The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [19]
For anyone living in Maadi in the fifties and sixties, there was one defining social standard: membership in the Maadi Sporting Club. All of Maadi society revolved around it. Because the Zawahiris never joined, Ayman would always be curtained off from the center of power and status. The family developed the reputation of being conservative and a little backward—saeedis, to use the term applied to them, referring to people from a district in Upper Egypt, which informally translates to “hicks.”
At one end of Maadi, surrounded by green playing fields and tennis courts, was the private, British-built preparatory school for boys, Victoria College. The students attended classes in coats and ties. One of its best-known graduates was a talented cricket player named Michel Chalhub; after he became a film actor, he took the name Omar Sharif. Edward Said, the Palestinian scholar and author, attended the school, along with Jordan’s future king, Hussein.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, however, attended the state secondary school, a modest, low-slung building behind a green gate on the opposite side of the suburb. It was for kids from the wrong side of Road 9. The students of the two schools existed in different worlds, never meeting each other even in sports. Whereas Victoria College measured its educational achievements by European standards, the state school had its back to the West. Inside the green gate, the schoolyard was run by bullies and the classrooms by tyrants. A physically vulnerable young boy such as Ayman had to create strategies to survive.
As a child, Ayman had a round face, wary eyes, and a mouth that was flat and unsmiling. He was a bookworm who excelled in his studies and hated violent sports—he thought they were “inhumane.” From an early age he was known for being devout, and he would often attend prayers at the Hussein Sidki Mosque; an unimposing annex of a large apartment building, it was named after a famous actor who had renounced his profession because it was ungodly. No doubt Ayman’s interest in religion seemed natural in a family with so many distinguished religious scholars, but it added to his image of being soft and otherworldly.
He was an excellent student, and invariably earned the respect of his teachers. His classmates thought he was a “genius,” but he was introspective and often appeared to be daydreaming in class. Once, the headmaster sent a note to Professor Zawahiri saying that Ayman had skipped a test. The professor replied, “From tomorrow, you will have the honor of being the headmaster of Ayman al-Zawahiri. In the future, you will be proud.” Indeed, Ayman earned perfect grades with little effort.
Although others saw Ayman as serious nearly all the time, he would show a more playful side at home. “When he laughed, he would shake all over—yanni, it was from the heart,” said his uncle Mahfouz Azzam, an attorney in Maadi.
Ayman’s father died in 1995. His mother, Umayma Azzam, still lives in Maadi, in a comfortable apartment above an appliance store. A wonderful cook, she is famous for her kunafa—a pastry of shredded phyllo filled with cheese and nuts and drenched in orange-blossom syrup. She was a child of the landed upper class and inherited several plots of rich farmland in Giza and the Fayoum Oasis from her father, which provide her with a modest independent income. Ayman and his mother shared an intense love of literature; she would memorize poems he sent—often odes of love for her.
Zawahiri’s uncle Mahfouz, the patriarch of the Azzam clan, observed that although Ayman followed the Zawahiri medical tradition, he was actually closer to his mother’s side of the family—the political side. Since the first Egyptian parliament, more than 150 years ago, there have been Azzams in government, but always in the opposition. Mahfouz carried on the tradition of resistance, having been imprisoned at the age of fifteen for conspiring against the government. In 1945 Mahfouz was arrested again, in a roundup of militants following the assassination of Prime Minister