Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was angered when Interpol issued an arrest warrant Dec. 5 for Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the ideological leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Expressing his resentment publicly at the Fifth Religious Council in Ankara Dec. 8, Erdogan said: “Look, a person who came to power through a coup is giving instructions to Interpol. Based on this instruction a step is being taken for the arrest of Youssef al-Qaradawi, president of the [International] Union of Muslim Scholars. What kind of a business is this?”
In July, an Egyptian news report of unknown reliability wrote that Qaradawi had ruled that a declaration of a caliphate by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is “void under Sharia,” but that he declared Turkey to be the capital of the caliphate.