ABOU EL FADL, Khaled 1963-

PERSONAL:

Born October 23, 1963 in Kuwait City, Kuwait; immigrated to United States, 1982, naturalized citizen; son of Medhat and Ataf (El Nimr) El Fadl; married Sanoa Al Marayoti (divorced October 1993); children: Cherif. Education: Yale University, B.A. (cum laude), 1986; University of Pennsylvania, J.D., 1989; Princeton University, Ph.D., 1996.

ADDRESSES:

Office—University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, Box 951476, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1476. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Lawyer, educator. Admitted to the Bar of Pennsylvania and New Jersey; Dashti and Abou El Fadl Law Office, Kuwait, legal assistant, 1981-82; associated with Immigration Law Clinic, Legal Services, Inc., Philadelphia, PA, 1987-88; University of Pennsylvania Law School, Philadelphia, research assistant, 1988; associated with Pennsylvania Legal Assistance Office, 1988, 1989; clerk to Justice James Moeller, Arizona Supreme Court, Phoenix, AZ, 1989-90; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Near East Department, teacher assistant, 1992, Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies, managing editor, 1993—; Yale Law School, New Haven, CT, lecturer, 1994-95; University of Texas, Austin, assistant professor, 1995-98; University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Fellow in Islamic Law, UCLA School of Law, 1998—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Yale University, Scholar of the House award, 1986; Jessup Moot Court Competition, first place, 1989.

WRITINGS:

The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses: A Contemporary Case Study, Dar Taiba (Austin, TX), 1997, revised and enlarged edition published as And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 2001.

Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 2001.

(With others) The Place of Tolerance in Islam, edited by Joshua Cohen and Ian Lague, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 2002.

(With others) Democracy and Islam in the New Constitution of Afghanistan, edited by Cheryl Bernard and Nina Hachigian, RAND (Santa Monica, CA), 2003.

Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, edited by Joshua Cohen and Deborah Chasman, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

A renowned expert in Islamic legal studies, Khaled Abou El Fadl has practiced law in both Kuwait and the United States, and currently serves as the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Fellow in Islamic Law at the UCLA School of Law. Through his lectures and writings, Abou El Fadl has earned a reputation as a vociferous critic of the fundamentalist strain in Islam, particularly in the Wahhabi sect, which holds sway in Saudi Arabia and in many Islamic centers funded by Saudi donations throughout the world. This stance in turn has earned him numerous death threats, a ban on his writings in Saudi Arabia, and Egypt's refusal to approve his visa applications. "Before September 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," noted Los Angeles Times reporter Teresa Watanabe.

For Abou El Fadl, the struggle is deeply personal. As Watanabe put it, "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." He memorized the Koran by the age of twelve, and used it to justify his attacks on all nonbelievers and backsliders. By his own estimate, he was a bully who beat up other students, destroyed his sister's pop music tapes, and denounced his parents as infidels. Then his father challenged him to undertake a rigorous study of the faith he claimed to preach. Attending classes at a mosque four hours a day, and spending summers in Egypt studying the Islamic classics, Abou El Fadl discovered an Islam that transcended his strict, authoritarian views. Inspired by these teachings, he wrote a number of pro-Democracy articles that soon got him into trouble with local security forces. In 1982, he immigrated to the United States on a student visa, where he has lived ever since and has become a naturalized citizen. "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 told the Los Angeles Times.

He has kept that vow, through his work as an expert witness at numerous immigration and human rights hearings, and through a number of books that have cemented his reputation for both scholarship and a passionate devotion to a more liberal, open-minded version of Islam. In The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses: A Contemporary Case Study, Abou El Fadl explored the implications of a Muslim basketball player's refusal to stand for the national anthem. What particularly intrigued him was an e-mailed fatwa issued by an obscure Muslim group that purported to instruct Muslims on how to properly view the case, raising the question, Who speaks for Islam? "The work allows the specialist as well as the generalist access to a compelling American Muslim case study, with the highlight of a condensed, readable lesson on a millennium of Islamic legal thought," wrote a reviewer for the Journal of Law and Religion. This study was later expanded and published as And God Knows the Soldiers, which Choice reviewer L. H. Mamiya commended as "a brilliant use of the traditions of Islamic jurisprudence in arguing for an anti-authoritarian and anti-elitist position in Islamic hermeneutics."

Abou El Fadl followed this with a more systematic treatment of these questions of authority in Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law, which explores the views of pre-modern Islamic jurists on the legality of rebellion, the treatment of rebels, and the use of such tactics as assassination and attacks on noncombatants designed to induce terror. Middle East magazine reviewer Fred Rhodes called it a "challenging book which sheds light on Islamic law and pre-modern attitudes to dissidence and violence."

Much of Abou El Fadl's reputation rests on his mastery of both ancient and modern Islamic texts. His personal library includes over 40,000 volumes on Islamic history, law, theology, and philosophy, including some over 800 years old. They range over the entire spectrum of Islamic thought, from the most tolerant to the most extremist. In Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam he imagines a meeting of these many books to discuss the present state of Islam, and in 62 essays he engages various intellectual trends in Islamic history in an attempt to find answers to various moral quandaries that confront contemporary Muslims. At the same time he seeks to highlight a neglected Islamic value—the value of beauty.

While he has earned respect for this wide-ranging scholarship, not everyone agrees with Abou El Fadl's conclusions, and in The Place of Tolerance in Islam he opens himself up to his critics. The book opens with the title essay, written by Abou El Fadl, followed by eleven responses written by supporters and bitter opponents, and a concluding essay in which Abou El Fadl responds to his critics. "The overall effect of the three sections is quite unexpected; the reader becomes engaged in a dialogue with each writer, realizing with each essay the complexity of the problems facing modern Muslims," wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Similarly, Booklist reviewer Ray Olson commended it as "an excellent place to start grappling with the problems of contemporary Islam vis-a-vis the West."

Khaled Abou El Fadl sums up his own mission in the opening essay, "The Place of Tolerance in Islam": "If we assess the moral trajectory of a civilization in light of its past record, then we have ample reason to be optimistic about the future. But the burden and blessing of sustaining that moral trajectory—of accentuating the Qur'anic message of tolerance and openness to the other—falls squarely on the shoulders of contemporary Muslim interpreters of the tradition."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 15, 2002, Ray Olson, review of The Place of Tolerance in Islam, p. 365.

Choice, March, 2000, L. H. Mamiya, review of And God Knows the Soldiers, p. 1254.

Journal of Law and Religion, winter, 2000, review of The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses: A Contemporary Case Study, pp. 397-398.

Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2002, Teresa Watanabe, "Battling Islamic 'Puritans,'" p. A1.

Middle East, April, 2002, Fred Rhodes, review of Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law, p. 40; spring, 2003, Sam Brannen, review of The Place of Tolerance in Islam, p. 364.

Publishers Weekly, October 28, 2002, review of The Place of Tolerance in Islam, p. 67.*