Abdullah Azzam, the man behind bin Laden’s jihadism

CAIRO – 5 August 2018: Osama bin Laden’s mother, Alia Ghanem, blamed in her first interview with the Guardian outsiders such as bin Laden's Palestinian mentor, Abdullah Azzam, for "brainwashing" her son and convincing him with jihadism.

She asserted that Azzam changed her son, a young man in his 20s, into a militant fighting in the "holy war" against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s.

“He was a very good child until he met some people who pretty much brainwashed him in his early 20s. You can call it a cult. I would always tell him to stay away from them, and he would never admit to me what he was doing, because he loved me so much,” She said to the Guardian.

Azzam was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood; he was a mentor and teacher of bin Laden and later became a founding member of al-Qaeda. Egypt Today presents the most important information about the Brotherhood leader.

Azzam is a Palestinian citizen who was born in 1941. He joined the Faculty of Sharia, Islamic law, at the University of Damascus and obtained a certificate of law. Then, he joined Al-Azhar University and received a master's degree in the fundamentals of jurisprudence.

Starting his career, he moved to Saudi Arabia to work at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah. Upon his request, he was transferred to work for a year at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan, aiming to be close to jihadists in Afghanistan.

Since then, he took the post of the leader of jihadists in Afghanistan, and together with bin Laden, he started founding al-Qaeda terrorist organization.

Azzam was highly influenced by the thought of Sayed Qutb, a leading MB figure, and he was one of the most important al-Qaeda figures who worked to attract young people to participate in the fighting in Afghanistan.

“Muslims must be terrorists,” Azzam’s most repeated words that lead him at last to be assassinated, along with his sons Muhammad and Ibrahim, in Pakistan on November 24, 1989.