challenging figure in Zawahiri’s life. A gangly, wiry-haired man, six feet five inches tall, sporting a goatee that harked back to his beatnik period in the 1950s, Schleifer bore a striking resemblance to the poet Ezra Pound. He had been brought up in a non-observant Jewish family on Long Island. After going through a Marxist period, and making friends with the Black Panthers and Che Guevara, he happened to encounter the Sufi tradition of Islam during a trip to Morocco in 1962. One meaning of the word “Islam” is to surrender, and that is what happened to Schleifer. He converted, changed his name from Marc to Abdallah, and spent the rest of his professional life in the Middle East. In 1974, when Schleifer first went to Cairo as the bureau chief for NBC News, Zawahiri’s uncle Mahfouz Azzam acted as a kind of sponsor for him. An American Jewish convert was a novelty; and Schleifer, for his part, found Mahfouz fascinating. He soon came to feel that he was under the protection of the entire Azzam family.
Schleifer quickly sensed the shift in the student movement in Egypt. Young Islamic activists were appearing on campuses, first in the southern part of the country, then in Cairo. They called themselves al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya—the Islamic Group. Encouraged by Sadat’s acquiescent government, which covertly provided them with arms so that they could defend themselves against any attacks by Marxists and Nasserites, the Islamic Group radicalized most of Egypt’s universities. Different branches were organized along the same lines as the Muslim Brothers, in small cells called ‘anqud—a bunch of grapes. Within a mere four years, the Islamic Group completely dominated the campuses, and for the first time in the living memory of most Egyptians, male students stopped trimming their beards and female students donned the veil.
Schleifer needed a guide to give him a better understanding of the scene. Through Mahfouz, Schleifer met Zawahiri, who agreed to show him around campus for an off-camera briefing. “He was scrawny and his eyeglasses were extremely prominent,” said Schleifer, who was reminded of the radicals he had known in the United States. “I had the feeling that this is what a left-wing City College intellectual looked like thirty years ago.” Schleifer watched students painting posters for the demonstrations and young Muslim women sewing hijabs, the head-scarves that devout Muslim women wear. Afterward, Zawahiri and Schleifer walked along the boulevard through the Cairo Zoo to the University Bridge. As they stood over the massive, slow-moving Nile, Zawahiri boasted that the Islamist movement had found its greatest recruiting success in the university’s two most elite faculties—the medical and engineering schools. “Aren’t you impressed by that?”
Schleifer was patronizing. He noted that in the sixties those same faculties had been strongholds of the Marxist Youth. The Islamist movement, he observed, was only the latest trend in student rebellion. “Listen, Ayman, I’m an ex-Marxist. When you talk I feel like I’m back in the Party. I don’t feel as if I’m with a traditional Muslim.” Zawahiri listened politely, but he seemed puzzled by Schleifer’s critique.
Schleifer encountered Zawahiri again soon thereafter. It was the Eid, the time of the annual feast, the holiest day of the year. There was an outdoor prayer in the beautiful garden of Farouk Mosque in Maadi. When Schleifer got there, he noticed Zawahiri with one of his brothers. They were very intense. They laid out plastic prayer mats and set up a microphone. What was supposed to be a meditative period of chanting the Quran turned into an uneven contest between the congregation and the Zawahiri brothers with their microphone. “I realized they were introducing the Salafist formula, which does not recognize any Islamic traditions after the time of the Prophet,” Schleifer recalled. “It killed the poetry. It was chaotic.”
Afterward, he went over to Zawahiri. “Ayman, this is wrong,” Schleifer complained. Zawahiri started to explain, but Schleifer cut him off. “I’m not going to argue with you. I’m a Sufi and you’re a Salafist. But you are making fitna”—a term for stirring up trouble that is proscribed in the Quran—“and if you want to do that, you should do it in your own mosque.”
Zawahiri meekly responded, “You’re right, Abdallah.”
EVENTUALLY THE DISPARATE underground groups began to discover one another. There were five or six cells in Cairo alone, most of them with fewer than ten members. Four of these cells, including Zawahiri’s, which was one of the largest, merged to form Jamaat al-Jihad—the Jihad Group, or simply al-Jihad. Although their goals were similar to those of the mainstream Islamists in the Muslim Brotherhood, they had no intention of trying to work through politics to achieve them. Zawahiri thought such efforts contaminated the ideal of the pure Islamic state. He grew to despise the Muslim Brotherhood for its willingness to compromise.
Zawahiri graduated from medical school in 1974, then served three years as a surgeon in the Egyptian Army, posted at a base outside Cairo. When he finished his military service, the young doctor established a clinic in the same duplex where he lived with his parents. He was now in his late twenties, and it was time for him to marry. Until then, he had never had a girlfriend. In the Egyptian tradition, his friends and relatives began making suggestions of suitable mates. Zawahiri was uninterested in romance; he wanted a partner who shared his extreme convictions and would be willing to bear the hardships his dogmatic personality was bound to encounter. One of the possible brides suggested to Ayman was Azza Nowair, the daughter of an old family friend.
Like the Zawahiris and the Azzams, the Nowairs were a notable Cairo clan. Azza had grown up in a wealthy Maadi household. She was extremely petite—like a young girl—but extraordinarily resolute. In another time and place she might have become a professional woman or a social worker, but in her sophomore year at Cairo University she adopted the hijab, alarming her family with the intensity of her newfound religious devotion. “Before that, she had worn the latest fashions,” said her older brother, Essam. “We didn’t want her to be so religious. She started to pray a lot and read the Quran. And, little by little, she changed completely.” Soon Azza went further and put on the niqab, the veil that covers a woman’s face below the eyes. According to her brother, Azza would spend whole nights reading the Quran. When he woke in the morning, he would find her sitting on the prayer mat with the holy book in her hands, fast asleep.
The niqab imposed a formidable barrier for a marriageable young woman, especially in a segment of society that still longed to be a part of the westernized modern world. For most of Azza’s peers, her decision to veil herself was a shocking abnegation of her class. Her refusal to drop the veil became a test of wills. “She had many suitors, all of them from prestigious ranks and wealth and elite social status,” her brother said. “But almost all of them wanted her to drop the niqab. She very calmly refused. She wanted someone who would accept her as she was. Ayman was looking for that type of person.”
According to custom, at the first meeting between Azza and Ayman, Azza lifted her veil for a few minutes. “He saw the face and then he left,” Essam said. The young couple talked briefly on one other occasion after that, but it was little more than a formality. Ayman did not see his fiancée’s face again until after the marriage ceremony.
He made a favorable impression on the Nowair family, who were a little dazzled by his distinguished ancestry but were put on guard by his piety. Although he was polite and agreeable, he refused to greet women, and he wouldn’t even look at one if she was wearing a skirt. He never talked about politics with Azza’s family, and it’s not clear how much he revealed even to her. In any case, Azza must have approved of his underground activism. She told a friend that her greatest hope was to become a martyr.
Their wedding was held in February 1978, at the Continental-Savoy Hotel, a once-distinguished Anglo-Egyptian watering hole in Cairo’s Opera Square, which had slipped from its days of grandeur into dowdy respectability. According to the wishes of the bride and groom, there was no music and photographs were forbidden. “It was pseudo-traditional,” said Schleifer. “We were in the men’s section, which was very somber, heavy, with lots of cups of coffee and no one cracking jokes.”
“MY CONNECTION WITH AFGHANISTAN began in the summer of 1980 by a twist of fate,” Zawahiri wrote in his brief memoir, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. While he was covering for another doctor at a Muslim Brothers clinic, the director of the clinic asked if Zawahiri would like to accompany him to Pakistan to tend to the Afghan refugees. Hundreds of thousands were fleeing across the border after the recent Soviet invasion. Zawahiri immediately agreed. He had been secretly preoccupied with the problem of finding a secure base for jihad, which seemed practically impossible in Egypt. “The River Nile runs in its narrow valley between two deserts that have no vegetation or water,” he observed in his memoir. “Such a terrain made guerrilla warfare in Egypt impossible and, as a result, forced the inhabitants of this valley to submit to the central government, to be exploited as workers, and compelled them to be recruited into its army.” Perhaps Pakistan or Afghanistan would prove a more suitable location for raising an army of radical Islamists who could eventually return to take over Egypt.
Zawahiri traveled to Peshawar with an anesthesiologist and a plastic surgeon. “We were the first three Arabs to arrive there to participate in relief work,” Zawahiri claims. He spent four months in Pakistan, working for the Red Crescent Society, the Islamic arm of the International Red Cross.
The name Peshawar derives from a Sanskrit word meaning “city of flowers,” which it may have been during its Buddhist period, but it had long since sloughed off any refinement. The city sits at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, the historic concourse of invading armies since the days of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, who left their genetic traces on the features of the diverse population. Peshawar was an important outpost of the British Empire, the last stop before a wilderness that stretched all the way to Moscow. When the British abandoned their cantonment in 1947,Peshawar was reduced to being a modest but unruly farming town. The war had awakened the ancient city, however, and when Zawahiri arrived it was teeming with smugglers, arms merchants, and opium dealers.
The city also had to cope with the influx of uprooted and starving Afghans. By the end of 1980, there were already 1.4 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan—a number that nearly doubled the following year—and most of them came through Peshawar, seeking shelter in the nearby camps. Many of the refugees were casualties of the Soviet land mines or the intensive bombing of towns and cities, and they desperately needed medical treatment. The conditions in the hospitals and clinics were degrading, however, especially at the beginning of the war. Zawahiri reported home that he sometimes had to use honey to sterilize wounds.
Writing to his mother, he complained of loneliness and pleaded for more frequent letters in return. In these notes, he would occasionally burst into poetry to express his despair:
She met my evil actions with goodness,
Without asking for any return…
May God erase my ineptness and
Please her despite my offenses…
Oh God, may you have pity on a stranger
Who longs for the sight of his mother.
Through his connection with local tribal chiefs, Zawahiri made several furtive trips across the border into Afghanistan. He became one of the first outsiders to witness the courage of the Afghan freedom fighters, who called themselves the “mujahideen”—the holy warriors. That fall, Zawahiri returned to Cairo full of stories about the “miracles” that were taking place in the jihad against the Soviets. It was a war few knew much about, even in the Arab world, although it was by far the bloodiest conflict of the 1980s. Zawahiri began going around to universities, recruiting for jihad. He had grown a beard and was affecting a Pakistani outfit—a long tunic over loose trousers.
At this point, there was only a handful of Arab volunteers, and when a delegation of mujahideen leaders came to Cairo, Zawahiri took his uncle Mahfouz to Shepheard’s Hotel to meet them. The two men presented the Afghans with an idea that Abdallah Schleifer had proposed. Schleifer had been frustrated by the inability of Western news organizations to get close to the war. He had told Zawahiri to find him three bright young Afghans whom he could train as cameramen. That way, they could record their stories and Schleifer could provide the editing and narration. But he warned Zawahiri, “If we don’t get the bang-bang, we don’t get it on the air.”
Soon after that, Schleifer paid a call on Zawahiri to learn what had happened to his proposal. He found his friend strangely formal and evasive. Zawahiri began by saying that Americans were the enemy and must be confronted. “I don’t understand,” Schleifer replied. “You just came back from Afghanistan where you’re cooperating with the Americans. Now you’re saying America is the enemy?”
“Sure, we’re taking American help to fight the Russians,” Zawahiri responded, “but they’re equally evil.”
“How can you make such a comparison?” said Schleifer, outraged. “There is more freedom to practice Islam in America than in Egypt. And in the Soviet Union, they closed down fifty thousand mosques!”
“You don’t see it because you’re an American,” said Zawahiri.
Schleifer angrily told him that the only reason they were even having this conversation was that NATO and the American army had kept the Soviets from overrunning Europe and then turning their attention to the Middle East. The discussion ended on a bad note. They had debated each other many times, but always with respect and humor. This time Schleifer had the feeling that Zawahiri wasn’t talking to him—he was addressing a multitude.
Nothing came of Schleifer’s offer to instruct Afghan newsmen.
Zawahiri returned for another tour of duty with the Red Crescent Society in Peshawar in March of 1981. This time he cut short his stay and returned to Cairo after only two months. Later he would write that he saw the Afghan jihad as “a training course of the utmost importance to prepare the Muslim mujahideen to wage their awaited battle against the superpower that now has sole dominance over the globe, namely, the United States.”
WHEN ZAWAHIRI RETURNED to his medical practice in Maadi, the Islamic world was still trembling from the political earthquakes of 1979, which included not only the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan but also the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Iran and the toppling of the Peacock Throne—the first successful Islamist takeover of a major country. When Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Shah of Iran, sought treatment for cancer in the United States, the Ayatollah incited student mobs to attack the American Embassy in Tehran. Sadat regarded Khomeini as a “lunatic madman…who has turned Islam into a mockery.” He invited the ailing Shah to take up residence in Egypt, and the Shah died there the following year.
For Muslims everywhere, Khomeini reframed the debate with the West. Instead of conceding the future of Islam to a secular, democratic model, he imposed a stunning reversal. His intoxicating sermons summoned up the unyielding force of the Islam of a previous millennium in language that foreshadowed bin Laden’s revolutionary diatribes. The specific target of his rage against the West was freedom. “Yes, we are reactionaries, and you are enlightened intellectuals: You intellectuals do not want us to go back 1,400 years,” he said soon after taking power. “You, who want freedom, freedom for everything, the freedom of parties, you who want all the freedoms, you intellectuals: freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way for the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom.” As early as the 1940s, Khomeini had signaled his readiness to use terror to humiliate the perceived enemies of Islam, providing theological cover as well as material support. “Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!”
The fact that Khomeini came from the Shiite branch of Islam, rather than the Sunni, which predominates in the Muslim world outside of Iraq and Iran, made him a complicated figure among Sunni radicals.* Nonetheless, Zawahiri’s organization, al-Jihad, supported the Iranian revolution with leaflets and cassette tapes urging all Islamic groups in Egypt to follow the Iranian example. The overnight transformation of a relatively wealthy, powerful, modern country such as Iran into a rigid theocracy showed that the Islamists’ dream was eminently achievable, and it quickened their desire to act.
Islamism was by now a broad and variegated movement, including those who were willing to work within a political system, such as the Muslim Brothers, and those, like Zawahiri, who wanted to wreck the state and impose a religious dictatorship. The main object of the Islamists’ struggle was to impose Islamic law—Sharia. They believe that the five hundred Quranic verses that constitute the basis of Sharia are the immutable commandments of God, offering a road back to the perfected era of the Prophet and his immediate successors—although the legal code actually evolved several centuries after the Prophet’s death. These verses comment upon behavior as precise and various as how to respond to someone who sneezes and the permissibility of wearing gold jewelry. They also prescribe specific punishments for some crimes, such as adultery and drinking, but not for others, including homicide. Islamists say the Sharia cannot be improved upon, despite fifteen centuries of social change, because it arises directly from the mind of God. They want to bypass the long tradition of judicial opinion from Muslim scholars and forge a more authentically Islamic legal system that is untainted by Western influence or any improvisations caused by the engagement with modernity. Non-Muslims and Islamic modernists, on the other hand, argue that the tenets of Sharia reflect the stringent Bedouin codes of the culture that gave birth to the religion and are certainly not adequate to govern a modern society. Under Sadat, the government had repeatedly pledged to conform to Sharia, but his actions showed how little that promise could be trusted.
Sadat’s peace agreement with Israel united the disparate Islamist factions. They were also inflamed by a new law, sponsored by the president’s wife, Jihan, that granted women the right to divorce, a privilege not provided by the Quran. In what would prove to be his final speech, Sadat ridiculed the Islamic garb worn by pious women, which he called a “tent,” and banned the niqab from the universities. The radicals responded by characterizing the president as a heretic. It is forbidden, under Islamic law, to strike against a ruler unless he doesn’t believe in God or the Prophet. The declaration of heresy was an open invitation to assassination.
In response to a series of demonstrations orchestrated by the Islamists, Sadat dissolved all religious student associations, confiscated their property, and shut down their summer camps. Reversing his position of tolerating, even encouraging, such groups, he now adopted a new slogan: “No politics in religion and no religion in politics.” There could scarcely have been a more incendiary formulation in the Islamist mind.
Zawahiri envisioned not merely the removal of the head of state but a complete overthrow of the existing order. Stealthily, he had been recruiting officers from the Egyptian military, waiting for the moment when al-Jihad had accumulated sufficient strength in men and weapons to act. His chief strategist was Aboud al-Zumar, a colonel in military intelligence who was a hero of the 1973 war against Israel (a Cairo street had been renamed in his honor). Zumar’s plan was to kill the main leaders of the country, capture the headquarters of the army and State Security, the telephone exchange building, and of course the radio and television building, where news of the Islamic revolution would then be broadcast, unleashing—he expected—a popular uprising against secular authority all over the country. It was, Zawahiri later testified, “an elaborate artistic plan.”
Another key member of Zawahiri’s cell was a daring tank commander named Essam al-Qamari. Because of his valor and intelligence, Major Qamari had been promoted repeatedly over the heads of his peers. Zawahiri described him as “a noble person in the true sense of the word. Most of his sufferings and sacrifices that he endured willingly and calmly were the result of his honorable character.” Although Zawahiri was the senior member of the Maadi cell, he often deferred to Qamari, who had a natural sense of command—a quality that Zawahiri notably lacked. Indeed, Qamari observed that there was “something missing” in Zawahiri, and once cautioned him, “If you are a member of any group, you cannot be the leader.”
Qamari began smuggling weapons and ammunition from army strongholds and storing them in Zawahiri’s medical clinic in Maadi, which was in a downstairs apartment in the duplex where his parents lived. In February of 1981, as the weapons were being transferred from the clinic to a warehouse, police officers arrested a young man carrying a bag loaded with guns, military bulletins, and maps that showed the location of all the tank emplacements in Cairo. Qamari, realizing that he would soon be implicated, dropped out of sight, but several of his officers were arrested. Zawahiri inexplicably stayed put.
Until these arrests, the Egyptian government had persuaded itself that the Islamist underground had been eliminated. That September, Sadat ordered the roundup of more than fifteen hundred people, including many prominent Egyptians—not only Islamists but also intellectuals with no religious leanings, Marxists, Coptic Christians, student leaders, journalists, writers, doctors in the Muslim Brothers syndicate—a potpourri of dissidents from various sectors. The dragnet missed Zawahiri but captured most of the other leaders of al-Jihad. However, a military cell within the scattered ranks of Jihad had already set in motion a hasty and opportunistic plan. Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli, who was twenty-three years old, proposed to kill Sadat during an appearance at a military parade the following month.
ZAWAHIRI TESTIFIED that he did not hear about the plan until nine o’clock on the morning of October 6, 1981, a few hours before the assassination was scheduled to take place. One of the members of his cell, a pharmacist, brought him the news. “I was astonished and shaken,” Zawahiri told his interrogators. The pharmacist proposed that they must do something to help the hastily conceived plot succeed. “But I told him, ‘What can we do? Do they want us to shoot up the streets and let the police detain us? We are not going to do anything.’” Zawahiri went back to his patients. When he learned, a few hours later, that the military exhibition was still going on, he assumed that the operation had failed and everyone connected with it had been arrested. He then went to the home of one of his sisters, who informed him that the exhibition had been halted and the president had left unharmed. The real news was yet to be heard.
Sadat had been celebrating the eighth anniversary of the 1973 war. Surrounded by dignitaries, including several American diplomats and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the future secretary-general of the United Nations, Sadat was saluting the passing troops when a military vehicle veered toward the reviewing stand. Lieutenant Islambouli and three other conspirators leaped out and tossed grenades into the stand. “I have killed the Pharaoh!” Islambouli cried, after emptying the cartridge of his machine gun into the president, who stood defiantly at attention until his body was riddled with bullets.
The announcement of Sadat’s death later that day met with little grief in the Arab world, which regarded him as a traitor for making peace with Israel. In Zawahiri’s opinion, the assassination had accomplished nothing in the way of achieving an Islamic state. But perhaps there was still time, in the shaky interval following the event, to put the grand plan into effect. Essam al-Qamari came out of hiding and asked Zawahiri to put him in touch with the group that had carried out the assassination. At ten that night, only eight hours after Sadat’s murder, Zawahiri and Qamari met with Aboud al-Zumar in a car outside the apartment where Qamari was hiding. Qamari had a daring proposal, this one with the chance to eliminate the entire government and many foreign leaders as well: an attack on Sadat’s funeral. Zumar agreed, and asked Qamari to supply him with ten bombs and two guns. The very next day the group met again. Qamari brought the weapons, as well as several boxes of ammunition. Meanwhile, the new government, headed by Hosni Mubarak, was rounding up thousands of prospective conspirators. Aboud al-Zumar was arrested before the plan could be put into action.
Zawahiri must have known that his name would surface, but still he lingered. On October 23, he had finally packed his belongings for another trip to Pakistan. He went to say good-bye to some relatives. His brother Hussein was driving him to the airport when the police stopped them on the Nile Corniche. “They took Ayman to the Maadi police station, and he was surrounded by guards,” his cousin Omar Azzam recalled. “The chief of police slapped him on the face—and Ayman slapped him back!” The family regards this incident with amazement, not only because of the recklessness of Zawahiri’s response but also because until that moment he had never, in their memory, resorted to violence. Zawahiri immediately became known among the other prisoners as the man who struck back.
SECURITY FORCES GREETED the incoming prisoners by stripping them naked, blindfolding and handcuffing them, then beating them with sticks. Humiliated, frightened, and disoriented, they were thrown into narrow stone cells, the only light coming from a tiny square window in the iron door. The dungeon had been built in the twelfth century by the great Kurdish conqueror Saladin, using the labor of captured Crusaders. It was part of the Citadel, a massive fortress on a hill overlooking Cairo, that had served as the seat of government for seven hundred years.
The screams of fellow prisoners who were being interrogated kept many men in a state of near madness, even when they weren’t tortured themselves. Because of his status, Zawahiri was subjected to frequent beatings and other ingenious and sadistic forms of punishment created by Intelligence Unit 75, which oversaw Egypt’s inquisition.
One line of thinking proposes that America’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human-rights advocates in Cairo argue that torture created an appetite for revenge, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes, including Ayman al-Zawahiri. The main target of the prisoners’ wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime. They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society. Indeed, the theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is important to understanding the radical Islamists’ rage. Egypt’s prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution—they called it justice—was all-consuming.
Montassir al-Zayyat, an Islamist attorney who was imprisoned with Zawahiri and later became his lawyer and biographer,* maintains that the traumatic experiences suffered by Zawahiri in prison transformed him from being a relatively moderate force in al-Jihad into a violent and implacable extremist. Zayyat and other witnesses point to what happened to his relationship with Essam al-Qamari, who had been his close friend and a man he keenly admired. Immediately after Zawahiri’s arrest, officers in the Interior Ministry began grilling him about Major Qamari, who continued to slip their nets. He was now the most wanted man in Egypt. He had already survived a firefight with grenades and automatic weapons in which many policemen were killed or wounded. In their relentless search for Qamari, the security officers booted the distinguished Zawahiri family out of their house and tore up the floors and pulled down all the wallpaper looking for evidence. They also waited by the phone, betting that eventually the desperado would call. Two weeks later, the call finally came. The caller identified himself as “Dr. Essam” and asked to meet Zawahiri. Qamari was unaware that Zawahiri was in custody when he phoned, since it had been kept secret. A police officer, pretending to be a family member, told “Dr. Essam” that Zawahiri was not there. The caller suggested, “Let him pray the maghreb”—the sunset prayer—“with me,” at a mosque they both knew.
“Qamari had given him an appointment on the road to Maadi, but he noticed the security people, and he escaped again,” said Fouad Allam, who was the head of the Interior Ministry’s anti-terrorism unit at the time. He is an avuncular figure with a basso profundo voice, who has interrogated almost every major Islamic radical since 1965, when he questioned Sayyid Qutb. “I called Ayman al-Zawahiri to my office in order to propose a plan.” Allam found Zawahiri “shy and distant. He doesn’t look at you when he talks, which is a sign of politeness in the Arab world.” According to Zawahiri’s uncle Mahfouz, Zawahiri had already been brutally tortured, and he actually came to Allam’s office wearing only one shoe, because of an injury inflicted to his foot. Allam arranged to have Zawahiri’s telephone line transferred into his office, and he held Zawahiri there until Qamari finally called again. This time Zawahiri answered and made a date to meet at the Zawya Mosque in Embaba. As planned, Zawahiri went to the mosque and fingered his friend.
Zawahiri himself doesn’t admit to this in his memoir, except obliquely, where he writes about the “humiliation” of imprisonment. “The toughest thing about captivity is forcing the mujahid, under the force of torture, to confess about his colleagues, to destroy his movement with his own hands, and offer his and his colleagues’ secrets to the enemy.”
Perversely, the authorities placed Qamari in the same cell with Zawahiri after Zawahiri testified against him and thirteen others. Qamari received a ten-year sentence. “As usual, he received the news with his unique calmness and self-composure,” Zawahiri recorded. “He even tried to comfort me, and said, ‘I pity you for the burdens you will carry.’” In 1988 Qamari was shot to death by police after escaping from prison.
ZAWAHIRI WAS DEFENDANT number 113 of 302 who were accused of aiding or planning the assassination, as well as various other crimes (in Zawahiri’s case, dealing in arms). Lieutenant Islambouli and twenty-three others charged with the actual assassination were tried separately. Islambouli and four conspirators were hanged. Nearly every notable Islamist in Egypt was implicated in the plot.* The other defendants, some of whom were adolescents, were crowded into a zoo-like cage that ran across one side of a vast improvised courtroom in the Exhibition Grounds in Cairo where fairs and conventions are often held. They came from various organizations—al-Jihad, the Islamic Group, the Muslim Brotherhood—that formed the fractious core of the Islamist movement. International news organizations covered the trial, and Zawahiri, who had the best command of English among the defendants, was their designated spokesman.
Video footage of the opening day of the trial, December 4, 1982, shows the three hundred defendants, illuminated by the lights of the TV cameras, chanting, praying, and calling out desperately to family members. Finally, the camera settles on Zawahiri, who stands apart from the chaos with a look of solemn, focused intensity. Thirty-one years old, he is wearing a white robe and has a gray scarf thrown over his shoulder.
At a signal, the other prisoners fall silent, and Zawahiri cries out, “Now we want to speak to the whole world! Who are we? Why do they bring us here, and what we want to say? About the first question, we are Muslims! We are Muslims who believe in their religion! We are Muslims who believe in their religion, both in ideology and practice, and hence we tried our best to establish an Islamic state and an Islamic society!”
The other defendants chant, in Arabic, “There is no God but God!”
Zawahiri continues, in a fiercely repetitive cadence, “We are not sorry, we are not sorry for what we have done for our religion, and we have sacrificed, and we stand ready to make more sacrifices!”
The others shout, “There is no God but God!”
Zawahiri then says, “We are here—the real Islamic front and the real Islamic opposition against Zionism, Communism, and imperialism!” He pauses, then: “And now, as an answer to the second question, why did they bring us here? They bring us here for two reasons! First, they are trying to abolish the outstanding Islamic movement…and, secondly, to complete the conspiracy of evacuating the area in preparation for the Zionist infiltration.”
The others cry out, “We will not sacrifice the blood of Muslims for the Americans and the Jews!”
The prisoners pull off their shoes and raise their robes to expose marks of torture. Zawahiri talks about the abuse that took place in the “dirty Egyptian jails…where we suffered the severest inhuman treatment. There they kicked us, they beat us, they whipped us with electric cables, they shocked us with electricity! They shocked us with electricity! And they used the wild dogs! And they used the wild dogs! And they hung us over the edges of the doors”—here he bends forward to demonstrate—“with our hands tied at the back! They arrested the wives, the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, and the sons!”
The defendants chant, “The army of Mohammed will return, and we will defeat the Jews!”
The camera captures one particularly wild-eyed defendant in a green caftan as he extends his arms through the bars of the cage, screams, and then faints into the arms of a fellow prisoner. Zawahiri calls out the names of several prisoners who, he says, died as a result of torture. “So where is democracy?” he shouts. “Where is freedom? Where is human rights? Where is justice? Where is justice? We will never forget! We will never forget!”
Zawahiri’s allegations of torture were later substantiated by forensic medical reports, which noted six injuries in various places on his body resulting from assaults with “a solid instrument.” Zawahiri later testified in a case brought against Intelligence Unit 75, which had conducted the prison interrogations. He was supported by the testimony of one of the intelligence officers, who confessed that he witnessed Zawahiri in the prison, “his head shaved, his dignity completely humiliated, undergoing all sorts of torture.” The officer went on to say that he had been in the interrogation room when another prisoner was brought into the chamber, chained hand and foot. The interrogators were trying to get Zawahiri to confess his involvement in the Sadat assassination. When the other prisoner said, “How would you expect him to confess when he knows the penalty is death?” Zawahiri replied, “The death penalty is more merciful than torture.”
THE TRIAL DRAGGED ON for three years. Sometimes the defendants would go every day, but then more than a month might pass before they returned to the improvised courtroom. They were from various groups, and many had not even known of the others’ existence before they found themselves locked up together. They naturally began to conspire. While some eagerly talked about rebuilding, there were also intensive discussions among the prisoners about the dismaying fact that so many of them had been arrested, the movement so quickly betrayed. “We were defeated, and so we became lost,” Zawahiri admitted to one of his prison mates. They spent many days considering why the underground operations had failed and how they might have succeeded. “Ayman told me that he hadn’t wanted the [Sadat] assassination to take place,” Montassir al-Zayyat, his fellow prisoner and biographer, recalled. “He thought they should have waited and plucked the regime from the roots through a military coup. He was not that bloodthirsty.”
His education, family background, and relative wealth made Zawahiri a notable figure. Every other day, a driver arrived with food from his family, which Zawahiri distributed among the other prisoners. He also helped out in the prison hospital.
During this time, Zawahiri came face-to-face with Egypt’s best-known Islamist, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who had also been charged as a conspirator in the Sadat assassination. A strange and forceful man, blinded by diabetes in childhood but blessed with a stirring, resonant voice, Sheikh Omar had risen in Islamic circles because of his eloquent denunciations of Nasser, who had tossed him in jail for eight months without charges. After Nasser’s death, the blind sheikh’s influence increased, especially in Upper Egypt, where he taught theology at the Asyut branch of al-Azhar University. He developed a following among the students and became the leader of the Islamic Group. Some of the young Islamists were financing their activism by shaking down Coptic Christians, who made up perhaps 10 percent of the Egyptian population but who included many shopkeepers and small-business owners. On a number of occasions, the young radicals stormed into Coptic weddings and robbed the guests. The theology of jihad requires a fatwa—a religious ruling—in order to consecrate actions that would otherwise be considered criminal. Sheikh Omar obligingly issued fatwas that countenanced the slaughter of Christians and the plunder of Coptic jewelry stores, on the premise that a state of war existed between Christians and Muslims.
After Sadat finally attempted to rein in the Islamists, the blind sheikh took a three-year sojourn to Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, where he found wealthy sponsors for his cause. When he returned to Egypt, in 1980, he was not merely the spiritual advisor of the Islamic Group, he was the emir. In one of Sheikh Omar’s first fatwas, he declared that a heretical leader deserved to be killed by the faithful. At his trial for conspiring in the assassination of Sadat, his lawyer successfully convinced the court that, because his client had not mentioned the Egyptian president by name, he was, at most, tangential to the plot. Six months after the sheikh’s imprisonment, he was released.
Although members of the two leading militant organizations, the Islamic Group and al-Jihad, shared the common goal of bringing down the government, they differed sharply in their ideology and tactics. The blind sheikh preached that all humanity could embrace Islam, and he was content to spread this message. Zawahiri profoundly disagreed. Distrustful of the masses and contemptuous of any faith other than his own stark version of Islam, he preferred to act secretly and unilaterally until the moment his group could seize power and impose its totalitarian religious vision.
The Islamic Group and al-Jihad had collaborated under the leadership of Sheikh Omar, but those from al-Jihad, including Qamari and Zawahiri, sought to have one of their own in charge. In the Cairo prison, members of the two organizations had heated debates about the best way to achieve a true Islamic revolution, and they quarreled endlessly over who was the best man to lead it. Zawahiri pointed out that Sharia states that the emir cannot be blind. Sheikh Omar countered that Sharia also decrees that the emir cannot be a prisoner. The rivalry between the two men became extreme. Zayyat tried to moderate Zawahiri’s attacks on the sheikh, but Zawahiri refused to back down. The result was that al-Jihad and the Islamic Group split apart once more. They would remain polarized by these two intransigent personalities.
ZAWAHIRI WAS CONVICTED of dealing in weapons and received a three-year sentence, which he had nearly finished serving by the time the trial concluded. Perhaps in response to his cooperation in testifying against other defendants, the government dropped several additional charges against him.
Released in 1984, Zawahiri emerged a hardened radical whose beliefs had been hammered into brilliant resolve. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a prominent sociologist at the American University in Cairo, spoke to Zawahiri soon after he got out of prison, and he noted a pronounced degree of suspicion and an overwhelming desire for revenge, which was characteristic of men who have been abused in prison. Torture may have had other, unanticipated effects on these intensely religious men. Many of them said that after being tortured they had had visions of being welcomed by the saints into Paradise and of the just Islamic society that had been made possible by their martyrdom.
Ibrahim had done a study of political prisoners in Egypt in the 1970s. According to his research, most of the Islamist recruits were young men from villages who had come to the city for schooling. The majority were the sons of middle-level government bureaucrats. They were ambitious and tended to be drawn to the fields of science and engineering, which accept only the most qualified students. They were not the alienated, marginalized youth that a sociologist might have expected. Instead, Ibrahim wrote, they were “model young Egyptians. If they were not typical, it was because they were significantly above the average in their generation.” Ibrahim attributed the recruiting success of the militant Islamist groups to their emphasis on brotherhood, sharing, and spiritual support, which provided a “soft landing” for the rural migrants to the city.
Zawahiri, who had read the study in prison, heatedly disagreed. He asserted that the recruits responded to the Islamist ideals, not to the social needs that the groups attended. “You have trivialized our movement by your mundane analysis,” he told Ibrahim. “May God have mercy on you.”
Ibrahim responded to Zawahiri’s challenge by recalling an old Arabic saying, “For everyone who tries, there is a reward. If he hits it right, he gets two rewards. But if he misses, he still gets a reward for trying.”
Zawahiri smiled and said, “You get one reward.”
Once again, Dr. Zawahiri resumed his surgical practice; however, he was worried about the political consequences of his testimony in the torture case against Intelligence Unit 75. He thought of applying for a surgery fellowship in England. He arranged to work at the Ibn al-Nafees clinic in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, even though the Egyptian government had forbidden him to leave the country for three years. Zawahiri secured a tourist visa to Tunisia, perhaps using a false passport. It seems obvious that he did not intend to return. He had shaved his beard after his release, which indicated that he was returning to his underground work.
As he was leaving, he ran into his friend Abdallah Schleifer at the Cairo airport. “Where are you going?” Schleifer asked.
“Saudi,” Zawahiri confided. He appeared relaxed and happy.
The two men embraced. “Listen, Ayman, stay out of politics,” Schleifer warned.
“I will!” Zawahiri replied. “I will!”