The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [30]
Zawahiri himself doesn’t admit to this in his memoir, except obliquely, where he writes about the “humiliation” of imprisonment. “The toughest thing about captivity is forcing the mujahid, under the force of torture, to confess about his colleagues, to destroy his movement with his own hands, and offer his and his colleagues’ secrets to the enemy.”
Perversely, the authorities placed Qamari in the same cell with Zawahiri after Zawahiri testified against him and thirteen others. Qamari received a ten-year sentence. “As usual, he received the news with his unique calmness and self-composure,” Zawahiri recorded. “He even tried to comfort me, and said, ‘I pity you for the burdens you will carry.’” In 1988 Qamari was shot to death by police after escaping from prison.
ZAWAHIRI WAS DEFENDANT number 113 of 302 who were accused of aiding or planning the assassination, as well as various other crimes (in Zawahiri’s case, dealing in arms). Lieutenant Islambouli and twenty-three others charged with the actual assassination were tried separately. Islambouli and four conspirators were hanged. Nearly every notable Islamist in Egypt was implicated in the plot.* The other defendants, some of whom were adolescents, were crowded into a zoo-like cage that ran across one side of a vast improvised courtroom in the Exhibition Grounds in Cairo where fairs and conventions are often held. They came from various organizations—al-Jihad, the Islamic Group, the Muslim Brotherhood—that formed the fractious core of the Islamist movement. International news organizations covered the trial, and Zawahiri, who had the best command of English among the defendants, was their designated spokesman.
Video footage of the opening day of the trial, December 4, 1982, shows the three hundred defendants, illuminated by the lights of the TV cameras, chanting, praying, and calling out desperately to family members. Finally, the camera settles on Zawahiri, who stands apart from the chaos with a look of solemn, focused intensity. Thirty-one years old, he is wearing a white robe and has a gray scarf thrown over his shoulder.
At a signal, the other prisoners fall silent, and Zawahiri cries out, “Now we want to speak to the whole world! Who are we? Why do they bring us here, and what we want to say? About the first question, we are Muslims! We are Muslims who believe in their religion! We are Muslims who believe in their religion, both in ideology and practice, and hence we tried our best to establish an Islamic state and an Islamic society!”
The other defendants chant, in Arabic, “There is no God but God!”
Zawahiri continues, in a fiercely repetitive cadence, “We are not sorry, we are not sorry for what we have done for our religion, and we have sacrificed, and we stand ready to make more sacrifices!”
The others shout, “There is no God but God!”
Zawahiri then says, “We are here—the real Islamic front and the real Islamic opposition against Zionism, Communism, and imperialism!” He pauses, then: “And now, as an answer to the second question, why did they bring us here? They bring us here for two reasons! First, they are trying to abolish the outstanding Islamic movement…and, secondly, to complete the conspiracy of evacuating the area in preparation for the Zionist infiltration.”
The others cry out, “We will not sacrifice the blood of Muslims for the Americans and the Jews!”
The prisoners pull off their shoes and raise their robes to expose marks of torture. Zawahiri talks about the abuse that took place in the “dirty Egyptian jails…where we suffered the severest inhuman treatment. There they kicked us, they beat us, they whipped us with electric cables, they shocked us with electricity! They shocked us with electricity! And they used the wild dogs! And they used the wild dogs! And they hung us over the edges of the doors”—here he bends forward to demonstrate—“with our hands tied at the back! They arrested the wives, the mothers, the fathers, the sisters,