The chief of Al-Qaida, killed in an American drone shot announced on Monday by Joe Biden, was out of the shadows after the September 11 attacks. From the Muslim Brotherhood to Al-Qaida, his career marries all the changes in contemporary jihadism.
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Ayman al-Zawahiri is the figure of radical Islam and jihadist who experienced, until his death announced on Tuesday August 2 by the American president, Joe Biden, the greatest longevity. His life alone covers all the changes in contemporary jihadism, his boom in Egypt in the 1970s, until the Taliban triumph, back to power in Kabul since August 2021, where the chief of Al- Qaida, killed in an American drone shot having 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 which best illustrates the history of contemporary Sunni Radical Islamism, writes the researcher Stéphane Lacroix, specialist in Islamist movements, In Al -Qaida in the text (PUF, 2008). Thirty years during Egypt, Afghanistan, Sudan -among others -, to pursue a single objective, from the reign of Islam in Egypt in Egypt , before giving, by “a spectacular turnaround”, the priority to the fight against the United States and the Christian West, accused of wage war on Islam.
medical graduate at 23 years
Ayman al-Zawahiri comes from a line of religious, making him a offspring of the Islamist aristocracy. He was born in 1951, in Cairo, within a family of the Sunni bourgeoisie, whose ancestry is doubly rich in men of religion engaged with the brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood, since his foundation by the teacher Hassan Al- Banna in 1928 in Ismaïliya, on the edge of the Suez Canal. His paternal grand-uncle was imam of the prestigious religious university of Al-Azhar while his maternal grandfather, a religious, was, among others, the founder of the University of King Saud in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where Care number of Muslim brothers took refuge after the start of their repression by the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, in 1954. Brilliant student and student -he won his medical diploma at the age of 23 -, rather reserved and pious, Ayman Al-Zawahiri enters politics from adolescence.
In 1966, he joined a clandestine cell of the Muslim Brotherhood and set one goal: the reversal of the regime. The date is not indifferent. It corresponds to the condemnation to death and the execution of the Egyptian fundamentalist thinker Sayyid Qotb, generally considered, with the Pakistani Abou Alaa Al-Mawdoudi, as the inspiration of Sunni jihadist movements. Qotb has theorized violence, as an answer to the ruthless repression and the torture that the Muslim Brotherhood undergoes – and itself – in the prisons of the Nassérien regime.
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