The Architect of Global Jihad: The Exile Life of Abdallah Azzam

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Born in Palestine in 1941, Abdallah Azzam became associated with the Muslim Brotherhood as an adult refugee in Jordan. Then, in his twenties and thirties, he moved between Amman, Cairo, and Jeddah, gaining religious qualifications and joining the Islamist opposition to Israel and Arab leftist movements alike. But it was only with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that Azzam found his calling: in calling others to participate in the Afghan jihad. In the 1980s, he set up an international infrastructure of both persuading overseas Muslims to join the Afghan jihad then practically enabling them to participate. As both rhetorician and logistician, propagandist and organizer, Azzam acted as both the architect of the transnational jihadism that grew out of the earlier national activism of the Muslim Brotherhood. Among his many recruits and colleagues was a man who would later become far better-known—Osama bin Laden. But it was Azzam who set in motion the doctrinal and organizational developments that enabled many other competing jihadist groups to emerge in the decades after his assassination in 1989. Nile Green talks to Thomas Hegghammer, author of The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad (Cambridge University Press, 2020).