The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [20]
Sayyid Qutb had been Mahfouz Azzam’s Arabic teacher in the third grade, in 1936, and Qutb and his young protégé formed a lifelong bond. Later, Azzam wrote for the Muslim Brothers magazine that Qutb published in the early years of the revolution. He then became Qutb’s personal lawyer and was one of the last people to see him before his execution. Azzam entered the prison hospital where Qutb was preparing to die. Qutb was calm. He signed a power of attorney, awarding Azzam the authority to dispose of his property; then he gave him his personal Quran, which he inscribed—a treasured relic of the martyr.
Young Ayman al-Zawahiri heard again and again from his beloved uncle Mahfouz about the purity of Qutb’s character and the torment he had endured in prison. The effect of these stories can be gauged by an incident that took place sometime in the middle 1960s, when Ayman and his brother Mohammed were walking home from the mosque after dawn prayers. The vice president of Egypt, Hussein al-Shaffei, stopped his car to offer the boys a ride. Shaffei had been one of the judges in the roundup of Islamists in 1954. It was unusual for the Zawahiri boys to ride in a car, much less with the vice president. But Ayman said, “We don’t want to get this ride from a man who participated in the courts that killed Muslims.”
His stiff-necked defiance of authority at such an early age shows Zawahiri’s personal fearlessness, his self-righteousness, and his total conviction of the truth of his own beliefs—headstrong qualities that would invariably be associated with him in the future and that would propel him into conflict with nearly everyone he would meet. Moreover, his contempt for the authoritarian secular government ensured that he would always be a political outlaw. These rebellious traits, which might have been chaotic in a less disciplined man, were organized and given direction by an abiding mission in his life: to put Qutb’s vision into action.
“The Nasserite regime thought that the Islamic movement received a deadly blow with the execution of Sayyid Qutb and his comrades,” Zawahiri later wrote. “But the apparent surface calm concealed an immediate interaction with Sayyid Qutb’s ideas and the formation of the nucleus of the modern Islamic jihad movement in Egypt.” Indeed, the same year that Sayyid Qutb went to the gallows, Ayman al-Zawahiri helped form an underground cell devoted to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamist state. He was fifteen years old.
“WE WERE A GROUP OF STUDENTS from Maadi High School and other schools,” Zawahiri later testified. The members of his cell usually met in each other’s homes; sometimes they got together in mosques and then moved to a park or a quiet spot on the boulevard along the Nile. There were five of them in the beginning, and before long Zawahiri became the emir, or leader. He continued to quietly recruit new members to a cause that had virtually no chance of success and could easily have gotten them all killed. “Our means didn’t match our aspirations,” he conceded in his testimony. But he never questioned his decision.
The prosperity and social position enjoyed by the residents of Maadi, which had insulated them from the political whims of the royal court, now made them feel targeted in revolutionary Egypt. Parents were fearful of expressing their opinions even in front of their children. At the same time, clandestine groups such as the one Zawahiri joined were springing up all over the country. Made up mainly of restless and alienated students, these groups were small, disorganized, and largely unaware of one another. Then came the 1967 war with Israel.
After years of rhetorical attacks on Israel, Nasser demanded the removal of UN peacekeepers in the Sinai and then blockaded the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Israel responded with an overwhelming preemptive attack that destroyed the entire Egyptian air force within two hours. When Jordan, Iraq, and Syria joined the war against Israel, their air forces