Yusuf al-Qaradawi Biography

Shaykh Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi was an Egyptian-Qatari Islamic scholar, jurist, and one of the most globally recognized Sunni voices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born on 9 September 1926 in the village of Saft Turab in the Nile Delta of Egypt, he was orphaned of his father at age two, raised by his uncle, and memorized the Qur'an by age nine. He pursued his Islamic education at al-Azhar, graduating from its Faculty of Usul al-Din in 1953, completing his master's in Qur'anic Studies in 1960, and earning his PhD in Islamic Jurisprudence in 1973 with a dissertation on zakat published as the seminal Fiqh al-Zakat.

Al-Qaradawi relocated to Qatar in 1961 at al-Azhar's assignment and spent the rest of his life in Doha, where he became a Qatari citizen. In 1977 he established and became founding dean of the Faculty of Sharia and Islamic Studies at Qatar University. In 1997 he co-founded the European Council for Fatwa and Research, and in 2004 he established the International Union of Muslim Scholars, which he chaired until 2018. His Al Jazeera program al-Shari'ah wa al-Hayah ('Sharia and Life'), broadcast for nearly seventeen years, drew an estimated audience of forty to sixty million worldwide. He authored more than 120 books, most prominently the widely translated al-Halal wa al-Haram fi al-Islam ('The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam'), and is associated with the wasatiyya (centrist) school of contemporary Sunni thought.

Al-Qaradawi died in Doha on 26 September 2022 / 1 Rabi' al-Awwal 1444 at the age of ninety-six and was buried at Mesaimeer Cemetery. His Fiqh al-Zakat remains the standard modern reference in Sunni jurisprudence on the institution of zakat, and his many translated works — particularly the Lawful and Prohibited and his fiqh of Muslim minorities — continue to circulate widely across the Arabic, English, and broader Muslim publishing world.