Al-Zawahiri is a true believer. He was inspired as a young man by the writing of Sayyid Qutb. After Qutb’s execution in 1966, Al-Zawahiri, 15, forms an underground cell dedicated to establishing an Islamic state in Egypt. His goal is to put Qutb’s ideas into practice. He believes that it is a duty to kill infidels and crusaders. It is also a duty to kill Muslims who have fallen into heresy. He believes that he has the religious authority of takfir, to declare other Muslims as unbelievers, or kafir. When his organization, Egyptian Islamic Jihad runs out of money, Zawahiri gives up his life long goal of ridding Egypt of a secular government to join forces with Osama bin Laden. He is most likely in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

I am an atheist. Culturally Christian, I enjoy celebrating Christmas by exchanging presents and eating chocolate and lamb on Easter. Listening to Al-Zawahiri on youtube, I both admire and despise the certainty of his statements. I don’t know whether the civilian body count in Iraq to date is 80,000 or 800,000 but either way when Zawahiri rants about the U.S. spilling Muslim blood, he is not wrong. However, I must admit I bristle at being called “a crusader.” While I am not surprised by Zawahiri’s hatred for President Musharref of Pakistan or the vulgarity of his anti-Semitism, I am amazed by the vehemence of his distain for Hamas. To make sense of his words, I try unsuccessfully to scrape back the veneer of religion to find the underlying determining economic factors. This is what I believe in. And whatever intellectual theories I might profess, I have an underlying faith in progress and technology. Modern dentistry and birth control are just two things that, in my mind, made the twentieth century a better time to live than previous centuries.