The men who were so feared and despised in the rest of the world did not seem so terrifying in their own homes, where they rough-housed with the children and helped with their homework. Zaynab remembered one occasion when her family was at the Zawahiris’ house in Kandahar and the father came in carrying his machine gun. As he was going up the stairs, Zaynab’s ten-year-old brother grabbed Zawahiri’s legs and begged him to give it to him. “Abdul Kareem, just wait until we go to the room!” said Zawahiri. The boy wouldn’t let go; he kept begging and grabbing for the weapon. Zawahiri finally relented and let the boy examine his weapon. This struck Zaynab and the others as a tender moment. “And this is the man, they make him seem like a monster!” she exclaimed
The Looming Tower ~ Lawrence Wright
Who we are often gets tied into what we do. When we meet people, one of the first questions asked is often, 'What do you do?' And, when we answer, we take on our occupation as our identity: 'I am a writer,' not 'I write.' Both answers are acceptable, but the first answer is far more common than the second.
We even train children that their identity corresponds with their occupation when we ask, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' Asking that question is actually very different from asking 'What do you want to do when you grow up?' Again, it's all about identity. The first merges identity with occupation. The second separates action from actor.
If someone commits a crime, are they a criminal or a good person who went down the wrong path and got caught up doing bad things? Or are they, more realistically, a person with both good and bad inside them but whose bad things are now on record and their primary identifier, regardless of their other goodness and complexities. After all, people are complex and multidimensional. No one thing truly describes us.
You're more than your job and even your other various positions—a writer and a father and a husband and a son and a brother and an uncle and a volunteer and a friend and some many other things to so many other people. But if someone asked who you are, you'd know you were more than just those titles and modifiers. You're someone not everyone else can be. Lots of people are writers and family men and volunteers and friends. But, in some way, you're different. In some way, you're just like everyone else in that something about you is completely different.
If you ask parents who they are, most will say they're parents before anything else: 'I'm a father before foreman' or 'I'm a mother before marketer.' Because, for most people, 'family comes first.' Family is the exception to other rules. You'll compromise your principles, break the rules, and bend your morals to take care of your family. It's different when it's family.
When Zaynab visited the Zawahiris for the engagement of their second daughter, Umayma, the girls talked and talked through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Late at night, they were still singing, making so much noise that they couldn’t hear Dr. Ayman knocking on the door asking them to keep it down. “I thought about how this guy scares the whole world but he doesn’t even scream at us. We see them as nice and gentle”
With family, you know them in a way the world doesn't. In fact, maybe you don't know them the way the world knows them at all. These girls only knew their fathers, not terrorists. Perhaps neither the girls nor the world were right. Perhaps they both were. Perhaps the truth about these men was somewhere in between what these girls knew and what the world knew. With family, you know them as more than what they're famous or infamous for
Looking back at her friendships with the bin Laden and Zawahiri children, Zaynab observed that the families “had their ups and downs, but they were pretty much normal kids. They had pretty much a normal childhood”
Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash