Defender of the Faith [Portrait of anti-Islamist Khaled Abou El Fadl]

Culture & Ideas 4/15/02

Defender of the Faith
Portrait: Khaled Abou El Fadl

To understand why UCLA law Prof. Khaled Abou El Fadl has become a thorn in the side of reactionary Muslims around the world, you might begin with a personal detail: He likes dogs. The Kuwait-born scholar, a devout Muslim, not only likes them but has three as pets. Why is that a big deal? According to one Islamic tradition, the prophet Mohammed declared dogs "unclean" and therefore, many strict Muslims infer, fit only for strictly utilitarian uses, like guarding the house or protecting the flocks.

Abou El Fadl's rejection of the kind of rigid legalism that declares man's best friend unfit for human companionship is no whim: It is based on a deep understanding of Islamic law. And it is precisely his advocacy of a broad-minded, critical approach that has earned the wrath of so many of his less tolerant co-religionists. It explains, for one, why major Middle Eastern publishers have repeatedly backed out of offers to bring out Arabic versions of his books. But hostility and censorship are not restricted to "over there." Throughout the 1990s, Abou El Fadl was subjected to verbal and physi- cal attacks at numerous American mosques and Islamic centers where he had come to speak or simply worship. Last summer, he began to receive a well-orchestrated barrage of death threats from a band of disgruntled zealots. And adding to the anger of such extremists are the articles and op-eds he has written since September 11, making clear that terrorism and suicidal bombing are "not supported by the rigorous classical heritage" and "are at odds with Islamic law."

Such controversy does not make life easy for Abou El Fadl, an intense, somewhat absent-minded man who fuels his nervous energy with Diet Cokes and relies on his wife, an Asian-American convert to Islam, to drive the family car and organize his daily schedule. It has necessitated increased security both at work and in his suburban Los Angeles home. But even more than other controversial scholarly investigations of Islam–including studies of the Koran that suggest that the rewards for martyrdom should actually be translated as "raisins," not "virgins"–Abou El Fadl's six books go to the heart of the question facing modern Islam: What is the place of Muslim religious law in everyday life? As Harvard historian Roy Mottahedeh puts it, "Abou El Fadl is asking the question that people are interested in: how you can get from a divine Scripture to a principle that creates law according to the spirit of the Scripture rather than the literal legal meanings."

Debates over literalist interpretations of Scriptures have roiled other religions in the 20th century, including Christianity. But the question has acquired particular urgency in the Muslim world, where many are calling for the restoration of Islamic law, or sharia, as the basis of their national legal systems, and where many predominantly Muslim countries such as Iran, Pakistan, and Sudan are already implementing it. What sharia means in all these cases is not immediately clear, however. If sharia is an inflexible code of rules that reduces women (and all non-Muslims) to second-class citizens, imposes draconian punishments, and violates most international norms of human rights, then sharia-based states will most likely end up resembling regimes like that of Saudi Arabia. (That's hardly a coincidence, since much of the support for puritanical Islam originates in Saudi Arabia's well-funded and globally influential religious establishment.) But if sharia is, as Abou El Fadl maintains, a moral vision larger than any single set of injunctions or prohibitions, then it can support something far more promising than crude attempts to impose primitive customs on modern societies.

Take that matter of dogs, for instance. To the literalists, the prohibition against dogs as pets is clearly delineated in one of the hadiths, the traditional accounts of the life and sayings of the prophet Mohammed. In their view, the hadiths and the Koran unambiguously set forth the laws of sharia. But as Abou El Fadl points out, determining which of the tens of thousands of hadiths are authoritative requires both knowledge and critical analysis. One must evaluate the reliability of the sources and assess how consistent the hadiths are with the moral vision of the God who speaks in and through the Koran. In the case of the dog hadith, Abou El Fadl found it hard to believe that the same God who created such companionable creatures would have his prophet declare them "unclean." Investigating the sources, he discovered that the hadith in question not only derived from an unreliable chain of sources but reflected views far more consistent with pre-Islamic Arab customs and attitudes. What's more, he says, he found that a hadith from one of the most trustworthy sources tells how the Prophet himself had prayed in the presence of his playfully cavorting dogs.

But Abou El Fadl knows how hard it is to make such an argument with what he calls "the hadith-hurlers," who are on the rise in the Muslim world as well as in the pulpits of American mosques and Islamic centers. For one thing, he says, they dismiss both knowledge and reason as sinful, irrelevant, and even an impediment to the faith. Abou El Fadl understands the young puritans: "I was once one of those hadith-hurlers myself." Growing up in Kuwait in the 1970s, the son of Egyptian professionals, he was well on his way to becoming a zealot of the type emblazoned in American minds by the events of September 11. Enrolled in the American school, the Westernized, middle-class Arab youth found answers to his sense of alienation in the rigid pieties of puritanical Islam. "In those days," he writes in his collection of personal essays, Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam, "my judgments were as quick as a gun."

No Rod Stewart. Even at home, he saw signs of "un-Islamicity" everywhere. Railing against television, trousers, and mixed gatherings, he destroyed his sister's Rod Stewart cassette tapes. Although both of his parents were religious, his father, a prominent lawyer and activist who had run into political troubles in Egypt, finally grew so exasperated with the young puritan that he challenged him to attend a local sharia class. Accepting the challenge, Abou El Fadl was shocked when the sheik handily dismantled his pious pronouncements on everything from the proper manner of dress to the sinfulness of all music and art. "If I cited a single hadith," Abou El Fadl recalls, "I would be challenged with 10 others plus the precedent of [the Prophet's] Companions and a meticulous accounting of the evidence at hand." The experience reduced him to tears, he says, but it changed the course of his life by spurring him to master the traditional learning that had defeated him.

Abou El Fadl's subsequent intellectual odyssey would blend Western secular traditions with Islamic ones. After earning an undergraduate degree at Yale (where he was elected "scholar of the house" for distinguished work and produced a prize-winning thesis), he received a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Islamic law from Princeton University. Beginning in middle school and continuing through his undergraduate years at Yale, he had been studiying Islamic law under distinguished scholars in both Kuwait and Egypt, accumulating the ijazas (certificates) that would eventually qualify him as a sheik.

But even in traditional schools, including Cairo's prestigious Al-Azhar, Abou El Fadl witnessed the encroachment of narrow-minded puritanism: Students influenced by Wahhabi doctrines denounced their teachers not only for teaching "forbidden" subjects such as speculative philosophy and mysticism but for using the Socratic, question-and-answer method of instruction rather than rote memorization. Generous, Saudi-sponsored fellowships for right-thinking scholars served as the carrot of Wahhabi influence. But scholars also experienced the stick if their teachings were incompatible with puritanical doctrines. Many lost their jobs and were reduced to giving private lessons in their homes.

"Dark ages." And what is the larger cost of this intellectual reign of terror? "There were 135 schools of law in the first century and a half of Islam," says Abou El Fadl. "This is what gave Islam so much of its cultural dynamism." But now, he says, much of the learning produced by those and later schools has been dismissed as sinful innovation. "We are in the dark ages of Islam."

Finishing his final ijazas in Cairo between his junior and senior years at Yale, Abou El Fadl experienced the horror of living in a state where justice was neither Western nor Islamic but merely the instrument of authoritarian thugs. Arrested without reason, he was imprisoned for two weeks, severely beaten and mistreated, and then just as inexplicably released. The experience, which he prefers not to discuss in detail, sent him into a deep depression and left him with a raft of physical ailments for which he still takes medications. It also made him lastingly wary about returning to his family's homeland.

But Abou El Fadl soon found that the fate of a moderate Muslim is not uncomplicated in America, either. While teaching at the University of Texas law school in 1996, he attempted to give a talk at the Islamic Center of Greater Austin only to meet with angry denunciations from the congregation. Nor did the ugliness stop there. Several congregants followed him out on the street and threatened to beat him up. Only when he threatened to sue if they so much as touched him did the hecklers back off. And he has had similar experiences in mosques around the country.

But zealous congregants are not even the greatest problem, Abou El Fadl says: The imams and prayer leaders of America's 1,400 mosques and Islamic centers tend to be self-appointed religious experts with little or no training in Islamic law and traditions. Many are professionals in engineering or medicine or other fields, capable only of quoting a few lines from the Koran or selected hadiths. Abou El Fadl is not alone in his concern. Taha Alalwani, president of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, Va., which trains Muslim chaplains for the American military, worries that many of these imams "are just Islamists," often supported by Saudi organizations and more concerned with ideology than with complexities of the faith. "I would love to see the Muslim community try to enrich their traditions and revive their values, and I try to encourage this in my school," he says. "Unfortunately, many imams think in a different way."

Some scholars argue that the literal legalism that Abou El Fadl challenges has been the consensus view of most Muslims since the 19th century and is not just the product of recent Wahhabi proselytizing. "My view is that Khaled is a brilliant legal scholar but a self-interested historian," says Islam expert John Voll of Georgetown University. Abou El Fadl does not deny that traditional Islam began to suffer in the colonial period. But he says his greater concern is with the future. If Muslims do not recover the critical and questioning spirit of the much older traditions of Islamic jurisprudence, sharia-based law, he believes, not only will be incompatible with human rights, but it simply won't work. Even in Saudi Arabia, as he points out, members of the royal family either privately ignore the law as they wish or observe the letter and flout the spirit. He believes that Iran is closer to developing a critical, adaptive notion of sharia than Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Sudan.

"I just hope the conservatives don't break that spirit," he says, "because if they do, then the hope of Islamic civilization is lost."

Some more links, with excerpts, concerning Abou El Fadl.

These are from a series of emails I've been sending out to my personal list (which includes a number of Muslim freinds) on "The Battle for Islam." I'm attempting to raise awareness of moderate, minority and other Muslims opposed to Islamofascists; discourage freinds from supporting organizations like the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) that are dominated by Islamists or fellow travelers; and join with me in writing producers of news and public affairs shows asking that they stop over representing Islamists in their broadcasts.

Home page at UCLA

Inside Islam
A brave Muslim speaks.
National Review Online January 8, 2002

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."

The Power of Fundamentalism
(Public Radio Series) First Person: Speaking of Faith

Abou el Fadl was a subject of this compelling and sensitive radio documentary, along with a Christian and Jew who were also former fundamentalists. There are links on this page to listen to the whole show, and to interview excerpts not included in the broadcast.

Islam and Tolerance
Boston Review

Index to an article by Abou el Fadl and subsequent discussion in a latter issue of the magazine.
[Editor:] In our December 2001/January 2002 issue, Khaled Abou el Fadl opened a discussion on the place of pluralism and tolerance in Islam. While Abou el Fadl argued for the centrality of tolerance, kindness, and justice in the Qur'an, he also insisted that Islamic scriptures, like all religious texts, provide "possibilities for meaning, not inevitabilities.” So the argument against Islamic fundamentalism cannot simply be textual. In this issue, the discussion continues. Three prominent students of Islam engage Abou el Fadl's comments about the history of Islam, the nature of religious interpretation, and the contemporary role of Islamic "puritans."

Terrorism at Odds with Islamic Tradition
Originally published in Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2001

Under the category of crimes of terror, the classical jurists included abductions, poisoning of water wells, arson, attacks against wayfarers and travelers, assaults under the cover of night and rape. For these crimes, regardless of the religious or political convictions of the perpetrators, Muslim jurists demanded the harshest penalties, including death. Most important, Muslim jurists held that the penalties are the same whether the perpetrator or victim is Muslim or non-Muslim.

Scholar of the House

Website maintained by friends and students. Tapes of lectures & speeches can be purchased here.

Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law

Extract from one of Dr. Abou el Fadl’s books (& Audio links to an interview)

Books by Abou el Fadl at Amazon.com

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