The passing of Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Qatar on Monday marks the end of an era in contemporary Islam. Al-Qaradawi was one of the world’s most influential Muslim scholars, and a vocal advocate for Palestinian liberation as well as for the Arab revolutions of 2011. His passing at the age of 96 brings to a close the career of one of the most important Muslim scholars of the last century.
Born in 1926 in a village in the Nile Delta of Egypt, which was still under British colonial rule, al-Qaradawi went to study at the prestigious Al-Azhar University based in Cairo. As a teenager, he was closely associated with it and the Muslim Brotherhood – two of the most important institutions of his day.
These two institutions would play a decisive role in his formation as a scholar and as an Muslim activist. Decades later, al-Qaradawi would write about his association with institutions with great pride in his memoirs. With respect to Al-Azhar, he graduated top of his class before eventually gaining his PhD in 1973.
But it was the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, whom he saw as his spiritual guide, and it was the latter’s comprehensive (shumuli) conception of Islam, which incorporated the personal, the social and the political, that inspired al-Qaradawi’s understanding of the role of Islam in public life.
His active association with the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest socio-political movement in the 1940s, whose leadership was often at loggerheads with Egypt’s rulers, meant that he was imprisoned repeatedly in the 1940s and 50s, experiencing torture at the hands of his jailers.
Yet, unlike some of his fellow detainees, and likely due to his theological training, he opposed the emergence in prison of extreme offshoots from the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed al-Qaradawi may have been one of the contributors to the Muslim Brotherhood leadership’s formal rebuttal of this tendency within their organisation in the 1960s.
He would go on to write several nuanced and influential critiques of violent views and its causes in subsequent decades, perhaps, most notably in his 1982 work, Islamic Awakening: Between Rejection and Extremism. His unequivocal condemnation of the violence perpetrated by al-Qaeda on 9/11 and armed groups like ISIL (ISIS) in later years would earn him recognition as an important voice indicative of mainstream Muslims’ rejection of such groups.
Moving to Qatar
In 1961, al-Qaradawi would travel to Qatar as a teacher, in part so that he could escape the persecution of Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt. He would soon develop a close relationship with the-then Qatari emir, Sheikh Ahmad Bin Ali Al Thani who passed away in 1977. The emir came to hold him in high esteem and would later grant him Qatari citizenship.
During this period, he also began publishing more frequently for a wider Muslim readership. In 1960, he wrote his first key work, commissioned by Al-Azhar as a guide for Muslims living in the West, The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam.
Al-Qaradawi’s written style was highly accessible – he steered away from the relatively obscure language of pre-modern Islamic legal manuals to write a book that could be read and understood by the lay reader. In addition to his lucid prose, al-Qaradawi would show himself to be unusually prolific, authoring more than 100 works over the course of his career.
