Abdullah Azzam

Abdullah Yusuf Azzam was born on 14 November 1941 in Silat al-Harithiya, in Mandatory Palestine. He studied at the agricultural college at Tulkarm, then at the Faculty of Sharia of the University of Damascus, graduating in 1966. After the 1967 war he left the West Bank for Jordan, and he later took a doctorate in legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) at al-Azhar in Cairo in 1973. He was associated with the Muslim Brotherhood from his youth.

He lectured at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah until 1979 and later taught at the International Islamic University in Islamabad. After the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan he issued a fatwa and treatise, Defence of the Muslim Lands, arguing that resisting foreign occupation of Muslim territory was a personal duty. He moved to Peshawar, where he set up the Maktab al-Khadamat (Services Office) to receive volunteers and support the Afghan resistance, working alongside Osama bin Laden among others.

His books and pamphlets, in Arabic and widely translated, deal with the law of jihad, accounts of the Afghan war, and religious education. His ideas on armed struggle have been very influential among later militant movements, and are treated critically by scholars. He was killed by a car bomb in Peshawar on 24 November 1989; those responsible have never been established with certainty.