Abdullah Azzam

Abdullah Azzam Born in Jenin in 1941, Abdullah Azzam studied Sharia at Damascus University and AlAzhar University in Cairo. Following the catastrophe of the 1967 Six-Day War he fled to Jordan and worked in a Palestinian refugee camp funded by Saudi Arabia’s aal-asSheikh. Disillusioned by the secularism of the Palestinian resistance under Yesser Arafat he moved to Egypt to continue his religious studies at Al-Azhar. Here he met supporters of Sayyid Qutb, the recently executed co-founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad in promoting Islamist jihad falls outside the scope of this book. What is relevant in the present context is that Sayyid Qutb had espoused the centrality of tawhid and the absolute necessity for Islam to combat un-Islamic ignorance (jahiliyya), as represented by the pagan West and Muslim countries like Egypt whose government tried to follow the Western model. Despite the pleas of Sheikh Bin Baz and other leading Muslims, in 1966 Sayyid Qutb was executed, after ten years’ incarceration. In 1974 or 1975 Abdullah Azzam was given sanctuary from Egyptian persecution by the government of Saudi Arabia and offered a lecturing at the King Abdul Aziz University of Jedda, where he was joined by Sayyid Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb. It is claimed that during this period Abdullah Azzam came under the direct influence of Bin Baz and became a Wahhabi. It is probably closer to the truth to describe Abdullah Azzam as a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood who, during his time in Saudi Arabia, gained a greater understanding of Wahhabism and of Ibn Taymiyya’s philosophy of militant jihad. Abdullah Azzam first came to international prominence with a fatwa entitled Defence of the Muslim Land, issued in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. In it he declared it obligatory on all Muslims to make jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan and the Israelis in Palestine. This fatwa was supported by Bin Baz and the Wahhabi ulema. Abdullah Azzam then moved with his family to Pakistan, taking as his inspiration the declaration of the Prophet that ‘a few moment spent in jihad in the path of Allah is worth more than seventy years spent praying at home’. Initially he taught at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, but then moved to Peshawar to set up an organisation he named the Bait al-Ansar, the House of Ansar, after the man who first gave the Prophet refuge when he and his Companions fled from Mecca to Medina. Its purpose was to assist Arab volunteers arriving on the Frontier to engage in jihad in Afghanistan. His political philosophy was now summed up in his terse declaration ‘Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, and no diologue’. Abdullah Azzam’s many admirers claim that he took an active part in fighting in Afghanistan, but his real contributions was as an organiser and inspirational firebrand who preached locally and published internationally on the duty of every Muslim to make jihad, not just in Afghanistan but wherever Muslims were oppressed. ‘Jihad’, he wrote, continues until Allah’s Word is raised high; jihad until all the oppressed peoples are freed; jihad to protect our dignity and restore our occupied lands. Jihad is the way of everlasting glory’. From 1980 to 1989 he worked unceasingly but largely unavailingly to persuade the many mujahedeen commanders waging war in Afghanistan to set aside their rivalries and unite – ideally, under one leader.

Abdullah Azzam has been called the ‘Emir of Islamic Jihad’, but it would be more accurate to describe him as its godfather. Which leads on, at last, to the present (2005) amir of world jihad, Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad BIN LADEN. [pg. 278-279] In the meantime, the Egyptian doctor Al-Zawahri had followed Bin Laden’s example by also moving his family from Arabia to Peshawar, where he and other Egyptian revolutionaries set up a local faction of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Inevitably, a rivalry developed between the Egyptians led by Al-Zawahria and the Arabs led by Abdullah Azzam from the Office of Services to the Mujahedeen. These differences became acute when in 1988 Soviet Russia decided to cut its losses in Afghanistan and began to pull out its troops. A decade of warfare against the Russian infidels had created a battle-hardened and highly politicized international brigade. Abdullah Azzam wished these foreign jihadis to remain in Afghanistan and secure it for the Islamist cause, after which they would join forces with the Deobandi politico-religious parties and other Islamist groups to liberate Pakistan and Kashmir. Al-Zawahri, however, argued that the pan–Islamist armed movement created in the cause of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan should now be employed in liberating the entire umma, beginning with Egypt. In the late summer of 1989 a plot by persons unknown to assassinate Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was foiled when a large cache of primed explosive was found under the pulpit of a mosque where he was about to preach. A face-to-face confrontation followed at which Al-Zawahri accused Abdullah Azzam of indulging in ‘cat’s piss politics’. It ended with the Doctor winning over to his camp the idealistic and impressionable man whom he was then treating for a kidney complaint: Osama bin Laden, aged thirty-one to Al-Zawhri’s thirty-eight. On Friday 24 November of that same year Abdullah Azzam, now increasingly isolated, was targeted once again as he and his teenage sons made the journey from their home to the local mosque for evening prayers. In a narrow lane just short of the mosque they got out of their vehicle to walk the rest of their way – at which point three mines were detonated. ‘A great thundering was heard over the city’, relates a website dedicated to Abdullah Azzam: People emerged from the mosque and beheld a terrible sight. The younger son Ibrahim flew 100 metre into the air; the other two youths were thrown a similar distance away, and their remains were scattered among the trees and power lines. As for Sheikh Abdullah Azzam himself, his body was found resting against a wall, totally intact and not at all disfigured, except that some blood was seen issuing from his mouth. That fateful blast indeed ended the worldly journey of Sheikh Abdullah, which had spent well in struggling, striving and fighting in the Path of Allah. Although the CIA was blamed, the most obvious beneficiary of the Sheikh’s death was the man who spoke the eulogy at his funeral: Dr Ayman al-Zawahri, who now became world Jihad’s leading ideologue. [pg. 284 – 286]