Free The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

“She had many suitors, all of them from prestigious ranks and wealth and elite social status,” her brother said. “But almost all of them wanted her to drop the niqab . She very calmly refused. She wanted someone who would accept her as she was. Ayman was looking for that type of person.”
    According to custom, at the first meeting between Azza and Ayman, Azza lifted her veil for a few minutes. “He saw the 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 did not see his fiancée’s face again until after the marriage ceremony.
    He made a favorable impression on the Nowair family, who were a little dazzled by his distinguished ancestry but were put on guard by his piety. Although he was polite and agreeable, he refused to greet women, and he wouldn’t even look at one if she was wearing a skirt. He never talked about politics with Azza’s family, and it’s not clear how much he revealed even to her. In any case, Azza must have approved of his underground activism. She told a friend that her greatest hope was to become a martyr.
    Their wedding was held in February 1978, at the Continental-Savoy Hotel, a once-distinguished Anglo-Egyptian watering hole in Cairo’s Opera Square, which had slipped from its days of 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,” said Schleifer. “We were in the men’s section, which was very somber, heavy, with lots of cups of coffee and no one cracking jokes.”
             
    “M Y CONNECTION WITH A FGHANISTAN began in the summer of 1980 by a twist of fate,” Zawahiri wrote in his brief memoir, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. While he was covering for another doctor at a Muslim Brothers clinic, the director of the clinic asked if Zawahiri would like to accompany him to Pakistan to tend to the Afghan refugees. Hundreds of thousands were fleeing across the border after the recent Soviet invasion. Zawahiri immediately agreed. He had been secretly preoccupied with the problem of finding a secure base for jihad, which seemed practically impossible in Egypt. “The River Nile runs in its narrow valley between two deserts that have no vegetation or water,” he observed in his memoir. “Such a terrain made guerrilla warfare in Egypt impossible and, as a result, forced the inhabitants of this valley to submit to the central government, to be exploited as workers, and compelled them to be recruited into its army.” Perhaps Pakistan or Afghanistan would prove a more suitable location for raising an army of radical Islamists who could eventually return to take over Egypt.
    Zawahiri traveled to Peshawar with an anesthesiologist and a plastic surgeon. “We were the first three Arabs to arrive there to participate in relief work,” Zawahiri claims. He spent four months in Pakistan, working for the Red Crescent Society, the Islamic arm of the International Red Cross.
    The name Peshawar derives from a Sanskrit word meaning “city of flowers,” which it may have been during its Buddhist period, but it had long since sloughed off any refinement. The city sits at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, the historic concourse of invading armies since the days of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, who left their genetic traces on the features of the diverse population. Peshawar was an important outpost of the British Empire, the last stop before a wilderness that stretched all the way to Moscow. When the British abandoned their cantonment in 1947, Peshawar was reduced to being a modest but unruly farming town. The war had awakened the ancient city, however, and when Zawahiri arrived it was teeming with smugglers, arms merchants, and opium dealers.
    The city also had to cope with the influx of uprooted and starving Afghans. By the end of 1980, there were already 1.4