2016 video of Ghanim Al-Muftah's conversation with Zakir Naik is attributed to FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
November 25, 2022
A video is being shared on social media claiming it as the recent visuals of Ghanim Al Muftah, a motivational speaker and the ambassador for the FIFA World Cup 2022, meeting Islamic preacher Zakir Naik in Qatar. Amid reports of Zakir Naik being invited to give religious lectures during the FIFA World Cup tournament in Qatar, this post is going viral on social media. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Video of Ghanim Al-Muftah having a conversation with Zakir Naik during a lecture at FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.
Fact: The video shared in the post shows the visuals from Zakir Naik’s ‘Does God Exist?’ lecture held in Qatar’s Katara cultural village on 26 May 2016. Ghanim Al-Muftah attended this event held in 2016 and expressed his happiness for meeting him. The video does not show a recent conversation between Zakir Naik and Ghanim Al-Muftah at FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022. Hence, the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
On reverse image search of the screenshots of the video, a video with similar visuals was found recently published by a YouTube channel. This YouTube channel described it as the visuals of Ghanim Al-Muftah welcoming Zakir Naik to Qatar during the “Does God Exist?” event held in Qatar’s Katara cultural village on 26 May 2016.
When we searched for further sources, we found the visuals of this conversation between Zakir Naik and Ghanim Al-Muftah in a video published by the ‘KataraQatar’ Facebook page on 27 May 2016. Ghanim Al-Muftah can be heard making the same comments in this video as shared in the viral post. ‘KataraQatar’ shared live videos of the “Does God Exist?” full event which can be seen here, here and here.  This Facebook page confirmed it as the visuals from the “Does God Exist?” lecture presented by Zakir Naik in May 2016.
The Full lecture and Q&A session of “Does God Exist?” event held in 2016 can be seen here. Though this video is uploaded recently, the description the video clearly states that video is from Zakir Naik’s ‘Does God Exist?’ tour to Qatar in 2016 at Katana Cultural Village, Amphitheatre, Doha, Qatar. Other videos that were uploaded recently also state that the visuals are from the 2016 event in Qatar.
On further research, we found the full speech video uploaded on ‘Aljazeera Mubasher’ YouTube channel on 27 May 2022. The title of this video mentioned in Arabic language translates to ‘A lecture by the Islamic preacher Dr. Zakir Naik entitled “Does God Exist?”‘. All these evidences indicate that the video shared in the post is old and is not related to FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.
We could not find any recent press reports on a meeting between Zakir Naik and Ghanim Al-Muftah during the FIFA World Cup 2022 tournament. Factly had earlier debunked another video clip from Zakir Naik’s ‘Does God Exist?’ lecture that was widely shared with the claim that four people had converted to Islam in his presence during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
To sum it up, 2016 video of Ghanim Al-Muftah having a conversation with Zakir Naik is attributed to FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.