Ayman al-Zawahiri was born in 1951 in the neighborhood of Maadi, Cairo, in the then Kingdom of Egypt, to Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri and Umayma Azzam.
The al-Zawahiri family was considered “distinguished” while they lived in Maadi. Al-Zawahiri’s parents both came from prosperous families. Al-Zawahiri’s father, Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri, came from a large family of doctors and scholars from Kafr Ash Sheikh Dhawahri, Sharqia Governorate, in which one of his grandfathers was Sheikh Muhammad al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri (1887–1944) who was the 34th Grand Imam of al-Azhar. Mohammed Rabie became a surgeon and a professor of pharmacy at Cairo University. Ayman’s mother, Umayma Azzam, came from a wealthy, politically active clan, being the daughter of Abdel-Wahhab Azzam, a literary scholar who served as the president of Cairo University, the founder and inaugural rector of the King Saud University (the first university in Saudi Arabia) as well as ambassador to Pakistan, while his own brother was Azzam Pasha, the founding secretary-general of the Arab League (1945–1952). From his maternal side yet another relative was Salem Azzam, an Islamist intellectual and activist, for a time secretary-general of the Islamic Council of Europe based in London. He also has a maternal link to the house of Saud: Muna, the daughter of Azzam Pasha (his maternal great-uncle), is married to Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud, the son of the late king Faisal.
Ayman has said that he has a deep affection for his mother. Her brother, Mahfouz Azzam, became a role model for Ayman as a teenager.Ayman has a younger brother, Muhammad al-Zawahiri, and a twin sister, Heba Mohamed al-Zawahiri.[citation needed] Al-Zawahiri’s sister, Heba Mohamed al-Zawahiri, became a professor of medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute, Cairo University. She described her brother as “silent and shy”.Muhammad worked in Bosnia, Croatia, and Albania under the cover of being an International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) official.[citation needed] While hiding in the United Arab Emirates, he was arrested in 2000, then extradited to Egypt, where he was sentenced to death.[citation needed] He was held in Tora Prison in Cairo as a political detainee. Security officials said he was the head of the Special Action Committee of Islamic Jihad, which organized terrorist operations. However, after the Egyptian popular uprising in the spring of 2011, on March 17, 2011, he was released from prison by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the interim government of Egypt. His lawyer said he had been held to extract information about his brother Ayman.However, on March 20, 2011, he was re-arrested. On August 17, 2013, Egyptian authorities arrested Muhammad al-Zawahiri at his home in Giza.
Youth
Ayman al-Zawahiri was reportedly a studious youth. Ayman excelled in school, loved poetry, and “hated violent sports” — which he thought were “inhumane.” Al-Zawahiri studied medicine at Cairo University and graduated in 1974 with gayyid giddan. Following that, he served three years as a surgeon in the Egyptian Army after which he established a clinic near his parents in Maadi. In 1978, he also earned a master’s degree in surgery. Ayman al-Zawahiri has also shown a radical understanding of Islamic theology and Islamic history.[citation needed] He speaks Arabic, English, and French.
Al-Zawahiri participated in Youth activism as a student. He became both quite pious and political, under the influence of his uncle Mahfouz Azzam, and lecturer Mostafa Kamel Wasfi.Sayyid Qutb preached that to restore Islam and free Muslims, a vanguard of true Muslims modeling itself after the original Companions of the Prophet had to be developed.
Muslim Brotherhood
By the age of 14, al-Zawahiri had joined the Muslim Brotherhood. The following year the Egyptian government executed Sayyid Qutb for conspiracy, and al-Zawahiri, along with four other secondary school students, helped form an “underground cell devoted to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamist state.” It was at this early age that al-Zawahiri developed a mission in life, “to put Qutb’s vision into action.” His cell eventually merged with others to form al-Jihad or Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
Marriage and children
Ayman al-Zawahiri has been married at least four times. His wives include Azza Ahmed Nowari and Umaima Hassan.[citation needed]
In 1978, al-Zawahiri married his first wife, Azza Ahmed Nowari, a student at Cairo University who was studying philosophy. Their wedding, which was held at the Continental Hotel in Opera Square, was very conservative, with separate areas for both men and women, and no music, photographs, or humour. Many years later, when the United States attacked Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks in October 2001, Azza apparently had no idea that al-Zawahiri had supposedly been a jihadi emir (commander) for the last decade. In June 2012, one of Zawahiri’s four wives, Umaima Hassan, released a statement on the internet congratulating the role played by Muslim women in the Arab Spring.
Al-Zawahiri and his wife, Azza, had four daughters, Fatima (born 1981), Umayma (born 1983), Nabila (born 1986), and Khadiga (born 1987), and a son, Mohammed (also born in 1987; the twin brother of Khadiga), who was a “delicate, well-mannered boy” and “the pet of his older sisters,” subject to teasing and bullying in a traditionally all-male environment, who preferred to “stay at home and help his mother.” In 1997, ten years after the birth of Mohammed, Azza gave birth to their fifth daughter, Aisha, who had Down syndrome. In February 2004, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded and subsequently stated that Abu Turab Al-Urduni had married one of al-Zawahiri’s daughters.
In the first half of 2005, one of Al-Zawahiri’s three surviving wives gave birth to a daughter, named Nawwar.
Ayman al-Zawahiri’s first wife Azza and two of their six children, Mohammad and Aisha, were killed in an airstrike on Afghanistan by US forces in late December 2001, following the September 11 attacks on the U.S.After an American aerial bombardment of a Taliban-controlled building at Gardez, Azza was pinned under the debris of a guesthouse roof. Concerned for her modesty, she “refused to be excavated” because “men would see her face” and she died from her injuries the following day. Her son, Mohammad, was also killed outright in the same house. Her four-year-old daughter with Down syndrome, Aisha, had not been hurt by the bombing, but died from exposure in the cold night while Afghan rescuers tried to save Azza.
Career
Ayman al-Zawahiri worked in the medical field as a surgeon. In 1985, al-Zawahiri went to Saudi Arabia on Hajj and stayed to practice medicine in Jeddah for a year. As a reportedly qualified surgeon, when his organization merged with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, he became bin Laden’s personal advisor and physician. He had first met bin Laden in Jeddah in 1986.
In 1981, Ayman al-Zawahiri traveled to Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, where he worked in a Red Crescent hospital treating wounded refugees. There he became friends with Ahmed Khadr, and the two shared a number of conversations about the need for Islamic government and the needs of the Afghan people.
In 1993, al-Zawahiri traveled to the United States, where he addressed several California mosques under his Abdul Mu’iz pseudonym, relying on his credentials from the Kuwaiti Red Crescent to raise money for Afghan children who had been injured by Soviet land mines—he only raised $2000
