Allama Abdul Karim Zidan (May God Almighty Have Mercy On Him)

Written by his student / Dr. Sami Rashid Al-Janabi

He is our teacher, the scholar, the fundamentalist jurist, the rest of the ancestors and the repertoire of the successor, and the relief of Iraq, but the rehana of knowledge wherever he descends and moves, Sheikh Dr. Abdul Karim bin Zaidan bin Beg al-Muhammadi al-Ani. He was awarded the King Faisal International Prize in Islamic Studies in 1417 AH / 1997AD, which is the Jurisprudence Encyclopedia of Rulings on Women and the Muslim House in eleven volumes, and one of the judges told me that they unanimously agreed that he deserves this scholarly rank and the international award. His book, like the rest of his books, is characterized by good classification and division, and I did not find in what I read a scholar that cares about tabulation, division and arrangement of investigations as I found it with our professor, may God have mercy on him, and he had supervised my letter in the fundamentals of jurisprudence, and I did not see anything like it in the depth of his jurisprudence, and his diving into the pearls of fundamentalist and jurisprudential meanings, and ability. On visualizing issues, distinguishing between difficult similarities, sorting between them, and weighing the most correct according to the evidence .

Likewise, God Almighty and His generosity and generosity endowed him with an iron memory, with which he invokes the meanings and sayings of jurisprudence no matter after its time, and I remember that he dictated some phrases to me in the introduction to the research so I wrote them, then I reformulated the research and modified the phrase according to my jurisprudence, and after a long time I read the research He said to me, Where is the phrase that I dictated to you? I said: I drafted it in a new form, so he said: I do not write it again, and he returned it as it is from his memorization without adding or decreasing. He has a high interest in following up the affairs of the Islamic mission in Iraq, so hardly a day passes by him without asking about the country and its news, preachers and their conditions, and inspecting them He directs and advises, as he has already passed out of his blessed ninety years .

Our sheikh was not keen on positions, and I saw him among the lowest in fame and closeness to princes and presidents, and kept them away from industrialization, pretension and hypocrisy . 

His time is divided between teaching, writing, reciting the Qur’an, reading what his students write of letters and discussing them in his home, and receiving scholars and lovers, and hardly a moment passes by the grace of God without good work. I never heard him speak anything other than classical Arabic with me or with others except rarely, whether he was at home or elsewhere, just as I never heard him backbiting anyone, and it is not allowed for anyone to backbite in his assembly. His divine disclosures and divine enlightenment have things that I keep now .

In all of his fatwas and research, he does not deviate from the words of Sheikh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah, and he almost kept his sayings. Islam Ibn Taymiyyah, especially the Wasitiyyah and Palmyriya doctrine, and the book (Al-Ubudiyyah), (The Criterion between the Saints of the Most Merciful and the Saints of Satan), (The Great Fatwas) and (The Fatwas Collection), and other books .

He told me that his first youth met some (Sufi) method, and he did not like their behavior, then in the forties he saw some of what Ibn Taymiyyah wrote, so he was influenced by it and loved it, and since then he did not leave a book for the Sheikh of Islam without reading it, and I asked him why he was affected by the Sheikh of Islam and he mentioned that He mentioned that from that time and because of his intense love for the Sheikh of Islam, he used to adhere to the Hanbali school of thought, and he used to write on his books the phrase (Abd al-Karim Zaidan, my predecessor of the doctrine is the Hanbali school of thought). It was sufficient for you to say the Hanbali madhhab, and he said this to confirm .

He summarized the Tahawi creed and decided it on the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq. Therefore, you find the Iraqi and Kuwaiti Brotherhood Salafists in the creed .

He founded the College of Islamic Studies at the end of the sixties, to allow forensic knowledge on the curriculum of the predecessors, for those who missed seeking knowledge from the Brotherhood and others, then hundreds of students graduated from the college .

The Iraqis did not know his destiny and lost him, especially the successive governments from the time of Abd al-Karim Qasim to the present day, and they narrowed down on him, so he was forced to emigrate at the end of the nineties of the last century, and if he was in countries that honor scholars such as the Hijaz and Al-Azhar, no one would have dared to advance him in knowing the sayings of the sects and the weighting between them according to Guide .

He is not infallible, and I disagreed with him on the issue of the region and did not discuss it with fear for him, and I apologized for him that he had no counselors who advised him, and he was in the country of distance and estrangement, and he sincerely endeavored, not in desire for a position, prestige or reputation, for he was one of the most distant people and most alienated from the people of positions And he was one of the most averse to satellite channels, seeking fame, and commanding me to do so, and I am still committed to his commandment to this day, and I do not know his affairs about religion, knowledge, asceticism, piety, and investigation of the right to what he says or does, and I have not seen any of his peers or students in Its meaning, and its rank is not based on knowledge, work, or asceticism .

On this painful occasion, we offer our condolences to his family, his children, ourselves and the Islamic world for the loss of this unique knowledge, the pride of Iraq and the nation, and we ask the Imams of the Two Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina to offer funeral prayers for the undisputed imam of the nation, the scholar Abdul Karim Zidan, may God have mercy on him. He was unanimously agreed on the strength of his religion, his trust, his imamate, his knowledge and asceticism, the scholars of the Ummah, its preachers and its righteous, all the Islamic groups, and millions of Muslims in the East and the West. Therefore, I ask the Imams of the Two Holy Mosques in Makkah and Madinah, may God grant them the funeral prayer, just like the imams and leaders prayed upon .

I ask God, the Hearer, the Respondent, to raise his rank in the two elites with the former who were blessed by God among the prophets, the righteous, the martyrs, the righteous, and the goodness of those who are companions, and that he does not deprive us of his reward or deceive us after him, and to improve our conclusion on the testimony of monotheism, and for the best deed we meet God .

He is able to do it .

And it was written by a poor man, may God forgive and forgive him

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