Why Ayman al Zawahiri Matters:
Osama bin Laden is the charismatic, financing face of al-Qaeda. Ayman al Zawahiri is the organization’s ideological half. It is al Zawahiri who gives al-Qaeda its violent, uncompromising, vitriolic anti-Western character, although al-Zawahiri once was equally intent on destroying Arab regimes he considers un-Islamic—that is, any regime that fails to apply God’s law as Zawahiri defines it. Zawahiri considers Christians and Jews at war with Islam, and Arab regimes allied with the West complicit in that war.
Since 2007, Zawahiri, who cannot resist media exposure, has been the exclusive face of al-Qaeda, leading to speculation about bin Laden’s fate.
Early Life: A Family of Intellect and Prominence :
Ayman al Zawahiri was born on June 19, 1951, in Maadi, one of Cairo’s glitziest neighborhoods, to a family of prominent but not rich intellectuals and clerics. On his father’s side, a great uncle had been the imam of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the theological epicenter of Sunni Islam. His father was a professor of pharmacology at Ayn Shams University. His maternal grandfather had headed the Cairo University Faculty of Literature and founded King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Yet another relative on his mother’s side, Abdul Rahman Azzam, was the founding secretary general of the Arab League in 1948.
Youth: Piety and Militancy:
A fan of Disney cartoons, Al Zawahiri seemed destined for a middle class life. He was extremely intelligent, precocious, sensitive, but also—and unlike the rest of his family (his mother, a terrific kunafa bjibin cook, did not wear the veil) extremely pious and unsmiling from his earliest youth. He read, rejected sports as “inhumane,” prayed, and earned perfect scores. He wrote love poems to his mother but, contemptuous of secular government, defied authority from his earliest youth. At 15 he created his first militant cell, with a few classmates. His aim: to overthrow the Egyptian regime.
Earliest Influence: Sayyid Qutb :
One of al-Qaeda’s few but powerful ideological guideposts is Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the Egyptian scholar and Muslim Brotherhood ideologue who believed the white man to be “the enemy of humanity” and Islam undiluted by modernism or secularism in any form the only path to a pure life. Even Muslims who did not take that path could be excommunicated from the Islamic community through takfir. Zawahiri early took Qutb to heart—especially when the Egyptian regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser executed Qutb for alleged militancy in 1966. Islamism’s non-violent phase was over. Al-Zawahiri would herald its violent transformation.
Double Life :
Zawahiri trained and practiced as a doctor while scheming for a caliphate. By 1974, his cell included about 40 individuals, according to Stephane Lacroix. He joined forces with a union of radical Islamist organizations under the leadership of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (subsequently the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing), which masterminded the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. Zawahiri was among the thousands of people arrested in the assassination’s aftermath.
Prison, Torture, Fame:
Zawahiri was brutalized, tortured and humiliated in prison. He also became a spokesmen for prisoners, speaking brashly to television cameras from behind bars during his and other militants’ trial. It was Zawahiri’s humiliating experience in prison, including his betrayal of associates, which turned Zawahiri’s vision of a caliphate from a peaceful struggle to a violent one. Zawahiri compared his prison experience to Qutb’s martyrdom—and made martyrdom a required part of the card-carrying Islamist’s CV. It was in prison, too, that Zawahiri emerged as violent Islamism’s leader.
Freedom, Afghanistan, Bin Laden:
Zawahiri was freed from prison in 1984. He traveled to Afghanistan to join the jihad against Soviet forces—and there, met Osama bin laden for the first time. In 1988, Zawahiri was at bin Laden’s side when al-Qaeda, “the base,” was founded. Zawahiri’s goal was still an Islamic regime in Egypt. It wasn’t bin Laden’s. Zawahiri traveled the globe (including a trip to the United States in 1993) to raise money for his venture and oversaw two terrorist attacks in Egypt—an attempted assassination of the prime minister in November 1993, which killed a little girl instead, and the attack on foreign tourists at Luxor in 1997.
The bloodbaths turned Egyptians against Zawahiri, who joined forces with bin Laden again and changed strategy. Zawahiri’s decision to abandon his fight against the “near enemy” (Egyptian and other Arab regimes) and adapt bin Laden’s strategy of attacking the “far enemy” (the United States was a turning point in al-Qaeda’s direction, as it joined Zawahiri’s ideological brutality with bin Laden’s broad financial reach: the two men put their plans to practice once the Taliban regime in Afghanistan gave them and their training camps free rein. Zawahiri was among the masterminds the origin of the 9/11 attacks.
After 9/11:
Zawahiri was briefly thought to have been killed in the Afghan-American assault on Tora Bora in late 2001. He had not. He has since been al-Qaeda’s most visible spokesman, unleashing a stream of videos, pamphlets and booklets advocating global jihad against the United States and its allies.
As Lacroix wrote in an introduction to Zawahiri’s works in Al Qaeda in Its Own Words (Belknap/Harvard 2008), “Zawahiri’s omnipresence in the media allowed Al Qaeda to fulfill the function it sought as a spokesman, but it also contributed to diluting its message. Though Zawahiri’s early interventions, in 2002 and 2003, had been front-page news worldwide, his last appearances were barely mentioned, meriting a brief note at best. His only true audience, from that point on, was the crowd of jihadist sympathizers on the Internet. […] In striving to make himself widely heard, Zawahiri became, in a sense, inaudible.”
Today, Zawahiri is believed to be hiding, with bin laden, somewhere in Waziristan or other parts of Pakistan’s tribal areas.
