The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [18]
In 1960 Dr. Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri and his wife, Umayma, moved from Heliopolis to Maadi. Rabie and Umayma belonged to two of the most prominent families in Egypt. The Zawahiri (pronounced za-wah-iri) clan was already on its way to becoming a medical dynasty. Rabie was a professor of pharmacology at Ain Shams University. His brother was a highly regarded dermatologist and an expert on venereal diseases. The tradition they established would continue in the next generation: a 1995 obituary in a Cairo newspaper for Kashif al-Zawahiri, an engineer, mentioned forty-six members of the family, thirty-one of whom were doctors or chemists or pharmacists scattered throughout the Arab world and the United States; among the others were an ambassador, a judge, and a member of parliament.
The Zawahiri name, however, was associated above all with religion. In 1929 Rabie’s uncle Mohammed al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri became the rector of al-Azhar, the thousand-year-old university in the heart of Old Cairo, which is still the center of Islamic learning in the Middle East. The leader of that institution enjoys a kind of papal status in the Muslim world. Imam Mohammed is remembered as the institution’s great modernizer, although he was highly unpopular at the time and eventually was driven out of office by student and faculty strikes protesting his policies. Rabie’s father and grandfather were al-Azhar scholars as well.
Umayma Azzam, Rabie’s wife, was from a clan that was equally distinguished, but wealthier and more political. Her father, Dr. Abdul Wahhab Azzam, was the president of Cairo University and the founder of King Saud University in Riyadh. Along with his busy academic life, he also served as the Egyptian ambassador to Pakistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. He was the most prominent pan-Arab intellectual of his time. His uncle had been a founder and the first secretary-general of the Arab League.
Despite their remarkable pedigrees, Professor Zawahiri and Umayma settled into an apartment on Street 100, on the baladi side of the tracks. Later they rented a duplex at Number 10, Street 154, near the train station. Maadi society held no interest for them. They were religious, but not overtly pious. Umayma went about unveiled, but that was not unusual; public displays of religious zeal were rare in Egypt then and almost unheard-of in Maadi. There were more churches than mosques in the neighborhood, and a thriving Jewish synagogue as well.
Children quickly filled the Zawahiri home. The oldest, Ayman and his twin sister, Umnya, were born on June 19, 1951. The twins were at the top of their classes all the way through medical school. A younger sister, Heba, born three years later, also became a doctor. The two other children, Mohammed and Hussein, trained as architects.
Obese, bald, and slightly cross-eyed, Ayman’s father had the reputation of being eccentric and absentminded, and yet he was beloved by his students and neighborhood children. He spent most of his time in the laboratory or in his private medical clinic. Professor Zawahiri’s research occasionally took him to Czechoslovakia, at a time when few Egyptians traveled because of currency restrictions. He always returned loaded with toys. He enjoyed taking the children to the movies at the Maadi Sporting Club, which were open to nonmembers. Young Ayman loved the cartoons and Disney films, which played three nights a week on the outdoor screen. In the summer, the extended family would go to the beach in Alexandria. Life on a professor’s salary was often tight, however, especially with five ambitious children to educate. The family never owned a car until Ayman was grown. Like many Egyptian academics, Professor Zawahiri eventually spent several years teaching outside of Egypt—he went to Algeria—to earn a higher income. To economize, the Zawahiris kept hens and ducks behind the house, and the professor bought oranges and mangoes by the crate, which he pressed on the children as a natural source of vitamin C. Although he was a druggist