Zindani joins his terrorist brothers in Turkey
Yemeni news sites and figures affiliated with the terrorist
Brotherhood revealed on Sunday evening, November 22 that Yemeni preacher and
terrorist leader Abdul Majeed al-Zindani arrived in Turkey from Saudi Arabia,
where he had been staying for years.
Mohamed el-Sagheer, former advisor to the Egyptian Minister
of Endowments under the former Brotherhood regime, confirmed Zindani's arrival
in Turkey.
“After long suffering, Sheikh Abdul Majeed al-Zindani
managed to leave Saudi Arabia and arrived in Turkey,” Sagheer tweeted.
This came about two weeks after the Council of Senior
Scholars in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia decided to consider the Brotherhood “a
terrorist group that does not represent the approach of Islam, but rather
pursues its partisan goals that contradict the guidance of our true religion,
conceals religion, and practices what contradicts it in terms of division,
stirring up discord, violence and terrorism.”
Zindani had resided in Saudi Arabia since 2015, when he came
from Yemen after the Houthi coup in Sanaa and its occupation of Iman
University, which was founded by the Yemeni preacher.
Since his arrival to Saudi Arabia, reports and media
affiliated with the Brotherhood claimed that Zindani had been subjected to
house arrest, and he has been in hiding since then, while some of his children
and family members reside in Turkey.
In July, Zindani’s son, Ali, denied that his father was
arrested in Saudi Arabia, posting on Facebook, “What is being circulated about
the Saudi authorities summoning my father Sheikh Abdul Majeed al-Zindani and
interrogating him is not true.”
Zindani
Abdul Majeed al-Zindani (born in 1942) is considered the
spiritual father of the Yemeni Brotherhood, the founder of Iman University in
Yemen, and one of the first to lay the building blocks for Islamist
organizations in Yemen. He also founded of the Commission on Scientific Signs
in the Quran and Sunnah in Mecca and was chairman of the Shura Council of the
Islah party, the political arm of the Brotherhood in Yemen, along with Sheikh
Abdullah al-Ahmar.
Zindani joined the College of Pharmacy in Egypt in 1960 and
studied there for two years, where he met many Yemeni students and was in
contact with the Egyptian Brotherhood and Yemeni Brotherhood leaders residing
in Egypt.
Zindani played a fundamental role in the formation of the
Arab Afghan Movement, as he took over the affairs of the camps in Yemen for
reception, training, intellectual mobilization and sending to Afghanistan. He
acquired the status of the godfather of the Arab Afghans, while former al-Qaeda
leader Osama bin Laden was the man in the field.
Fatwas against South Yemen
During the conflict between late Yemeni President Ali
Abdullah Saleh and the southerners, Zindani played the religion card, viewing
the southerners as infidels because they embrace Marxist ideology and that they
accordingly must be re-Islamized. He even reached the point of counting all
marriages that took place during the period of socialist rule in the south
since 1978 as invalid because it happened under a communist state.
This atmosphere led to the 1994 war launched by the north
against the south, which ended with the victory of the northern side and the
departure of the southerners from the equation of unity. Ahmar and Zindani
participated fiercely in that war. Zindani in particular played a prominent
role, because he led the jihadist factions from the Arab Afghans, which were
the vanguard of the battles.
President Saleh rewarded Zindani by granting him a plot of
land on which he went on to build Iman University, which made him a
philanthropist. But it also opened eyes to his new political role, which made
him a target of the United States as a baron of terrorism, not because of his
previous relationship with Bin Laden. His university had a role in preparing
new generations with a fanatic and anti-Western Salafist ideology, which was
clearly revealed after the events of September 11, 2001. When the Americans
arrested an American al-Qaeda operative in Afghanistan, they discovered that he
had studied at Iman University, and this is when the United States opened a
file on Zindani.
After the February 2011 Arab Spring protests, Zindani jumped
from President Saleh's ship when he realized that it was beginning to sink, and
then he found himself standing on dry land with Islah and the Hashid tribe.
With Major General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, he weaved a theatrical thread to move
part of the military establishment to the ranks of the protesters to raise the
slogan “The people want to try the butcher.”
Zindani is considered a complex and problematic figure,
moving between the limits of religion and politics. His general approach follows
the ideological line of the Egyptian Brotherhood movement, which is
characterized by a twisted and sinuous pragmatism, fortified with religion when
it wants to gain a political goal, which it uses as a cover for its rhetoric
and its desire for power.
