Ayman Al Zawahiri

Name: Ayman Al Zawahiri

He is also known by a number of other titles and names. These include The Doctor, a reference to Zawahiri's statues, and Teacher (Ustaz in Arabic), a conventional respectful title in Arabic speaking countries.

Family Background: Ayman Al Zawahiri—and his twin sister Omnya—were born on June 19, 1951 to an eminent Cairo family. Joining them later were a younger sister, Heba, and two brothers, Mohammad and Husayn.

Zawahiri's family was notable for its connection to Al Azhar University, among the most important religious institutions in the Islamic world. Zawahiri's great uncle, Muhammad Al Ahmadi Al Zawahiri, was the chief imam, Ayman's great grandfather and grandfather were also Azhar scholars.

His father, Rabie Al Zawahiri, was a professor of pharmacology at Ein Shams university, and his mother, Umayma Azzam, was the daughter of an Egyptian ambassador who became the president of Cairo University.

Childhood: Zawahiri was raised in Maadi, a wealthy, upper middle class neighborhood. His family, according to a number of was religious, though not zealous, genteel and lived modestly on Ayman's father's income as a teacher. They were marginal members of the wealthy, chic neighborhood whose social life revolved around a local "sporting club." Ayman attended state school rather than the local private school, Victoria college.

Early Adulthood: In 1966, Zawahiri helped form an underground cell with the aim of overthrowing an increasingly authoritarian Egyptian government. In 1979 he merged his group with three others to create the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization. Islamic Jihad was the organization responsible for Egyptian Presiden Sadat's assassination in 1980, and with the other members, Zawahiri was rounded up, put on trial and imprisoned for it.

In the meantime, he had also received a medical degree from Cairo University. In 1978, he married Azza Nowair, a young woman who had herself become extremely religious, an anomaly in upper class Egypt.

In 1980, Zawahiri made his way to Afghanistan, in part to see how the Afghan mujahideen were faring in their holy war to oust their Soviet invaders. There he met Osama bin Laden.

More about jihad in Afghanistan:

• December 26, 1979: Jihad in Afghanistan Gets its Start
• The U.S. Funded Jihadists in Afghanistan before the 1979 Soviet Invasion

Key Influences:

Zawahiri grew up in an era in which political Islam was beginning to take hold. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual who became the most prominent, and most visibly radical, proponent of a strictly Islamic political system in the 1950s. Islamist means someone who believes in a vision of Islam as a political system, a theocracy.

Views such as Qutb's that Islam offered a political answer were extremely appealing in many Arab cities in this period, as Arab societies struggled to become independent states in a bipolar world that offered either socialism or Soviet-inspired Marxism, or Western style capitalism.

Related Terms

• Jihad
• Jihadist
• Glossary of Islamic Terms

Objectives:

Zawahiri's vision is the strictest, most radical and most militant of Islamist visions.. For most of his political life, he focused on the overthrow of the Egyptian government, to pave the way for a theocracy.

His association with bin Laden shaped a more global vision.

Youssef H. Aboul-Enein, a Middle East-North Africa Foreign Area Officer for the U.S. military, sums up Zawahiri's ambitions as they were expressed in Zawahiri's 2001 book, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner:

Al-Zawahiri dreams of a future jihad in the southern Russian Republics, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan to unite a nuclear Pakistan and the gas-rich Caspian region to serve jihad. Al-Zawahiri identifies the following targets for al-Qaeda and its affiliates:

• The United Nations
• Arab rulers
• Multinational corporations
• The Internet
• International News and satellite media
• International relief organizations, which he believes are covers for spying, proselytizing, attempted coups, and weapons transfers.

Zawahiri and Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri have mutually influenced each other. They first met in Afghanistan in the 1970s. In 1985, following his release from prison, Zawahiri went to bin Laden's home, Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and then to Sudan, when bin Laden relocated there in 1992.

In 1998, the two men jointly issued a , or non-binding legal opinion, as the "World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders." Three years later, in 2001, the groups merged, calling the new organization Qaeda Al Jihad.

Speculations continue to circulate about how much responsibility, and of what sort,Zawahiri has assumed in the running of Al Qaeda.

More on bin Laden

• Osama bin Laden
• Osama bin Laden in Historical Context
• Osama bin Laden and Jihad

Notable Attacks

Zawahiri is wanted by the U.S. State Department for his reported role in several notable attacks on Americans, including:

• September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
• 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, off the coast of Yemen
• 1998 attacks on American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya

Zawahiri is also known, from an earlier point, for extremely violent bombing attacks on Egyptian targets, despite the cost in innocent bystanders' lives, and for his aggressive employment of suicide bombers.

Where He is Now

Zawahiri went underground in the immediate aftermath of the American attack on Afghanistan in October 2001. He was last seen in Afghanistan and is believed to be in Northwest Pakistan at present. The United States has made several, if not more, efforts to kill him there.

Zawahiri has also taken, apparently, to fulfilling a communications role on behalf of al Qaeda. He has released a number of videos directed at either American or European audiences in the years since 9/11, with specific messages, warnings and analyses of ongoing events.

For more about Zawahiri's videos:

• Dec. 2006: Al Zawahiri Videotape May Offer Clues to Pakistan Bombing