The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [22]
In October 1973, during the fasting month of Ramadan, Egypt and Syria stunned Israel with simultaneous attacks across the Suez Canal into the occupied Sinai and on the Golan Heights. Although the Syrians were soon beaten back and the Egyptian Third Army was rescued only by UN intervention, it was seen in Egypt as a great face-saving victory, giving Sadat a badly needed political triumph.
Nonetheless, Zawahiri’s underground cell began to grow—it had forty members by 1974. Zawahiri was now a tall and slender young man with large black glasses and a moustache that paralleled the flat line of his mouth. His face had grown thinner and his hairline was in retreat. He was a student in the Cairo University medical school, which was aboil with Islamic activism, but Zawahiri had none of the obvious attributes of a fanatic. He wore Western clothes—usually, a coat and tie—and his political involvement was almost completely unknown at the time, even to his family. To the few who knew of his activism, Zawahiri preached against revolution, which was an inherently bloody business, preferring a sudden military action designed to snatch the reins of government in a bold surprise.
He did not completely hide his political feelings, however. Egypt has always had a tradition of turning political misery into humor. A joke that his family recalls Zawahiri telling at this time concerned a poor woman who carried her plump little baby—in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, her go‘alos—to see the king pass by in his royal procession. “I wish that God would grant that you will be seen in such glory,” the woman prayed for her son. A military officer overheard her. “What are you saying?” he demanded. “Are you out of your mind?” But then, twenty years later, the same military officer saw Sadat passing by in a grand procession. “Oh, go‘alos—you made it!” the officer cried.
In his last year of medical school, Zawahiri gave a campus tour to an American newsman, Abdallah Schleifer, who later became a professor of media studies at the American University in Cairo. Schleifer was a challenging figure in Zawahiri’s life. A gangly, wiry-haired man, six feet five inches tall, sporting a goatee that harked back to his beatnik period in the 1950s, Schleifer bore a striking resemblance to the poet Ezra Pound. He had been brought up in a non-observant Jewish family on Long Island. After going through a Marxist period, and making friends with the Black Panthers and Che Guevara, he happened to encounter the Sufi tradition of Islam during a trip to Morocco in 1962. One meaning of the word “Islam” is to surrender, and that is what happened to Schleifer. He converted, changed his name from Marc to Abdallah, and spent the rest of his professional life in the Middle East. In 1974, when Schleifer first went to Cairo as the bureau chief for NBC News, Zawahiri’s uncle Mahfouz Azzam acted as a kind of sponsor for him. An American Jewish convert was a novelty; and Schleifer, for his part, found Mahfouz fascinating. He soon came to feel that he was under the protection of the entire Azzam family.
Schleifer quickly sensed the shift in the student movement in Egypt. Young Islamic activists were appearing on campuses, first in the southern part of the country, then in Cairo. They called themselves al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya—the Islamic Group. Encouraged by Sadat’s acquiescent government, which covertly provided them with arms so that they could defend themselves against any attacks by Marxists and Nasserites, the Islamic Group radicalized most of Egypt’s universities. Different branches were organized along the same lines as the Muslim Brothers, in small cells called ‘anqud—a bunch of grapes. Within a mere four years, the Islamic Group completely dominated the campuses, and for the first time in the living memory of most Egyptians, male students stopped trimming their beards and female students donned the veil.
Schleifer needed a guide to give him a better understanding of the scene. Through Mahfouz, Schleifer met Zawahiri, who agreed to show