At the same time the disciples were encouraged to return to their villages outside of Haifa, either on regular visits or to resume residence, to cultivate the support of their local mukhtar and to prepare likely recruits for a visit by al-Qassam. Then al-Qassam would visit the village, accompanied by the disciple and frequently by other members of his particular circle in Haifa, and the slow process of preaching, observation, guidance, military training, eventual initiation of disciples and the formation of new circles would begin again. At times, the "Sheikhs", as the members of the oldest Haifa mujahidin circles were known, ,were authorised to directly initiate tribesmen and villagers in the countryside to the mujahidin. ^"49"
By 1923 al-Qassam had secured land in the Beisan valley and he sent Muhammed Hanifi there to farm in order to have an eventual source of income to purchase weapons for the jihad as well as a centre of communication with all parts of Palestine. In the summer al-Qassam came to Beisan and helped Hanifi plant his crops; in the winter Hanifi would come to al-Qassam and together they visited the villages on horseback.
Hanifi served as al-Qassam's deputy and as treasurer of the mujahidin. He was entrusted by al-Qassam with the contacts to all of the circles. The head of each was called either arif or naqib, both titles drawn from the technical vocabulary of the turuq.
Because the majahidan only knew members of their own circle, or at most of their parent circle, the numbers given for the strength of the Qassamiyun in the biographical accounts vary from 50 to 200 and all were said to be concentrated in northern Palestine. But according to Hanifi, who visited all of the circles and arranged the dispatch of communications from al-Qassam to the arif of each village circle by courier, the number of trained and initiated mujahidin was more than a thousand. While the movement was strongest in the northern districts, Hanifi claims al-Qassam managed to visit most of Palestine and had disciples and secret circles throughout most of the countryside, even as far south as Gaza^"50"
Although al-Qassam was not particularly successful in recruiting mujahidin from among the predominantly middle class members of the Young Men's Muslim Association in Haifa, his position as President of the YMMA provided him with an acceptable explanation for his frequent visits to the villages around Haifa where he was organising branches of the Association which became, outside of Haifa, the equivalent of a "front" or "cover" group for the local mujahidan.^"51"
His appointment in the late 1920's as roving registrar of weddings for the shari'a court of the greater Haifa district provided al-Qassam with still greater opportunities to travel around northern Palestine to meet, observe, and eventually initiate disciples.
Sometime in the late 1920's al-Qassam visited Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and head of the Supreme Islamic Council (which was the closest to a self-governing Palestinian authority tolerated by the British) and requested an appointment as a roving preacher for the Council. This would have provided al-Qassam with an opportunity to travel the length of Palestine and with an acceptable explanation to the authorities for such travel. But Haj Amin never responded to the request and Hanifi credits al-(Zassam's coolness towards Haj Amin to this incident, which predates a more widely reported incident in which al-Qassam informed Haj Amin of his preparations for jihad and asked Haj Amin to lead the struggle in central Palestine. Haj Amin refused, saying he believed the problem could be solved by political means according to Subhi b'asin's version, or because the timing was premature, according to Abu Ibrahim al-Kabir. ^"52"
AI-(Za:.~sam's position as President of the YMMA provided him access to the notables and with still closer relations to the younger and more radical Arab nationalists from the modern educated classes who were to coalesce around the Istiqlal Party, which was a Palestinian inheritance of the aborted Arab national movement in Syria. These relationships protected al-Qassam, for while the Istiqlal were radical in comparison to the traditional parties of the big families, they were nevertheless profoundly respectable. His closest professional associate in the Istiqlal was the Haifa banker Rashid Haj Ibrahim, a leading figure in the charitable society Jamiat al-Islamiya and the founder and first president of the Young Men's Muslim Association in Haifa. Such men could never be associated with the Bedouin, village fellahin or landless farm workers involved in the sporadic acts of violence against Jewish settlements from the late 1920's on. Although it is precisely in this milieu that al-Qassam found his first followers, his professional association with the notables and young professional men were such that neither his public preaching of jihad nor his peculiar working class following were to be taken with sufficient seriousness by either British intelligence or his Arab nationalist acquaintances. But his public preaching of jihad so disturbed the British authorities that he was picked up and interrogated on at least one occasion (one informant reports four such occasions) and warned not to be so provocative. Rashid Haj Ibrahim also appealed to al-Qassam on several occasions to moderate his sermons since it was becoming increasingly difficult for Haj Ibrahim to persuade the British not to arrest the Sheikh.
Although the Istiqlal was a loosely organised, non-sectarian party focussed upon secular Arab rather than Islamic identity in its nationalism, the party was sufficiently close in time to the salifiya origins of much of its inspiration and is association between Arabism and Islam for any but the most hardened secularist not to colour its Arab nationalism with an Islamic rhetoric that employed such phrases as Jihad and sabil Allah.
This vague approximation of rhetorical style was reinforced by the one basic political position shared by the Istiqlal and al-Qassam, that opposition to the Zionist colonisation of Palestine could not be separated from opposition to the British occupation since Zionist settlement was only possible by virtue of British protection. This was in contrast to the prevailing strategy among all the big-family parties, be they "moderate" or nationalist, to work politically by a mixture of cooperation and principled protest for a realignment of British policy in favour of the Arabs that would halt further Zionist encroachment on Palestine.
Al-Qassam identity of view with the Istiqlal was limited to this one point, but from the perspective of Palestinian politics and their subsequent interpretation as secular history, that identity of view was not only profound but inescapable reinforced by al-Qassam's continuous denunciation of the British in his sermons and less formal public talks. But al-Qassam shared this perspective with whoever else held it, and as late as November 2, 1935, the Palestine Post reports al-Qassam sharing the platform at a Haifa rally condemning Balfour Day with Jamal al-Husseini, leader of the Arab Party, rather than in Nablus for the big Istiqlal rally organised by Akram Zu'ayter. ^{"53"
These ass}ociations were such that Akram Zu'ayter, the leader at that time of the Istiqlal in Nablus, believed that al-Qassam was a member of the Haifa branch of the party and describes him as such when entering the news of of al-Qassam's death into his diary.^"54"
The same claim occurs in the history of the Palestinian struggle written by Izzat Darwaza, who was senior leader of the Istiqlal, and it has been repeated in all the subsequent biographical accounts of al-Qassam.^"55"
However, all of the Qassamiyun informants interviewed in this study deny that al-Qassam belonged to any party. Still more significant, Darwaza has acknowledged this confusion and his subsequent account is that al-Qassam sympathised with the Istiqlal and was closely associated with its Haifa leadership but that he was never a member.
Nor is this a uniquely Istiqlal phenomenon; rather, it is that the Istiqlal claim is the most creditable. Al-Qassam has also been claimed posthamously by the partisans of Haj Amin Husseini as a member of the Arab Higher Committee and a close associate of the Mufti.
Haganah Intelligence, in its own jaundiced manner but without any vested self-image at stake, could clearly see decisive factors at work that seem so difficult of discernment or acknowledgment by many of al-Qassam's Arab biographers: ". . . contrary to the general national movement .. . the organisation had a prominent Islamic stamp. The Sheikh was an old-fashioned fanatic of Islam ... Everyone who entered the organisation swore a purely religious oath".
With the passage of time and distance - geographic, spiritual and ideological - the claims on behalf of al-Qassam became more extraordinary.
Ghassan Kanafani's appreciation of al-Qassam in his study analysis of the 1936 Uprising nearly sums up in entirety the understanding of a new generation. Al-Qassam's Syrian birth (which Kanafani refers to as "his Syrianism", "represents the Arab nationalist factor in the battle". Al-(Zassam's status as an Azhari "represents the religious-nationalist factor represented by A1 Azhar at the beginning of the century". It must be assumed that Kanafani is referring either to the modernist Islamic nationalism of al-Afghani or the salifiya school of Rashid Rida, both of which were currents of thought opposed overwhelmingly in their time by the consensus of A1 Azhar. Al-(Zassam is no longer a mujahid; he is now, in these later interpretations, a munadal, freedom fighter.
Kanafani's account must be slightly amended to incorporate additional nuances. Among the secular reconstructionists, for Shawki Khayrallah for example (who is perhaps the most dedicated admirer of al-Qassam), the Sheikh is the prototype of the Syrian nationalist revolutionary.^"56" For the Popular Democratic Front he was the prototype of the Leninist militant, "preaching the idea of armed revolution in the ranks of the workers and in the rural areas", ^"57" an idea already echoed by earlier treatments (and denied by his disciples) that he excluded anyone outside the ranks of the working classes from the mujahidin.
Al-Qwssam is that rarity in the modern Muslim world, an enduring but relatively contemporary hero, and perhaps a uniquely contemporary hero who lacks a literature of his own. This makes al-Qassam particularly vulnerable to the same process of political appropriation that to a lesser degree threatens all heroes.
But there is more here than the political misuses of history, and the corruption of thought. There is a process at work in al-Qassam's life that is, by its nature, difficult to recognise even by the most sympathetic of eulogists within the Arab national movement. Ahmed Shukeiry writes very movingly about his attempt as a young nationalist lawyer to defend the Qassamiyun survivors of the battle of Ya'bud and how struck he was by the calm and composure with which they awaited their trial. Shukeiry, the political lawyer looking for a defence suggests that the Qassamiyun had been tortured or coerced into making a full confession. But no, they had acknowledged their participation in the battle freely. He asks the Qassamiyun what he can say to the court. "Tell them we are mujahidin fi-L sabil Allah and nothing will affect us except by the Will of God", they replied. Shukiery, who was deeply touched by this experience, admits that he had met al-Qassam many times at YMMA conventions in Haifa, knew him very well and admired him as a man of piety and as a good orator, "but it had never occurred to me or to others, even among his close friends, that he was preparing himself for an armed revolt directly against the British authorities".^"58" Akram Zu'ayter makes a similar remark in almost identical words.
And even Shawish, whose archives contain much of this unpublished history of al-Qassam, saw the product of the process begun by al-Qassam as "profound piety but without knowledge", which led to what Shawish thought of as naive errors on the part of the mujahidin, such as refusing to take food from the fellaheen if not offered to them (the Qassamiyun would not ask for food), or telling the truth to their enemies about their objectives, not realising, as the 'ulama do, that "war is a deceit".^"59" But from the perspective of a spiritual chivalry, of their Quranic sense of shahid as "witnesses against mankind", and their imitiation of a Prophet who "makes the Truth victorious by the Truth",^"60" their behaviour was impeccable.
If al-Qassam and the products of his effort seem to defy even the best intentioned modern Muslim thinkers, it is because his life and thought - dedicated to jihad in all of its dimensions - transcended the identity systems and contradictions of modern Islamic political thought. But he was capable of waging jihad in the contemporary milieu because he was able to absorb whatever of these conflicting schools filtered through his own traditional orthodox conscience, applying what he understood as compatible with orthodox Islam and rejecting what he understood was not.
Al-Qassam -- moving among jealous effendis, decadent 'ulama, and worldy religious reformers, a secret presence in the shacks of railroad porters and stone masons in the oil, cotton and cleaning rod painstaking ugliness of his treasured light machine guns - experienced by the vehicle of those spiritual virtues that he dlisciples perfected so earnestly, an opening into their tawdry and doomed natural world for the presence of the supernatural. This, by his own doctrine, was his greatest and only enduring triumph and it is precisely this triumph that has been denied him by his modern biographers.