His legacy did indeed live on. The end of chapter 2 of the Looming Tower has now struck and I’m here to confirm that my predictions (that I hadn’t mentioned previously were actually true). Today, I’ll be talking about the predictions I made, a summary of the story of Ayman al Zawahiri, and how his life was related to Qutb’s life.
Legacy. At the end of chapter 1, we as readers were told that Qutb legacy lives on. Now after reading this, internally I thought: “Hmm, that seems interesting.” Consequently, it made me wonder about what would happen next and you know how whenever you finish a chapter you wonder what will happen in the next chapter? Well that’s exactly what happened to me. Somehow, I managed to connect the dots that Qutb’s story must be related to the 2nd chapter because they decided to end chapter one with, as I’ve said many times, the word “legacy.” With this in mind, I decided to go forth with this prediction and this is how it went…
Connecting to the end of the last chapter, this chapter talks about Ayman al Zawahiri, his life, and his life being influenced by Sayyid Qutb. Ayman’s relatives were all notable because of their contribution in Egypt and growing up, Ayman had high expectations. When he was young, Ayman was taught about Sayyid Qutb and that sort of carved out his beliefs. One day, he was offered a ride by the vice president of Egypt Hussein el-Shafei but refused because he didn’t want to ride in a car that had a person who killed Muslims (al-Shaffei was a judge during Qutb’s imprisonment). In the early 1970’s he created a group called al-Jihad which was a group similar to the Muslim Brothers group that Qutb was a part of. Due to the fact that Ayman was the leader of al-Jihad, he was a target and eventually, he was shown to be involved with the assassination of the President of Egypt. He was tried and thrown into jail. In a way, Ayman’s life was similar to Qutb and that also gives proof that Qutb’s legacy did in fact live on.
Qutb’s legacy sure did live on, the books don’t lie. I feel a sort of respect for Ayman al Zawahiri because his relatives were notable but he didn’t exactly feel that he needed to be notable but still ended up standing out. It sort of interests me that he unintentionally lived up to the expectations.