Zawahiri was shaken by the popular outrage. “The unintended death of this innocent child pained us all, but we were helpless and we had to fight the government, which was against God’s Sharia and supported God’s enemies,” he notes in his memoir. He offered what amounted to blood money to the girl’s family. The Egyptian government arrested two hundred and eighty of his followers; six were eventually given a sentence of death. Zawahiri writes, “This meant that they wanted my daughter, who was two at the time, and the daughters of other colleagues, to be orphans. Who cried or cared for our daughters?”
Is religion something primitive which civilization corrects? Or is it itself a product of civilization?
If religion is a product of civilization, and we can understand civilization as something made by us, then we can understand religion.
When the new head of the world terror conspiracy tells us he is helpless, he frightens us with what we fear in ourselves. Or he reminds us of our responsibility in our lives together not to let ourselves become helpless.
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