Abdul Majeed al-Zindani
Abdul Majeed al-Zindani (Arabic: عبد المجيد الزنداني, romanized: ʿAbd al-Majīd al-Zindānī; January 1, 1942 – April 22, 2024) was a Yemeni Islamist politician and founder and head of the Iman University in Yemen.
[1] He has been described by Daniel Golden of the Wall Street Journal as "a charismatic Yemeni academic and politician"[2] and by CNN as "a provocative cleric with a flaming red beard".
[7][8] The Sunday Times established that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Northwest Airlines Flight 253 suspected bomber who was arrested on Christmas Day 2009, attended lectures by al-Awlaki at the university in 2005.
[2] In 1984, a member of the commission, Mustafa Abdul Basit Ahmed, moved to the United States to recruit non-Muslim Western scientists to verify the miraculous signs of the Quran.
However, in a 2002 story[2] in the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal, several non-Muslim scientists spoke of questionable practices used by the commission to coax statements from them, such as hard-sell interviews by Sheikh Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, and false promises to be "completely neutral."
More recently, the YouTube user TheRationalizer recorded interviews with William Hay, Alison (Pete) Palmer, Prof Tom Armstrong and Alfred Kröner in order to give them the opportunity to put forward their accounts of the events and explain their true opinions in full, without editing.
[11] Al-Zindani gave a speech praising the quality of scientific and medical research carried out at the Iman University, claiming that they had successfully treated many cases of AIDS.
[12][13] In 20 cases, al-Zindani said that the virus had vanished completely without any side effects, and he called on the UN, which "spends enormous amounts of money to fight the disease," to send "its senior scientists to review [the university's] findings.
[14] Later, Al-Zindani applied for a patent for a herbal method purporting to treat AIDS; the application was published on the World Intellectual Property Organization website in April 2011.
The Meeting for Protecting Virtue and Fighting Vice declared its intention to alert Yemen's police force to infringements of Islamic law.
The Department also stated that it suspected students of his Al Iman University of assassinating three American missionaries, and "the number two leader for the Yemeni Socialist Party, Jarallah Omar".
