UAE takes custody of poet and dissident Abdul Rahman Yusuf al-Qaradawi
The United Arab Emirates has taken custody of Egyptian poet and dissident Abdul Rahman Yusuf al-Qaradawi amid a campaign by human rights activists and experts to prevent his extradition to the Gulf state.
On Thursday, the UAE's official news agency, Wam, confirmed that Abdul Rahman had been taken into custody after arriving in the Gulf state from Lebanon.
Fears of his imminent extradition increased on Wednesday after a plane owned by RoyalJet landed in Beirut. RoyalJet is the same Emirati company that rights groups have said wrongfully extradited a Bahraini dissident from Serbia in 2022.
MEE understands that Abdul Rahman's lawyers in Lebanon have lost contact with him.
The 55-year-old dual Egyptian-Turkish national is a poet and political activist who had been working and living in Turkey.
He was a major proponent of the 2011 Egyptian revolution that ended the decades-long rule of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. He also worked on the campaign of Mohammed el-Baradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who ran for the Egyptian presidency after Mubarak's rule ended after the Egyptian revolution.
Abdul Rahman was arrested in Lebanon on 28 December after returning from Syria, where he took part in celebrations following the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
He had recorded a three-minute video and posted it on the social media platform X, saying he hoped the country’s future wouldn’t be hindered by Arab states, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The UAE and Egypt filed subsequent requests for Abdul Rahman’s extradition, with the Lebanese government acting only on the Emirati warrant.
Abdul Rahman's father, Yusuf, who died in Qatar in 2022, was arguably one of the most prolific and published Islamic scholars and a household name in the Arab world.
While the elder Qaradawi long refused any official political roles in Egypt, he had an outsized intellectual influence on the Muslim Brotherhood, the primary opposition party in the country, which is now considered a terrorist group under the Sisi government.
As one of the most prominent ideologues associated with the group, Yusuf and his teachings stood at the centre of pivotal global events.
