Renowned Islamic scholar Yusuf Qaradawi passes away

Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the Muslim world’s most influential religious scholars, died on Monday. He was 96 years old.

The Qatar-based Egyptian scholar was the chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), and was also regarded as revered leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to his official twitter account of the nonagenarian scholar followed by the announcement on IUMS Twitter.

Activities and laurels

Throughout his life, Al-Qaradawi kept enlightening Muslim rulers and educating non-Muslims world about Islamic principles, ethics and theology in the light of Quran and Islamic jurisprudence. For years, he made regular appearances on Al Jazeera Arabic to discuss religious matters, hosted a popular TV programme, “Shariah and Life” and contributed write-ups for a plethora of periodicals on Islamic issues. He delivered lectures “offering advice on everything from global politics to mundane aspects of daily life”.

He has also received eight international prizes for his contributions to Islamic scholarship. He has published more than 120 books, including The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam and Islam: The Future Civilization, among others. AlJazeera reported that Qaradawi’s early famous work was the 1973 book Fiqh al-Zakat (The Jurisprudence of Zakat). Al-Qaradawi also sought to reinterpret historical rules of Islamic law in order to better integrate Muslims in non-Muslim societies.

Educational Background

Al Qaradawi read and memorized the entire Quran by the time he was 10. In 1954, he earned a diploma in teaching from Al Azhar University’s Faculty of Arabic Language. He enrolled in the graduate program in the Department of Quran and Sunnah Sciences of the Faculty of Fundamentals of Religion and Da’wah where he graduated with a master’s degree in 1960. He was awarded his PhD degree with first merit in 1973 from the same college with a thesis titled ‘Zakat and its impact on solving social problems’.

Political View 

Qaradawi was often described by supporters as a moderate who offered a counterweight to the radical ideologies espoused by al-Qaeda, according to AlJazeera. “He’s somebody who was committed to democracy and popular sovereignty from an Islamic perspective,” said David Warren, a scholar of contemporary Islam and research fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. “But being a democrat doesn’t mean that someone has to be a pacificist, so in the context of a civil war like Libya and Syria, he could hold those positions while similarly saying that Gaddafi is a tyrant who should be killed…,” he said, as quoted by Reuters.

It is said that he supported suicide bombings against Israel in the Second Intifada and also backed armed resistance against America’s occupational forces in Iraq in 2003.  However, he strongly condemned the twin tower attacks on September 11, 2001 in the United States and supported democratic politics, reported the Qatar-based news outlet. He criticized the coup that overthrew Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013. He was unable to return to Egypt following Morsi’s overthrow due to his opposition to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

His writings reflected views of noted Islamic jurisprudence Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim among others. He was also influenced by Muslim Brotherhood founders Hassan al-Banna and Indian-born scholars such as Abul Hasan Ali Hasani Nadwi, Abul A’la Maududi and Naeem Siddiqui.

 Exiled by Egypt, banned by Western nations  

His activism against the British occupation and later, his association with the Muslim Brotherhood led to his arrest several times during the 1950’s, reported AlJazeera and added that he moved to Qatar in the early 1960s. He was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Shariah at Qatar University and then later granted Qatari citizenship. He had previously been in exile from Egypt prior to the 2011 revolution that overthrew former President Hosni Mubarak. During the Arab Spring uprisings he called for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to be killed and declared jihad against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government, according to a Reuters report.

-INDIA NEWS STREAM