“Imam Youssef al-Qaradaoui has died after dedicating his life to making Islam known and defending his community,” announced a post on his official Twitter account on Monday, September 26.
Considered one of the spiritual fathers of the brotherhood founded in 1928 in Egypt, Youssef al-Qaradaoui has been imprisoned several times in his country, where the Muslim Brotherhood is now considered "terrorists" and incurs the death penalty for belonging to their organization.
Sentenced in absentia to the death penalty in Egypt, Youssef al-Qaradaoui has lived for many years in Qatar, which only recently reconciled with Egypt.
The latter is now led by former Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, architect of the overthrow of the president from the Muslim Brotherhood Mohamed Morsi in 2013.
The famous preacher, whose sermons were often broadcast by the Qatari satellite channel Al-Jazeera, chaired the International Union of Muslim Scholars, an association of Sunni clerics based in this small gas emirate in the Gulf.
His daughter Ola al-Qaradaoui is herself prosecuted in Egypt for "belonging to a prohibited organization" and "participation in its financing".
She has already spent four and a half years in preventive detention and, if she was released at the end of 2021, the charges against her still weigh.
With AFP
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