The Caravan Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad

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.

Introduction; Prologue; 1. Palestinian; 2. Brother; 3. Fighter; 4. Scholar; 5. Vagabond; 6. Writer; 7. Pioneer; 8. Diplomat; 9. Manager; 10. Recruiter; 11. Ideologue; 12. Mujahid; 13. Resident; 14. Enemy; 15. Martyr; 16. Icon; Conclusion.

Thomas Hegghammer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Universitetet i Oslo. Trained in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and Sciences Po, Paris, he is the author of the prize-winning book Jihad in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, 2010) and is the editor of Jihadi Culture (Cambridge, 2017). He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Middle East, including interviews with former militants, and he has testified on jihadism in front of the US Congress and the British Parliament.