Everything about Abdullah Azzam totally explained
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (born 1941 As-ba'ah Al-Hartiyeh,
British Mandate of Palestine – died November 24, 1989,
Peshawar,
Pakistan) (Arabic عبدالله عزام) was a highly influential Palestinian
Sunni Islamic
scholar and
theologian, and a central figure in preaching for
defensive jihad by Muslims to help the Afghan mujahideen against the
Soviet invaders. He raised funds, recruited and organized the international Islamic volunteer effort of
Afghan Arabs through the 1980s, and emphasised the political ascension of Islamism. He is also famous as a teacher and mentor of
Osama bin Laden who persuaded bin Laden to come to Afghanistan and help the jihad. After joining with
Ayman Zawahiri, bin Laden rejected Azzam's political route. He was assassinated by a bomb blast in November 1989.
Early life in the West Bank
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam was born in 1941 in the village of As-ba'ah Al-Hartiyeh (Seilat al-Harithia village), a few kilometers northwest of the city of
Jenin, in the Jenin
Sanjak (District), then administered as the
British Mandate of Palestine.
After completing his elementary and secondary school education in his home village, he studied agriculture at
Khadorri College near
Tulkarm. After college graduation,
Sheikh Azzam worked as a teacher in the south Jordanian village of Adder. He subsequently joined Sharia College at the
University of Damascus where he obtained a B.A. in
Sharia in 1966. After the 1967
Six-Day War ended in
Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Azzam left the West Bank and followed the
Palestinian exodus to
Jordan, where he joined the Palestinian
Muslim Brotherhood.
His father, Mustafa Azzam, died in 1990. His mother was Zakia Saleh who died in 1988, one year before the Sheikh was killed. She was buried in the Pabi camp, in
Peshawar,
Pakistan, where Abdullah Azzam was later assassinated in a massive car bombing.
Life in Jordan and Egypt
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 non-Islamic colonial powers. He is believed to have had a role in founding the Islamist
Hamas movement in Palestine.
Azzam then went to
Egypt to continue
Islamic studies at
Cairo’s
Al-Azhar University where he earned a Master’s degree in
Sharia. He returned to teach at the
University of Jordan in
Amman, but in 1970, the Jordanian military expelled PLO militants from Jordan during what became known as
Black September, thereby preventing the use of Jordanian territory for anti-Israeli and anti-western attacks. In 1971, Azzam received a scholarship to once again attend Al-Azhar University where he obtained his Ph.D. in the
Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence (Usool ul-Fiqh) in 1973.
During theological studies in
Egypt, Azzam met
Omar Abdel-Rahman, Dr.
Ayman al-Zawahiri and other followers of
Sayyed Qutb, an extremely influential leader of the Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood, who had been executed by President
Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966. Azzam adopted elements of Sayyed Qutb’s ideology, including beliefs in an inevitable “
clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and non-Islamic world, and in the necessity of violent revolution against secular governments to establish an Islamic state.
Life in Saudi Arabia
After obtaining his Doctorate in Egypt in 1973, Azzam returned to teach at the University of Jordan, but his radical views were suppressed there. So Azzam then moved to Saudi Arabia. Since the 1960s,
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia had welcomed exiled teachers from
Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, so that by the early 1970s it was common to find many Saudi high school and university teachers who had become involved with exiled dissident members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
As one of those Jordanian dissidents in the early 1970s, Azzam took a position as lecturer at
King Abdul Aziz University in
Jeddah,
Saudi Arabia, where he remained until 1979.
Osama bin Laden had grown up in Jeddah, and was enrolled as a student in the university there between 1976 and 1981 and he probably first made contact with Azzam at that time.
Life in Pakistan and Afghanistan
1979 became a pivotal year for Islamic fundamentalism, with three huge revolutionary events in the Muslim world. First, on
January 16,
1979 the
Iranian Revolution began with the forced exile of the
Shah,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, which then brought about the world's first modern Muslim
theocracy under the rule of
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The second major attempt at Islamic revolution that year was the
November 20,
1979 Grand Mosque Seizure at
Mecca, in western Saudi Arabia, the holiest site in Islam. The hostage-taking, two week siege, and bloody ending shocked the Muslim world, as hundreds were killed in the ensuing battles and executions. The event was explained as a fundamentalist dissident revolt against the Saudi regime. The Saudi regime responded with repression, and in 1979, Azzam was expelled from the university at Jeddah. He then moved to
Pakistan to be close to the nascent Afghan Jihad.
In the third major event of the year, on
December 25,
1979 the Soviet Union, attempting to suppress a growing Islamic rebellion, deployed the 40th Army into
Afghanistan, in support of advisors it already had in place there.
Support for Afghan mujahideen
When the
Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Azzam issued a
fatwa,
Defense of the Muslim Lands, the First Obligation after Faith declaring that both the Afghan and Palestinian struggles were jihads in which killing occupiers of your land (no matter what their faith) was
fard ayn (a personal obligation) for all Muslims. The edict was supported by Saudi Arabia's
Grand Mufti (highest religious scholar), Abd al-Aziz Bin Bazz.
In Pakistan in 1980, Azzam began to teach at
International Islamic University in
Islamabad. Soon thereafter, he moved from Islamabad to Peshawar, closer to the Afghan border, where he then established
Maktab al-Khadamat (Services Office) to organize guest houses in Peshawar and paramilitary training camps in
Afghanistan to prepare international recruits for the Afghan war front.
Peshawar is a major border city of a million people in the
North-West Frontier Province of
Pakistan. From there, Azzam was able to organize resistance directly on the Afghan frontier. Peshawar is only 15 km east of the historic
Khyber Pass, through the
Safed Koh mountains, connected to the southeastern edge of the
Hindu Kush range. This route became the major avenue of inserting foreign fighters and material support into into eastern
Afghanistan for the resistance against the Soviets, and also in later years.
After Osama bin Laden graduated from the university in Jeddah in 1981, he also came to live for a time in Peshawar, "Azam prevailed on him to come and use his money" for training recruits, according to Rahimullah Yusufzai, executive editor of the English-language daily
The News International.
Through al-Khadamat, bin Laden's fortune paid for air tickets and accommodation, dealt with paperwork with Pakistani authorities and provided other such services for the jihad fighters. To keep al Khadamat running, bin Laden set up a network of couriers travelling between Afghanistan and Peshawar, which continued to remain active after 2001, according to Yusufzai.
After orientation and training, Muslim recruits volunteered for service with various Afghan militias tied to Azzam. In 1984, Osama bin Laden founded Bait ul-Ansar (House of Helpers) in Peshawar to expand Azzam’s ability to support “
Afghan Arab” jihad volunteers and, later, to create his own independent militia.
In 1998, Azzam convinced
Ahmed Said Khadr to fundraise for an alleged new charity named
al-Tahaddi based in Peshawar. He granted Khadr a letter of commendation to take back to Canadian mosques, calling for donations. However, the pair had a sensationalist show-down when Khadr insisted that he'd a right to know how the money would be spent, and Azzam's supporters labelled Khadr a Western spy. A
Sharia court was convened in bin Laden's compound, and Azzam was found guilty of spreading allegations against Khadr, though no sentence was imposed.
Employing tactics of
asymmetric warfare, the Afghan resistance movement was able to fend off the Soviet Union’s superior military forces throughout most of the war, although the lightly armed Afghan
mujahideen suffered enormous casualties. The
Saudi Arabian government and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) gradually increased financial and military assistance to the Afghan mujahideen forces throughout the 1980s in an effort to stem Soviet expansionism and to destabilize the Soviet Union.
Azzam frequently joined Afghan militias and international Muslim units as they battled the Soviet Union’s forces in Afghanistan. He sought to unify elements of the resistance by resolving conflicts between mujahideen commanders and he became an inspirational figure among the Afghan resistance and freedom-fighting Muslims worldwide for his passionate attachment to jihad against foreign occupation.
In the 1980s, Azzam traveled throughout the Middle East,
Europe and
North America, including 50 cities in the United States, to raise money and preach about jihad. He inspired young muslims with stories of miraculous deeds, mujahideen who defeated vast columns of Soviet troops virtually single-handed, who had been run over by tanks but survived, who were shot but unscathed by bullets. Angels were witnessed riding into battle on horseback, and falling bombs were intercepted by birds, which raced ahead of the jets to form a protective canopy over the warriors. Critics complain these stories proliferated because Sheikh Abdullah paid mujahids to bring "him wonderful tales."
Global jihad
Azzam's trademark slogan was "Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues." In
Join the Caravan, Azzam implored Muslims to rally in defense of Muslim victims of aggression, to restore Muslim lands from foreign domination, and to uphold the Muslim faith.
Sheikh Azzam built a scholarly, ideological and practical paramilitary infrastructure for the globalization of Islamist movements that had previously focused on separate national, revolutionary and liberation struggles. Sheikh Azzam’s philosophical rationalization of global jihad and practical approach to recruitment and training of Muslim militants from around the world blossomed during the Afghan war against Soviet occupation and proved crucial to the subsequent development of the
al-Qaida militant movement.
Like earlier influential Islamist
Sayyid Qutb, Azzam urged the creation of `pioneering vanguard`, as the core of a new Islamic society. `This vanguard constitutes the solid base` [qaedain Arabic] for the hoped-for society .... We shall continue the jihad no matter how long the way, until the last breath and the last beat of the pulse - or until we see the Islamic state established.'
From its victory in Afghanistan jihad would liberate Muslim land (or formerly Muslim land in the case of Spain) ruled by unbelievers: the southern Soviet Republics of Central Asia, Bosnia, the Philippines, Kashmir, Somalia, Eritrea, and Spain. He believed the natural place to continue the jihad was his birthplace, Palestine. Azzam planned to train brigades of Hamas fighters in Afghanistan, who would then return to carry on the battle against Israel."
This put him at odds with another influential faction of the
Afghan Arabs the
Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and it leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The next group of "unbelievers" the EIJ wanted to jihad against were not Israeli Jews, Europeans Christians or Indian Hindus, but self-professed Muslims of the Egyptian government and other secular Muslim governments. For the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, takfir against the allegedly impious Egyptian government was central, but Azzam opposed
takfir of Muslims - including takfir of Muslim governments - which he believed spread
fitna and disunity within the Muslim community.
Assassination
In 1989, a first attempt on his life failed, when a lethal amount of
TNT explosive was placed beneath the pulpit from which he delivered the sermon every Friday. 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 neighborhood. Had the bomb exploded, reportedly it would have destroyed the mosque, and killed everybody in it.
But then on
November 24,
1989, Azzam and his two sons, Ibrahim and Muhammad, among others, were killed outside the mosque, while on their way to Friday prayers in Peshawar, when unknown assassins detonated land mines as Sheik Azzam’s vehicle approached. Among the dead was one of the sons of the late Sheikh Tameem Adnani. The explosive that time consisted of an estimated 20 kg of TNT. Sheikh Abdullah 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.
By this time the
Soviet Union had withdrawn all troops from Afghanistan. Suspects in the assassination include competing Afghan militia leaders, Pakistani
Interservices Intelligence Agency, the
CIA, and the
Israeli
Mossad.
Azzam's son-in-law, Abdallah Anas, accused the EIJ of killing his father-in-law on the grounds that it "considered Sheikh Abdullah Azzam to be a rogue who had strayed from the right path of the faith ... Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was murdered because he'd issued a fatwa in which he stated that once the Russians were ejected from Afghanistan, it wouldn't be permissible for us to take sides."
Others suspect the killing was part of a purge of those who favored moving the jihad to Palestine. In March 1991, Mustapha Shalabi, who ran the Maktab al-Khidmat, the Services Bureau in New York and was also "said to prefer a `Palestine next` strategy, turned up dead in his apartment." He was replaced by Wadih el-Hage, who later became bin Laden's personal secretary.
Osama bin Laden has also been accused of being a suspect in the murder, but seems to have remained on good terms with Sheikh Azzam during this time.
Legacy
After his death, Azzam’s militant ideology and related paramilitary manuals were promoted through print and Internet media by Azzam Publications, which described itself as "an independent media organisation providing authentic news and information about Jihad and the Foreign Mujahideen everywhere." The publishing house operated from a London post office box (Azzam Publications — BMC UHUD, LONDON, WC1N 3XX) and an Internet site, www.azzam.com, that were shut down shortly after the
September 11, 2001 attacks and are no longer active, though
mirror sites persisted for some time afterwards.
Babar Ahmad, the alleged administrator of azzam.com, is awaiting extradition from Great Britain to the USA.
In terms of ideas, Azzam’s belief in jihad - 'one hour in the path of jihad is worth more than 70 years of praying at home' - has had considerable impact. Azzam is thought to 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".
Quotes
- "Muslims can't be defeated by others. We Muslims are not defeated by our enemies, but instead, we're defeated by our own selves."
"Jihad and rifle alone. No negotiations. No conferences and No Dialogue"
"Every on earth should unsheathe his sword and fight to liberate . The Jihad isn't limited to Afghanistan. Jihad means fighting. You must fight in any place you can get. Whenever Jihad is mentioned in the, it means the obligation to fight."
"History doesn't write its lines except with blood. Glory doesn't build its loft edifice except with skulls; Honour and respect can't be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses"
Written works
Defense of the Muslim Lands: The First Obligation after Faith, 1979
Join the Caravan, 1987
The Lofty Mountain (A biographical book on the life of Sheikh Tameem Adnani, a heroic 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 Ar-Rahman in the Jihad of the Afghan (A fully checked and revised version of a book listing over a hundred eyewitness accounts of miracles experienced by the Mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan Jihad, from perfumed bodies of martyrs to accounts of angels helping the Mujahideen.)
Lovers of the Paradise Maidens (Widely regarded as one of the best books written by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam and completed shortly before his own martyrdom, Lovers of the Paradise Maidens contains the biographies and stories of over 150 Mujahideen who were martyred in the Soviet-Afghan Jihad.)Further Information
Get more info on 'Abdullah Azzam'.
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