Monday, November 10, 2008

Something About Dr Abdullah Azzam

Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (1941 As-ba'ah Al-Hartiyeh, British Mandate of Palestine – 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,[1] although the two differed as to where the next front in global jihad should be after the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan. [2] [3] He was assassinated by a bomb blast on November 24, 1989.[4]

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 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. [5] He is believed to have had a role in founding the Islamist Hamas movement in Palestine.[6]

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. [7]

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 [8] 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. [9]

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 had 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.[10]

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. [11] Critics complain these stories proliferated because Sheikh Abdullah paid mujahids to bring "him wonderful tales."[12]

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. [13]

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[citation needed] 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` [qaeda in 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.'[14] 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." [15]

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, European 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,[16] 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. [17]

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 three 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. [18]

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 had issued a fatwa in which he stated that once the Russians were ejected from Afghanistan, it would not be permissible for us to take sides." [19][20] Fawaz Gerges also believes it is likely that Ayman al-Zawahiri orchestrated the assassination,{cn} in doing so he hoped to become Al-Qaeda's number two.

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. [21] 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. [22] Yet another actor accused of the hit is Iranian intelligence,[23] an active adversary of Wahhabi/Salafi jihadis.

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".[24]

Quotes

  • "Muslims cannot be defeated by others. We Muslims are not defeated by our enemies, but instead, we are defeated by our own selves."[citation needed]
  • "Jihad and rifle alone. No negotiations. No conferences and No Dialogue"[citation needed]
  • "Every Moslem on earth should unsheathe his sword and fight to liberate Palestine. The Jihad is not limited to Afghanistan. Jihad means fighting. You must fight in any place you can get. Whenever Jihad is mentioned in the Holy Book, it means the obligation to fight."
  • "History does not write its lines except with blood. Glory does not build its loft edifice except with skulls; Honour and respect cannot 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 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 alleged accounts of 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.)

See also

References

  1. ^ BBC News: Bin Laden biography, Tuesday, November 20, 2001
  2. ^ Kepel, Gilles, Jihad, Harvard University Press, (2002), p.145
  3. ^ Wright, Lawrence, Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright, NY, Knopf, 2006
  4. ^ Allen, Charles God's Terrorist, (2006) p.285,286
  5. ^ 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
  6. ^ Abdullah Azzam, 'The Godfather of Jihad'
  7. ^ 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
  8. ^ Defence of the Muslim Lands; The First Obligation After Iman, by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam (Shaheed), English translation work done by Brothers in Ribatt
  9. ^ 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.
  10. ^ Michelle Shephard, "Guantanamo's Child", 2008.
  11. ^ examples can be found in "The Signs of ar-Rahmaan in the Jihad of the Afghan,` www.Islamicawakening.com/viewarticle.php?articleID=877& accessed 2006 and Abdullah YusufAzzam,"Abul-Mundhir ash-Shareef," www.islamicawakening.com/viewarticle.php?articleID=30& accessed 2006
  12. ^ Mohammed Loay Baizid in interview, from Wright, Lawrence, Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright, NY, Knopf, 2006, p.106
  13. ^ Join the Caravan, by Imam Abdullah Azzam, Downloaded from the website www.al-haqq.org in December 2001
  14. ^ "The Solid Base" (Al-Qaeda), Al-Jihad (journal), April 1988, n.41
  15. ^ Wright, Lawrence, Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright, NY, Knopf, 2006, p.130
  16. ^ Sageman, Marc, Understanding Terror Networks by Marc Sageman, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, p.37
  17. ^ Profiles of Ash Shuhadaa, SHEIKH ABDULLAH AZZAM, Ummah Forum, posted 07-04-2002, 02:44 AM
  18. ^ Peter L. Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know, New York: Free Press, 2006, p.97
  19. ^ Al-Sharq al-Awsat, London, October 6, 2001 (check for date of year)
  20. ^ see also Wright, Lawrence, Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright, NY, Knopf, 2006, p.130
  21. ^ The Age of Sacred Terror, by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, Random House, c2002, p.104
  22. ^ Wright, Lawrence, Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright, NY, Knopf, 2006, p.143
  23. ^ The Iranian Intelligence Services and the War On Terror By Mahan Abedin
  24. ^ Statement of Magnus Ranstorp to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States March 31, 2003
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