Abdullah Yusuf Azzam

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Sheikh Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (1941–1989) (Arabic عبدالله عزام) was a central figure in the global development of the militant Islamist movement.

Shaikh 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. Shaikh 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.

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[edit] 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 District, in the northern West Bank territory of the Jordan River area 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, Shaikh 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, Shaikh 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.

[edit] Life in Jordan and Egypt

In Jordan, Shaikh 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, Shaikh Azzam envisioned a pan-Islamic trans-national movement that would transcend the political map of the Middle East drawn by non-Islamic colonial powers. [1]

Shaikh 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, Shaikh 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, Shaikh Azzam met Shaikh 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. Shaikh 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.

[edit] Life in Saudi Arabia

After obtaining his Doctorate in Egypt in 1973, Shaikh 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 Shaikh Azzam at that time. [2]

[edit] 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.

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Shaikh Azzam issued a fatwa, Defense of the Muslim Lands, the First Obligation after Faith [3] declaring that both the Afghan and Palestinian struggles were jihads in which killing kuffar (unbelievers) 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, Shaikh 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, according to Rahimullah Yusufzai, executive editor of the English-language daily The News International. "Azam prevailed on him to come and use his money" for training recruits, reported Yusufzai. [4]

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 Shaikh Azzam. In 1984, Osama bin Laden founded Bait ul-Ansar (House of Helpers) in Peshawar to expand Shaikh Azzam’s ability to support “Afghan Arab” jihad volunteers and, later, to create his own independent militia.

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.

Shaikh 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 radical Muslims worldwide for his passionate attachment to jihad against foreign occupation. In the 1980s, Shaikh Azzam traveled throughout the Middle East, Europe and North America, including 50 cities in the United States to raise money and preach about jihad. Shaikh Azzam believed that the struggle in Afghanistan was a model for future struggles with the objective of establishing an Islamic Caliphate across all Muslim lands under foreign occupation.

Shaikh Azzam’s radical ideology, combined with his skill at organizing paramilitary training for more than 20,000 Muslim recruits from about 20 countries around the world, created an international cadre of highly motivated and experienced militants intent on perpetuating his vision of global Islamic revolution.

In Join the Caravan, Shaikh 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. [5] Shaikh Azzam's trademark slogan is "Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues."

[edit] 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. [6]

But then on November 24, 1989, Shaikh 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 20kg 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 the faction including Osama bin Laden, competing Afghan militia leaders, Pakistani Interservices Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and the Israeli Mossad. The first possibility is supported by an alleged falling out with the nascent Al Qaeda group over the next target and the scope of jihad. Azzam apparently wanted to bring a somewhat limited jihad back to his native Palestine against Israel, while the competing faction (in which Osama bin Laden was at that time emerging as an eminent figure) wanted to fight an all-out war to the West in general; the differences can best be understood from the divergent points of view on the philosophical nature of jihad (serving political vs. serving ideological aims), though some have rejected this as American propaganda aimed at disuniting Muslims.

After his death, Shaikh 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.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Defence of the Muslim Lands; The First Obligation After Iman; Biography of Abdullah Azzam and Introduction, by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam (Shaheed), English translation work done by Brothers in Ribatt
  2. ^ Letter From Jedda, Young Osama, How he learned radicalism, and may have seen America, by Steve Coll, The New Yorker Fact, Issue of 2005-12-12, Posted 2005-12-05
  3. ^ Defence of the Muslim Lands; The First Obligation After Iman, by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam (Shaheed), English translation work done by Brothers in Ribatt
  4. ^ Rahimullah Yusufzai, executive editor of the English-language daily The News International, in a statement to Reuters in Peshawar on December 29, 2001. Yusufzai met bin Laden twice in Afghanistan in 1998.
  5. ^ Join the Caravan, by Imam Abdullah Azzam, Downloaded from the website www.al-haqq.org in December 2001
  6. ^ Profiles of Ash Shuhadaa, SHEIKH ABDULLAH AZZAM, Ummah Forum, posted 07-04-2002, 02:44 AM

[edit] External links

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