Yusuf al-Qaradawi

Turkish President Erdogan conveys condolences as thousands bid farewell to the religious scholar and political activist who died on Tuesday.

He was imprisoned several times in Egypt over his links to the Brotherhood and was among those sentenced to death, in absentia, in 2015, on charges of links to a 2011 mass jailbreak. "Our sheikh and our role model, Sheikh Yusef, stood by Palestine and did not believe in giving up any inch of it. Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, died in Qatar on Monday at the age of 96. [He believed] that jihad and resistance are the way to liberate it, and that the cause of Palestine is the cause of the nation," Haniyeh said. Qaradawi was the founder and former chairman of the International Union of Islamic Scholars, a global union of Islamic intellectuals and clerics. Speaking at the funeral, Haniyeh said that the Arab and Muslim world had lost one of its most prominent scholars who dedicated his life to serving Arab and Muslim issues, particularly the Palestinian cause.