Born in 1959, Salah Sultan was the president of Islamic American University, and was the head of the Muslim American Society’s Department of Islamic Research and Studies. During the 1999 annual conference of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), a group which terrorism expert Steven Emerson has characterized as Hamas’ “primary voice in the United States,” Sultan encouraged young people to strive toward martyrdom. “I want every child,” he said, “to sleep on the wound of Palestine and the actions of martyrdom, just like that mother in the country whose son wrote to her that they are to meet in Paradise.”

Sultan has been in prison since 2013 for opposing the Egyptian military’s ousting of the elected president, Mohamed Morsy. He was sentenced to life in prison in September 2017.