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III—AN UNDERGROUND LIFE
"We were a group of students from Maadi High School and other schools," Zawahiri testified about his days as a young radical, when he was put on trial for conspiring in the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, in 1981. The members of his cell usually met in one another's homes; sometimes they got together at a mosque and then went to a park or to a quiet spot on the tree-lined Corniche along the Nile. In the beginning, there were five members, and before long Zawahiri became the emir, or leader. "Our means didn't match our aspirations," he conceded in his testimony. But he never seemed to question his decision to become a revolutionary. "Bin Laden had a turning point in his life," Omar Azzam points out, "but Ayman and his brother Mohammed were like people in school moving naturally from one grade to another. You cannot say those boys were naughty guys or playboys, then turned one hundred and eighty degrees. To be honest, if Ayman and Mohammed repeated their lives, they would live them the same way."

Under the monarchy, before Nasser's assumption of power, the affluent residents of Maadi had been insulated from the whims of the government. In revolutionary Egypt, they suddenly found themselves vulnerable. "The kids noticed that their parents were frightened and afraid of expressing their opinions," Zawahiri's former schoolmate Zaki told me. "It was a climate that encouraged underground work." Clandestine groups like Zawahiri's were forming all over Egypt. Made up mainly of restless or alienated students, they were small and disorganized and largely unaware of each other. Then came the 1967 war with Israel. The speed and the decisiveness of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War humiliated Muslims who had believed that God favored their cause. They lost not only their armies and territory but also faith in their leaders, in their countries, and in themselves. For many Muslims, it was as though they had been defeated by a force far larger than the tiny country of Israel, by something unfathomable—modernity itself. A newly strident voice was heard in the mosques, one that answered despair with a simple formulation: Islam is the solution.

The clandestine Islamist groups were galvanized by the war, and, as Nasser had feared, their primary target was his own, secular regime. In the terminology of jihad, the priority was to defeat the "near enemy"—that is, impure Muslim society. The "distant enemy"—the West—could wait until Islam had reformed itself. For the Islamists, this meant, at a minimum, imposing Sharia on the Egyptian legal system. Zawahiri also wanted to restore the caliphate, the rule of Islamic clerics, which had formally ended in 1924, after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, but which had not exercised real power since the thirteenth century. Once the caliphate was reëstablished, Zawahiri believed, Egypt would become a rallying point for the rest of the Islamic world. He later wrote, "Then, history would make a new turn, God willing, in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world's Jewish government."

Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970. His successor, Sadat, desperately needed to establish his political legitimacy, and he quickly set about trying to make peace with the Islamists. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a dissident sociologist at the American University in Cairo and an advocate of democratic reforms, who was recently sentenced to seven years in prison, told me last spring, "Sadat was looking around for allies. He remembers the Muslim Brothers. Where are they? In prison. He offers the Brothers a deal: in return for their political support, he'll allow them to preach and to advocate, as long as they don't use violence. What Sadat didn't know is that the Islamists were split. Some of them had been inspired by Qutb. The younger, more radical ones thought that the older ones had gone soft." Sadat emptied the prisons, without realizing the danger that the Islamists posed to his regime.

The Muslim Brothers, who were forbidden to act as a genuine political party, began colonizing professional and student unions. By 1973, a new band of young fundamentalists had appeared 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, which was uncompromising in its militancy, radicalized most of Egypt's universities. Soon it became fashionable for male students to grow beards and for female students to wear the veil.

Zawahiri claimed that by 1974 his group had grown to forty members. In April of that year, another group of young Islamist activists seized weapons from the arsenal of a military school, with the intention of marching on the Arab Socialist Union, where Sadat was preparing to address the nation's leaders. The attempted coup d'état was very much along the lines of what Zawahiri had been advocating: rather than revolution, he favored a sudden, surgical military action, which would be far less bloody. The coup was put down, but only after a shootout that left eleven dead.

The Cairo University medical school, where Zawahiri was specializing in surgery, was boiling with Islamic activism. And yet Zawahiri's underground life was a secret even to his family, according to a recent article in the Egyptian press, which quoted his younger sister, Heba, on the subject. It was also a secret to his friends and classmates. "Ayman never joined political activities during this period," I was told by Dr. Essam Elerian, who was a colleague of Zawahiri's and is now the leader of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt. "He was a witness from outside."

Zawahiri was tall and slender, and he wore a mustache that paralleled the flat lines of his mouth. His face was thin, and his hairline was in retreat. He dressed in Western clothes, usually a coat and tie. He did not completely hide his political feelings, however. In the seventies, while he was in medical school, he gave a campus tour to an American newsman, Abdallah Schleifer, who is now a professor of media studies at the American University in Cairo. A gangly, wiry-haired man who wears a goatee, a throwback to his beatnik phase in the late fifties, Schleifer was a challenging figure in Zawahiri's life. He was brought up in a non-observant Jewish family on Long Island. He went through a Marxist period and then, during a trip to Morocco in 1962, he encountered the Sufi tradition of Islam. 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 has spent his professional life since then in the Middle East. In 1974, when Schleifer first came to Cairo, as the bureau chief for NBC News, Zawahiri's uncle Mahfouz Azzam became a kind of sponsor for him. "Converts often get adopted, and Mahfouz was fascinating," Schleifer told me. "To him, it was sort of a gas that an American had taken Islam. I had the feeling I was under the protection of the whole Azzam family."

Recalling his first meeting with Zawahiri, Schleifer said, "He was scrawny and his eyeglasses were extremely prominent. He looked like a left-wing City College intellectual of thirty years earlier." During the tour, Zawahiri proudly pointed out students who were painting posters for political demonstrations, and he boasted that the Islamist movement had found its greatest recruiting success in the university's two most élite faculties—the medical and engineering schools. "Aren't you impressed by that?" he said.

Schleifer replied that in the sixties those same faculties had been strongholds of the Marxist youth. The Islamist movement, he observed, was merely the latest trend in student rebellions. "I patronized him," Schleifer remembers. "I said, '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.' He was well bred and polite, and we parted on a friendly note. But I think he was puzzled."

Schleifer encountered Zawahiri again at a celebration of the Eid festival, one of the holiest Muslim days of the year. "I heard they were going to have outdoor prayer in the Farouk Mosque in Maadi," he recalls. "So I thought, Great, I'll go pray in their lovely garden. And who do I see but Ayman and 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 day of chanting the Koran turned into a contest between the congregation and the Zawahiri brothers with their microphone. "I realized that they were introducing the Salafist formula, which does not recognize any Islamic traditions after the time of the Prophet," Schleifer told me. "It was chaotic. Afterward, I went over to Zawahiri and said, 'Ayman, this is wrong.' He started to explain. I said, '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, which is proscribed by the Koran—" 'and if you want to do that you should do it in your own mosque.' " According to Schleifer, Zawahiri meekly responded, "You're right, Abdallah."

Eventually, in the late seventies, the various underground groups began to discover each other. Four of these cells, including Zawahiri's, merged to form Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Their leader was a young man named Kamal Habib. Like Zawahiri, Habib, who had graduated in 1979 from Cairo University's Faculty for Economics and Political Science, was the kind of driven intellectual who might have been expected to become a leader of the country but turned violently against the status quo. Arrested in 1981 on charges related to the assassination of Sadat, he was released from prison after serving a ten-year sentence. In Cairo earlier this year, Habib told me, "Most of our generation belonged to the middle or the upper-middle class. As children, we were expected to advance in conventional society, but we didn't do what our parents dreamed for us. And this is still a puzzling issue for us. For example, Ayman finished his degree as a doctor, specializing in surgery, and set up a clinic in a duplex apartment that he shared with his parents in Maadi. Anybody else would have been happy with this. But Ayman was not happy, and this led him into trouble."

Zawahiri graduated from medical school in 1974, then spent three years as a surgeon in the Egyptian Army, posted at a base outside Cairo. He was now in his late twenties, and it was time for him to marry. According to members of his family, he had never had a girlfriend. "Our custom is to have friends or relations suggest a spouse," his cousin Omar told me. "If they find acceptance, they are allowed to meet once or twice, then start the engagement. It's not a love story." One of the possible brides suggested to Ayman was Azza Nowair, the daughter of a prominent Cairo family. Both her parents were lawyers. Azza had been born in a villa and brought up in a handsome Maadi home. In another time, she might have become a professional woman or a socialite going to parties at the Sporting Club, but at Cairo University she adopted the hijab, the headscarf that has become a badge of conservatism among Muslim women. Azza's decision to veil herself was a shocking disavowal of her class. "Before that, she had worn the latest fashions," her older brother, Essam, told me. "We didn't want her to be so religious. She started to pray a lot and read the Koran. 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 spent whole nights reading the Koran. When he woke in the morning, he would find her sitting on the prayer mat with the Koran in her hands, fast asleep.

The niqab imposed a formidable barrier for a marriageable young woman. Because of Azza's wealthy, distinguished family, she had many suitors, but they all insisted that she drop the veil. Azza refused. "She wanted someone who would accept her as she was," her brother told me. "Ayman was looking for that type of person."

At the first meeting between Azza and Ayman, according to custom Azza lifted her veil for a few minutes. "He saw her 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 never saw his fiancée's face again until after the marriage ceremony. He had made a favorable impression on the Nowair family, who were a little dazzled by his distinguished ancestry. "He was polite and agreeable," Essam says. "He was very religious, and he didn't greet women. He wouldn't even look at a woman if she was wearing a short skirt." He apparently never talked about politics with Azza's family, and it's not clear how much he revealed about his activism to her. She once confided to Omar Azzam that her greatest desire was to become a martyr.

Their wedding was held in February, 1978, at the Continental-Savoy Hotel, which had slipped from colonial 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," Schleifer recalls. "Lots of cups of coffee and no one cracking jokes."

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Courtesy: The New Yorker

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