Wagdi Ghoneim

Education

Born on 8 February 1951 in Alexandria, he graduated in business administration in 1973 and worked as an accountant at the Ministry of Finance. Alongside this he studied Islamic sciences, earning a certificate in Quran recitation in 1984 and an advanced diploma in Islamic studies in 1985, and later a master's degree and doctorate from the Graduate Theological Foundation in Indiana, United States.

Preaching and arrests in Egypt

Alongside his preaching, he served as secretary of professional syndicates in Alexandria and Cairo in the 1990s. He was detained on several occasions, in 1981, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1998. In 2001 he left Egypt, with a court's permission, to perform the Hajj, and did not return.

Exile

In the United States he served as imam of the Islamic Institute of Orange County in California. Arrested for violating immigration rules, he left for Qatar in January 2005 with a ten-year re-entry ban. He later spent time in South Africa, Yemen and Malaysia, among other places; he was expelled from Bahrain in 2008, placed on the UK Home Office's list of people banned from entering Britain in May 2009, and barred from Tunisia in July 2019 over remarks about President Beji Caid Essebsi. Press reports in 2021 placed him in Turkey.

In Egypt he was charged from 2009 in the so-called "international organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood" case and has received sentences in absentia, including a death sentence in 2017 for forming what the court called a terrorist cell. That same year he announced that he had frozen his membership of the Muslim Brotherhood.