A widely shared press release claiming that PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang was banned from entering Saudi Arabia is fake.
According to PAS' official Facebook, the party said the document was fake because the date based on the Gregorian calendar was used and not the Hijri calendar.
It also said Hadi is no longer vice president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), as stated in the purported statement, dated July 23.
Malaysiakini's checks of previous press statements in English by Saudi Arabia's Foreign Ministry also found that the fonts in the statement about Hadi did not match those used by the kingdom.
Saudi's ministry also typically uses both the Gregorian calendar and the Hijri calendar in their English statements.
Malaysiakini has contacted the Saudi embassy in Kuala Lumpur for further clarification.
Why IUMS on terrorist list
The issue surrounding whether Hadi has been banned from Saudi first cropped up in 2017.
Over the years Hadi has refuted claims he was banned from entering Saudi, including in the Dewan Rakyat in 2019.
The IUMS was placed on a terrorist list in 2017 by Saudi, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain - a group of countries widely known as the "Gulf quartet".
The Qatar-based IUMS is made up of some 90,000 Muslim scholars worldwide, and the IUMS blacklist does not refer to individual scholars, including Hadi.
The reasons for the blacklist are also complex, and closely linked to Gulf geopolitics.
In June 2017, the Gulf quartet severed ties with Qatar, citing Qatar's support for terrorism - a charge Qatar denied.
Saudi and Qatar had strained ties for many years before that, with Saudi recalling its envoy to Doha from 2002 to 2008, while Saudi and Bahrain recalled their Doha envoys in 2014.
The reasons for the recall were political differences, including Qatar's support for groups like the Palestinian political group Hamas and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.
The IUMS itself is largely made up of scholars with ties to the Brotherhood.
The Gulf quartet also took issue with various other Qatar decisions, including the broadcast of the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera news network.
The diplomatic crisis caused economic and social problems with land borders and airspace restrictions affecting travel and trade.
The crisis, which extended to many other countries, came to an end in January 2021 through an agreement brokered by Kuwait and the United States.
Anwar’s teacher
During the time of the blacklisting, IUMS was chaired by prominent Egyptian scholar Yusof Qhardawi - a scholar Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim deemed as his teacher.
Qhardawi, who died in 2022, has been accused in the West of promoting terrorism, but he has also spoken against the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
On his part, Hadi blamed the inclusion of IUMS into the terrorist list on a so-called "Mason-International Zionist" network, likely referring to an alleged alliance between Zionist Jews and Freemasons.
Malaysiakini is part of the Malaysian fact-checking alliance JomCheck.
Through JomCheck, Malaysians can submit requests to fact-check a claim by sending a WhatsApp message to the tipline at 017-477 6659 (WhatsApp text only, no calls) or via this link. - Mkini
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