His father: Abdul Qadir; His mother: Halima Kassab. His brother: Fakhr al-Din. His sister: Nabiha. His brothers from his father: Ahmed; Mustafa; complete; Sherif.
His wife: Amina Nanoua; His daughters: Khadija; Aisha; starboard. His son: Muhammad.
He received his primary lessons in his town from his father’s bookshop. At the age of fourteen, he traveled to Cairo, joined Al-Azhar Mosque, and took knowledge from its best imams, including the reformer Sheikh Muhammad Abduh.
After obtaining his certificate of eligibility, Izz al-Din al-Qassam returned to Jableh in 1903, where he succeeded his father in his bookstore, teaching the basics of writing, reading, memorizing the Qur’an, and some modern sciences.
During his stay in Egypt, Al-Qassam absorbed the atmosphere of national unrest against the British occupation, following the failure of the revolution led by Egyptian army officer Ahmed Orabi, and the spirit of reformist calls to preserve the nation through unity, self-reliance, and resistance to foreign occupation.
Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam assumed the imamate of the Mansouri Mosque in Jableh, and through his sermons, lessons, and behavior, he became an object of people’s respect, and his fame and good reputation extended to neighboring regions.
After the Italian attack on Libya in 1911, Al-Qassam called for supporting the Libyan Arab people by demonstrating and volunteering to fight alongside them. Then he was one of the first to join the revolution against the French occupation on the Syrian coast between the years 1919-1920, and he performed the best in fighting them in the mountains. Surrounding Saladin Citadel above Latakia, the French realized his danger and sentenced him to death.
Al-Qassam took refuge with his family and some of his brothers to the city of Haifa in the late 1920s, where he worked as a teacher in the “Al-Burj” secondary school, which was established by the “Islamic Society” responsible for managing Islamic endowments in the Haifa area. Then he began giving religious lessons at the “Istiqlal” Mosque, which It was built by the Islamic Society itself, attracting attention with its sermons. A few years later, he became an imam and preacher at the same mosque. He also established a night school to combat illiteracy.
Al-Qassam participated in establishing the branch of the “Young Muslim Men’s Association” in the city of Haifa, and in July 1928, he was elected its president. This association was an effective means of spreading national awareness among the ranks of youth and men and attracting them.
In 1930, Al-Qassam was appointed a Sharia official by the Sharia Court in Haifa. He began going out to the villages of Galilee, communicating with people and getting to know them, which increased his reputation.
Al-Qassam followed the escalation of the Zionist threat due to the British policy supporting the “Jewish National Homeland” project, and he came to the conviction that Britain was the cause and effect and that there was no way to deter it except through direct armed struggle against it, and that there was no way to do that except through sincere faith, rejecting partisanship and familism, cooperation, sacrifice, and a commitment to secrecy. Work, strict organization and timing, in addition to his compassion for the poor and those with little income and his continuous effort to improve their situation, thus attracting in his private circles the loyalty of ever-widening circles of the rural population and its elders who came to Haifa to work in its port, factories and refineries, and lived in miserable neighborhoods surrounding the city to the east. Many of them were evicted from their lands because their ownership was transferred to the hands of the Zionists.
Al-Qassam did not want to declare jihad against British colonialism before completing his preparations, but the flood of mass Jewish immigration in the first 1930s, the authorities’ tightening of control over it, and the fear of a pre-emptive strike, made him rush to declare jihad on November 12. November 1935, at night in Haifa, and then heading with eleven of his brothers to the forests of the village of Ya`bad near Jenin. It was an unequal battle – which lasted six hours – with the British forces on the 20th of the same month, in which the sheikh was martyred with four of his men, and the others were wounded and captured.
The city of Haifa witnessed a comprehensive strike on November 21, 1935, after news of his martyrdom arrived. Shops, shops, and restaurants were closed, and thousands of its residents bid farewell to the martyr Izz al-Din al-Qassam and those of his supporters who were martyred with him in the largest funeral the city had ever known.
Sheikh Al-Qassam was buried in the “Balad Al-Sheikh” cemetery in Haifa.
Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the sheikh of the Palestinian Jihad, his martyrdom played a major role in igniting the Great Palestinian Revolution (1936-1939), and has since inspired the Palestinian resistance, generation after generation. -Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestinian issue
