The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [72]
For the next ten years, Zawahiri would be pulled in both directions. The Egyptian option was al-Jihad, which he had created and defined. The universal option had not yet been named, but it was already taking shape. It would be called al-Qaeda.
ZAWAHIRI’S WIFE, Azza, set up housekeeping in Hayatabad, Pakistan, where many of the other Arabs were living. The wives of al-Jihad kept themselves apart, wearing black abayas and covering their faces in public. The Zawahiris rented a four-bedroom villa and kept one room always available for the many visitors who passed through. “If they had money left over, they gave it to the needy,” Azza’s brother Essam said. “They were happy with very little.”
Azza’s mother, Nabila Galal, visited Azza and Ayman in Pakistan on three occasions. She brought boxes of Fisher-Price toys to her grandchildren. She thought they were “an unusually close family, and always moved together as one unit.” But the man her pious daughter had chosen still confounded her. He seemed always to be drawing his wife and children deeper into danger. Nabila was helpless to stop this fatal drift, which had begun in 1981 when Zawahiri went to prison just as his first child, Fatima, was born. Nabila had taken care of his wife and child until he got out three years later. After Zawahiri escaped from Egypt and relocated to Jeddah, Nabila dutifully came to attend the birth of Umayma, who was named after Zawahiri’s mother. During those visits, Azza privately confessed to her mother how much she missed Egypt and her family. Again and again, Nabila fretted over the direction that Azza’s life was taking.
“One day, I got a letter from Azza, and I felt intense pain as I read the words,” Nabila said. “She wrote that she was to travel to Pakistan with her husband. I wished that she would not go there, but I knew that nobody can prevent fate. She was well aware of the rights her husband held over her and her duty toward him, which is why she was to follow him to the ends of the earth.”
In Peshawar, Azza gave birth to Nabila, her mother’s namesake, in 1986, and to a fourth daughter, Khadija, the following year. In 1988 the Zawahiris’ only son, Mohammed, was born, so Ayman was at last accorded the honor of being called Abu Mohammed. Nabila came for her final visit soon after that. She would never forget the sight of Azza and her daughters waiting for her at the airport, all wearing hijabs and smiling at her. That was the last time she would ever see them.
BIN LADEN SOMETIMES CAME to lecture at the hospital where Zawahiri worked. Although the two men had different goals at the time, they had in common much that drew them together. They were both very modern men, members of the educated and technological class, despite their fundamentalist religious views. From a young age, bin Laden had managed large teams of workers on sophisticated construction projects, and he was at ease in the world of high finance. Zawahiri, seven years older, was a surgeon, immersed in contemporary science and medical technology. They were both from families that were well known throughout the Arab world. They were quiet-spoken, devout, and politically stifled by the regimes in their own countries.
Each man filled a need in the other. Zawahiri wanted money and contacts, which bin Laden had in abundance. Bin Laden, an idealist given to causes, sought direction; Zawahiri, a seasoned propagandist, supplied it. They were not friends but allies. Each believed he could use the other, and each was pulled in a direction he never intended to go. The Egyptian had little interest in Afghanistan except as a staging area for the revolution in his own country. He planned to use the Afghan jihad as an opportunity to rebuild his shattered organization. In bin Laden, he found a wealthy, charismatic, and pliable sponsor. The