The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [27]
Sadat’s peace agreement with Israel united the disparate Islamist factions. They were also inflamed by a new law, sponsored by the president’s wife, Jihan, that granted women the right to divorce, a privilege not provided by the Quran. In what would prove to be his final speech, Sadat ridiculed the Islamic garb worn by pious women, which he called a “tent,” and banned the niqab from the universities. The radicals responded by characterizing the president as a heretic. It is forbidden, under Islamic law, to strike against a ruler unless he doesn’t believe in God or the Prophet. The declaration of heresy was an open invitation to assassination.
In response to a series of demonstrations orchestrated by the Islamists, Sadat dissolved all religious student associations, confiscated their property, and shut down their summer camps. Reversing his position of tolerating, even encouraging, such groups, he now adopted a new slogan: “No politics in religion and no religion in politics.” There could scarcely have been a more incendiary formulation in the Islamist mind.
Zawahiri envisioned not merely the removal of the head of state but a complete overthrow of the existing order. Stealthily, he had been recruiting officers from the Egyptian military, waiting for the moment when al-Jihad had accumulated sufficient strength in men and weapons to act. His chief strategist was Aboud al-Zumar, a colonel in military intelligence who was a hero of the 1973 war against Israel (a Cairo street had been renamed in his honor). Zumar’s plan was to kill the main leaders of the country, capture the headquarters of the army and State Security, the telephone exchange building, and of course the radio and television building, where news of the Islamic revolution would then be broadcast, unleashing—he expected—a popular uprising against secular authority all over the country. It was, Zawahiri later testified, “an elaborate artistic plan.”
Another key member of Zawahiri’s cell was a daring tank commander named Essam al-Qamari. Because of his valor and intelligence, Major Qamari had been promoted repeatedly over the heads of his peers. Zawahiri described him as “a noble person in the true sense of the word. Most of his sufferings and sacrifices that he endured willingly and calmly were the result of his honorable character.” Although Zawahiri was the senior member of the Maadi cell, he often deferred to Qamari, who had a natural sense of command—a quality that Zawahiri notably lacked. Indeed, Qamari observed that there was “something missing” in Zawahiri, and once cautioned him, “If you are a member of any group, you cannot be the leader.”
Qamari began smuggling weapons and ammunition from army strongholds and storing them in Zawahiri’s medical clinic in Maadi, which was in a downstairs apartment in the duplex where his parents lived. In February of 1981, as the weapons were being transferred from the clinic to a warehouse, police officers arrested a young man carrying a bag loaded with guns, military bulletins, and maps that showed the location of all the tank emplacements in Cairo. Qamari, realizing that he would soon be implicated, dropped out of sight, but several of his officers were arrested. Zawahiri inexplicably stayed put.
Until these arrests, the Egyptian government had persuaded itself that the Islamist underground had been eliminated. That September, Sadat ordered the roundup of more