Abdul-Aziz Al-Rahim
Biographical Information
Name	Abdul-Aziz Al-Rahim
Alias	Razim
Title	--
DOB	Unknown
Age	45
Physical Information
Status	Deceased
Nationality	Iraqi
Gender	Male
Hair	Gray
Eyes
Skin
Relationship Information
Family
Affiliations	SCORPIA
Occupation
Series Information
First Appearance	Scorpia Rising
Last Appearance	Scorpia Rising
Mentioned	--

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

Contents 1 Life 2 Appearance 3 Personality 4 Role in Series 4.1 Scorpia Rising 4.2 Death 5 Trivia

LifeEdit

Razim is a terrorist who claims that he has no emotions; this means he lacks fear, pleasure, sadness, or even anger. As a child, 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.

AppearanceEdit

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.

PersonalityEdit

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 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 many of his experiments involve vivisection.

Being a sociopath, Razim holds virtually no regard or understanding for the feelings of other people, and 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 scale 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 "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 joked that Razim had resembled a Middle Eastern Harry Potter.

When Alex Rider foils his plans, for the first time in Razim's life, all of his emotions burst out of him: fury, bitterness, and despair. On the verge of death, his last moments were spent screeching and tirading about how he should have come out on top.

Role in SeriesEdit

Scorpia RisingEdit

Zeljan Kurst, the head of SCORPIA, chooses the newly recruited Razim to command the organization's latest task, Operation Horseman. The mission: return 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 was 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 to 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) to blackmail the British government into returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece. As part of Operation Horseman, Razim would proceed to gather evidence to prove that Alex had been working for MI6 for the past year. He accurately speculates that the British government would immediately release the marbles back to Greece, as Razim would otherwise publicly reveal the contents of the Horseman file, ruining Great Britain's reputation around the world for generations to come.

After MI6 sends Alex and Jack Starbright to Cairo (so that Alex can attend the 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. Grief from Point Blanc who received plastic surgery to resemble Alex) and he takes him in a helicopter to see Razim at his desert fortress.

Razim introduces himself to Alex and Jack and has dinner with them, all the while explaining how SCORPIA is 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 he claims that he is in the power position and will still 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 torturing abductees and using machines to record their vital statistics, eventually hoping to create a universal scale of pain with units of measurement called 'Razims'. He straps Alex to a chair and plans to carry out a similar test, but he does not inflict any physical harm on him (for reasons that will be explained later). Instead, Razim forces Alex to watch as Julius kills Jack Starbright, and measures his emotional pain.

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 uttered the word "Britain". He then plans to frame Alex for the murder (seeing as how he and Julius look identical) and then have him shot, making it look like Alex was an assassin sent by MI6 to take revenge on the Secretary of State for giving a speech on how the British should have less power in international affairs. To fulfill 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 Siwa Oasis along with American and Egyptian armed forces. He meets with Razim, who has changed into Western clothes (loose shirt, jeans and sandals), 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 with Razim in pursuit. After a brief struggle between the pair, the bridge is brought down - Alex manages to hang on, but Razim falls into a large salt pile which quickly sucks him down, burying him alive.

DeathEdit

After falling off a bridge, Razim landed in a huge pile of salt. He sank into the pile of salt and was buried alive.

TriviaEdit

• 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, 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.

Scorpia Rising Characters
Main Characters
Alex Rider • Jack Starbright • Alan Blunt • Abdul-Aziz al-Razim • Julius Grief
Other Key Characters
Smithers • Tulip Jones • Joe Byrne • Erik Gunter • Zeljan Kurst • Yannis Ariston Xenopolos