A top Muslim Brotherhood scholar from Egypt was hailed as a great spiritual leader and cleric when he died four years ago in Qatar, but concerning aspects of his life and career have surfaced and continue to impact students in the West today.
Given that Yusuf al-Qaradawi was so publicly associated with the radical Muslim Brotherhood group to the point that he received life imprisonment in absentia in his home country of Egypt, it might come as a surprise that he was in fact a trustee of the Centre for Islamic Studies at Oxford University. However, Dr. Charles Asher Small, an antisemitism expert and Cambridge Fellow, is not surprised.
In his work with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), Small and his colleagues have uncovered $US 18 billion in undocumented money flowing from the Muslim Brotherhood into top academic institutions both in the U.S. and the U.K., along with the organization’s incendiary ideas.
“Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in his entire life, as the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, always argued that the true believer is obligated to complete the work of Hitler. The true believer, the true Muslim, is obligated to finish the work of Hitler,” Dr. Small emphasized, adding that al-Qaradawi had been a key pillar in the Islamic studies department at one of the best universities in the world.
“That institution, like Georgetown and other fine universities, is disseminating, using soft power, this ideology,” he warned.
The Sunni cleric was never a formal head in the Muslim Brotherhood but was considered a spiritual leader, characterized as a “scholar with a streetwise touch” by the Guardian and his teachings were highly popular throughout the Muslim world.
Born on Sept. 9, 1926, in Egypt, Professor Yousef Al-Qaradawi had memorized the Quran by the age of nine and became a highly influential scholar over the course of his life.
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He was awarded the prize for his efforts to relate Islamic Law (Fiqh) to modern Muslim society and became the founding president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars.
However, his consistent support of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians led to him being denied an entry visa to the United Kingdom in 2008 and he was later barred from entering France in 2012.
He said on Al-Jazeera, where he had a weekly show, that he believed such suicide bombings were a legitimate form of self-defense and that hundreds of other Islamic scholars were of the same opinion.
He told the BBC Newsnight program that all Israeli women were valid targets for violence because they were soldiers and saw that type of “martyrdom operation” as “evidence of God’s justice.”
“Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do,” he proclaimed.
Described by the ADL as a “theologian of terror,” al-Qaradawi was also barred from the United States and Tunisia as a result of his reputation as a violence-inciting teacher, and was designated as a terrorist in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates according to the Counter Extremism Project.
Yet now the West is importing his ideas hand over fist via Qatari funding, which is compromising higher education.
Dr. Small explains how ISGAP is mapping the problem.
“One of our projects now is looking at how Qatar is funding higher education and cultural institutions in the West. For those of you who do not know, Qatar is a small country of less than 350,000 citizens. The leaders of Qatar have a spiritual oath with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood started about 100 years ago in Egypt in a reaction to British colonialism, and has taken the lies, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, European, genocidal antisemitism, and even Nazism, and fused it with a perversion of Islam,” he said, clarifying that he was speaking about the Muslim Brotherhood rather than Islam generally.
Dr. Small outlined how Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, effectively turned material from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” into their charter to the degree that they should be penalized for plagiarism.
“They literally take the words and ideas which led to and justified the systematic extermination of millions of Jews as a core element of their ideology,” he warned. “If that were not bad enough, we know there is sympathy for this genocidal, antisemitic, sexist, homophobic, anti-democratic social movement in the best institutions in the Western world, be it liberal universities or the media of record.”
After highlighting Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s beliefs, which at times have included a call for the “annihilation” of Jews and his claim that the Holocaust “put Jews in their place,” Small cautioned, “This is who the Qatari regime follows.”
“Yusuf al-Qaradawi was the founding director of the Board of Trustees of Islamic Studies at my alma mater, the University of Oxford. Oxford has one of the most important Islamic Studies departments in the world, which was started by the man who preached his entire life that Muslims are obligated to complete the work of Hitler when it comes to Jews. So we should not be shocked that this is the discourse in our finest universities,” said Small.
“If we found $18 billion with our meager resources, I assure you, it’s the tip of an iceberg,” he said.
This article originally appeared on ALL ISRAEL NEWS and is reposted with permission.
