Izz al-Din al-Qassam

Izz al-Din al-Qassam was born in 1882 in the town of Jabla, south of Latakia on the Syrian coast, where his father Abd al-Qadir ran the village Qur’an school. At fourteen he travelled to Cairo to attend the lectures given at al-Azhar Mosque by its most distinguished teachers, among them the reformer Shaykh Muhammad Abduh, and he was in Egypt during the aftermath of the Urabi rebellion against the British occupation. He returned to Jabla in 1903 with the Ahliyya diploma, succeeded his father in running the school, and became imam of the town’s Mansuri Mosque. After Italy attacked Libya in 1911 he called for aid to its people through demonstrations and volunteering, and in 1919–20 he was among the first to join the revolt against the French occupation of the Syrian coast, fighting in the mountains around the Citadel of Salah al-Din north of Latakia. The French authorities sentenced him to death.

In late 1920 he took refuge with his family in Haifa. He taught at the Burj secondary school run by the Muslim Society, gave religious lessons at the Istiqlal Mosque — becoming its imam and preacher — and founded a night school offering adult literacy classes. In July 1928 he was elected president of the Haifa branch of the Society of Muslim Youth, which he had helped to found, and in 1930 the Shari’a Court in Haifa appointed him a marriage registrar, work that took him through the villages of the Galilee. His congregation was above all the poor: the countryside people driven off lands that had passed into Jewish hands, who had migrated to Haifa to work in its port, industries and refinery and lived in the miserable suburbs east of the city.

Watching mass Jewish immigration grow in the early 1930s under British protection of the “Jewish National Home,” Qassam concluded that Britain was the root cause of the problem and that only armed struggle could restrain the Zionist project — on conditions he preached with rigour: sincerity of faith, abandonment of party and family loyalty, cooperation, sacrifice, secrecy, and strict organization and timing. He was reluctant to declare the revolt before his preparations were complete, but the flood of immigration, growing surveillance of his activities, and his fear of a pre-emptive move against him led him to declare jihad in Haifa on the night of 12 November 1935. With eleven companions he took to the forests near the village of Ya’bad in the Jenin district, and there, on 20 November, they fought a much larger British force for six hours. Qassam and four of his men were killed; the rest were wounded or captured.

Haifa declared a general strike in mourning on 21 November 1935, and thousands walked in the largest funeral procession the city had seen, burying him in the cemetery of Balad al-Shaykh. His death was to a large extent instrumental in igniting the Great Palestinian Rebellion of 1936–39, and his name has remained a source of inspiration for succeeding generations of Palestinian resistance — the military wing formed by Hamas in the late 1980s called itself the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

Sources

• Izzeddin al-Qassam — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• Ahmad Ismail Yasin — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question