A renowned Islamic scholar and Founding President of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, IUMS, Sheikh Yusuf Al‑Qaradawi, Monday, passed away in Doha, at the age of 96.

The news of his demise was shared on his official Twitter account, followed by the same announcement on IUMS Twitter. “The Islamic nation has lost one of its most sincere and virtuous scholars,” the IUMS added.

Sheikh Al-Qaradawi was born in Egypt on 9 September 1926.

Al-Qaradawi was awarded his PhD degree with First Merit from Al Azhar University in 1973, upon completion of his thesis entitled “Zakah and its effect on solving social problems”.

Al-Qaradawi headed the European Council for Fatwa and Research; he was the chairman of the Jerusalem International Foundation, and a member of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

He was also a trustee of the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, which is an independent research institution.

Al-Qaradawi was jailed three times for his relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and subsequently stripped of his Egyptian citizenship in the 1970s—driving him to seek exile in Qatar.

Al-Qaradawi had been sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian court along with over 100 other Egyptians affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation banned in Egypt.

For many years while living in exile, he had a popular talk show on Qatar’s Al-Jazeera network and often weighed in on controversial political topics.

According to Irish Examiner, Al-Qaradawi supported suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinians against Israel and also voiced support for the Iraqi insurgency that erupted after the US-led invasion of 2003.

But he also backed the Muslim Brotherhood’s embrace of democratic elections and was a staunch critic of more radical groups, like the Islamic State.

He had strongly criticised the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, calling on all Muslim nations at the time to prepare to fight the Americans there “if the Iraqis fail to drive them out”.

“By opening our ports, our airports and our land, we are participating in the war,” Al-Qaradawi was quoted to have said in a pointed critique of US-allied Arab governments.

“We will be cursed by history because we have helped the Americans.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt nearly a century ago and has branches across the region, played a major role in the 2011 uprisings that rocked the Middle East and rose to power in Egypt’s first democratic elections after the overthrow of a democratically elected president, Hosni Mubarak.

Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates included Al-Qaradawi on a list of dozens of organisations and individuals that were sanctioned for alleged terrorism in 2017 as part of a diplomatic dispute with Qatar, which denied the allegations.