Sulaiman Al-Alwan

Shaykh Sulaiman al-Alwan (Arabic: سليمان العلوان) is a Saudi Arabian Islamic scholar and a 'Muhaddith' (hadith specialist). Sulaymān bin Nāṣir bin ʿAbdillāh al-ʿAlwān, born 1969) is a Saudi Islamic scholar and Salafist preacher. He is known to have memorised the Nine Major Books of Hadith. At a young age, he memorised a lot of texts in different Islamic sciences alongside the explanations of these texts.

Fatwa In 2000, he issued a Fatwa endorsing the use of suicide bombings against Israel, and in 2001 he supported the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban. Al-Alwan's mosque in Al-Qassim Province was criticised by moderate Islamic scholars as a "terrorist factory". Among his students was Abdulaziz al-Omari, one of the plane hijackers in the September 11 attacks. After the September 11 attacks, al-Alwan issued two fatwas (21 September 2001 and 19 October 2001), in which he declared that any Muslim who supported the Americans in Afghanistan was a disbeliever, and called on all Muslims to support the Afghans and Taliban by any means, including jihad.

Prison On 31 March 2003, 11 days after the start of the Iraq War, al-Alwan published an open letter in which he called on the Iraqi people to fight the American soldiers and use suicide bombings against them. and after being held for nine years without trial, he was released on 5 December 2012.

In October 2013, Alwan was sentenced to a 15-year prison term; charges included questioning the legitimacy of the country's rulers. He was due to be released in 2019.