A renown Egyptian Scholar Youssef al-Qaradawi, dubbed as the spiritual leader of the pan-Arab Muslim Brotherhood, died on Monday at the age of 96, the International Union of Muslim Scholars confirms.
Al-Qaradawi hosted a popular TV program, “Shariah and Life,” in Qatar, where he had been living in exile following the military coup which ousted a Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Egypt in 2013.
Al-Qaradawi had been tried and sentenced to death in absentia in Egypt. For many years while living in exile, he had a popular talk show on the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera network and often weighed in on globally contentious or political issues.
He backed the Muslim Brotherhood’s embrace of democratic elections and was a staunch critic of terrorist groups like Islamic State.
On many occasions, he strongly criticised the U.S.-led bombardment of Iraq, calling on all Muslim nations at the time to prepare to fight the Americans there “if the Iraqis fail to drive them out.”
“By opening our ports, our airports and our land, we are participating in the war,” al-Qaradawi said in a pointed critique of U.S.-allied Arab governments. “We will be cursed by history because we have helped the Americans.”
Qatar, which hosted him for decades, also hosts American troops and now serves as the forward headquarters of the U.S. military’s Central Command.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt nearly a century ago and has branches across North Africa was instrumental to the 2011 uprisings that rocked the Middle East and rose to power in Egypt’s first democratic elections, after the overthrow of long-ruling dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Al-Qaradawi made a triumphant return to Egypt for the first time in decades in February 2011, addressing tens of thousands of supporters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the pro-democracy uprising that toppled Mubarak.
But the year-long rule in Egypt of President Mohammed Morsi, a senior Muslim Brotherhood figure, proved extremely divisive, and the military pushed him out of power in 2013 amid nationwide protests. Morsi collapsed and died in court in 2019.
Al-Qaradawi remained a staunch critic of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, who led the overthrow of the Brotherhood and who rights groups say has established an even more authoritarian government than the one led by Mubarak.
Born in a small village in Egypt’s Nile Delta on September 9, 1926, Al-Qaradawi memorised the Quran before the age of 10 and went on to study at Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, the leading centre of Sunni Muslim scholarship.
He fled to Qatar in the early 1960s, when Egypt’s then-president Gamal Abdel Nasser, an Arab nationalist, was waging a fierce crackdown on the Brotherhood, seeing it as a threat to his rule.