2020
First Published
4.29
Average Rating
723
Number of Pages
Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric who led the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s, played a crucial role in the internationalization of the jihadi movement. Killed in mysterious circumstances in 1989 in Peshawar, Pakistan, he remains one of the most influential jihadi ideologues of all time. Here, in the first in-depth biography of Azzam, Thomas Hegghammer explains how Azzam came to play this role and why jihadism went global at this particular time. It traces Azzam's extraordinary life journey from a West Bank village to the battlefields of Afghanistan, telling the story of a man who knew all the leading Islamists of his time and frequented presidents, CIA agents, and Cat Stevens the pop star. It is, however, also a story of displacement, exclusion, and repression that suggests that jihadism went global for fundamentally local reasons.
Avg Rating
4.29
Number of Ratings
93
5 STARS
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4 STARS
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3 STARS
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2 STARS
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Author
Thomas Hegghammer
Author · 4 books
Thomas Hegghammer is a Norwegian academic who has studied jihadism since before 9/11. He is senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) and adjuct professor of political science at the University of Oslo. His latest book is The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad.
