Lightning through the Clouds

A welcome scholarly publication...Sanagan’s choice of narrating the social history of ʿIzz Al-Din Al-Qassam as the representative of resistance in the modern Middle East offers a valuable contribution to both the biography of the iconic hero and the historiography of Mandate Palestine during its middle period. The study would benefit scholars and students of history, religious studies, and Middle East and cultural studies. ~Arab Studies Quarterly

Lightning through the Clouds is a thoughtful study that makes a virtue of the lack of detailed, credible information about the life of 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam, taking it as an opportunity to produce a social biography that sets his likely life activities in the social, political, economic, and religious context of late Ottoman and early Mandate Syria, as well as Mandate Palestine. It is an important investigation into the life of a key but poorly understood middle-Mandate figure, whose image lives but has been produced largely by the needs of the various people who invoke him. And as a study of the Mandate in its middle period, told from the perspective of Haifa rather than Jerusalem, it offers a critical new perspective on the overall history of Mandate Palestine. ~Andrea Stanton

This is an elegant, well-written social biography on an individual who, despite his centrality to Palestinian history, until now was quite absent from the professional historiography on Palestine. This biography is thus a welcome and urgently needed contribution that fills an unacceptable lacuna in the historiography of the country. ~Ilan Pappé

"[A] masterful study of [‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam]...The judicious analysis and research found in Lightning through the Clouds allows us to cast aside the myth and lore surrounding this iconic figure and uncover the many complex historical forces that shaped his life. Lightning through the Clouds is not only a welcome contribution to Palestinian studies but a valuable addition to the larger field of modern Middle Eastern history." ~Journal of Palestine Studies

This biography of [‘Izz al-Din] al-Qassam places him not only in the context of his social and political settings, but also allows us to see him within a wider movement in which his charisma and community connections made him not a single, dominating figure, but first amongst equals...Sanagan has thus succeeded in writing a rare book, one that combines the compelling narrative thrust of a biography with a breadth of view that tells the reader something genuinely new about the development of Palestine and Levantine anti-colonial politics over the first third of the twentieth century. ~Contemporary Levant