 Khaled Abou El Fadl, Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Fellow in Islamic Law |
Opposition to Israel, to colonialism and to immoral aspects of Western culture – all cited in the report – aren't evidence of Wahhabi extremism, he said. Freedom House suggested that the U.S. government should crack down on distribution of the material. But Dr. Abou el Fadl said that's not a good solution. "When we resort to bannings and manipulative use of immigration laws and national security laws to counter this literature, all we end up doing is transforming the Wahhabi side into a world victim by feeding into conspiracy theories," he said.
This desire to continue the distribution of Saudi publications hardly comes as a surprise to me, given Abou El Fadl's record of apologizing for Wahhabism and even lending his skills to it, as documented in my 2004 article. How long will it be until his Islamist outlook is generally recognized? (February 4, 2005)
Dec. 12, 2005 update: Our old friend, Lorraine Ali, has a silly piece on Muslim women in Newsweek (she really should go back to writing what she knows about – rock music) where Khaled Abou El Fadl is quoted: "Historically the West has used the women's issue as a spear against Islam." Once again, he sounds suspiciously like an Islamist.
Also of note is Abou El Fadl's historical ignorance. On the issue of the status of Muslim women, he says: "It was raised in the time of the Crusades, used consistently in colonialism and is being used now." This misses the point, which is that the Western view of Muslim women exactly reversed itself from premodern to modern times. Here is a summary of the change, from my review of a study titled Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque:
in the medieval period, the West looked at the Muslim woman as a termagant, an archaic English word usually applied to Muslims and meaning a "quarrelsome, overbearing woman; a virago, vixen, or shrew." Europeans strenuously disapproved of this kind of woman and found her deeply threatening. Then, in the seventeenth century, the Muslim female's image changed as "the veil and the seraglio" entered the picture. The new (Turkish-origin) term to describe the Muslim woman was odalisque, "an abject harem slave."
Mar. 26, 2006 update: Irfan Khawaja skewers Abou El Fadl – whom he calls an "apologist for theocracy, zealous critic of secularism, and (not coincidentally) darling of the liberal media establishment" – at "Academic Apologists for Shariah: The Real Meaning of the Abdul Rahman." (Abdul Rahman is the Afghan convert to Christianity whose apostasy would have led to his execution if not for intervention by the pope and others in the West.) Khawaja, instructor of philosophy at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, writes:
the sad fact is that however hard El Fadl tries to mask his differences from the inquisitors in Afghanistan, he cannot mask his fundamental agreement with them. He shares their faith, shares their moral verdict on apostasy, and shares Islam's view of the eventual fate of the apostate. He may not want to kill an apostate with his own hands, or even want one to be killed by any actual government. But in compliance with the wishes of his "Lord" and master, he can't help acquiescing in the thought that the apostate deserves to be damned to Hell for eternity. ...
Professor El Fadl, Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Fellow in Islamic Law, defends a doctrine according to which it is permissible to torture someone for eternity for having the wrong beliefs. Excuse me, but who is the bigot among us?
 UCLA's Abou el Fadl. |
 Goldfinger's Odd Job. |
As for the reference to "Odd Job" in the title, it's explained by a pairing of pictures in the text, which I reproduce here.
Mar. 27, 2008 update: Appearing in an IslamOnLine chat session, Abou El Fadl makes a number of Islamist statements, but the one that most caught my attention concerns the Danish cartoons:
that the West is accustomed to insulting, making fun of, mocking all of the religious symbols from Prophets Moses and Jesus to the Pope in Rome. This is, as explained earlier, the moral choice of the West. But it is indeed a dubious moral choice to celebrate the right to mock a symbol of sacredness and yet preserve a complacent silence when Muslims are subjected to torture or murder from Palestine to Afghanistan to Iraq to Guantanamo to secret detention centers around the world.
No, I do not believe that the West's reaction to the caricatures about the Prophet is a matter of freedom of expression as much as it is a matter of sending a message to Muslims, in Europe specifically and the West generally, that their choices of values and morality are not welcome in the West. The caricatures against the Prophet (peace be upon him) comes at a time when a large number of Islamophobes have written books about the so-called Islamic menace in Europe, and several conservative parties have been elected to government in places such as Italy, Spain, and France. Parties with a very deliberate and public moral choices of intolerance towards the moral contributions of Muslims in the West.
The caricatures against the Prophet are a symbol, and as a symbol, it wished to tell Muslims in the West that "You either become like us, fully, thoroughly, without reservations or contingencies; either you adopt our way of life in all its particulars including our choices as to the way we deal with sacredness, the way we deal with the female body, the way we deal with sexuality, the way we deal with pornography – either you adopt these values fully and unconditionally, or we will send you a very poignant symbol and that is you are not welcome."
My sister, the caricatures against the Prophet (peace be upon him) is a speech of intolerance, not an upholding of a worthwhile moral value.
Dec. 24, 2010 update: Abou El Fadl gave a talk on Nov. 3, 2009, under the title "Shari'ah Watch: A View from the Inside" at the Center for Near East Studies at UCLA which Cinnamon Stillwell and Eric Golub.of Campus Watch dissect at "UCLA's Professor of Fantasy." Once again, Abou El Fadl obsesses over me and I respond to him today in a weblog entry, "Answering Khaled Abou El Fadl."
Apr. 24, 2012 update: Good to see Abou El Fadl on the David Horowitz Freedom Center's list below.
Aug. 9, 2014 update: Abou El Fadl's "The Tragedy of Great Power: The Massacre of Gaza and the Inevitable Failure of the Arab Spring" is a long and turgid apologia for Hamas in its war against Israel, again confirming his Muslim-Brotherhood outlook.
Oct. 1, 2014 update: In his book Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari'ah in the Modern Age (p. 124), Abou El Fadl replies belatedly to the my article above about him:
Functionally, the lslamist label becomes nothing more than a cover for expressing an anti-Muslim prejudice. For instance: it is not an accident that a binary constructionist like Daniel Pipes labels as lslamist any Muslim who threatens Pipes's own sense of superiority toward Muslims or who threatens his sense of political and social priorities. Therefore, in effect, in Pipes's constructions, any Muslim who does not perceive Islam to be a fundamentally flawed and inferior religion or any Muslim who believes that Islam can make a positive contribution to the social, political, and moral sphere is promptly declared as an lslamist, and, according let Pipes, Islamists are the moral equivalents of Nazis.
My takeaway from this is the title "binary constructionist," one I did not know of until now but which henceforth I shall wear with unblemished pride.
Jan. 18, 2017 update: I dubbed Khaled Abou El Fadl a "stealth Islamist" in a 2004 article. Well, he's stealth no more. His 4,500-word screed today, "How Hatred of Islam is Corrupting the American Soul," attacks a Congressional initiative to list the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and includes such beauts as:
In the Muslim world, the bogeyman of the Muslim Brotherhood has been exploited by authoritarian governments to repress their citizens for more than half a century. It is but a pathetic and pitiful irony that now the very same bogeyman will be used to persecute a broad array of Muslim organizations and individuals in the United States. ...
by designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, the Trump administration will have unfettered powers to go after any group or person that it suspects or accuses of having so much as pro-Brotherhood sympathies. ...
Abou El Fadl diverts briefly to flay the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to flay Wahhabism:
In addition to repressing any active religious opposition as a corruption brought about by the Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia has welcomed and encouraged the deflection of blame for Islamically-inspired violence from Wahhabism to Ikhwanism (that is, Brotherhood inspired). Moreover, Saudi Arabia finds it convenient to blame the entire democratic impulse of the Arab Spring on the heretical ideas of the Brotherhood.
Then he goes after an alleged alliance between "the most repressive and reactionary Arab regimes" with "the most nefarious and xenophobic movements the West has ever seen," those being "the Islam-haters of the West." (I guess they are worse than Communists and Nazis.) That would be a "cabal of writers" such as
Steven Emerson, Mark Steyn, Robert Spencer, Brigitte Gabriel, Walid Phares, Daniel Pipes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Andrew Bostom, Andrew McCarthy, David Horowitz, Bruce Bawer, Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, David Yerushalmi and Bill Warner.
We are quite a force:
I do not believe that in the sad annals of modern history ... there ever been a campaign equal in its sheer volume and bulk of production and seemingly limitless resources, or even comparable to the magnitude of malignant virulence to the one currently being waged against the religion of Islam and Islamists.
(Note the unexpected mention of Islamists; most Islamists deny such a category even exists.) Abou El Fadl then goes after anti-Islamist Muslims with special venom, calling them "a class of panderers":
These are disaffected Muslims and ambitious non-whites who serve an important token function in providing the White Christian elite with a modicum of reasonability, respectability and discerning openness. They serve a function, but they will never be looked at or treated as equals no matter how much they are rewarded for their services.
Sure, Zuhdi Jasser et al. are treated like house boys. Abou El Fadl then overtly proudly proclaims that Islamists ended the U.S.S.R.:
Islamists helped the triumphalist West bring down the Soviet Union and while Islamists expected to share the spoils of war, their partners in the West were scandalized at the very notion. In particular, the rage-filled new Christians could not believe what they saw as the ingratitude and the sheer audacity of Islamists in expecting to be credited for bringing down the Soviet empire.
In their view, this victory belonged to the capitalist West and to no one else, and how dare the Islamists think that they are entitled to demand that after the crumbling of the Soviet Union, the West vacate and stay away from their lands and affairs, or that the West mitigate its support of Israel as well.
I think he's saying that the triumphalist West exploited the Islamist victory over the Soviet Union to invade Muslim lands. Right.
June 28, 2019 update: Abou El Fadl wanted to pay homage to former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in a sermon at the Islamic Center of Southern California (ICSC). Mosque leaders, however, wishing to avoid "divisive political discussions" that do not "directly affect American Muslims," declined his offer. Cinnamon Stillwell recounts the UCLA prof's next step for Campus Watch:
In response, an indignant Abou El Fadl posted a rambling 50-minute video on YouTube, in which he praised Morsi as a "martyr," while calling ICSC leaders "authoritarian and despotic garbage," "ignorant idiots," and "an embarrassment to Islam."
Jan. 1, 2024 update: Mr Moderate, Abou El Fadl, gave a Friday sermon that MEMRI summarized as "the Israelis and Americans blame the Palestinians for their own slaughter like the Germans blamed the Jews; they dehumanize us like the Nazis dehumanized the Jews."
