The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [104]
MONEY FOR AL-JIHAD was always in short supply. Many of Zawahiri’s followers had families, and they all needed food and housing. A few had turned to theft and shakedowns to support themselves. Zawahiri strongly disapproved of this; when members of al-Jihad robbed a German military attaché in Yemen, he investigated the incident and expelled those responsible. But the money problem remained. He hoped to raise enough money in America to keep his organization alive.
Zawahiri had none of the blind sheikh’s charisma or fame, so when he appeared after evening prayers at the al-Nur Mosque in Santa Clara, presenting himself as “Dr. Abdul Mu’iz,” nobody knew who he actually was. Ali Mohammed introduced him to Dr. Ali Zaki, a gynecologist in San Jose, and asked him to accompany them on Dr. Mu’iz’s tour of the Silicon Valley. Zaki took Zawahiri to mosques in Sacramento and Stockton. The two doctors spent most of their time discussing medical problems that Zawahiri encountered in Afghanistan. “We talked about the injured children and the farmers who were missing limbs because of all the Russian mines,” Zaki recalled. “He was a well-balanced, highly educated physician.”
At one point, the two men had a tiff over what Zaki thought was Zawahiri’s narrow-minded view of Islam. Like most jihadis, Zawahiri followed the Salafist teachings of Ibn Tamiyyah, the thirteenth-century reformer who had sought to impose a literal interpretation of the Quran. Zaki told Zawahiri that he was leaving out the other two streams of Islam: the mystical, which was born in the writings of al-Harith al-Muhasibi, the founder of Sufism; and the rationalist school, which was reflected in the thought of the great sheikh of al-Azhar, Mohammed Abdu. “Your brand of Islam will never prevail in the West, because the best thing about the West is the freedom to choose,” Zaki said. “Here you see the mystical movement spreading like fire, and the Salafis didn’t even convert a single person to Islam!” Zawahiri was unmoved.
Zaki estimated that, at most, the donations produced by these visits to California mosques amounted to several hundred dollars. Ali Mohammed put the figure at two thousand dollars. Whatever the case, Zawahiri returned to Sudan facing a dispiriting choice: whether to maintain the independence of his bootstrap organization that was always struggling financially or to formally join forces with bin Laden.
When they had met nearly a decade before, Zawahiri was by far the more powerful figure; he had an organization behind him and a clear objective: to overthrow the government of Egypt. But now bin Laden, who had always had the advantage of money, also had his own organization, one that was much more ambitious than al-Jihad. In the same way that he ran multiple businesses under a single corporate tent, bin Laden sought to merge all Islamic terrorist groups into one multinational consortium, with common training and economies of scale and departments devoted to everything from personnel to policymaking. The protégé had begun to outstrip his mentor, and both men knew this.
Zawahiri also faced the prospect of being overshadowed by the blind sheikh and the activities of the Islamic Group. Despite the fact that Zawahiri had assembled a capable and dedicated cadre, many of them well-educated, skilled operatives like Ali Mohammed, who moved easily from the suburbs of Silicon Valley to the dusty streets of Khartoum, al-Jihad had not undertaken a single successful operation. Meanwhile, the blind sheikh’s followers had undertaken an unparalleled rampage of murder and pillage. In order to weaken the government and prod the masses into rebellion, they chose to attack tourism,