Lightning through the Clouds: ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Abstract

Even before Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam was buried, several groups had already claimed him as their own. They draped his corpse in the Iraqi flag and those of his companions in the flags of other independent Arab states. Although al-Qassam (b. 1883) died nearly a century ago in November 1935, an array of different, if not opposing, groups have since appropriated his image and memory. Before Hamas named a brigade in his honor and intifada communiqués evoked his legacy, leftist groups had already hailed him as an “Arab Che Guevara.” Mark Sanagan’s masterful study of this iconic figure tackles these conflicting and contested interpretations of his legacy. Based on extensive archival research, as well as memoirs, newspapers, and interviews, this study challenges conventional works that treat the events of alQassam’s life as a prologue to his martyrdom in 1935. These works reduce the Syrian-born scholar’s life to simplistic characterizations, such as “anti-colonial,” “Palestinian nationalist,” “jihadist,” and “Salafi.” Citing Ted Swedenburg’s study on early biographies of al-Qassam,* Sanagan explains, “There has been no hegemonic ‘national’ interpretation of al-Qassam imprinted on the minds of Palestinians.” As a result, al-Qassam has become “a sort of nationalist tabula rasa,” subject to the many claims over his memory and legacy by different Palestinian groups and writers (p. 3). As a result, Sanagan produces a social biography of al-Qassam in this lucidly written work accessible to a wide range of audiences. He contextualizes al-Qassam’s life story in the larger sociohistorical environment of the late-Ottoman and post–World War I Arab East (mashriq). A social biography, as Sanagan demonstrates, is “dialectic”—it reveals how the environment shaped the life of a single individual, just as it explains that environment through the lens of an individual (p. 6). The first three chapters explore al-Qassam’s life before arriving in Palestine in 1921. He grew up in Jabla, Syria (120 miles southwest of Aleppo), where his family was active in the Qadiri Sufi order. Al-Qassam favored the Naqshbandiyya Sufi order’s understanding of “sober” mysticism grounded in strict adherence to the sharia. Later, that Sufism was mixed with a Salafism that he encountered while studying at al-Azhar University in Cairo. Sanagan avoids debates about al-Qassam as either a “Salafi” or a “Sufi,” demonstrating how both these religious ideals shaped how he understood proper Islamic practice and Islam’s relevance to the larger umma. These beliefs inspired him to assemble fighters to defend Libya against Italian occupation and take up arms against the French in Syria after World War I. After eluding a French death sentence, al-Qassam found refuge in Haifa, the topic of the following five chapters. In Haifa, al-Qassam cultivated a relationship with the city’s swelling labor force that had been pushed out of their surrounding villages because of global capitalism, British colonialism, and Zionist expansion. Distant from the influence of Palestine’s traditional