Izz ad-Din al-Qassam

Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (1882–1935) was a Syrian-born Muslim preacher and resistance leader who fought the French in Syria and then organised armed resistance to British rule and Zionist settlement in Palestine, where British forces killed him in November 1935; the English article notes that his campaign and death were factors leading to the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine ^{1 2}.

He was born in Jableh, near Latakia, to a mother, Halima Qassab, and a father, Abd al-Qadir al-Qassam, a sharia court official and a local leader of the Qadiriyya order. The sources disagree on his birth date: the English article's lead gives 1881 or 19 December 1882 and its infobox the latter date; the Arabic article gives 1883. He studied first under Sheikh Salim Tayarah at the Istambuli Mosque in Jableh. His years at al-Azhar in Cairo are likewise dated differently: the English article places them sometime between 1902 and 1905, while the Arabic article has him travel in 1896, aged fourteen, and graduate in 1906 ^{1 2}.

Returning to Jableh in 1909, he taught at a Qadiriyya madrasa — where, the English article records citing Schleifer, he taught both the mystical practices of the Qadiriyya order and the jurisprudence and commentary of the Qur'an — and preached as imam of the Ibrahim ibn Adham Mosque, leading a campaign of moral reform in the town ¹.

From 1911 he supported the Libyan resistance to the Italian occupation, raising funds and fighters. After the First World War, in which he served as an Ottoman army chaplain, he financed weapons for Jableh's militia against the French and, after the French consolidated their hold, led guerrilla raids from Mount Sahyun in alliance with Ibrahim Hananu's revolt in the north ^{1 2}.

Driven from Syria, he settled in Haifa, where he became a waqf official and marriage registrar, imam of the al-Istiqlal Mosque, and from 1928 president of the Haifa branch of the Young Men's Muslim Association. From Haifa he built a clandestine organisation of cells — the Black Hand — among peasants and labourers, preaching that armed struggle was the answer to British rule and Zionist settlement; Israeli historian Tom Segev, quoted in the English article, called him "the Arab Joseph Trumpeldor". On 20 November 1935, after the killing of a British policeman attributed to his followers, British forces killed him near Sheikh Zeid (Nazlet Zeid) in the Jenin subdistrict ¹.

The English article's text, citing Schleifer, states that al-Qassam followed the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, and the English and Arabic infoboxes give Sunni Islam and Hanafi; on that combined evidence his affiliation is recorded as Sunni Hanafi, documented, with the configuration flagged in his record for the founder's ruling. The Qadiriyya evidence — his father's local leadership of the order, his own teaching at a Qadiriyya madrasa, and the infobox order field — does not attest his personal membership by two sources, and no Sufi affiliation is recorded ^{1 2 3}.