Imtiaz Sooliman

Imtiaz Ismail Sooliman was born on 7 March 1962 in Potchefstroom.¹² He is a South African medical doctor and the founder and chair of Gift of the Givers, which under his leadership has been developed into the largest disaster response agency of African origin.¹ He founded the organisation in Pietermaritzburg on 6 August 1992, on the instruction of his spiritual teacher, a Sufi sheikh in Istanbul.¹

Sooliman completed his high school education at Sastri College in Durban in 1978.¹ He qualified as a medical doctor by obtaining his MBChB at the University of Natal in 1984.¹² He ran a medical practice in Pietermaritzburg and gave up his career in medicine in pursuit of humanitarian aid.¹³ Nelson Mandela University's citation records that he began his schooling in Potchefstroom, where he lived with his family in a communal atmosphere, and later moved to Sastri College in Durban.³ His drive for establishing Gift of the Givers was the instruction of a Sufi sheikh, Muhammed Safer Dal Effendi of the Jerrahi tariqah, in Istanbul on 6 August 1992; the sheikh also gave the organisation its name, "Waqful Waqifin" — Gift of the Givers.¹ Sooliman recounts the instruction in his own words: "My spiritual teacher looked me in the eye and in fluent Turkish said, 'My son, I'm not asking you – I'm instructing you – form an organisation.'"¹ In the 1994 elections he ran for political office as the head of the Africa Muslim Party; the party failed to win any seats and he subsequently left politics.¹ He closed his private practice and became engaged full-time in Gift of the Givers in 1994.² His first wife is a co-founder of Gift of the Givers, and together they have five children; in 2007 he married his second wife, a nurse he met on a Gift of the Givers mission, and they have one child.¹ As the leader of the foundation he has travelled to war-torn regions, braved bombings in Syria, witnessed the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, and been held at gunpoint in Bosnia.³

Gift of the Givers was established in 1992 in Pietermaritzburg to offer worldwide disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, and as of January 2025 reported distributing over R6 billion in aid across 47 countries in 32 years.¹ Under Sooliman the organisation developed the world's only containerised mobile hospital, a groundnut-soya high-energy and protein supplement, and Africa's only "LifeLocator" device for detecting people alive under rubble.³ His recognition includes the Order of the Star of South Africa from President F. W. de Klerk in 1993, Pakistan's Tamgha-i-Eisaar in 2006, the Order of the Baobab in Silver in 2010, and honorary doctorates, among them Nelson Mandela University's in 2016 and Rhodes University's in 2016 and Stellenbosch University's in 2018.¹³ North-West University named him its Social Justice Champion for 2021.² In September 2024 he was adopted as one of the king's sons by the Royal House of AmaXhosa.¹

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum. The article records that Sooliman has publicly commended South Africa's case brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and Nelson Mandela University's citation likewise describes Palestine as a cause close to his heart that he has continuously supported.¹³ In October 2024 an open letter to the Helen Suzman Foundation, published in The Times of Israel, called for his invitation to deliver its 2024 Memorial Lecture to be withdrawn, alleging that he directly or indirectly funded terrorism and identifying him with radical Islamist ideologies.¹ The foundation confirmed Sooliman as speaker as planned, and Sooliman denied the charges, saying he could account for every cent received and donated and affirming his support for Palestinians.¹ The article also quotes his response to his critics, thanking them for the escalation in his organisation's profile and the resulting flood of donors.¹

• Gift of the Givers — English Wikipedia (founder section on Imtiaz Sooliman)¹
• Imtiaz Sooliman 2016 — Nelson Mandela University honorary doctorate citation³
• The gift that keeps on giving — North-West University news²
• Imtiaz Sooliman — Wikidata Q135825507⁴