The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [145]
In 1997 Azza had a surprise: She was pregnant again, almost a decade after the birth of her last child. The baby was born in the winter, severely underweight. Dr. Ayman realized at once that his fifth daughter suffered from Down syndrome. Azza, already pressed by the responsibility of taking care of a large family in extraordinary circumstances, accepted this new burden as well. They named the baby Aisha. Everyone loved her, but Azza was the only one who could attend to all her needs.
Looking back at her friendships with the bin Laden and the Zawahiri children, Zaynab observed that the families “had their ups and downs, but they were pretty much normal kids. They had pretty much a normal childhood.”
IN JULY 1997, two months after Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan, he was infuriated by a development in Egypt that threatened to undermine his entire movement. The Islamist lawyer Montassir al-Zayyat had brokered a deal between the Islamic Group and the Egyptian government. The nonviolence initiative, as it was called, had originated in the same prisons where Zayyat and Zawahiri had been incarcerated together sixteen years before. With twenty thousand Islamists in Egyptian custody, and thousands of others who had been cut down by the security forces, the fundamentalist movement had been paralyzed, and it was clear to the leaders of the Islamic Group that unless they formally renounced violence they would never see daylight.
After the initiative was declared, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman added his imprimatur from his prison cell in the United States. While denying that a deal had been struck, the government released two thousand members of the Islamic Group within the following year. Many senior members of Zawahiri’s own al-Jihad joined the movement to reconcile with the regime.
At first, Zawahiri was alone in his dissent. “The political translation of this initiative is surrender,” he raged. “In which battle is a fighter forced to end his fighting and incitement, accept captivity, and turn in his men and weapons—in exchange for nothing?” The barrage of letters over this matter between Zawahiri and other Islamists to the editor of an Arabic paper in London came to be called the War of the Faxes. Zawahiri said he understood the suffering of the imprisoned leaders, but “if we are going to stop now, why did we start in the first place?”
Zawahiri’s stance divided the Egyptian Islamists between those still in the country, who wanted peace, and those outside Egypt who opposed reconciliation. Zawahiri enlisted Mustafa Hamza, the new emir of the rival Islamic Group, and its military leader, Rifai Ahmed Taha, both of whom were in Afghanistan, to join him. (As for the blind sheikh’s participation in the initiative, he may have thought of it as a bargaining chip with the Americans, whom he hoped would set him free. When it later became clear that would not happen, he retracted his support.) The Egyptian exiles decided to justify the continuing use of violence through a single transformative blow.
The attack may have been intended for a performance of Aida, Verdi’s opera of ancient Egypt, which was staged in October 1997 in front of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor. The splendid ruin is one of the great artifacts of the New Kingdom. Suzanne Mubarak, the president’s wife, hosted the opening-night gala.
The Islamic Group’s strategy was to attack tourism, the life force of the Egyptian economy and the main source of foreign exchange, in order to provoke the government into repressive, unpopular responses. Al-Jihad had always disdained this approach as counterproductive.