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Some of the other defendants would achieve even greater prominence. Ayman al-Zawahiri was a young surgeon from a distinguished clerical-medical dynasty with a practice in Cairo’s Maadi suburb where he had organised a jihadist cell that was on the periphery of the plot to kill Sadat. Although he had learned of the plot only hours before it happened, al-Zawahiri and his friend Aboud al-Zuma were bent on using Sadat’s funeral to kill Mubarak and any foreign dignitaries who happened along. On 23 October al-Zawahiri was arrested by the police, the gateway to endless horrors at the hands of Intelligence Unit 75, the government’s expert torturers. During the court hearings, he emerged as the defendants’ spokesman, using this public forum to give chapter and verse about beatings, electrocution and wild dogs, testimony—all probably true—that provoked chants of ‘The army of Mohammed will return, and we will defeat the Jews’ from his co-accused. At the end of the three-year trial, al-Zawahiri was sentenced to three years in jail, which he had already largely served on remand. His sentence may have been lightened by intelligence on other terrorists that he gave his tormentors. When he emerged from this ordeal in 1984, al-Zawahiri was no longer the retiring bookish medic with a sideline in militant jihadism. The physical and psychological humiliations of torture, and perhaps the religious ecstasies that extreme pain can generate, had created a suspicious, steely man focused on revenge. The only future question would be, against whom?17

III THE RISE OF ISLAMISM IN ALGERIA

The succession of stony-faced army officers who ruled Algeria after it achieved independence in 1962 were confronted by mounting problems that the FLN’s brand of single-party national socialism with an Islamic tinge could not solve. Oil and natural-gas revenues were not converted into industrial jobs quickly enough to cope with staggering population growth or the flood of people migrating from the mountains and scrublands to the slums of the major cities. In fact they ended up in Swiss bank accounts of the ruling military elite. Every year 180,000 well-educated youths under twenty-five years of age entered a labour market that grew by only 100,000.18 Algeria had 8.5 million people in 1954; by 1980 that had become 18.5 million, and 26.6 million thirteen years later. The emigration of about eight hundred thousand workers, largely to France, did not significantly alleviate these demographic pressures, always assuming that people were prepared to put up with the resentment they often faced in the erstwhile colonial metropolis towards the indigent victors of the Algerian War. Moreover, nearly half of the population was aged under fifteen in a society where women had an average of eight children—whose own life expectancy rose because of better medical care.

Many young people had no work; indeed the official unemployment rate reached 28 per cent and that is likely to be an underestimate. Since these boys spent their time slouched against walls, they were referred to as ‘hittistes’, from hit, the Arab word for wall. To these young people, the army and FLN leaderships’ constant harping on their allegedly heroic revolutionary role in the 1950s and 1960s meant nothing. They were the corrupt crowd who used the privatisation of state lands in the 1980s to build luxury villas and private factories, and whose security services routinely assaulted and tortured people. Reality for youths in the teeming slums was unemployment, houses so badly built that they sometimes collapsed, and relentless heat made insufferable by chronic water shortages. A distinctive youth culture developed based on gangs, football hooliganism, drugs and raï music, which fused North African idioms with rap, reggae and punk. In October 1988 these young males rioted in downtown Algiers, smashing up buses, roadsigns, telephone kiosks, and luxury shops where the local jeunesse dorée, or ‘tchi-tchi’, were wont to flaunt their wealth. Much sexual frustration was vented against rich young women driving