The President of the UAE issues a presidential pardon to Abdul Rahman Yusuf Al-Qaradawi

(CNN) - The Emirati President, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, issued a presidential pardon to the Egyptian poet and dissident, Abdul Rahman, the son of the late Islamic cleric, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi.

The official Emirates News Agency reported the pardon decision, which said: “Today, Friday, September 4, 2026, His Highness the President, may God protect him, pardoned the convict Abdul Rahman Yousef Al-Qaradawi, whom the Abu Dhabi Federal Court of Appeal - Electronic Crimes Department had ruled on August 27, 2026, convicting him of the crimes charged against him, punishing him with imprisonment for ten years, and fining him two hundred thousand (200,000).” AED... The necessary measures have been taken to implement the presidential pardon.”

The UAE had announced that it would receive Abdul Rahman Al-Qaradawi from Lebanon in the year 2024, “based on a request for temporary arrest issued against him by the General Secretariat of the Council of Arab Interior Ministers - Department of Prosecution and Criminal Data, and submitted by the competent authorities in the UAE for committing acts that would provoke and disturb public security,” according to what the Emirati agency reported at the time, which said that “the extradition order came based on the submission of an extradition request from the central authority in the UAE, represented by the Ministry of Justice, to the central authority in the Republic of Lebanon, according to The principle of reciprocity and the national laws and legislation of both countries.”

On December 29, 2024, the Lebanese authorities arrested Abd al-Rahman al-Qaradawi, who holds Turkish citizenship, upon his return from Syria. There was a state of controversy over a video clip that Abd al-Rahman filmed in the Umayyad Mosque during his visit to Damascus, after the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and the clip contained statements by him that were considered offensive to Egypt and Gulf countries.