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Following are excerpts from an interview with Umm Khaled Al-Islambouli the mother of Al-Sadat's assassin, which aired on Dream1 TV on September 12, 2011:
Interviewer: When you were in Iran, did you visit the street named after Khaled Al-Islambouli?
Umm Khaled: There is not only a street. There is a square, brigades, and towns. There are billboards in the square that read: "The Martyr Khaled Al-Islambouli."
Interviewer: You visited all these places in Iran?
Umm Khaled: Yes, they showed it to me. You see him brandishing a gun, and saying: "I'm the killer of Pharoah."
Interviewer: You didn't get to meet Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri or Osama Bin Laden?
Umm Khaled: No, I did meet them. My son's daughter married his son after we left… The families were together.
Interviewer: The daughter of your son, Muhammad Shawqi, married the son of…
Umm Khaled: The son of Osama Bin Laden. She married him and stayed with him until they reached Syria, where his mother lived. She got to Syria, and wanted to come here, but the government refused. This was before the revolution.
Interviewer: The Egyptian government?
Umm Khaled: Yes. It said that she is a Saudi citizen, because the son of Osama Bin Laden is Saudi. They are Saudis. They are banned from Saudi Arabia, and are not allowed in. They wanted to come here, but were denied entrance. So Qatar took them in.
Interviewer: They are in Qatar now?
Umm Khaled: Yes. They are very happy there.
Interviewer: When you saw Osama Bin Laden, did he have the same characteristics depicted by the West – a Satanic personality and Satanic traits?
Umm Khaled: I cannot answer that… Anybody who has faith… When I left Egypt, it felt like going from Heaven to Hell, but when I go to Afghanistan during the war, the people there had good, tolerant, and radiant faces. I saw corpses being pulled out from under the rubble caused by missiles, and buried in mass graves.
Interviewer: This was after the 9/11 attacks?
Umm Khaled: Yes.
Interviewer: The American war against Afghanistan, which was revenge for 9/11…
Umm Khaled: Yes. Body parts were flying like shrapnel. There were body parts of children.
Interviewer: What did you think of Osama Bin Laden when you met him?
Umm Khaled: He was a very humble and shy man. He was young. He was like one of our children. I patted him on the shoulder and said: "May Allah bless you, my son." He said to me: "This is your country, my mother. It has everything you want – schools, colleges, sports, tourism. They settled us in Kabul, and every week, they would take us on excursions to the mountains, which were full of peach and other fruit trees.
Interviewer: It sounds as if you were happy in Afghanistan.
Umm Khaled: Very happy. Those were the best days of my life.
[…]
Interviewer: When you returned [to Egypt], did the Egyptian security forces give you an easy time, or did they interrogate you?
Umm Khaled: I returned to Egypt through diplomatic channels, not security ones.
Interviewer: How?
Umm Khaled: They placed me in a hotel for 15 days, and made all the travel arrangements.
Interviewer: Where?
Umm Khaled: In Iran, in Tehran. They wanted to make sure I had a safe trip, out of fear that somebody would assassinate or kidnap me on the way. That's what they were afraid of.
Interviewer: Iran was afraid that someone might kill you if you went back to Egypt?
Umm Khaled: Or that I might be kidnapped while in transit. They prepared an international permit me, and so they didn't even open my handbag. Nobody said anything to me but: "Go ahead, Madam." I left through the diplomatic exit. The pilot brought me in through the VIP entrance. I didn't see the airport when we landed [in Egypt], because they were afraid that people would say: "There's Umm Khaled." So they brought me through the international airport.
[…]
Interviewer: Some people consider Khaled Al-Islambouli to be a blood-shedding murderer. You must know that people deem him to be a killer and a terrorist.
Umm Khaled: This was said only by our government. The government said these things. They said that he was a terrorist, a criminal, and a murderer, but what they didn't say was that he was defending Islam. They didn't say anything about the oppressed people in Palestine, about Camp David, or about the selling out of the country to the Jews. We are only human. My son was only human too. He was raised with them and knew [the regime's] secrets. He said that [Al-Sadat] had sold out the land and the country to the Jews. This is the right context – [Sadat] sold out his country to the Jews. He violated the honor of the Islamic nation.
Interviewer: The immediate answer is that he could have made a change peacefully, without resorting to bloodshed and killing. Islam prohibits the spilling of blood.
Umm Khaled: I wish people knew my son. They don't want to know anything. [Al-Sadat] said that he would show no mercy. Who are you to show no mercy? The Arab peoples were opposed to Camp David, and said that he had sold his country… Saudi Arabia, Syria, and all the Arab countries that should have stuck together fell apart. We [Egyptians] couldn't raise our heads. Only now can we do so. Any Egyptian you met anywhere in the world was humiliated.
Interviewer: What I meant was that even Islamic scholars considered the killing of President Anwar Al-Sadat to be an act of terrorism, and the perpetrators to be murders. When I talked about the sanctity of blood in Islam, I meant that we should employ political means.
Umm Khaled: You meant that it is forbidden to harm the ruler.
Interviewer: Yes.
Umm Khaled: But there is another point of view. We were under injustice, tyranny, and oppression, with prisons, death, and young people dying of torture on a daily basis. When they die of beating in prison, their honor is violated – morally, physically, and sexually. What for? For saying: "There is no god but Allah." Because they belong to the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamic groups. What is happening in this country? Selling us to the Jews?! Why, what have we ever done to you?! Why are you selling us to the Americans? For money?! May Allah curse that money.
[…]