Yusuf al-Qaradawi

Early life and education

Born on 9 September 1926 in Saft Turab in the Nile Delta, he lost his father at the age of two and memorised the Quran before he was ten. He was educated entirely at Al-Azhar: he graduated first in his class from the Faculty of Usul al-Din in the early 1950s, went on to specialise in Arabic, obtained a diploma in Arabic studies (1958) and completed graduate studies in Quran and Sunnah sciences (1960), and earned his doctorate in 1973 with a thesis on zakat and its role in solving social problems, published as Fiqh al-Zakat.

Close to the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth, he was imprisoned once under King Farouk (1949) and three times under Gamal Abdel Nasser.

In Qatar

Sent by Al-Azhar in 1961 to head the religious secondary institute in Doha, he settled permanently in Qatar. In 1977 he founded the Faculty of Sharia and Islamic Studies at Qatar University, serving as its dean until 1990, along with a research centre for the Sunnah and the Prophet's biography. His Al Jazeera programme Al-Sharia wal-Hayat (Sharia and Life) reached tens of millions of viewers.

He headed the European Council for Fatwa and Research, founded in 1997, and presided over the International Union of Muslim Scholars from 2004 to 2018. His awards include the King Faisal International Prize for Islamic Studies (1994) and the Sultan Al Owais Award (1999).

Controversies, death and legacy

His political positions led to entry bans from the United States, the United Kingdom (2008) and France (2012); in 2015 an Egyptian court sentenced him to death in absentia, and in 2017 Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain placed him on a list of individuals they designated as terrorists.

He died in Doha on 26 September 2022, aged 96. His books, especially The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam and Fiqh al-Zakat, remain widely read and translated.