"...I bear witness by God - and there is no other deity except Him - to what I know from familiarity with this imposter who has called himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as he had studied under me with a group of the erudite ones...in the year 2005, then the study was cut off because of my arrest, and I had got to know him very well. He was of limited intelligence, slow to understand, pale in intuitive grasp. For he is not from among the average students of Islamic knowledge ['ilm], and his studies background are academic studies in the government universities, whose standard is emaciated and which have no relation with forming a student of knowledge, let alone a knowledgeable person [referring to Baghdadi's time at the Islamic University of Baghdad]."