Harry's Place

According to Labour’s London Mayoral election candidate Ken Livingstone, Yusuf al-Qaradawi is ‘one of the leading progressive voices in the Muslim world’.

Really?

Jean-Charles Brisard’s 2005 book on Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi provides the following information on Al-Qaradawi:

In the course of 2003 Sheikh Yussef Al-Qaradawi, religious leader of the Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood who had taken refuge in Qatar, developed the concept of ‘resistance’ to foreign aggression in Iraq. Sheikh Qaradawi is one of the primary theoreticians of suicide missions before and after the attacks of September 11 in the United States. Beyond the ambiguous position of the disciples of the Muslim Brotherhood, his intentions are relatively clear on this subject. In February 2001 he told an Egyptian daily newspaper that ‘necessity justifies the prohibition [of suicide in the Koran]‘ and that ‘human bombs’ are ‘a new weapon’ whose sacrifice is tantamount to religious martyrdom.

A few months later he was of the opinion that suicide missions were not the same as suicide and constituted ‘the noblest form of war’. Questioned in 2001 after the attacks in the United States, Al-Qaradawi had not changed his position, stating that ‘it is wrong and unjust to characterize suicide operations in this way, since they actually come under the heading of heroic action, and martyr attacks must under no circumstances be considered tantamount to suicide’.

[...]

In September 2003 resistance was no longer the only issue, since he begged God to ‘eliminate’ the United States.

(Polity Press paperback edition, pp.147-148)

Following the execution of Saddam Hussein, Qaradawi eulogised him, stating:

The man died saying, ‘There is no God but Allah’. How can anyone curse a man who says ‘there is no God but Allah’? Anybody whose last words are ‘There is no God but Allah’ goes to Paradise.

Qaradawi’s vision for the future is one in which Islam will ‘conquer’ Europe:

And when he’s not praising suicide bombings, defending dictators, and dreaming of a Europe ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood, these are the kind of things that he thinks it important to discuss:

Only in some kind of parallel universe could Qaradawi be considered a ‘moderate’. But I suppose you have to be moderate yourself in order to see that Qaradawi isn’t.