Inside Islam

UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, 38, is a devout Muslim whose brilliant writings on Islamic law and fearlessness in public defense of human rights have made him one of the most formidable weapons in the battle against Islamic fundamentalism.

The Islamofascists, unsurprisingly, want the Egyptian-born legal scholar dead. He understands. He used to be one of them.

Abou El Fadl, now a naturalized American who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and young son, grew up in Egypt and Kuwait, the son of an Islamic jurist. He remembers entering his teenage years feeling powerless and resentful of classmates who came from rich and well-connected families. His was neither.

"It starts out with harmless enough piety," he says. "But on top of the usual insecurities of the teenage years, you live in a society where nothing around you seems to work, your family isn't powerful, you don't know what tomorrow will bring, and there's no social mobility."

Fundamentalist Islam offered the angry teenager a way out. It gave him a sense of belonging and superiority. He ardently embraced its stark theology and rigid morality. Though his family were observant Muslims, he destroyed his sister's music cassettes and bullied his parents, thinking them infidels.

"It was just a remarkable high, an intoxicant in many ways, to be drunk on the power that comes from God," he told NRO in a phone interview from Los Angeles. "You go around aggressively worshiping yourself, shoving the law down everybody's throat. It's a utopian world, with you at the center of it. Every contradiction, every challenge becomes a serious problem to the utopian vision."

Abou El Fadl's father challenged his headstrong son, who had memorized the entire Koran at age 12, to take classes and learn more about the depth and breadth of Islamic thought and tradition. The teenage fundamentalist immersed himself in classical Islamic texts. In time, the complexity of Islamic jurisprudence forced Abou El Fadl to come to terms with the inadequacy of his primitive Wahhabist faith.

Today, he considers himself luckier than most young men in the socially and intellectually circumscribed Arab world.

"What if I hadn't had a father who pushed me to attend class? What if I didn't have books lying around the house tempting me to dabble into them? What if I had been a bad student? Or what if instead of studying Islamic law, I had studied biology or chemistry, so my social views remained isolated?" he muses. "I don't know if I ever would have grown out of it."

Americans may not realize, says the law professor, that throughout the despotic Arab world, governments strictly control education, keeping students from ideas considered dangerous. And in those countries, undergraduates who choose science, engineering, or technical majors will never have even the slimmest opportunity to have their worldview challenged by the humanities.

"It's really naïve to think that all of this doesn't push people toward fundamentalism," he says.

Arab Muslim immigrants, even if they aren't fundamentalists, bring the habits of their authoritarian societies with them to America, he explains. This helps account for the failure of Muslims in America to speak out forcefully against the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"There's really a sense that having an opinion about something political that matters is trouble," Abou El Fadl says. "And the fundamentalists have become very effective in scaring people. Throughout my work, I've met so many people who sympathize with me who tell me for the sake of my family, please quit speaking out.

"But in [American] society, you know that sometimes it's important to sacrifice yourself or other cherished things for the principle of liberty."

Finally, the professor blames the "siege mentality" of Muslim émigrés for their post-9/11 silence. Many Muslims admit among themselves that the terrorists are a disaster for the Islamic community, he claims.

"But if they're asked by an outsider, especially the media, it's different. You get into the habit of thinking of the media and the police as the two main avenues of destruction. Back home, if people speak to either, they disappear. But if you've been in [America] long enough not to fear the media, you worry that you'll contribute to making Islam look bad, and the fanatics will come around to give you trouble. So it's just easier to keep your mouth shut."

Abou El Fadl doesn't have much respect for leading Muslim-American advocacy groups, who in his view shy away from addressing plainly and directly things they fear will make Muslims look bad. He says the Koran commands believers to speak truthfully and to stand for justice, no matter what the result. Less caginess and more honesty in the public square about the fundamentalist problem would be a public-relations boon to the American Muslim community, he believes.

"If you're honest, if you don't appear bigoted, or biased, or apologetic or defensive, people admire that," he says. "People become far more sympathetic towards you when they find that you are not trying to lie to them or trick them or give them a false sense of security or well-being, or a false sense of who you are. I think ultimately that people learn to admire whatever is truthful and introspective, and whoever looks to themselves before going around blaming everyone but themselves for their problems."

Abou El Fadl's books are banned in Saudi Arabia, which is the homeland of Wahhabism, and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Yet they are secretly copied and passed around samizdat-style. "That tells me there's a hunger," he says.

Because governmental and religious authorities in the Middle East have intimidated publishers into shunning the work of scholars like himself, Abou El Fadl thinks the United States could do much long-term good by establishing foundations and publishing houses to fund and distribute the writings of moderate Muslim intellectuals at prices the Arab street can afford.

"I'm not talking about CIA money, which ultimately discredits moderates," he says. "I'm talking about intellectuals who find now that the only way they can survive is to accept money from the Gulf Arab states."

Despite his tireless efforts to spark an Islamic Reformation, Abou El Fadl doesn't expect to live to see his ideas bear fruit. Islam has become obsessed with power at the expense of its ethical tradition, he asserts, turning the faith into a force for oppression.

He believes, as all faithful Muslims do, that Islam is God's gift to humanity. Yet many outside the Muslim world associate this gift not with tolerance, compassion, and mercy, but with intolerance, violence, and repression.

"If humanity thinks of Islam's symbols in terms of violence and hate, then Muslims in the modern world have failed," he says. "We have not managed to be persuasive spiritually or intellectually to humanity at large, no matter who our enemies are."

Though his is a lonely struggle, Abou El Fadl is encouraged by the words of support he receives from like-minded Muslims — to a point. Last week, the Los Angeles Times published a long, sympathetic profile of him, which prompted 40 e-mails from Muslims praising him for his work.

"They were all perpetuating this paradigm of finding a savior to speak for you, and your job is just to stand there and applaud, rather than taking active initiatives yourself," he says. "I don't want to put down supporters, because they didn't have to say anything to me at all. But it's a sad legacy."

Not true. Name one secular culture which has ever created anything progressive on its own. Communism and Marxism, etc. are really religions on their own despite the blowhard claiming secularism. Religion provides the soul of the country whether good or bad depends on the Alpha Male who draws first and last blood.

Further, I do not subscribe to the term Judeo-Christian. Judaism is a failed religion which Christianity took over and improved. The Jews on their own have been unable to defend and hold on to Israel as history has shown. The current state of Israel simply exists because it is the 51st U.S. state supported by a Christian nation. Christians freed Israel from the Islamic yoke in the last centuries with the Jews given custody to defend it. Take U.S. support away and they are toast. Interesting to see how Jews were grateful to come to America and changed their names from Goldfish to Goldwyn, etc. to hide their Jewishness. But now they are so uppity that they are taking anti-Christian steps in the U.S. Not being anti-Jew as the Holy Land should not fall back to those terrorist thugs but just pointing out the contradictions.And they wonder why they got the Shylock treatment in the past.

>>>Communism and Marxism, etc. are really religions on their own despite the blowhard claiming secularism. Religion provides the soul of the country whether good or bad depends on the Alpha Male who draws first and last blood.

I totally agree with your point about Communism and Marxism. After the 9-11 attacks, I got into a few arguments with some "Progressives" (watermelon commies) about the politics they believed in. The progressives seem to pride themselves on separating God from things, and it may be a reason why they appeal to New Agers and athiests. But I read through zmag.org and a bit of Michael Moore and came to the conclusion that it took much more faith to belief in Progressivism than to believe in God. I mean these people live in the most free country in the world, and probably in all of history, yet they are so ready to jump on any anti-American bandwagon --to believe that America is a police state and represses its people --or to believe that our government is bad but could be made perfect if only made bigger. It's pretty crazy.

>>>Further, I do not subscribe to the term Judeo-Christian. Judaism is a failed religion which Christianity took over and improved. The Jews on their own have been unable to defend and hold on to Israel as history has shown. The current state of Israel simply exists because it is the 51st U.S. state supported by a Christian nation. Christians freed Israel from the Islamic yoke in the last centuries with the Jews given custody to defend it. Take U.S. support away and they are toast. Interesting to see how Jews were grateful to come to America and changed their names from Goldfish to Goldwyn, etc. to hide their Jewishness. But now they are so uppity that they are taking anti-Christian steps in the U.S. Not being anti-Jew as the Holy Land should not fall back to those terrorist thugs but just pointing out the contradictions.And they wonder why they got the Shylock treatment in the past.

I have no idea what you're talking about there, Transoxus. Judaism is very much a part of Christianity, though Christianity is not really a part of Judaism, except for Messianic Jews. Judiasm is the foundation of Christianity. But I don't see it as Christianity taking Judaism and improving on it. It sounds as though you are suggesting that Christianity and Judaism are man made. It is all part of God's work and God's time. The Hebrew OT prophesied the coming of the Messiah. And tells of his return and rule over Jerusalem. That many or most Jews do not believe Jesus is that Messiah is part of God's design and not our own. Now when you say that Jews have become uppity and are now taking Anti-Christian steps in America, what exactly do you mean? It's true that a lot of Jews are very liberal and many probably follow Noam Chomsky's Progressive doctrine. I know a few of those, actually. But you should read www.jewishworldreview.com -- there was an interesing article there a few weeks ago, saying that Israel actually gets more support from Christians than Jews in America --so much so that one of Israel's lobby groups is headed by a Christian lawyer. But for every Noam Chomsky, Barbara Striesand, etc. there are many Jews who take their faith very seriously and uphold "Judeo-Christian" morals --take a listen to Dr. Laura if you don't believe me. She must be one of the most vocal advocates of conservatism, morality, faith, and virtue in this country. And she's a devout Jew.

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