The Looming Tower (8 page)

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.”

“M
Y CONNECTION WITH
A
FGHANISTAN
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.”

W
HEN
Z
AWAHIRI 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.”