Book dossier

The Caravan

by Thomas Hegghammer

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. - Tells the entertaining story of Azzam's extremely eventful life, culminating in his extremely mysterious death - Explains why the jihadi movement went international in the 1980s, improving our understanding about this ideology and the people behind it - Revises early history of al-Qaida through the use of previously untapped primary sources —Publisher