Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam
Background: Al-Qassam was born in Jableh , northwestern Syria , to father Abd al-Qadar, a sharia court official during Ottoman rule and a local leader of the Qadariyya Sufi order. His grandfather had been a leading sheikh of the Qadariyya order and moved to Jableh from Iraq. Al-Qassam also followed the Hanafi school of fiqh (jurisprudence) of Sunni Islam and studied at the local Istambuli Mosque under the teaching of well-known ′alim (scholar) Sheikh Salim Tayarah. Sometime between 1902 and 1905, al-Qassam left for Cairo to study at the al-Azhar Mosque . Who he studied with is disputed by the sources; some accounts say he studied under the Muslim reformist scholar Muhammad Abduh and came into contact with the prominent proto- Salafist , Rashid Rida , who himself studied under Abduh, while others are skeptical of al-Qassam's relationships with either. However, the attitude al-Qassam later adopted toward the political issues in the Arab world suggests he was well acqu...
