ʿAzzām, ʿAbdallāh - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
[Article]
Rougier, Bernard
Leiden
Brill
(1,016 words)
ʿAbdallāh ʿAzzām (1941-89), an influential theoretician of jihād , was born to a family of modest means in the village of Sīlat al-Ḥārithiyya, northwest of Jinīn, in what was then British Mandate Palestine. While he was still a teenager, his village schoolteacher convinced him to join the West Bank branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. He studied agronomy, to please his parents, and immediately upon graduating, in the late 1950s, he became a schoolteacher, working in both the West Bank and the East Bank of what was by then the