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The Palestinian Muslim revolutionary leader, Sheikh Izz od-Din al-Qassaam
Compiled By: Syed Ali Shahbaz
On December 20, 1935 AD, the Palestinian Muslim revolutionary leader, Sheikh Mohammad Izz od-Din al-Qassaam, attained martyrdom near Haifa in Palestine at the age of 53. Born in Jableh in the Latakia Governorate of the Ottoman Province of Syria, he was a follower of the Qadari Sufi order. After studying at Egypt’s al-Azhar Academy he returned home to become prayer leader and teacher at a local mosque.
After Italy\'s 1911 seizure of Libya from the Turks, he recruited dozens of volunteers, but Turkish officials prevented him from going to Libya. He joined the Ottoman army when World War I broke out, and served as a chaplain at a base. After the war, he organized a local defense force to fight the French occupation of Syria, but internecine fighting forced him to take refuge in the mountains to plan guerrilla warfare. He was a key figure in the 1921 Syrian uprising against the French when Faisal, a son of the British agent, Sharif Hussain, was brought from Hejaz and declared king of Syria in Damascus. Al-Qassaam was sentenced to death after the failure of the revolt.
When the French occupiers besieged the city, he fled via Beirut to Haifa in British occupied Palestine. Already in his forties, he concentrated his activities on mobilizing Islamic resistance against the colonialists. His followers were mainly the landless farmers drifting in to Haifa from Upper Galilee, where land purchases by the illegal Zionist migrants from Europe was creating a crisis.
He joined the Istiqlal or Independence Party and in 1929 was appointed the marriage registrar in Mufti Amin al-Hussaini\'s Supreme Muslim Council Sharia Court in Haifa, a role that allowed him to tour the northern villages, whose inhabitants he encouraged to set up agricultural cooperatives. In 1930 he established ‘Black Hand’, a combatant organization for fighting the British occupiers as well as the illegal Zionist migrants. He arranged military training for peasants and by 1935 had enlisted nearly 800 men.
In November 1935, fearing arrest after a British constable was killed in a skirmish with some of his followers he fled with his men to the hills between Jenin and Nablus. The British cornered al-Qassaam in a cave near Ya\'bad, and in the ensuing battle he was martyred. The manner of his last stand assumed legendary proportions in Palestinian and other Arab circles as the symbol of resistance. The al-Qassaam Brigades of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance were named after him for the struggle to liberate their homeland from the Zionist usurpers.
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