The Egyptian sheikh, who was the regular “telecoranist” of the Qatari channel Al-Jazira, died on September 26, 2022. Followed by millions of faithful around the world, he claimed to embody an Islam “of the right environment” . Some of his sermons, with anti -Semitation connotation or legitimizing violence against women, have caused scandal.
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Youssef al-Qaradawi, the most famous preacher in the Arab-Sunni world, which animated a program followed by millions of faithful on the al-Jazira, died in Doha, Qatar, September 26, 2022, at the ‘Age of 96 years. President of the Muslims International Ulemas (scholars) and manager of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, an Islamic think tank based in Dublin, he exercised an unequaled magisterium, for several decades, on the Sunni theological circles.
From the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood but installed in Qatar since the 1960s, the “Global Mufti”-title of a study dedicated to it (Global Mufti. The Phenomenon of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, by Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen and Bettina Gräf, Hurst, 2009) – was also one of the masters of the small gas emirate, of which he accompanied the ramp -up, in particular his controversial involvement in the Arab Spring.
Islamist orthodoxy
After the abdication, in June 2013, of Sheikh Hamad Ben Khalifa Al-Thani in favor of his son Tamim, a concomitant decision of the overthrow of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, also from the brotherhood, Qatar reoriented his Foreign policy in a less favorable sense of “brothers” and asked Youssef al-Qaradawi to be more discreet. Even if the new monarch continued, in the years which followed, to show him the consideration, the preacher had to stop his program.
Incarnation of Islamist orthodoxy, conservative in terms of manners but hostile to the outrageous of the Salafists, Al-Qaradawi was in turn courted by the French authorities, aware of his power of influence, then stigmatized, because of several Sulfurous preaching, especially one of them where he praised the punishment administered by Hitler to the Jews. A violently anti -Semitic statement, made in January 2009, in the midst of Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip.
In 2012, shortly after the Toulouse killing, perpetrated by Mohamed Merah, and in the middle of the electoral campaign, President Nicolas Sarkozy decreed al-Qaradawi Persona Non Grata on French territory. The Sheikh had to give up attending the annual congress of the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, a rally at the Bourget in which he had participated a few years earlier.
“It is not only the disappearance of a man, it is the end of an era, affirms the researcher Nabil Ennasri, who devoted a thesis of political science to the interactions between the clerk and the diplomacy of the Qatar. Qaradawi has exerted a major influence on the Frériste thought. He held symbolic capital without equivalent in the Islamist world. His death leaves many orphaned Arabs “.
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