Early Life and Education
According to Human Rights Watch, Sharif was born in 1950, in the southern Egyptian province of Beni Suef seventy-five miles south of Cairo. His father was a headmaster in Beni Suef. Sharif studied the Koran, and was a hafez (i.e. he had memorized the Quran) by time he finished sixth grade. At fifteen, the Egyptian government enrolled him in a boarding school in Cairo for exceptional students. At 18 he entered medical school, and began preparing for a career as a plastic surgeon, specializing in burn injuries. He has been described as being "pious and high-minded, prideful, and rigid" at that time.
It was while studying medicine at Cairo University in the 1970s that al-Sharif met Ayman Al-Zawahiri. In 1977, Zawahiri asked al-Sharif to join his group. According to al-Sharif, Zawahiri misrepresenting himself as a delegate from a group that was advised by Islamic scholars, when in fact Zawahiri was the group's emir and was not guided or advised by clerical authorities. Al-Sharif did not join Zawahiri's group.
Read more about this topic: Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“On the Coast of Coromandel
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.
Two old chairs, and half a candle,—
One old jug without a handle,—
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,”
—Edward Lear (1812–1888)
“If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.”
—Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)
“Institutions of higher education in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity.”
—Yolanda Moses (b. 1946)