Ayman Al-Zawahiri is the figure of radical and jihadist Islam having known, until his death announced Tuesday August 2 by the American president, Joe Biden, the greatest longevity. His life alone covers all the mutations of contemporary jihadism, from its rise in Egypt in the 1970s, to the triumph of the Taliban, back in power in Kabul since August 2021, where the leader of Al- Qaida, killed in an American drone strike that targeted the balcony of the house where he lived in Kabul, under the protection of his Afghan hosts.
“Of all the figures of the international jihadist movement, it is the Egyptian Ayman Al-Zawahiri who best illustrates the history of contemporary Sunni radical Islamism, writes researcher Stéphane Lacroix, a specialist in Islamist movements, in Al-Qaida in the text (PUF, 2008). For thirty years he will, from Egypt, Afghanistan, Sudan – among others – pursue a single objective “, establish the reign of Islam in Egypt, before giving, by “a spectacular turnaround”, priority to the fight against the United States and the Christian West, accused of waging war on Islam.
23 year old medical graduate
Ayman Al-Zawahiri comes from a line of clerics, making him a scion of the Islamist aristocracy. He was born in 1951, in Cairo, into a family of the Sunni bourgeoisie, whose ancestry is doubly rich in men of religion committed to the brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood, since its foundation by the teacher Hassan Al- Banna in 1928 in Ismailia, on the banks of the Suez Canal. His paternal great-uncle was imam of the prestigious religious university of Al-Azhar while his maternal grandfather, a cleric, was, among other things, the founder of King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where many Muslim Brotherhood took refuge after the beginning of their repression by the Gamal Abdel Nasser regime in 1954. A brilliant pupil and student – he obtained his medical degree at the age of 23 – rather reserved and pious, Ayman Al-Zawahiri entered politics as a teenager.
In 1966, he joined a clandestine cell of the Muslim Brotherhood and set himself a goal: the overthrow of the regime. The date is irrelevant. It corresponds to the death sentence and the execution of the Egyptian fundamentalist thinker Sayyid Qutb, generally considered, with the Pakistani Abou Alaa Al-Mawdoudi, as the inspiration of the Sunni jihadist movements. Qutb theorized the violence as a response to the ruthless repression and torture suffered by the Muslim Brotherhood – and himself – in the prisons of the Nasser regime.
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