Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [80]
While in university, Abdel Rahman developed an interest in and became a member of the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. He quickly emerged as the leader. Calling for a purely Islamic government, he denounced the Egyptian government. He even issued a fatwa calling for the overthrow of President Anwar Sadat. When Sadat was assassinated, Abdel Rahman was arrested for issuing the fatwa and spent three years in Egyptian prisons awaiting trial, during which time he was tortured. Although he was acquitted, the Egyptian government expelled him. He traveled to Afghanistan, where all the radicals appeared to be gathering. There he met up with his former schoolteacher, Abdullah Azzam. Through Abdullah Azzam, he met my father.
Abdullah Azzam’s assassination in 1989 was a tragedy, for he often calmed the violence brewing among radical believers.
After the assassination, the blind Abdel Rahman traveled to New York to establish himself as head of Abdullah Azzam’s organization. Despite the fact Abdel Rahman was listed on the U.S. terrorist list, he was given a visa and allowed to enter the country.
The blind cleric traveled throughout the United States and Canada, recruiting support for the Islamic cause to overthrow secular governments. He was a brazen speaker, calling for supporters to ignore American laws and to kill American Jews. He aggressively ordered Muslims to attack the West, and to “tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land.”
In fact, his followers were behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Abdel Rahman was arrested in June 1993, approximately a year after we arrived in Sudan. That’s why his son was running his organization. But the blind cleric’s incarceration became a rallying cry for Islamic militants worldwide.
Put simply, all three groups focused on various aspects of restoring Islamic Jihad, although the two Egyptian groups were rabid regarding their goal of overthrowing the Egyptian government so that an Islamic government might be put in place.
The al-Jihad and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya groups had brought their families to live in Sudan as well. At first our father had kept us isolated from everyone but our own family members, but increasingly he allowed us to mix with the teenage sons of those leaders. There was one particular boy who was my age and enjoyed the same sort of activities. He was the son of Mohammed Sharaf, an important man in the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya group.
There was a sickening incident when someone targeted my friend, the son of Mohammed Sharaf. That young man was abducted and brutally gang-raped by a group of men. The rapists added insult to injury by snapping photographs of the young man during and after the rape.
My poor friend managed to escape with his life and returned to his father, Mohammed. Shockingly, those damning photographs ended up in the hands of Dr. Zawahiri, the leader of the al-Jihad group. Zawahiri was incensed, believing that the young teenage boy was somehow at fault. There were pictures to prove it! In our world, sex between men is punishable by death. So a second horror was awaiting my friend. He was arrested by the group leaders, put on trial, and condemned to death.
My father was uninvolved with anything to do with this incident, although he used the episode to remind us that he had always kept his sons under guard and close at home to ensure that such things could never happen to us. He reminded us that many people would like to harm him through his young sons.
I was so sad that my father refused to approach Dr. Zawahiri about the incident, and to save my friend’s life, as I believed in those days that my father could accomplish anything he wanted.
Mohammed Sharaf knew the truth. That good father strongly defended his son, telling Zawahiri that his boy was an innocent victim. But no one wanted to believe they had wrongly condemned an innocent boy.