al Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is back in the news, issuing various threats, blasting Bush, and making calls for Muslim unity against the infidel. I recently spent some time putting together a Psychoanalytic look at Zawahiri, using open source material, which may offer some illumination into the mind of a brilliant, psychopathic savage.
Although I used a number of sources, all the quotes in this post are from the New Yorker profile of Zawahiri by Lawrence Wright from 2002.
Ayman al-Zawahiri: A Study in Humiliation and Grandiosity
Ayman al-Zawahiri was the first born child, along with a twin sister, of a prominent Egyptian family. There is little concrete information available on-line about his early life but later evidence suggests, not surprisingly for first born Arab boys, that his mother adored him.
"Ayman and his mother share a love of literature. "She always memorized the poems that Ayman sent her," Mahfouz Azzam told me."
At the same time, his birth was quickly followed by the arrival of numerous siblings. This combination of being the first born male of fraternal male/female twins, followed by the rapid arrival of multiple siblings, in a highly patriarchal society, is a recipe for heightened Narcissistic pathology in the child. The Mother’s adoration tells him he is the favored child (and he almost certainly was) while her need to attend to the sister and then the younger siblings, often leads to feelings of neglect in such situations. The partially neglected child who is promised "everything" and has to often settle for so much less of the mother’s love and attention, can be particularly vulnerable to feelings of rejection; failures are intolerable and must be denied or externalized.
His grandfather and father were physicians, as were several Uncles; in fact, the Zawahiri clan attained great prestige for their work in the Medical field. Of even greater significance, his great-uncle was the Grand Imam of Al-Ahar, described thusly:
"The Zawahiri name, however, was associated above all with religion. In 1929, Rabie's uncle Mohammed al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri became the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, the thousand-year-old university in the heart of Old Cairo, which is still the center of Islamic learning in the Middle East. The leader of that institution enjoys a kind of papal status in the Muslim world, and Imam Mohammed is still remembered as one of the university's great modernizers. Rabie's father and grandfather were Al-Azhar scholars as well."
While he came from a deeply religious family on his father’s side, his mother’s family was wealthy and prominent in the world of politics, although primarily active in opposition parties.
Ayman grew up on the "wrong side of the tracks" and held himself aloof from his classmates. He lived in a middle class area of transition between the very wealthy, most modern and cosmopolitan section of Cairo, and the slums where the poor lived. He attended public school where his brilliance was apparent. While his sister, who also became a physician, would have to study for hours, Ayman would barely crack a book and yet easily score at the top of his class. Once again, native brilliance, in such a setting, can reinforce tendencies toward the narcissistic over-valuation of the self. In other words, the Narcissist always struggles to manage his inner sense of impoverishment by using more superficial feelings of superiority to defend against the inner despair.
Ayman was noted to be a bookworm, uncomfortable with physical exploits. He hated sports and described them as "inhumane" according to his uncle Mahfouz. Here we overtly see the tendency to devalue that which stirs up feelings of inadequacy. There is evidence of a common resort to religiously that is often seen in insecure young men and boys, especially those who are insecure about their sexuality. Zawahiri was devout from an early age. As so often happens with such young men, the strength of their religious fervor tends to reflect the intensity of their inner conflicts. Adolescents typically adopt highly ascetic versions of religion in order to control unconscious forbidden desires; Zawahiri did just that. Further, such adolescents often display their unconsciously driven and defended against homoerotic drives by idolizing and idealizing men who appear to have surmounted their own inner conflicts and achieved greatness. (This is one of the reasons religious authorities including Priests, Rabbis, Preachers, Imams, are so well situated to take advantage of their young charges.) Zawahiri became devoted to the vision of Sayyid Qutb, the scholar of Jihad who spent two years amidst the temptations of America and returned to Egypt in 1950 (the year before Zawahiri’s birth) disgusted and filled with righteous rage against the infidels who had so tempted him.
He (Qutb) was appalled to witness a dance in a church recreation hall, during which the minister, setting the mood for the couples, dimmed the lights and played "Baby, It's Cold Outside." "It is difficult to differentiate between a church and any other place that is set up for entertainment, or what they call in their language, 'fun,' " he wrote. The American was primitive in his art as well. "Jazz is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires," he concluded. [Emphasis mine-SW.]
After two trials and much time spent in jail, Qutb was ultimately hanged when Zawahiri was 15. The response by both Qutb and Zawahiri to Qutb’s death sentence are notable:
"Thank God," he said. "I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom."
The same year Qutb was hanged, Zawahiri helped form an underground militant cell dedicated to replacing the secular Egyptian government with an Islamic one. He was fifteen years old.
The hanging took place in 1966. Zawahiri had seen the great man destroyed by the state. Qutb had, in Zawahiri’s youthful eyes, conquered his inner demons and successfully framed the struggle as an externalized battle against a state which has strayed away from an ascetic enough exercise of religion. Further, the religion promised two main avenues by which the supplicant could re-attain the infantile utopia (primitive fusion with the early mother) which Ayman had lost so long ago; those avenues were Jihad and Martyrdom.
For Zawahiri, his salvation could only come through the "perfect" religion, Islam, but great humiliations were to follow. In 1967, Israel destroyed the Egyptian army in a staggering defeat for the Arab armies, though in characteristic fashion, the Arabs proclaimed their disastrous misadventure a great victory. Nonetheless, to someone like
Zawahiri, such a defeat could only mean that either Islam was wrong, and not the final answer, which was unthinkable, or the application of Islam was wanting; if the failure wasn’t Islam itself, it could only be those who professed to be Islamic yet failed to exercise their religion virtuously. This became a deeply held belief by Zawahiri, who expended a great deal of energy and time fighting against those who were not pure enough in their practice of Islam; it led to multiple splits in the ranks of the Islamists as time went on. Meanwhile, although he continued to be involved in radical Islamic activities, Zawahiri went through Medical School and graduated in 1974. In his late 20s, it was time to get married.
His "courtship" and marriage were only unusual in that they were even more ascetic than the usual.
Even among the most devout in Zawahiri’s family, this was unusual. It is further evidence that Zawahiri continued to be deeply conflicted over his sexuality and was using his strict interpretation of his religion to control his inner demons.
Azza Nowair was a young woman from a wealthy family who had become much more religious than her parents and siblings. By the time she met Zawahiri, she was not only wearing the hijab, but had adopted the niqab; she was completely veiled. In a Catholic country, she could have become a Nun; in Islam, in a relatively relaxed cultural surround, she used the veil to distance herself from available men.
The niqab imposed a formidable barrier for a marriageable young woman. Because of Azza's wealthy, distinguished family, she had many suitors, but they all insisted that she drop the veil. Azza refused. "She wanted someone who would accept her as she was," her brother told me. "Ayman was looking for that type of person."
At the first meeting between Azza and Ayman, according to custom Azza lifted her veil for a few minutes. "He saw her face and then he left," Essam said. The young couple talked briefly on one other occasion after that, but it was little more than a formality. Ayman never saw his fiance's face again until after the marriage ceremony. He had made a favorable impression on the Nowair family, who were a little dazzled by his distinguished ancestry. "He was polite and agreeable," Essam says. "He was very religious, and he didn't greet women. He wouldn't even look at a woman if she was wearing a short skirt." He apparently never talked about politics with Azza's family, and it's not clear how much he revealed about his activism to her. She once confided to Omar Azzam that her greatest desire was to become a martyr.
Their wedding was held in February, 1978, at the Continental-Savoy Hotel, which had slipped from colonial grandeur into dowdy respectability. According to the wishes of the bride and groom, there was no music, and photographs were forbidden. "It was pseudo-traditional," Schleifer recalls. "Lots of cups of coffee and no one cracking jokes."
I will not recapitulate here Zawahiri’s involvement with Osama bin Laden, but will suggest that he readily transferred his former devotion to Qutb to the man he literally looked up to, bin Laden, who was the very embodiment of the Arab Holy Warrior, an iconic image in the Arab world. Osama was wealthy, cultured, devout, and charismatic. Zawahiri found in bin Laden those attributes missing in himself and wedded his fortunes to al Qaeda.
One more formative experience occurred which clearly accentuated Zawahiri’s struggles with his inner sense of inferiority, emptiness, and uncertain masculinity. In his book, Al-Zawahiri as I Knew Him, lawyer Muntasir Al-Zayyat describes the arrest, torture, and breaking of Zawahiri following the assassination of Anwar Sadat, an event in which he was apparently uninvolved. Under torture, he apparently surrendered his colleague and mentor, al-Qamari, who was ultimately executed for his involvement in the assassination. Although al-Qamari forgave Zawahiri, such a failure of his manhood must have had a corrosive effect upon the young Jihadi; a holy warrior would not be so easily broken and turned. The reaction against such cowardice (and I am suggesting that Zawahiri would see this as cowardice even while recognizing that his failure under torture was unexceptional) would have been to redouble his efforts to destroy that which he blamed for his humiliation. His hatred of Jews and Americans, the powers who could make the Egyptians cower and bend to their will, became insurmountable.
In summary, my hypothesis is that Ayman al-Zawahiri exhibits the characteristics of an insecure, damaged narcissist who uses others to support a sense of himself as powerful and to confirm his grandiosity. This suggests he has an extreme sensitivity to ridicule (as Jihadis in general do, witness the short lag time between the humiliating out-takes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his subsequent betrayal and death) and all efforts should be made to raise questions about his courage and his sexuality. If PsyOp rumors, or photo-shopped efforts, are done well, he would lose face among his fellows; in any case, he is likely to be enraged by such ridicule and enraged enemies are usually careless enemies.
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