[Reader-list] UCLA Professor Fights Islamic `Puritans'

[shohini]

Los Angeles Times
January 2, 2002   

COLUMN ONE
Battling Islamic 'Puritans'

[UCLA professor, once a fanatic himself, is now a leading scholarly voice
against intolerance among Muslims. Death threats don't deter him]

By TERESA WATANABE, TIMES RELIGION WRITER

The most incendiary Muslim in American academia knows a thing or two about
Islamic fanatics. He says he used to be one as a seventh-grader in his native
Kuwait.

UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl remembers beating up other kids,
condemning his parents as unbelievers and destroying his sister's Rod Stewart
tape, "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" 

 "I found it remarkably empowering to spew my hatred with the banner of God
in my hand," he says. But challenged by his father to take up true religious
scholarship, Abou El Fadl began a journey of Islamic learning that would
transform him into a nemesis of the extremists he once endorsed. Today, at
38, he is a leading warrior in the intellectual struggle that exploded into
America's consciousness Sept. 11: Who speaks for Islam? Who defines it?

With breathtaking bluntness, Abou El Fadl attacks Muslims who promote a
strict, literalist trend in Islam, most prominently the creed of Wahhabism in
Saudi Arabia.

In his writings and through the electronic media, he accuses them of an
"intolerant puritanism" that values ritual over morality. He blames them
for oppressing millions of women, creating hostility toward non-Muslims and
giving the likes of Osama bin Laden their theological justification for
terrorism. He issues scathing critiques of Saudi legal rulings that permit
everything from the mistreatment of dogs to the beating of women.

For tackling the puritans in high-profile forums, Abou El Fadl has received
so many death threats that new security systems are going up around his
office and home. His books are banned in Saudi Arabia and his visa
applications denied in Egypt.

Before Sept. 11, his daily battles would have been dismissed by outsiders as
esoteric doctrinal debates. Today they are better understood as critical
insights into the fierce ideological tensions raging within Islam between the
forces of puritanism and moderation. They shed light on how Islam can produce
such chilling extremists as Bin Laden, who exults in the carnage of Sept. 11
as "blessed strikes."

By devoting himself to a modern interpretation of the Koran, Abou El Fadl is
perhaps the most articulate enemy of the Wahhabi creed that shaped Bin
Laden's brand of Islam.

"The supremacist creed of the puritan groups is distinctive and uniquely
dangerous," the scholar recently wrote in the influential Boston Review.
"They do not merely seek self-empowerment, but aggressively seek to
disempower, dominate or destroy others."

To many muftis, ayatollahs, sheiks and their followers throughout the world,
Abou El Fadl has become "America's most dangerous corrupter of Islam," as one
foe put it.

One international network of students claims credit for successfully working
to blacklist him from most Islamic conferences and publications under the
banner of protecting "the one and only true Islam."

Wahhabism's founder, 18th century evangelist Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, was
alarmed by what he viewed as corruptions to the faith. He advocated a strict,
back-to-basics approach to keep Islam as pure as the day it was revealed to
the Prophet Muhammad and practiced by his early companions nearly 1,400 years
ago.

Wahhabism had long been a marginal force in Islam. Abou El Fadl asserts that
it has risen in prominence in the last three decades because of the collapse
of Islamic institutions after colonialism, creating a vacuum of authority
that puritans, backed by Saudi petrodollars, rushed to fill.

Today's puritans advocate strict gender roles and perpetual guarding against
what they view as heretical innovations--be they new interpretations of the
faith by scholars such as Abou El Fadl or other expressions of Islam, such as
mystical Sufism or the Shiite branch of the faith.

Many followers of Wahhab describe their approach benevolently, merely as
"monotheism without the frills," as one member of the Saudi-financed
King Fahd Mosque in Culver City put it.

Abou El Fadl, however, says extremists have used Wahhabism to justify
sometimes violent intolerance--massacres of Sufis and Shiite, for
instance--or hostility to non-Muslim "infidels" that has bred terrorist acts.

Many Muslims see an even more pervasive impact of puritanism--robbing Islam
of its richness and flexibility. Howard University professor Sulayman Nyang
calls it "the mummification, ossification and fossilization of Islam."

"Most of these groups we call fundamentalists have a rigid idea that
everything is sealed in concrete and there is no elasticity in
reinterpretation," says Nyang, an African-born professor of African and
Islamic studies. "We need to inject life back into Islam and open it up in
light of new realities."

In that pursuit, Nyang says, Abou El Fadl "is blazing a new trail."

Other Muslim intellectuals trying to reclaim their faith's rich legacy of
tolerance and compassion have also suffered for it.

Abdulaziz Sachedina at the University of Virginia says his liberal views on
women and pluralism provoked a 1998 fatwa, or religious edict, from an Iraqi
ayatollah that resulted in some Islamic centers in the United States banning
his appearances.

Ebrahim Moosa, an associate professor of Islamic studies at Duke University,
says his South African home was bombed by puritans in 1998 because of his
activism promoting religious, racial and gender equality.

But it is Abou El Fadl who appears to pose the greatest threat to the
puritanical view of Islam because he promotes his competing vision with an
erudition and persuasive prose that even his foes grudgingly acknowledge.

Fajrul Din, a student in Saudi Arabia who belongs to the international
student group that opposes Abou El Fadl, ticks off the scholar's sins:
defending infidels against Muslims in court; befriending Shiite, Jews and
Bahais; embracing music; owning devilish black dogs; and sheltering wives
fleeing from the "discipline" of husbands.

What makes Abou El Fadl such a master of pandering to Western liberal
sensitivities, Din wrote in an e-mail, is that "with each of these heretical
views, he weaves sweet words like a serpent, and misleads the naive and
simple. His sin is greater than any other. He studied and saw the light, but
chose to turn away from it. We will not dirty our hands by touching him, but
let him perish like a dog among the heathens he loves so much."

Dogs and Books as Symbols of His Effort

The man at the center of this ideological furor is physically unimposing,
with a short, stocky frame, light brown eyes and olive skin. His home is
dominated by two elements that symbolize much about Islam's ideological
tensions today: dogs and books.

Abou El Fadl loves to use dogs to illustrate what he regards as the puritans'
willful ignorance of Islamic tradition and an oppressive emphasis on law over
morality.

In much of the Muslim world, dogs are decidedly not man's best friend. Abou
El Fadl says he was taught that they were impure and that black dogs in
particular were evil.

Religious traditions hold that if a dog--or woman--passes in front of you as
you prepare to pray, it pollutes your purity and negates your prayer. Dogs
are permissible as watchdogs or for other utilitarian purposes, but not
simply for companionship. Abou El Fadl says this zealous adherence to
doctrine led one religious authority to advise a Muslim that his pet dog was
evil and should be driven away by cutting off its food and water.

Many Muslims say this caution toward dogs is fundamentally a matter of
hygiene. Many devout Muslims follow such rules without question, for
submission to God is Islam's highest call whether the reasons for divine law
are apparent or not, according to Sheik Tajuddin B. Shuaib of the King Fahd
Mosque.

But Abou El Fadl prides himself on questioning just about everything. He
could not fathom a God who would condemn such loving, loyal creatures. So
about five years ago he set out to investigate.

After a lengthy process of textual research and prayer for divine guidance,
he concluded that reports against dogs were passed on through questionable
chains of transmissions, or contradicted by more favorable reports--for
instance, one story of Muhammad praying with his dogs playing nearby.

Some reports against dogs bear uncanny similarities to Arab folklore, Abou El
Fadl says, leading him to suspect that someone took the tales and attributed
them to the prophet.

As Abou El Fadl speaks, Honey snoozes near his side. The yellow cocker
spaniel mix was abandoned by its owners and was cowering in the corner of an
animal shelter, dirty and racked by seizures, when the scholar and his wife
rescued him.

They also rescued Baby, a black shepherd a day away from being killed, and
Calbee, an abused dog who smelled of garbage for a year and still feels
secure only when curled up inside a plastic laundry basket.

"Dogs represent my rebellion against ignorance about the basis of actual
historical law," Abou El Fadl says. "They are a symbol of the irrationality
of our tradition, the privileging of law over humaneness."

How, he asks, pointing to Honey, who constantly follows him and nestles at
his side, does God "create animals with these natural tendencies and then
condemn them as thoroughly reprehensible?"

A Male Feminist Who Cites Tradition

In the same audacious manner, he is a leading Muslim feminist, challenging
puritanical positions that women must be fully veiled and obey their husbands
without question or submit to beatings for disobedience. He even urges his
wife, Grace, to lead him in prayer, challenging prevailing Muslim practice of
all-male religious leadership.

Most troubling to his ideological enemies, Abou El Fadl cannot be written off
as a Westernized "Uncle Tom," a term puritans use to dismiss American Muslims
with similar open views. His work is painstakingly grounded in classical
Islamic sources, they acknowledge, giving him the ability to defend his
modern interpretations with a dizzying command of ancient traditions.

For example, in a book published this year challenging Saudi legal rulings on
women--barring them from freely wearing bras or high heels, for
instance--Abou El Fadl read 350 sources, some of them ancient Islamic texts
that are virtually impenetrable to the untrained Muslim.

His book, "Speaking in God's Name," has outraged puritans, prompting Din's
international student group to declare that it will organize demonstrations
against the work in London and elsewhere.

But to fans such as Asma Gull Hasan, author of "American Muslims: The New
Generation," Abou El Fadl gives feminists like her the courage and
intellectual firepower to resist what she calls the growing influence of
puritans in mosques and on college campuses.

"They are making Islam a religion of shame, guilt and oppression," says
Hasan, 25, bemoaning puritan exhortations to avoid non-Muslims, MTV and, for
women, uncovered heads. "Without someone of Khaled's caliber to speak out
against them, many more Muslims would feel we have to accept their positions,
and we might turn away from the religion."

Abou El Fadl has also worked with international human rights groups, blowing
the whistle on such practices as the widespread rape of Southeast Asian maids
in Muslim countries throughout the Persian Gulf.

He has helped document abuses in Sudan, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Israel, Algeria,
Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. As a result, he says, he can no longer travel
to Egypt, even as his relatives are aging and asking to see him to say a last
goodbye.

As a lawyer in the United States, he has taken on highly sensitive cases,
such as a suit against an American Muslim leader's son for leaving a woman
pregnant and in debt in apparent violation of an oral marriage contract. And
he frequently serves as an expert witness to help victims of religious
persecution obtain political asylum here.

On a recent afternoon, he took the witness stand in the Los Angeles courtroom
of federal immigration-law Judge Richard D. Walton. Wagih Wadie, an Egyptian
bank teller and member of the Coptic Christian church, was seeking political
asylum, telling the judge he was tortured by Egyptian security police on
trumped-up charges of defaming Islam and causing fitna, or national disunity,
last year. His only crime, Wadie asserted, was offending an influential
Muslim by refusing to cash his check.

When Abou El Fadl took the stand, he testified about the Egyptian
government's record of torture and the plausibility of the petitioner's fears
of persecution. Walton granted asylum.

"I don't know any other Muslim who sticks his neck out like he does," says
Wadie's attorney, Roni Deutsch. He says Abou El Fadl's testimony is so
authoritative that it nearly always clinches court victories, yet comes
either free or at just a fraction of the $500 hourly going rate.

"I don't know anybody who does what he does in any religion. He doesn't have
an agenda. He does this because he believes it is right."

Abou El Fadl says he does this, in part, because he has been on the other
side. He says he was persecuted by security forces in the Mideast in the
1980s after writing pro-democracy articles and poems. (He asks that the name
of the country not be printed for fear of retribution against relatives.)
Advised to flee, he stood in line at the U.S. Embassy praying for a student
visa.

"I made a promise to God that if you allow me to be where I can speak without
fear, I will never shut up," he says. "Now it's been 20 years, and I've kept
my bargain."

A Cocky Boy Learns to Overcome Arrogance

Abou El Fadl is physically frail, popping 36 pills a day for maladies ranging
from osteoporosis to asthma. He speaks in a soft voice and sometimes avoids
direct eye contact. He can boyishly haul his family to video arcades to shoot
down zombies in "House of the Dead." He is the quintessential absent-minded
professor who doesn't drive, can't remember his address, took two years to
learn his phone number and once wore his son's pint-sized tie to class,
vaguely wondering why students kept grinning.

All this belies an extravagant overachiever.

He memorized the Koran at age 12, but says his real learning began after his
rebellion against his parents as a seventh-grader.

His father, a lawyer from a family with a long tradition of Islamic learning,
challenged his cocky son to test his expertise in a religion class at a local
mosque. The class was on shariah, Islamic law, taught Socratic-style, and
Abou El Fadl says the other students--both girls and boys--demolished him.
Crushed, he ran home, dived under his bed and cried.

"Is the solution for you to cry? Or learn?" his father admonished him. "If
anyone can learn it is you. Your only stupidity is your arrogance."

For the next decade, Abou El Fadl spent four hours each day after school, all
weekend and every summer in Egypt learning the Islamic classics at the feet
of such celebrated sheiks as Muhammad Al-Ghazali, a world-renowned proponent
of moderate Islamic revivalism.

He spoke broken English when he arrived at Yale in 1982. Four years later, he
graduated magna cum laude and won the prestigious Scholar of the House award
for exceptionally gifted students.

Next was a law degree in 1989 from the University of Pennsylvania and a
first-place award in the national Jessup Moot Court Competition. He clerked
for the Arizona Supreme Court and worked in commercial and immigration law.
He became a naturalized American citizen.

In 1998, he completed his doctorate in Islamic law at Princeton, where he
earned a perfect grade point average, nabbed a prestigious writing award and
won Best Dissertation for a paper on "Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law."

Abou El Fadl was teaching at the University of Texas in Austin when Irene
Bierman of UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies went to scout him out in
1998 for a new chair in Islamic law. Bierman says his chief attraction was
his rare combination of a doctorate and a law degree, Western and Islamic
training, legal experience and prolific academic scholarship.

To Muslim philanthropists Omar and Esmeralda Alfi, who have pledged a
$1-million endowment to finance the chair, Abou El Fadl presented the perfect
candidate.

"People say there is a conflict between modernity and tradition, but Khaled
is able to get the most liberal thoughts from a very old tradition because of
his deep knowledge and the awesome amount of reading he does," Esmeralda Alfi
says.

Library Illustrates Vast Traditions

Abou El Fadl's most important weapon is books. They line the walls of his
home, fill an entire room on the second floor and spill out into another
detached room outside. His annual book budget is more than $60,000. His
entire collection surpasses 40,000 volumes on law, theology, sociology,
philosophy, history, literature.

His mother, Afaf El Nimr, says her eldest son was drawn to the written word
from the time he was 3, every day spreading out the newspaper and studying it
in deep concentration.

By the time he was 9, he had begun reading his father's tomes on Winston
Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru.
Young Khaled would sell off his underwear to raise money for more books,
according to his mother.

The 10,000 volumes in his Islamic law library illustrate the vastness of the
faith's traditions--and some of its problems. The collection, some of its
items eight centuries old, includes writings from every school of thought in
the majority Sunni and minority Shiite traditions, some extinct. They run the
gamut from works by Muslims whom Abou El Fadl reveres, such as the 11th
century Baghdad jurist Ibn 'Aqil, to those by writers he abhors, such as Omar
Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik serving a life sentence in connection with the
1993 World Trade Center bombing.

"Imagine how many intellects are deposited in here," he says, "how many
glimpses of perception."

He agonizes over a rising tide of censorship. He blames it directly on the
1970s rise in oil prices that gave Saudi Arabia the financial resources to
control the Islamic book market and propagate the nation's puritan creed.

During a recent trip to an Arabic bookstore in Anaheim, he pointed out
numerous books banned in the Mideast, including such classics as "1001
Nights" and other books on theories of human rights, homosexuality and
Islam, and a treatise on Sufism.

Abou El Fadl's own books--he published four in just the last year--are banned
in Saudi Arabia, although Din of the opposition student group says bootleg
translations are making the rounds in Medina and scandalizing devout Muslims
there.

Recently, Abou El Fadl says, puritan Muslims have even begun cleansing the
sacred texts of passages they deem offensive. He exposes the practice in an
essay, "Corrupting God's Book," citing as one example a popular English
translation of the Koran, widely distributed in the United States, that he
says skews the Arabic text to claim women must cover their entire body except
for one or both eyes.

"The agony of the Muslim plight in the modern world cannot be expressed
either in words or tears," Abou El Fadl writes in the piece, published this
year in a collection of critical essays titled "Conference of the Books."
"What can one say about those people who, in their utter ignorance and
maniacal arrogance, subjugate even the word of God to ugliness and
deformities?"

Some Muslims are offended by such searing self-criticism, believing that it
only aids enemies of Islam. Others, such as University of Michigan Islamic
studies professor S. Abdal-Hakim Jackson, say Abou El Fadl's boldness is
needed, but they worry that it alienates the very audience the scholar is
trying to reform. Still others embrace the candor as a sign of the Muslim
community's maturity.

"You have to be confident in your place in society to begin airing your dirty
laundry," says Rick St. John, a Muslim convert and Los Angeles attorney who
believes that Abou El Fadl is "trying to improve the religion and return it
to something better and beautiful."

On his good days, such comments encourage Abou El Fadl to believe that he is
making a difference. On his bad days, when he encounters death threats,
back-stabbing, censorship or indifference from his fellow Muslims, he is
plaintive in his pain.

"I am so lonely," he blurted out one night. "God gave me this affliction of
law. I learned all of it, and there is nothing I can do with it, and if I
don't preserve it, it will die."

He needs to pray. It is 1:25 a.m. In the darkened silence, for more than an
hour, he offers supplication to his creator, moving his lips in silent
worship. Then he rises. He kisses the Koran, touches it to his forehead and
lets out a soft whisper.

"And everything looks beautiful again."

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

ISLAMIC TERMS

Sunni Muslim: A follower of the main branch of Islam, which accepts the
legitimacy of the four "rightly guided" caliphs who were the companions and
immediate successors of the Prophet Muhammad: Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab,
Uthman ibn Affan and Ali ibn Abi Talib.

Shiite Muslim: Historically, a follower of those who called for the rulership
of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the prophet's cousin, after the prophet's death. Today,
the Shiites constitutes the second-largest branch of Islam after the Sunnis.

Sufi Muslim: Those who seek to achieve higher degrees of spiritual excellence
or pursue Islamic mysticism.

Wahhabi: A follower of the strict teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Adherents,
who object to the terms Wahhabism and Wahhabi, say they observe the "one true
Islam." They are hostile to the intercession of saints, visiting tombs of
saints, Sufism, Shiite Muslims and rational methods of deducing law. The
creed dominates in Saudi Arabia.

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