Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam - Establishment in Haifa

Establishment in Haifa

From Tartus, al-Qassam traveled to Beirut by boat and then to Haifa, then under the British Mandate, where his wife and daughters later joined him. Already in his forties, he concentrated his activities on the lower classes, setting up a night school for casual labourers and preaching to them as imam in the Istiqlal mosque, and he would seek them out on the streets and even in brothels and hashish dens. His greatest following came from the landless ex-tenant farmers drifting in to Haifa from the Upper Galilee where purchases of agricultural land by the Jewish National Fund and Hebrew labour policies excluding Arabs had dispossessed many of their traditional livelihoods'. He was also a prominent member of the Young Men's Muslim Association. Associated with the Istiqlal party (Independence Party), his activities were financed by several well-off businessmen due to his spreading reputation.

In 1929 he was appointed the marriage registrar at the Sharia court in Haifa by the Waqf authorities in Jerusalem, a role that allowed him to tour the northern villages, whose inhabitants he encouraged to set up agricultural cooperatives. According to Abdullah Schleifer, Al-Qassam was:

'An individual deeply imbued with the Islamic social gospel and who was struck by the plight of Palestinian peasants and migrants. Al-Qassam's pastoral concern was linked to his moral outrage as a Muslim at the ways in which the old implicit social compact was being violated in the circumstances of British mandatory Palestine. This anger fueled a political radicalism that drove him eventually to take up arms and marks him off from the Palestinian notable politicians'

He also took advantage of his travels to deliver fiery political and religious sermons in which he encouraged villagers to organise resistance units to attack the British and Jews. He intensified his agitation and obtained a fatwa from Shaykh Badr al-Din al-Taji al-Hasani, the Mufti of Damascus, which ruled that the struggle against the British and the Jews was permissible.