Aid al-Qarni

Al-Qarni is on the United States do not fly list and was barred entry in 2012 and 2015 to attend a convention in Chicago.[4]

His book: (لا تحزن) "Don't be sad" is very similar to Dale Carnegie's book ("How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", 1948).

The 2011 published book: (لا تيأس) "Don't despair" is a 90% copy of the Saudi writer Salwa Al-Ódaidan (سلوى العضيدان) "Thus overcame despair" (هكذا هزموا اليأس) published previously, in 2007. After an unsolicited friendly complaint, the writer Salwa Al-Ódaidan turned to the justice that issued and confirmed the plagiarism, condemning "the thief" to financial compensation and the withdrawal of his book from bookstores.[5]

On 1 March 2016, Al-Qarni was shot and wounded in an assassination attempt in Zamboanga City in the Philippines, where he held a lecture at an auditorium of the Western Mindanao State University.[6] He was shot by a man wearing a school uniform of the institution's engineering college as the cleric left the auditorium after the lecture.[7][8]

The gunman was shot dead and authorities recovered a student's driver license and a local government I.D. identifying a man as a local 21-year old Filipino. The police are not ruling out possibilities that these recovered items were forged and the university couldn't confirm immediately if the man is an enrolled student of the institution.[7]

J M Berger of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University suspects that the attempted assassination has links to the militant group, Islamic State since Al-Qarni was listed as a target for assassination in the group's magazine Dabiq.[9][10] It was later confirmed the gunman was a Sunni Muslim.[11]

In May 2019, appearing on a talk-show, he apologized for his previous "hardline interpretations" of Islam and called for a modernization of the religion. Previously associated with the radical Sahwa movement, he says that after reading interpretations of the Qur'an by classical scholars, after travelling to "40 countries" and having "read thousands of books", as well as meeting intellectuals, religious scholars and poets, he now embraces the reformist Islam of crown-prince Mohammad bin Salman.[12]