The Looming Tower (6 page)

Sayyid Qutb was hanged after dawn prayers on August
29, 1966.
The government refused to surrender his corpse to his family, fearing that his grave would become a shrine to his followers. The radical Islamist threat seemed to have come to an end. But Qutb’s vanguard was already hearing the music.

2

The Sporting Club

A
YMAN AL
-Z
AWAHIRI,
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.

“W
E 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.