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him around campus for an off-camera briefing. “He was scrawny and his eyeglasses were extremely prominent,” said Schleifer, who was reminded of the radicals he had known in the United States. “I had the feeling that this is what a left-wing City College intellectual looked like thirty years ago.” Schleifer watched students painting posters for the demonstrations and young Muslim women sewing hijabs, the head-scarves that devout Muslim women wear. Afterward, Zawahiri and Schleifer walked along the boulevard through the Cairo Zoo to the University Bridge. As they stood over the massive, slow-moving Nile, Zawahiri boasted that the Islamist movement had found its greatest recruiting success in the university’s two most elite faculties—the medical and engineering schools. “Aren’t you impressed by that?”

Schleifer was patronizing. He noted that in the sixties those same faculties had been strongholds of the Marxist Youth. The Islamist movement, he observed, was only the latest trend in student rebellion. “Listen, Ayman, I’m an ex-Marxist. When you talk I feel like I’m back in the Party. I don’t feel as if I’m with a traditional Muslim.” Zawahiri listened politely, but he seemed puzzled by Schleifer’s critique.

Schleifer encountered Zawahiri again soon thereafter. It was the Eid, the time of the annual feast, the holiest day of the year. There was an outdoor prayer in the beautiful garden of Farouk Mosque in Maadi. When Schleifer got there, he noticed Zawahiri with one of his brothers. They were very intense. They laid out plastic prayer mats and set up a microphone. What was supposed to be a meditative period of chanting the Quran turned into an uneven contest between the congregation and the Zawahiri brothers with their microphone. “I realized they were introducing the Salafist formula, which does not recognize any Islamic traditions after the time of the Prophet,” Schleifer recalled. “It killed the poetry. It was chaotic.”

Afterward, he went over to Zawahiri. “Ayman, this is wrong,” Schleifer complained. Zawahiri started to explain, but Schleifer cut him off. “I’m not going to argue with you. I’m a Sufi and you’re a Salafist. But you are making fitna”—a term for stirring up trouble that is proscribed in the Quran—“and if you want to do that, you should do it in your own mosque.”

Zawahiri meekly responded, “You’re right, Abdallah.”

EVENTUALLY THE DISPARATE underground groups began to discover one another. There were five or six cells in Cairo alone, most of them with fewer than ten members. Four of these cells, including Zawahiri’s, which was one of the largest, merged to form Jamaat al-Jihad—the Jihad Group, or simply al-Jihad. Although their goals were similar to those of the mainstream Islamists in the Muslim Brotherhood, they had no intention of trying to work through politics to achieve them. Zawahiri thought such efforts contaminated the ideal of the pure Islamic state. He grew to despise the Muslim Brotherhood for its willingness to compromise.

Zawahiri graduated from medical school in 1974, then served three years as a surgeon in the Egyptian Army, posted at a base outside Cairo. When he finished his military service, the young doctor established a clinic in the same duplex where he lived with his parents. He was now in his late twenties, and it was time for him to marry. Until then, he had never had a girlfriend. In the Egyptian tradition, his friends and relatives began making suggestions of suitable mates. Zawahiri was uninterested in romance; he wanted a partner who shared his extreme convictions and would be willing to bear the hardships his dogmatic personality was bound to encounter. One of the possible brides suggested to Ayman was Azza Nowair, the daughter of an old family friend.

Like the Zawahiris and the Azzams, the Nowairs were a notable Cairo clan. Azza had grown up in a wealthy Maadi household. She was extremely petite—like a young girl—but extraordinarily resolute. In another time and place she might have become a professional woman or a social worker, but in her sophomore year at Cairo University