Yusuf al-Qaradawi: The Sheikh Who Preached to Sixty Million Screens
By the time Yusuf al-Qaradawi died in September 2022 at ninety-six, he had spent decades doing something almost no other twentieth-century Islamic scholar managed: turning a weekly television program into one of the most consequential pulpits in the Muslim world. His Al Jazeera show Al-Sharia wal Hayat — "Sharia and Life" — reached an estimated sixty million viewers at its peak, and through it a barefoot boy orphaned in rural Egypt became, for millions, the voice that decided what modern Islamic practice should look like. That same reach made him one of the most polarizing religious figures alive, condemned as a terrorist sympathizer by some governments and revered as a moderating reformer by others.
An Orphan Who Memorized the Quran
Qaradawi was born in September 1926 in Saft Turab, a village in Egypt's Nile Delta, the only child of a poor peasant family. He was orphaned young and raised by an aunt and uncle, and by the accounts of his own biography had memorized the entire Quran before the age of ten — a feat that marked him early as destined for religious scholarship. He studied at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Sunni Islam's most prestigious institution, earning a degree in the basics of religion in 1953 and graduating top of a five-hundred-student class in Arabic language studies the following year. He completed a doctorate there in 1973. His path into the Muslim Brotherhood began even earlier: he was jailed multiple times starting in 1949 for his association with the movement, imprisonment that shaped both his theology and his politics for the rest of his life.
Exile to Qatar and a Global Pulpit
In 1961, facing continued pressure in Nasser's Egypt, Qaradawi relocated to Doha, Qatar, where he would live for the rest of his life in what amounted to a self-imposed exile. There he built an entire scholarly infrastructure: he directed the Institute of Religion, chaired the Department of Islamic Research at the University of Qatar from 1973, and in 1977 founded Qatar University's Faculty of Sharia and Islamic Studies. In 1989 he founded a research center devoted to the life and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. His institutional reach kept expanding internationally — he chaired the European Council for Fatwa and Research, based in Dublin, from 1997, and in 2002 became founding chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, positioning himself as a kind of transnational chief jurist for Sunni Islam outside any single state's control. He also chaired the influential website IslamOnline.com, through which he issued more than 150 fatwas, and wrote roughly 170 books over his lifetime, the most famous being The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam (1960), a foundational text of modern practical jurisprudence still assigned in Islamic studies programs today.
A Reformer by His Own Telling
Qaradawi styled himself a centrist within Islamic jurisprudence, opposing the violent doctrine of takfir — the practice of declaring other Muslims apostates — and positioning himself explicitly against the ideology of al-Qaeda. He supported women's rights to education and employment even as he upheld more conservative positions on hijab and issued rulings condemning homosexuality. He backed the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings and, according to reporting at the time, supported armed resistance against government violence in Libya and Syria, casting himself as an ally of democratic change across the Arab world even as his sympathies clearly ran toward Islamist political movements, above all the Muslim Brotherhood he had never really left.
The Record His Critics Cite
The honest ledger on Qaradawi is heavily contested, and the contest is not close to settled. He was banned from entering the United States as early as 1999 and was later barred from the United Kingdom, France, and Tunisia. In 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain formally designated him a terrorist, and the UAE separately designated the International Union of Muslim Scholars he chaired as a terrorist organization in 2014. He endorsed suicide bombings against Israeli civilians as legitimate "martyrdom operations" during the Second Intifada, a position he only partially revised in 2016, saying Palestinians had "other capabilities" like rockets and no longer needed such tactics. In 2004, he issued a fatwa declaring that "all of the Americans in Iraq are combatants" whose killing was "a religious obligation," a statement that hardened Western perceptions of him regardless of his simultaneous condemnations of al-Qaeda-style attacks on civilians elsewhere. He was also recorded making antisemitic statements invoking divine punishment against Jewish people, and he expressed support for Hezbollah and financial backing for jihadist fighters. After Egypt's 2013 military coup removed Muslim Brotherhood-linked President Mohamed Morsi, Qaradawi's fierce criticism of the new government led Egyptian courts to sentence him to death in absentia in 2015 and to life imprisonment in 2018; he never returned to Egypt and died in exile in Qatar.
Why Yusuf Is Called a Genius
The word "genius" attaches to Qaradawi almost entirely for a specific communicative gift rather than for original theological breakthrough: an unusual ability to translate dense classical Islamic jurisprudence into plain, television-ready language that a mass Arabic-speaking audience — tens of millions of people with no formal religious education — could absorb and act on weekly for over a decade. Admirers within the Muslim Brotherhood tradition and sympathetic obituaries, including from outlets like Al Jazeera itself, describe him as one of the most influential religious minds of his generation precisely on those terms: reach, clarity, and prolific output rather than novel doctrine. That is a real and rare skill — most scholars with his classical training never build an audience beyond specialists. But the counter-case is not a footnote here; it is central to any honest account. Qaradawi's fatwas endorsing suicide bombing, declaring American personnel in Iraq lawful targets, and making antisemitic statements are not minor blemishes on an otherwise moderate record — they are why multiple governments, including some Sunni Muslim-majority states, formally branded him a terrorist, and why Western governments barred him from entry for over two decades. His own claim to centrism sits uneasily beside that record. Whatever cognitive gift he had was rhetorical and pedagogical, not a mitigating force against the violence some of his rulings sanctioned.
Legacy
Qaradawi leaves behind an institutional architecture — the European Council for Fatwa and Research, the International Union of Muslim Scholars, a shelf of widely read books — that continues to shape how Sunni Islamic jurisprudence gets debated outside traditional state-controlled religious authorities. He also leaves a legal and reputational record, sealed by terrorism designations and a death sentence in his home country, that ensures his name will remain as contested in death as it was for most of his life.
Achievements
- Notable work: The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam
- Affiliated with Qatar University and IslamOnline
- Educated at Al-Azhar University and Institute of Arab Research and Studies
- Worked as ulema, writer and Islamic jurist
