Abdul-Aziz Al-Rahim

Abdul-Aziz al-Razim
Biographical Information
Name	Abdul-Aziz al-Razim
Alias	--
Title	--
Date of birth	Unknown
Age	Unknown
Physical Information
Status	Deceased
Nationality	Egyptian
Gender	Male
Hair	Gray (silver)
Relationship Information
Affiliations	SCORPIA
Series Information
First Appearance	Scorpia Rising
Last Appearance	Scorpia Rising
Mentioned	--

Abdul-Aziz al-Razim, referred to simply as Razim, is the main antagonist in Scorpia Rising, the ninth and Alex Rider novel.

Life

Razim is a terrorist who claims that he has no emotions; this means he lacks fear, pleasure or even anger. He once tested this characteristic by strangling his dog, just to see if he would feel any guilt or remorse (which he didn't). At the age of fourteen, he worked for Saddam Hussein and felt that this was perfect for his personality (Razim even sold out his own parents after they talked against Saddam, an act which resulted in both their deaths). A few years later, he graduated to Al-Qaeda and eventually earned a placement within the criminal organization SCORPIA.He lives in an ancient but personally modified fortress in the Sahara Desert.

Appearance

Razim wears round glasses. He is described as being small and slight, more like a girl than a man. His hair grew gray when he was only in his twenties. He wears a bleached white dishdasha. He also smokes Black Devil cigarettes.

Personality

Razim is a callous, self-serving sociopath with virtually no emotions or empathy. His evil even showed at a young age - as a baby, he never laughed or cried, instead lying sullenly in a cot. When he was a young child, he had multiple, uncontrollable temper tantrums which often resulted in the harm or suffering of others. Each and every nanny that had ever looked after him never lasted a day; one was even stabbed in the thigh with a pair of scissors after she told him off for teasing his sister.

Razim wishes to create a measurable unit of pain, which he would name after himself. To do this, he uses horrific medical instruments to inflict systematic pain on innocent people who he captures and uses machines to record the pain they feel. He does not stop until the test subjects are killed. It is implied that much of his "experiments" involve vivisection. Being a sociopath, Razim has virtually no regard or understanding for the feelings of other people, as he sees emotion as a waste of time. Thus, he is unable to feel compassion and he is virtually indifferent to the pain and suffering of his human test subjects. When Alex is screaming and crying upon witnessing Jack Starbright's death, Razim isn't even paying attention. He nonchalantly notes that the readings he received were far higher than he had expected and that he may have to create a second unit of measurement.

Razim feels that he views the world like a scientist, analyzing and studying things and people as if they were slides under a microscope. He views human passions such as love and hatred as frivolous wastes of time. In his eye, everything that he does is purely scientific, but Alex suspects that the man secretly derives some sort of perverse amusement from his "pain experiments".

Razim is also highly intelligent, having earned top grades in school as a child and being almost fluent in three languages by the age of twelve. He is highly interested in science, and he had intended to invent his own weapon in college. His intelligence allowed him to contrive a convoluted plan to get the Elgin Marbles out of Britain while still dealing Scorpia's revenge on Alex Rider.

Like other sociopaths, Razim is self-centered and entirely self-focused. He wishes to name his inventions after himself and he kills people who make jokes about him, as demonstrated when he used a paper knife to murder one of his officers who had joked that Razim resembled a Middle Eastern Harry Potter.

Ultimately, when things go wrong for Razim, for the first time in his life, all his emotions burst out of him: anger, bitterness, hatred, defeat. His last moments are spent screeching and tirading about how he should have come out on top before the salt pours over his mouth.

Role in Series

Scorpia Rising

Zeljan Kurst, the head of SCORPIA, chooses the newly recruited Razim to command the organization's latest task, Operation Horseman. The basis of this task involved returning the Elgin Marbles (a series of divine Greek marble sculptures from Athens) to Greece from their current location within the British Museum. Kurst had been summoned by Yannis Ariston Xenopolos (a Greek shipping magnate worth approximately twenty-five billion pounds) who was dying from cancer; he believed that the marbles were a part of Greece and that his country were longing for their return, so he had called on SCORPIA to help him achieve this goal. In return, Kurst and his organization would receive forty million euros.

Kurst leaves it with Razim to plan how to force the British government into returning the Elgin Marbles, and he quickly dismisses the use of violence. Instead, he decides to use Alex Rider (who had already foiled two of SCORPIA's operations) as the source of their blackmail and eventually kill him. As part of Operation Horseman, Razim would proceed to gather evidence to prove that Alex had been working with MI6 for the past year. He accurately speculates that the British government would immediately release the marbles back to Greece once the Horseman file was complete, as Razim would otherwise reveal the contents of the file (thus revealing the British secret service's manipulation and exploitation of a fourteen year old boy) and lead to disastrous consequences concerning the country's reputation in the eyes of the public and ultimately the world.

After MI6 send Alex and Jack Starbright to Cairo in Egypt (so that Alex can attend Cairo International College of Arts and Education, a school believed to be involved in SCORPIA's plans), Jack is eventually kidnapped by the organization. Alex is told to go to a cemetery in the north of the city, called the City of the Dead, otherwise she will die; when Alex arrives, he is confronted by Julius Grief (a clone of Dr. Hugo Grief from Point Blanc who was surgically altered to resemble Alex) and he takes him in a helicopter to see Razim at his desert home.

Razim introduces himself to Alex and Jack and has dinner with them, all the while explaining how SCORPIA are planning to take revenge on Alex for seriously damaging their reputation. Razim believes that revenge is as much of a waste of time as love, but still he claims that he is in the power position and will kill Alex slowly and painfully. Razim calls himself a scientist and had been studying the subject of pain, realizing that there has never actually been a unit for pain in terms of its intensity. He had been using victims in experiments and reading their behaviour when exposed to different pain levels, eventually wanting to create a measurement of pain called the 'Razim'. He straps Alex to a chair and plans to carry out a similar test, but is not allowed to inflict any physical harm on him (for reasons explained later on). Instead, Razim reads his levels of emotional pain instead, after Alex witnesses Julius Grief blowing up Jack Starbright inside a jeep filled with explosives.

Razim sends Alex back to the city of Cairo, where the US Secretary of State is about to deliver a speech about the changes in global powers and the strength of relationships between various countries. Having had an insight into the general topics of her speech, Razim had sent Julius Grief to assassinate her as soon as she mentioned the word 'Britain'. He then plans to frame Alex for the murder (seeing as he and Julius are identical) and then have him shot, making it look like Alex was an assassin sent by MI6 to stop the Secretary of State saying how 'useless' and 'untrustworthy' the Brits are. To fulfil the plan, an unscathed Alex (which is why Razim wasn't allowed to previously hurt him) was going to be shot dead, and once the British government had denied their involvement with the assassination and the whole incident had been forgotten, the Horseman file would be released to prove that the assassin had indeed been working for MI6. However, Alex manages to stop Julius from assassinating the Secretary of State and kills him.

A while later, Alex returns to Razim's fort in the Sahara Desert along with American and Egyptian armed forces. He meets with Razim and poses as Julius, but Razim senses that something is wrong and quickly realizes that he is in fact Alex. As the armed forces invade the fort and take down Razim's men, Alex races up onto a rope bridge above the fort and Razim pursues him. After a brief struggle between the pair, the bridge is brought down - Alex manages to cling on, but Razim falls.

Death

After he falls off of the bridge, He lands in a huge pile of salt. The salt begins to enter his pores, causing salt to pour out of his eyes and mouth. Very soon, he is buried by the mound and is never seen again.

Adbul-Aziz al-Razim

Trivia

• Razim's name is a callback to previous Alex Rider books. Abdul is the fake name that Alex used when masquerading as an Afghan refugee in Snakehead, and Rahim is the Indian spy who helped out Alex in Crocodile Tears.
• Razim is similar to Shirō Ishii(for more info) , the Japanese scientist who directed immoral medical experiments, often unanesthesized vivisections, on war prisoners during World War II. Isshi believed that his experiments had scientific value and that he was benefiting the medical fields through his experiments, similarly to Razim, who conducts his experiments so that he can present a scientific measurement of pain to the scientific community.