Thomas Hegghammer: The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
“This book is about why jihadism went global,” written through the prism of the life of Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian Arab instrumental in organizing “the world’s first truly global foreign-fighter mobilization,” which occurred in 1980s Afghanistan in response to the 1979 Soviet invasion. “The Soviet-Afghan war is the cradle of today’s jihadi movement,” the event which nurtured new leaders (including Azzam and Osama bin Laden), new fighters, intra-jihadi networks, and Islamist ideology. In Iran, jihadis had successfully targeted the secularist regime of the Shah. But in the Arab countries regimes both secular and religious proved harder to subvert. “Jihadism went global in the 1980s because [Arab] Islamists had been excluded from domestic politics in preceding decades” and accordingly “turned to an arena in which they faced less government interference—namely, transnational activism for pan-Islamic causes.” Men like Azzam and bin Laden channeled this activist passion into military organizations, urging Muslim youth to “join the Caravan,” head to Afghanistan, and make war for Allah.
Hegghammer wants to know several things about Azzam: Who was he? That is, “where did he come from, and what shaped him as a thinker?” “What motivated the big decisions in his life? And what were his opinions?” “Why was he so influential?” And how did he and his associates organize their movement?
Azzam was born into a family of jihadis; his father had fought against the British, whose empire encompassed Palestine, having taken it over from the Ottomans. In his childhood he saw members of the Muslim Brotherhood from around the Middle East who joined with Palestinian Arabs to fight the Israel as soon as it was founded in 1948. While this was an international conflict, as the Afghan war would prove to be, decades later, it was regional, not global, organized by states not ‘non-state actors.’ Most of the foreign fighters were “not especially religious,” unlike the Brothers. Azzam later wrote, “True Islam did not enter the battles of 1948.” Nonetheless, “To Azzam…the war of 1948 had offered a glimpse of what the Islamist movement could achieve militarily if it were not obstructed by governments and if it collaborated across borders.”
The youth joined the Brotherhood in 1954, going on to study Islamic law at Damascus University, where he graduated in 1966, a year after his marriage. The Six-Day War of 1967 “was a turning point in Azzam’s life,” making him a refugee and spurring his passion for revenge. As many have noticed, the war also injured the prestige of the secularist Arab regimes, making Islamism more appealing to the masses. And Azzam was far from the only displaced Palestinian Arab; he was among several hundred thousand who joined the 700,000 displaced in the aftermath of 1948. With the Israeli takeover of Jerusalem, Muslim militants gained a focus for their cause; the struggle was no longer simply a question of reclaiming those parts of Palestine ruled by Israelis and the Hashemites of Jordan, but of reclaiming the third holiest city of Islamdom. For this reason, Azzam would always maintain that “Palestine is more important than Afghanistan,” even as he recruited fighters against the Soviets in the 1980s. Indeed, he regarded Afghanistan as a solid potential base for (in his words) “found[ing] a core around which a big Muslim army can be gathered to cleanse the earth of the big corruption,” of which the Jewish occupation of Jerusalem was a major symptom and symbol. Being an Islamist, he had no use for the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasir Arafat, “whom he saw as godless traitors” to the cause of Islam. He remained loyal to the Brothers.
“Azzam’s Brotherhood background is crucial for understanding his subsequent activities; it shaped not only his ideological outlook but also his career opportunities and personal trajectory”; “his Brotherhood network would come into play at almost every key juncture of his life, and it would help him fundraise and recruit for the Afghan cause.” He had been “one of the very few Palestinians to study Islamic Law in the 1960s,” when secularism held the dominant position in Arab intellectual life. “Azzam’s sustained commitment to the weaker side in this political struggle is indicative of a deep and genuine ideological conviction,” a conviction refined by his mentor, a schoolteacher in his village who was a Brotherhood member. Later, the curriculum he found at the University of Damascus aimed not only “to transmit traditional religious heritage, but to train modern experts on Islamic law who could deal with real-world challenges,” such as the confrontation of the Shari’a with secular Common Law. “The Brotherhood presence at the Shar’ia faculty reflected the enormous importance that Islamists attached (and continue to attach) to the issue of legislation. The main political objective of all Brotherhood branches in the region was the Islamization of the legal system,” inasmuch as Muhammad himself was a legislator. Unfortunately for the Islamists, Syria’s nationalist/secularist Ba’thist Party seized power in 1963, strongly resisting the Brother’s agendum. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser cracked down on the Brotherhood in that country; Nasser had the leading Brotherhood thinker, Sayyid Qutb, executed in 1966. Qutb had been Azzam’s principal intellectual influence, one whose writings he recommended to his students, after he became a university professor. [1]
Before that, however, Azzam joined in the guerrilla fighting along the Jordanian-Israeli border which erupted after the Six-Day War. The Fedayin conducted cross-border raids, recruiting militants from around the region. These men were mostly left-wing secularists, but some, like Azzam, were Muslim Brothers; “militarily insignificant” at the time, they would nonetheless form a nucleus of fighters among whom Azzam was already “a relatively senior figure,” although a military novice. With his training in the Shar’ia, he soon took “the role of a religious authority in the camps,” giving brief sermons before military engagements and also returning to talk about jihadi exploits among rank-and-file Arabs. Thus, by 1969 “Azzam was already taking on the role he would be famous for during the Afghan jihad, namely, as a preacher who brings news and martyrdom stories from the battlefront to the people.” From time to time, secularist-Islamist tensions within the Fedayin would flare; Azzam never wavered, reportedly sneering at the Left’s hero, Che Guevara, “My religion is Islam, and Guevara is under my foot.” Although the secular Arab regimes soon closed down the militants, who threatened their own rule more than Israel did, Azzam profited; his experience on the front line “gave him a taste of military life with all its emotional rewards: the sense of purpose, the thrill of adventure, the pride of making it through hardship, and the pleasure of camaraderie.” And it enhanced his prestige within the Brotherhood, which had prudently withdrawn from military struggle before the crackdown began.
He had already done some teaching in Saudi Arabia in the 1960s. He earned a Master’s degree in Islamic Law at the University of al-Azhar in Cairo, then a Ph.D, also at al-Azhar, “the most prestigious place of religious learning in the world of Sunni Islam” at that time. In the early 1970s, Egypt’s new president, Anwar Sadat was less antagonistic towards Islamists than Nasser had been. For its part, the Egyptian chapter of the Brotherhood moderated its tone, “abandon[ing] revolutionary violence, in both theory and practice.” Azzam evidently held his tongue, completing his dissertation on Islamic jurisprudence in 1973, emerging from the university “as a classically trained scholar of Islamic Law with impeccable credentials.” On the strength of them he obtained a teaching position at the University of Jordan, where he taught for seven years. “As many as a third of the teaching staff in the department [of Shar’ia law] were Muslim Brothers, some of whom were known as relative hardliners.” A popular professor, Azzam advanced the ideology of Islamism not only on campus but in talks throughout Jordan. For a time, the monarchy there regarded the Islamists as useful counterweights to the leftists, who were sponsored by the Soviet Union, “confident that [Islamists] would not produce a violent revolutionary offshoot.”
That began to change. Having earned for himself the title, “Sayyid Qutb of Jordan,” he began to travel and lecture internationally, even visiting the United States in 1978, where he met Usama bin Laden at the University of Indiana’s Islamic Teaching Center. Back in Jordan, he began to teach a course titled “The Muslim World Today,” in which he propounded the claim that “Western and Jewish conspiracies against Muslims” were causing “most of the region’s ills.” Communism was nothing more than “a Jewish ploy to weaken Islam,” and indeed “all Communist revolutions in the world are Jewish” in their inspiration. The downfall of the Ottoman Empire, the last caliphate, was the product of exactly this Communist-Jewish conspiracy. Arab nationalist regimes constitute only another Communist front, deploying Arab Christians as their pawns. More alarming to the monarchy than these vaporings was his dismissal of the Jordanian regime as “un-Islamic” and secretly in alliance with Israel. His rhetorical fireworks against the neighboring Ba’athist regime’s struggle against the radical wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria provoked “a Syrian hit team” to pepper his house with bullets in warning. Eventually, he was fired from his university position for threatening a Jordanian newspaper editor who had published a cartoon satirizing the Iranian mullahs, whom he preferred to the secularist Iraqi tyrant, Saddam Hussein on the grounds that at least the mullahs were Muslims. By then, even his Muslim Brotherhood colleagues had grown nervous about his outspoken radicalism, which threatened to upset the “delicate balance” between the Brothers and the monarchy.
He landed another university position, this time in Mecca. “Lacking educated manpower at this time,” Saudi Arabia welcomed foreign academics, including Brotherhood activists from Syria and Egypt. “These well-educated men found employment in Saudi schools and universities, and formed the backbone of the kingdom’s education system in the 1960s and 1970s.” At the same time, the movement for pan-Islamism was gaining momentum in the Middle East. Pan-Islamists differed from their predecessors because they dismissed the Arab governments as insufficiently Islamic, obstacles rather than vehicles for the restoration of the Caliphate. Whereas the Muslim Brotherhood had always advocated international cooperation among Muslims, “the various national Brotherhood branches had operated to a large extent as vertically separated silos, with most political activities taking place within countries”; now “there emerged a new class of Islamists, preoccupied with building horizontal connections between countries.” Activities included proselytizing on behalf of Islam and exploiting the annual Hajj in Mecca to network with fellow Islamists, while “construct[ing] an identity discourse emphasizing the unity of the Muslim nation and highlighting outside threats.” That is, before the Caliphate, a religio-national state, could be founded, it was first necessary to induce Muslims to think of themselves as ‘one nation under Allah,’ as it were, yearning for the honor and protection a Muslim state, indeed a Muslim empire, would bring. “Jihad is the key to Muslims’ success and felicity,” the pan-Islamists maintained, “especially when their sacred shrines [were] under the Zionist occupation in Palestine, when millions of Muslims are suffering suppression, oppression, injustices, torture and even facing death and extermination campaigns in Burma, Philippines, Patani, USSR, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cyprus, Afghanistan, etc.” Saudi Arabia and several other Arab governments “tolerated the diffusion of pan-Islamist propaganda because it vilified primarily non-Muslim powers” keeping the jihadis’ attention pointed ‘outward.’
In Mecca, Usama bin Laden may have attended some of Azzam’s lectures; at any rate, they reacquainted themselves with one another, more than a decade after their brief meeting in the United States. Bored with teaching, eager to return to the battlefield, Azzam taught only one semester at King Abd al-Aziz University, heading next to Pakistan, where he hoped to plan his move into his real destination, Afghanistan. Arriving in Islamabad in November 1981, he had an appointment at the Islamic University of Islamabad, which was part of Pakistani president Zia ul Haq’s policy of Islamization, undertaken against the secularist Bhutto family and its allies. Azzam joined a faculty with a large foreign Arab contingent, teaching students who were mostly foreigner from Asia or the Middle East. This Islam-based internationalism coincided with his own long-held convictions, and he took the opportunity to lead student trips to Afghan refugee camps in the Peshawar area.
By the end of the 1980s, the Soviet military would kill somewhere between one million and two million Afghans while displacing about 7.5 million (“over half the population”). “Although the Afghan jihad was widely perceived in the West as a national liberation struggle, the Afghan Mujahidin neither presented nor saw themselves simply as a nationalist movement in need of external support.” They repeatedly proclaimed that they were engaged in a world-historical struggle, extending the Muslim revolution in Iran to its eastern neighbor, preliminary to greater conquests on behalf of Allah. For his part, Azzam worked to connect the Muslim Brotherhood to the Mujahidin, asking for humanitarian aid not fighters. The man who undertook military recruitment of Arabs was Jalaluddin Haqqani, who “became an important early ally of Azzam’s.” While he did bring the Afghan jihad to “Arab attention,” Azzam couldn’t unite the Mujahidin, nor could he persuade the Brothers to lend military support to them. Contrary to much that has been written, the Arabs who did fight in Afghanistan never received “direct support” from the CIA or any other Western intelligence services, which reserved their assistance for the indigenous fighters. (As for Bin Laden, he worked with the Saudis.) Generally, the Arab groups contributed little to the overall effort to expel the Soviets from the country. Azzam did arrange for Islamic charitable funding in Peshawar, through non-governmental organizations rather than governments: “No tyrant has power over me.” Such aid did assist the nascent terrorist movement, inasmuch as “it was in this period that Islamic charities developed the militant ties and problematic practices that led some of them to lend support, wittingly and unwittingly, to more radical organizations such as al-Qaida in the 1990s.”
Having failed to reconcile Mujahidin factions, Azzam turned to organizing the Services Bureau, “a militarized charity with projects in multiple domains.” Bin Laden provided the funding for its activities, which included hosting incoming volunteers, providing education for children and adults, gathering intelligence, monitoring press coverage of the war, coordinating humanitarian aid, military logistics, and publishing the Al-Jihad magazine, “a resounding success.” The Bureau itself was riddled with factions, which the “notoriously conflict-shy” Azzam failed to moderate; it nonetheless proved crucial to bringing Arabs to Afghanistan after the Soviets had been expelled. More, it functioned as “a vital mechanism for turning global Muslim interest in the Afghan jihad into actual fighters on the ground.” “Azzam was a better recruiter than manager,” bringing Muslims from “at least forty different countries” in “the most international volunteer force the world had ever seen.” It is noteworthy that “the Service Bureau’s most elaborate overseas infrastructure was not in the Middle East but in the United States”; Azzam himself visited dozens of American cities during the 1980s, telling Muslims there that they shouldn’t live in the West “because it exposed them to sinful things and benefited the Jews who run the global capitalist system.” The Bureau and other Islamist organizations recruited approximately 10,000 foreign fighters, half of them Arabs, most of them students. Although they didn’t do much to kill Russians, they did form a nucleus for worldwide terrorist activities after the Soviet troops retreated.
In addition to his lectures, in the 1980s Azzam published nine books and over 100 articles, arguing that “internal division was the main source of Muslim weakness”; “all forms of nationalism, sectarianism, ethnic politics, and tribalism” must be opposed. His theology was therefore syncretistic, intended as an ideational basis for activism in shared causes. “Azzam was thus in some sense an Islamic culture warrior; he considered it more important to protect Islamic culture from foreign influences than for Muslim society to advance materially or technologically.” “No education at all was better than a non-Islamic education,” he insisted. As in any regime, the Umma as Azzam conceived it held up an ideal human type for emulation, “a new conception of the ideal Muslim, a kind of homo jihadicus for whom warfare is integral to his way of life,” superior to any other form of religious activism. He claimed that jihadis witnessed many acts of divine intervention on the battlefield—for example, an enemy tank that exploded because an Islamic warrior threw a Koran under it—proof of Allah’s approval. Failure too only instanced divine approval, inasmuch as martyrs earn honor in Heaven. To those who doubted such tales, he replied that doubters are men of little faith. More worrisome were those Muslims who suspected Azzam of Sufism, on the grounds that claims of miracles and martyrdom smacked of mysticism. To this, he answered that the Koran itself testifies to the existence of miracles and lauds martyrdom.
The core of Azzam’s argument for jihadism “combined two existing but previously unconnected ideas”: that Islamic law requires Muslims to repel invaders of Muslim land by military force; and “that the duty of jihad is universal and not subject to approval by any one nation-state.” Individual Muslims must therefore heed the call to jihad in Afghanistan, regardless of the policy of their government. This doctrine had the advantage of shifting militants’ attention from “rebelling against Muslim rulers,” who might be false Muslims but claimed to be faithful, towards “fighting infidel invaders” who made no claims to be Muslims at all. Hegghammer notes that this nonetheless departs from Muslim orthodoxy, which holds that “jihad is in principle only an individual obligation for the population touched by the invasion,” whereas “for everyone else it is a collective obligation, meaning that it is optional and subject to a range of restrictions.” The only exception to this is a circumstance in which the Muslims under attack are unable to defend themselves; in that case, Muslims outside that area are obligated to intervene. This gave Azzam a theological opening. He argued that “the very existence of an occupation somewhere was evidence that the locals were unable to defend themselves, and hence the individual obligation should extend to all the world’s Muslims immediately.” This claim effectively ‘privatizes’ jihad, taking it out of the control of Islamic rulers. The problem was that jihadis so inspired might refuse the ruler of those who called them in. Having arrived in Afghanistan, many foreign fighters refused to obey Azzam’s commands, either, and factionalism arose within his own movement.
Azzam called not only for military resistance to those who invade Muslim-ruled lands but terrorism, especially against Jews and against anyone who donated money to Israel. Answering a question after delivering a lecture in a California mosque, he endorsed “revenge on American Jews” as commanded by the Qur’anic verse, “Kill them wherever you find them.”
In addition to expelling Soviet troops, the jihadis aimed at regime change, replacing the Soviet puppet government with the Taliban. Azzam hoped that “the Islamic state in Afghanistan would serve as a base for a new missionary effort and a military of other lost territories,” an “impregnable fortress,” as he called it, serving not only as a refuge for jihadis seeking shelter from persecutors but as the nucleus of “a transnational caliphate that would encompass all the world’s Sunni-majority nation-states,” an empire that might even expand worldwide, God willing. As the Mujahidin rolled back the Soviets, Azzam’s “hostility toward the West,” and toward America especially, intensified. He blamed the United States for assassinating Zia ul Haq and installing Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan and for planning to assassinate the leaders of the Afghan jihad. In response to such alleged enormities, he justified jihad defense of the Umma, which would in turn justify bin Laden’s terrorism. It was bin Laden who insisted that the Services Bureau expand its military activities, and so vindicate the honor of Arab volunteers. Being the Bureau’s principal donor, bin Laden got his way; in April 1987 he ordered an assault on an Afghan army outpost; Azzam fought alongside the other volunteers. Shortly thereafter, bin Laden formed al-Qaida in order to maintain order and discipline among his men. As yet, the organization “had no clear political objective or designated geographical operating area”; “it was not until the mid-1990s that the group would stake out a clear strategy in the form of war against America.” Meanwhile, although “the Arab role in evicting the Soviet Union” from Afghanistan “was miniscule,” the prestige of the new leaders had been enhanced throughout the jihadi network.
As with any regime, the “Afghan Arabs” had not only rulers and ruling institutions but a way of life. “The Afghan jihad experience was otherworldly compared with the ordinary lives most fighters left behind,” “involv[ing] extended isolation in landscapes that were literally moon-like as well as intense emotional and spiritual experiences” that induced many to abandon any thought of returning home. Azzam refined and directed these emotions with the careful use of poetry, “an age-old feature of mainstream Arab culture, which in the 1980s was used by Islamists to glorify jihad.” Azzam judiciously inserted poetic verses into his writings and speeches, drawing on what one co-worker called “an endless treasury of Arab epic poems” he had committed to memory, knowing “exactly how to use them in provoking the sentiments of Arab youths.” He also saw to it that “a specifically jihadi iconography” was developed for use in magazines and films. All of this established his authority as “the undisputed spiritual leader of the Afghan Arabs and an influential figure in intra-Mujahidin politics.”
As Azzam gained prominence, he attracted enemies. These included the Pakistani government, nervous about too many Arab fighters on their soil, Salafists in Saudi Arabia, who distrusted his distrust in Arab governments and considered his theological syncretism too lax, jihadi radicals who judged him “too moderate,” Israel, which took exception to his ties with Hamas and his Pakistan-based training camps open to Palestinians, and finally rival Mujahidin factions. He was assassinated in 1989; any one of these entities may have done it.
“Famous in life,” Azzam “became iconic in death.” Among jihadis, his memory is venerated to this day, by internationalists and even nationalists (especially Palestine’s Hamas). His main critics remain the more apolitical Muslims. His admirers continue to promote his legacy, keeping his books in print for the benefit of new recruits. The several, often conflicting, jihadi groups all claim him as their own, thanks to a certain vagueness in his writings which elevates him above the bitter tactical disputes that have given rise to faction. They “seem to have appreciated most of all…that he was a scholar who dared speak his mind and take part in jihad”—a figure combining the kind of spiritual and intellectual authority earnest youths revere with the kind of energy and ambition earnest youths possess, a man who synthesized words and deeds. As a result, “the phenomenon that Abdallah Azzam helped create has become the preeminent rebel movement of the post-Cold War era.
Note
- For a brief account of Qutb’s religio-political thought, see “Islam and Modern Politics,” on this website under “Nations.”
Recent Comments