Abdullah Yusuf Azzam

Abdullah Yusuf Azzam was born in 1941 in the Palestinian village of Silat al-Harithiya, about eight kilometres northwest of the city of Jenin in the West Bank, then administered under the Mandatory Palestine.[6][11][12] Azzam is described by most of his biographers as being exceptionally intelligent as a child. He liked to read, excelled in class, and studied topics above his grade level.[11][12]

In the mid-1950s, Azzam joined the Muslim Brotherhood after being influenced by Shafiq Asad `Abd al-Hadi, an elderly local teacher who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Recognizing Azzam's sharp mind, Shafiq Asad gave Azzam a religious education and introduced him to many of the Muslim Brotherhood's leaders in Palestine. Azzam became more interested in Islamic studies and started a study group in his village. Shafiq Asad then introduced Azzam to Muhammad `Abd ar-Rahman Khalifa, the Muraqib `Am (General Supervisor) of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan. Khalifa met with Azzam during several visits that he made to Silat al-Harithiya. During this part of his life, Azzam began reading the works of Hasan al-Banna and other Muslim Brotherhood writings.[11]

In the late 1950s, after he had completed his elementary and secondary education, Azzam left Silat al-Harithiya and enrolled in the agricultural Khaduri College in Tulkarm, about 30 kilometres southwest of his village. Though he was a year younger than his classmates, he received good grades.[11][12] After graduation from the college, students were sent out to teach at local schools. Azzam was sent to the village of Adir, near the town of Kerak in central Jordan.[11][12] According to one of his biographers, Azzam had wanted a position closer to home, but was sent to a distant school after an argument with his college's dean.[11] After spending a year in Adir, Azzam returned to the West Bank, where he taught at a school in the village of Burqin, about four kilometers west of Jenin. His colleagues in Burqin remembered him as being noticeably more religious than them. During breaks, while others ate, Azzam would sit and read the Quran.[11]

In 1963, Azzam enrolled in the Faculty of Sharia at the University of Damascus in Syria. While in Damascus, he met Islamic scholars and leaders including Shaykh Muhammad Adib Salih, Shaykh Sa`id Hawwa, Shaykh Mohamed Said Ramadan Al-Bouti, Mullah Ramadan al-Buti, and Shaykh Marwan Hadid.[11] Azzam's mentor, Shafiq Asad `Abd al-Hadi died in 1964. This strengthened Azzam's determination in working for the cause of Islam. During the holidays, Azzam would return to his village, where he would teach and preach in the mosque.[11] Azzam graduated with highest honors in 1966, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Sharia. Thereafter he returned to the West Bank, where he taught and preached in the region around his village. After the 1967 Six-Day War ended with the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Azzam and his family left the West Bank and followed the Palestinian exodus to Jordan.[11][12]

In Jordan, Azzam participated in paramilitary operations against the Israeli occupation but became disillusioned with the secular and provincial nature of the Palestinian resistance coalition held together under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and led by Yasser Arafat.

Instead of pursuing the PLO's Marxist-oriented national liberation struggle supported by the Soviet Union, Azzam envisioned a pan-Islamic trans-national movement that would transcend the political map of the Middle East drawn by European colonial powers.[13] In Egypt Azzam continued his studies at the prestigious Al-Azhar University, getting a PhD in Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence in 1973, while being acquainted during his stay with the ideas of Sayyid Qutb.[14] He completed his 600-page doctoral thesis in around 16 months.[15]

Some researchers believe he had a role as an ideologist in founding the Islamist Hamas movement in Palestine.[16]

Azzam took a position as lecturer at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he remained until 1979. He was also known as Shaikh Abdullah due to his seniority and his aspirations to become UH NSU. Osama bin Laden was enrolled as a student in the university between 1976 and 1981 and probably first met Azzam during that time.[17]

In 1989, a first attempt on his life failed, when a lethal amount of TNT explosive placed beneath the pulpit from which he delivered the sermon every Friday failed to detonate. The Arab mosque was in the University Town neighbourhood in western Peshawar, in Gulshan Iqbal Road. Abdullah Azzam used the mosque as the jihad center, according to a Reuters inquiry in the neighbourhood. Had the bomb exploded, it would reportedly have destroyed the mosque and killed everybody inside it.[37]

On 24 November 1989, Muhammad Azzam was driving his father and brother to Friday prayers in Peshawar, when unknown assassins detonated a bomb as the vehicle approached. Lying in a narrow street across from a gas station, the explosive had a 50-metre detonation cord which led to the sewerage system where the assailant presumably waited.[38] According to Time, Waheed Muzhda had noticed what he assumed was a crew doing routine road maintenance working on the culvert where the bomb was placed, the day before the assassination.[39] Azzam and his sons were buried near the same site as his mother the year before, the Pabi Graveyard of the Shuhadaa' (martyrs), in Peshawar.

After his death, Azzam's militant ideology and related paramilitary manuals were promoted through print and Internet media by Azzam Publications,[47] a publishing house that operated from a London post office box[48] and an Internet site. Both were shut down shortly after the September 11 attacks and are no longer active, though mirror sites persisted for some time afterwards. Babar Ahmad, the administrator of azzam.com, was extradicted from the UK to the USA where he pleaded guilty to "conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism."

Azzam popularized the idea of armed Islamic struggle (which went on to be developed further by groups such as the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA)).[49] Prior to his work, declarations of jihad in the twentieth century (such as against Israel) were essentially rhetorical and served more as a religious blessing of wars already declared and organized by secular bodies. But with his tireless travel and exhortation of activists, thousands of whom traveled to be trained and to fight in Afghanistan, what Azzam "called for actually came about".[50]

Azzam also broadened the idea of jihad. Azzam preached that jihad was

• the transcendent in importance – 'one hour in the path of jihad is worth more than 70 years of praying at home';
• and had global significance – 'if a piece of Muslim land the size of a hand-span is infringed upon, then jihad becomes fard `ayn [a personal obligation] on every Muslim male and female, where the child shall march forward without the permission of its parents and the wife without the permission of the husband'[51]

Azzam had considerable impact. Fatwas going back to the Crusades had urged Muslims to defend one another against an invasion, but his contention that "such defense was a global obligation," that "Muslims everywhere were personally bound to take up arms" against invasions such as the Soviet's, was "all but unprecedented".[52]

Azzam is thought to have had influence on jihadists such as al-Qaeda with the third stage of his "four-stage process of jihad". This third stage was "ribat," defined as "placing oneself at the frontlines where Islam was under siege". This idea is thought to reinforce militants' "perception of a civilizational war between Islam and the West".[53] His son Huthaifa Azzam, who assumes his father's legacy, on the other hand, says that al-Qaeda's methods of targeting civilians in the West or elsewhere would have been rebuked by Azzam, as would have been the use of kidnappings and beheadings.[54]

The internationally recognized terrorist group Abdullah Azzam Brigades (a Lebanese branch of al Qaeda) is named after Azzam.

Having "published over 100 books, articles and recorded conferences",[55] some of his works include:

• Defence of the Muslim Lands: The First Obligation after Faith, 1979 (many typographical errors); 2002 (second English ed., revised with improved citations and spelling.) Is a study on the legal rulings of Jihad. It discusses the types of Jihad, the conditions under which Jihad becomes an obligation upon all Muslims, parents’ permission, fighting in the absence of the Islamic State and peace treaties with the enemy.[13]
• Join the Caravan, 1987, 1991 (second English ed.) (An appeal for Muslims to establish "a solid foundation as a base for Islam" in Afghanistan by expelling the Russian invaders of this Muslim land. The author quoted extensively from the Quran and the ahadeeth in establishing his jurisprudence reasoning as to why there is now an individual obligation (Fard Ain) for committed Muslims to travel to Pakistan-Afghanistan and become active combatants – mujahideen themselves.)
• The Lofty Mountain (A biographical book on the life of Tameem Adnani, a scholar of the Afghan Jihad. It contains a unique, descriptive, first-hand account of the famous Lion's Den Operation in Jaji, Afghanistan, in 1987 whereby 50 Mujahideen held off a month-long assault by several battalions of Soviet and Communist soldiers.)
• The Signs of The Merciful in the Jihad of the Afghan (A fully checked and revised version of a book listing over a hundred eyewitness accounts of alleged miracles experienced by the Mujahideen in the Soviet–Afghan Jihad, from perfumed bodies of martyrs to accounts of angels helping the Mujahideen, and other claims.)
• Lovers of the Paradise Maidens (Lovers of the Paradise Maidens contains the biographies and stories of over 150 Mujahideen who died in the Soviet–Afghan Jihad.)
• The titans of the north, was a book written by Abdullah Azzam but which he was unable to get printed. In it, he praised noted commander Ahmad Shah Massoud (who was later assassinated by Al-Qaeda) but because almost all of Peshawar was semi-owned by warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a rival of Massoud, no one would print it there.[56]

• Hegghammer, Thomas. 2019. The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad. Cambridge University Press.

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