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 CLA
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."
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