Ayman Al-Zawahiri is the longest-lived figure of radical and jihadist Islam, until his death, announced on Monday 1er August, by US President Joe Biden. 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. the leader of Al-Qaeda, killed on July 31, at the age of 71, in an American drone strike, on the house where he lived, 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 Islamismwrites 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 an imam at the prestigious religious Al-Azhar University, while his maternal grandfather, a cleric, was, among other things, the founder of King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where many of the Muslim Brotherhood took refuge after the beginning of the repression led against them by the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954. 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 Abu Ala Al-Maududi, 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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