The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad. Thomas Hegghammer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

While some notable figures in the modern jihadist movement get a lot of attention, it is the rare individual who rates an English-language biography from a top academic press.[1] Brynjar Lia’s account of the life of jihadist and military theorist Abu Musab Al-Suri is an exception. Lia’s biography helpfully dissects Suri’s complex ideas about insurgency in the modern age.[2] Thomas Hegghammer, Lia’s colleague at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (FFI), has produced a biography of an even more consequential figure for global jihad. In The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad, Hegghammer uses the major events of Abdallah Azzam’s life story, from the displacement of Palestinians during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1947-1949 to the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, to illustrate  Azzam’s impact on today’s jihadist landscape.[3] The Islamic State’s drive to create a caliphate—and the migration of over 40,000 people to join and fight for it—are important legacies of Azzam’s story, an interpretation of the past by a reputable scholar with the right tools to help us understand our present circumstances.[4]

The research behind Hegghammer’s work is comprehensive, the product of intensive field work in the countries where Azzam lived and interviews with his colleagues and family, as well as archival research in Arabic sources—including Azzam’s dissertation, correspondence, and famous books. Hegghammer augments these primary sources with an abundance of secondary sources, reviews, and biographies (or, as Hegghammer describes them, hagiographies). The result is a detailed study of Azzam’s story from his childhood to his death, with themed chapters highlighting his various identities and the different phases of his life: Palestinian, fighter, Muslim Brother, scholar, writer, diplomat, recruiter, ideologue, and, finally, martyr and icon. The book has maps, timelines, and pictures that help the reader relate to the subject. And at 700 pages, the author leaves no stone unturned.

Azzam is widely recognized for developing the justification for individual Muslims to travel to Islamic countries under attack by non-Muslims, specifically in his text Defense of the Muslim Lands.[5] He believed in this so strongly that despite the occupation of his own village in Palestine and his experience as a jihadist fighting Israelis from Jordan, he moved to Pakistan to manage the foreign fighters who were flowing into Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation after 1979. In addition to his other roles as a publicist, recruiter, preacher, and professor, Azzam was also a mentor to the future leaders of global jihadism, and in these ways he has had a lasting legacy.

Although Azzam was known to have been both prolific and forthright, his life story has still produced conspiracy theories in the decades since his death. Hegghammer’s research provides important context to lingering questions about Azzam’s efforts to marshal Arab support for the Afghan mujahideen within the United States, which famously helped fund the resistance against the Soviets. Although Azzam frequently traveled to the United States for fundraising purposes, Hegghammer argues Azzam was simply exploiting American protections of freedom of speech—as well as Washington’s ignorance of his role in the jihadist movement—rather than working in conjunction with the U.S. government in a formal capacity. Hegghammer concludes that evidence for surveillance of Azzam by the United States is lacking, and American officials seem to have had no idea who he was. Likewise, Hegghammer asserts the United States steered clear of funding Arab fighters and instead worked mainly with the Afghan resistance, which upends a persistent legend about Washington’s relationship with Azzam and, by association, the men who would a decade later plan the attacks of 9-11.

As for the lingering question of who was responsible for Azzam’s assassination in 1989, Hegghammer, despite his meticulous research, is circumspect, concluding it is still impossible to assign blame to any one party. Importantly, however, he is skeptical of the much-discussed possibility that the future leaders of Al-Qaeda—Usama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, both of whom had previously worked closely with Azzam in running the Afghan Services Bureau—had anything to do with his murder. Whether Azzam would have discouraged the September 11 attacks if he lived longer is a worthwhile counterfactual, and Hegghammer avoids imposing any judgments on how he feels about this in an academic but satisfying way.[6]

A vocal proponent for restoring the caliphate, Azzam probably would not support the Islamic State if he were alive today…

The book’s main contribution is to detail the complicated—but nevertheless substantial—ways in which Azzam has influenced the subsequent jihadist movement. Hegghammer notes the ways Azzam is held up for his advocacy for “jihad with clean tactics” contrast in a real way with what he set in motion: foreign fighter/traveler flow, promotion of a Sunni martyrdom culture, the internationalization of jihad, and the undercutting of traditional institutions that advocated restraint in jihad.[7] As a researcher on the Islamic State, I find it hard to understate Azzam’s impact on this particular movement. Yet, after reading The Caravan, I have a better appreciation for how his influence manifests itself in some ways, and was rejected in others. A vocal proponent for restoring the caliphate, Azzam probably would  not support the Islamic State if he were alive today, despite the group’s past accomplishments in this respect. Azzam’s passionate belief in unifying the factions of Islamic resistance would have been too great a contrast with Islamic State’s Machiavellian attitude toward jihadist rivals, and I think the group’s takfirist bent and open killing of rival Islamists would have been too much for Azzam, whose diplomatic skill in uniting factions was lauded by many after his death.

The veracity of these opinions is unknowable, and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi—the founder of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State movement—took advantage of Azzam’s posthumous charisma when he used the phrase “join the caravan” in his first public speech, an explicit homage to one of Azzam’s most famous books.[8] After the Afghanistan experience, al-Zarqawi was deeply frustrated by how few Arab volunteers were coming to the defense of a Muslim land—Iraq—that had been invaded by infidels, a concept of course popularized by Azzam over a decade before. Eventually, thousands of volunteers did come, supporting the founding of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2006 and, eight years later, the formation of a physical caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.[9]

There are other legacies. Azzam’s production of propaganda materials, which were designed to globalize jihad, blazed the way for the glossy, digitally distributed magazines available today in more than a dozen languages. His emphasis on ideological training has survived his death in ways that are surprising. According to Mustafa Hamid and Leah Farrall, Azzam’s facilities in Afghanistan more closely resembled mosques than training camps.[10] Recent research shows the Islamic State has integrated its unique ideological canon into its initial basic training of recruits, child soldiers, and bureaucrats, and in its leadership academies.[11] Most critically, Azzam’s dismissal of traditional authority figures who were not supportive of one’s duty to perform jihad opened a floodgate that has led not only to an influx of foreign fighters into countries like Iraq and Syria, but also the growth of homegrown terrorist attacks, which Islamic State propagandists have actively supported.[12] Again, this is something Azzam might have opposed were he still alive. As Hegghammer puts it, “These uncompromising activists were generally hostile to pragmatists such as Azzam.”[13] But Hegghammer’s research helps explain the history of how Azzam’s ideas contributed to the opening of a rather toxic Pandora’s Box and indubitably influenced subsequent evolution of the global jihadist movement.

The Islamic State, then, is in many ways the imperfect offspring of Azzam’s influential works. As Hegghammer puts it, Azzam advocated for the tawhid of action—matching Islamic beliefs and “the ultimate form of practicing jihad, by which he meant warfare.”[14] Azzam disdained claims that jihad had multiple meanings, including spiritual struggle, and his “unabashed militarism was relatively new within the Islamist movement.”[15] After Azzam, Hegghammer explains, apologetics on the topic of jihad largely disappeared, leaving few figures to counter the militant trend amongst Islamists. Instead, in a phrase Islamic State leaders and spokesmen have borrowed or paraphrased from Azzam repeatedly, he was fond of saying, “The tree of this religion…cannot be watered except with blood.”[16]

…even though Azzam was critical of the previous era of transnational hijacking and terrorism, he ultimately became the inspiration for a subsequent, more violent movement…

Azzam’s legacy, then, is a complicated one. Indeed, it is difficult to pin down the exact extent of his influence and where others have distorted his ideas. Moreover, even though Azzam was critical of the previous era of transnational hijacking and terrorism, he ultimately became the inspiration for a subsequent, more violent movement, one that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Muslims, most of them at the hands of other Muslims. But as complex as Azzam’s legacy in the evolution of global jihad has been, Thomas Hegghammer’s masterful book will certainly contribute to our growing, collective understanding of his important role.

Craig Whiteside is an associate professor of the Naval War College’s resident program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is a co-author of The ISIS Reader: Milestone Texts of the Islamic State Movement. The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Naval War College, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: Caravan in the Sahara desert, Morocco (Sergey Pesterev/Wikimedia)

Notes:

[1] Glenn Robinson, “The Four Waves of Global Jihad, 1979-2017,” Middle East Policy 24, no. 3 (Fall 2017), 70-88.

[2] Brynjar Lia, Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al-Qaida Strategist Abu Mus‘ab Al-Suri (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

[3] Thomas Hegghammer, The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

[4] Joana Cook and Gina Vale, “From Daesh to ‘Diaspora’: Tracing the Women and Minors of Islamic State,” International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, 2018, 3.

[5] Abdallah Azzam, Defense of the Muslim Lands (Maktabah Publications, 2002 – originally published in 1984).

[6] Hegghammer, 438-462.

[7] Hegghammer, 503-506.

[8] Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, untitled speech, January 4, 2004, in Haroro Ingram, Craig Whiteside, and Charlie Winter, The ISIS Reader: Milestone Texts of the Islamic State Movement (London: Hurst, 2020), 21-36; Abdallah Azzam, Join the Caravan, Minbar al-Tawhid wa’l-Jihad, 1987.

[9] Ingram, Whiteside, Winter, The ISIS Reader, 60; also 161-176.

[10] Hegghammer, 292; cited from Mustafa Hamid and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[11] Craig Whiteside, et al., “The ISIS Files: Islamic State’s Department of Soldiers,” George Washington’s Program on Extremism, forthcoming, 2020.

[12] Hegghammer, 364, 499; Ingram, Whiteside, and Winter, The ISIS Reader, 178-186.

[13] Hegghammer, 418.

[14] Tawhid is roughly translated as monotheism, belief in the one God. A strict interpretation of tawhid is one of the major tenets of Salafi Jihadism according to Shiraz Maher, Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea (London: Hurst Publications, 2016); Hegghammer, 293.

[15] Hegghammer, 293.

[16] In an ISIS propaganda video called “Structure of the Caliphate,” the narrator describes the proto-state as “erected by the arms of defiant men and irrigated by the blood of the shuhada (martyrs).” See Ingram, Whiteside, and Winter, The ISIS Reader, 236.