[2][3] A 1974 graduate of the engineering college at Cairo University,[3][4] al-Zawahiri moved to Saudi Arabia and took work with a construction firm.
[4][5] He joined the World Islamic Relief Organization, and traveled to Indonesia, Bosnia, and Malawi, where he helped build schools and medical clinics.
[4] Married with six children, al-Zawahiri moved to Yemen with his family, and then joined his older brother in Khartoum, where al-Jihad had begun to congregate.
But after the group was forced to leave following the execution of the teenaged son of Ahmad Salama Mabruk, Ayman went to Afghanistan while Muhammad took his family back to Yemen and began working with engineering contractors.
[4] In February 2004, the al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper announced that they had discovered he was still alive and being held in the Tora Prison, which was confirmed the following month by the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior, who also stated that he could be visited by his family in March.
[4] In July 2006, lawyer Mamdouh Ismail reported about an individual with the alias Sharif Hazaa (شريف هزاع Šarīf Hazāʿ), whom he believed to be the al-Zawahiris' associate Abu Ayyub al-Masri.
In April 2007, he and other Islamists pushed for a review of their sentences and sought commutation based on revising their previously-held beliefs in the necessity of terrorism.
[10] In 2012 he established jihadist organization Al-Salafiya al-Jihadiya in the Sinai[11] In September 2012, Zawahiri offered to mediate a 10-year hudna between Islamists and the Western world, in return for which the United States and the West would stop intervening in Muslim lands, stop allegedly interfering in Muslim education, end the so-called "war on Islam", and release all Islamist prisoners.