Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif

Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, (Arabic: سيد إمام الشريف‎‎, Sayyid ‘Imām ash-Sharīf) (born 8 August 1950), aka "Dr. Fadl" and Abd Al-Qader Bin 'Abd Al-'Aziz, has been described as a "major" figure "in the global jihad movement." He is said to be "one of Ayman Al-Zawahiri's oldest associates, and his book al-'Umda fi I'dad al-'Udda ("The Essentials of Making Ready [for Jihad]"), was used as a jihad manual in Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Fadl is reported to be one of the first members of Al Qaeda’s top council.

He has recently attacked al-Qaeda and called for a stop to violent jihad activities both in Western and Muslim countries.

He is reported to have two wives, with four sons and two daughters between them.

According to Human Rights Watch, Sharif was born in 1950, in the southern Egyptian province of Beni Suef seventy-five miles south of Cairo. His father was a headmaster in Beni Suef. Sharif studied the Koran, and was a hafez (i.e. he had memorized the Quran) by time he finished sixth grade. At fifteen, the Egyptian government enrolled him in a boarding school in Cairo for exceptional students. At 18 he entered medical school, and began preparing for a career as a plastic surgeon, specializing in burn injuries. He has been described as being "pious and high-minded, prideful, and rigid" at that time.

It was while studying medicine at Cairo University in the 1970s that al-Sharif met Ayman Al-Zawahiri. In 1977, Zawahiri asked al-Sharif to join his group. According to al-Sharif, Zawahiri misrepresenting himself as a delegate from a group that was advised by Islamic scholars, when in fact Zawahiri was the group's emir and was not guided or advised by clerical authorities. Al-Sharif did not join Zawahiri's group.

Following the 1981 assassination of the President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat - who had signed a peace treaty with Israel two years earlier - thousands of Egyptian Islamists were rounded up. These included Zawahiri, who was charged with smuggling weapons, but not Al-Sharif who fled the country, was tried in absentia, and convicted. Al-Sharif left Egypt for the UAE in 1982, where he worked as a doctor. He then resided in Pakistan for few weeks before leaving for Saudi Arabia, and then went back to Pakistan again, where he worked for a Kuwaiti Red Crescent hospital in Peshawar.

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Wikipedia