Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri (born 19 February 1951) is a Pakistani-Canadian Islamic scholar and former politician, founder of Minhaj-ul-Quran International (1980) and of the Pakistan Awami Tehreek party (1989). ^{1 2} He was a professor of international constitutional law at the University of the Punjab and a jurist consultant on sharia law to the Supreme Court and the Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan, and is known internationally for his 2010 Fatwa on Terrorism. ¹

Tahir-ul-Qadri was born in Jhang, West Punjab, Pakistan, on 19 February 1951, into a Punjabi Muslim family with a strong scholarly and spiritual heritage; his father, Dr Farid-ud-Din Qadri, was a physician, Sufi poet and religious scholar. ^{1 3} He began formal Islamic studies under his father at the age of ten, and at twelve travelled to Medina to study at Madrasa al-Ulum ash-Shar'iyya. He graduated from the University of the Punjab, where he later taught, and his doctoral thesis was "Punishment in Islam: their Classification & Philosophy" (1984). ¹

The Urdu article records that he became a disciple of Shaykh Sayyid Tahir Allauddin al-Qadri al-Gillani, taking formal bay'ah from him on 26 July 1972, and that he lectured in Islamic studies (1974–1975) and practised as an advocate in the Jhang district courts (1976–1978) before his appointment as jurist consultant to the Federal Shariat Court and the Supreme Court from 1978. ³

He founded Minhaj-ul-Quran International on 17 October 1980, Minhaj University Lahore in 1986, and the Minhaj Welfare Foundation and the Pakistan Awami Tehreek in 1989. He won a seat in the National Assembly in 1990 and served until 2004, when he resigned in protest against President Pervez Musharraf's policies. ^{1 2} In 2005 he relocated to Canada and refocused on religious work; he holds Pakistani and Canadian citizenship. ^{1 4}

He returned to Pakistan in December 2012 and led the Long March on Islamabad in January 2013 against the government of Yusuf Raza Gilani; after the Model Town incident of June 2014 he led the Inqilab March against Gilani's successor, Nawaz Sharif. ¹ In 2019 he announced his retirement from politics, citing health issues and academic commitments, and has since continued to give religious lectures in Canada. ¹

He has authored more than a thousand books in Urdu, Arabic and English — about 550 of them published, according to the article — delivered over six thousand lectures, and appeared in every edition of The 500 Most Influential Muslims since its first edition in 2009. ¹

His best-known work is the Fatwa on Terrorism and Suicide Bombings (2010), an Islamic decree of 600 pages in Urdu and 512 in English which argues from the Qur'an and Sunnah that terrorism and suicide bombings are unjust, evil and un-Islamic, declaring terrorism unbelief (kufr) under Islamic law; it received wide international press coverage. ¹ The article also reports an eight-volume, 7,000-page Qur'anic encyclopaedia among his works. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum.

His documented public positions centre on an absolute condemnation of terrorism without excuses, interfaith dialogue and religious moderation, as the sources report them. ¹ On his own school identity, the Urdu article reports his stated position: that he is a Sunni scholar who declares himself simply an Ahl-e-Sunnat Muslim, free of the Barelvi and Deobandi labels, holding it wrong to attach the Ahl-e-Sunnat to any person or region — while the Urdu and Arabic articles' categories file him among Barelvi personalities. Both readings are preserved in his record as they stand. ^{3 2}

He has also faced criticism from Islamic scholars and organisations for views described as unconventional, such as his celebration of Christmas: some have labelled him "misguided", and the Indian scholar Akhtar Raza Khan issued a fatwa in 2014 declaring him a disbeliever, as the English article reports. ¹ In the Model Town incident of June 2014, the police claimed they were attacked from inside his party's secretariat, a claim the party denies, while Qadri himself called the police firing the worst form of state terrorism; both accounts are set out here attributed, without a verdict. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.