Sheikh Ra’ed Salah head of the Islamic Movement in 1948 occupied Palestine has mourned Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi describing his passing as a “huge loss for the Palestinian cause.”
Sheikh Salah told al-Jazeera satellite channel on Monday morning that Sheikh Qaradawi was one of the greatest Muslim religious figures who dedicated their lives to defending the Palestinian cause.
He said that Sheikh Qaradawi was a great Muslim scholar who was adherent to the right Islamic faith and left a legacy full of optimism about the future of the Palestinian cause.
“Had it not been for the discourse of the International Union of Muslim Scholars headed by Sheikh al-Qaradawi the Palestinian cause and the Islamic holy sites would have died” Sheikh Salah underlined.
He said that Sheikh Qaradawi’s writings were aimed in the first place at awakening the Muslim Ummah (nation) about Jerusalem and the Aqsa Mosque and strengthening its belief in Jerusalem “as the land of Isra and Mi’raj” and the Aqsa Mosque as “the first Qibla and the third holiest site.”
For his part head of Hamas’s foreign political bureau Khaled Mishaal expressed his heartfelt condolences to the Palestinian people and the Muslim nation over the passing of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
In a statement Mishaal hailed Qaradawi as “an encyclopedic scholar a moderate imam and one of the greatest religious references in the Islamic world.”
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi one of the Sunni Muslim world’s most influential religious scholars passed away Monday in Qatar at age 96.
Sheikh Qaradawi was among the Islamic world’s most renowned clerics and public intellectuals and was one of the few Muslim clerics who publicly backed the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and other Arab countries.
He was the founder and former chairman of the International Union of Islamic Scholars a global union of Islamic intellectuals and clerics.
Sheikh Qaradawi was born on September 9 1926 in the village of Saft Turab in Egypt’s Nile Delta governorate of Gharbia. He was educated at al-Azhar University in Cairo the Islamic world’s most prestigious religious institution completing both his higher education and post-graduate studies at the same university until he obtained his PhD in 1973 with a focus on zakat tax and its social impacts.
