The Looming Tower (75 page)

Ayman al-Zawahiri grew up in Maadi, a middle-class suburb of Cairo. A solitary child, his classmates regarded him as a genius. He is shown in his childhood in a Cairo park.

Zawahiri as a schoolboy, right, and as a medical student at Cairo University, below

Opposite bottom: Ayman al-Zawahiri was defendant number 113 of the 302 who were charged with aiding or planning the October 1981 assassination of Anwar al-Sadat. He became spokesperson for the defendants because of his superior English. He is shown here delivering his lecture to the world press in December 1982. Many blame the torture of prisoners in the Egyptian prisons for the savagery of the Islamist movement. “They kicked us, they beat us, they whipped us with electric cables! They shocked us with electricity! And they used the wild dogs!”

The defendants on trial

Left: Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, “the blind sheikh,” was one of the defendants. He was the emir of the Islamic Group at the time.

Left: Mohammed bin Laden came to Saudi Arabia in 1931 as a penniless Yemeni laborer and rose to become the king’s favorite contractor and the man who built much of the infrastructure of the modern Kingdom. He gestures here to Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz during a tour of the renovation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, circa 1950.

Right: Mohammed bin Laden and King Faisal. During the construction of the road to Taif, King Faisal would often come to examine the progress and ask about cost overruns. When the road was completed, the Kingdom was finally united and Mohammed bin Laden became a national hero.

Left: The renovation of the Grand Mosque took twenty years. During the hajj it can accommodate a million worshippers at once.

Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden’s college friend and later his brother-in-law, moved into bin Laden’s house with his first wife. Their friendship broke apart over the issue of creating an all-Arab legion in Afghanistan, which was the predecessor of al-Qaeda.

Osama moved to this house in Jeddah with his mother after Mohammed bin Laden divorced her.

Osama bin Laden’s second house in Jeddah, a four-unit apartment building, which he acquired after he became a polygamist
Opposite, bottom: Juhayman al-Oteibi, the leader of the attack on the mosque in 1979, a turning point in the history of Saudi Arabia. The demands of the insurgents foreshadowed bin Laden’s agenda. When Oteibi begged for forgiveness after his capture, Prince Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, told him, “Ask forgiveness of God!”