“Colonized Muslims,” such as “immigrant Muslims, don’t like their own race” and “have learned to covet whiteness,” stated UCLA’s Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Professor of Law Khaled Abou El Fadl during a recent webinar. Speaking with Stanford University Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies associate director Farah El-Sharif, the “liberal” Abou El Fadl further documented his unsettling sharia apologetics.
The webinar focused on Abou El Fadl’s new book, The Prophet’s Pulpit: Commentaries on the State of Islam. As Sharif noted, the book chapters developed out of his past mosque sermons or khutbahs, whose frank nature he contrasted with khutbahs subjected to censorious political pressures throughout Islamic history. “Islamic history is full of narratives of jurists that are persecuted because they don’t say the right thing in the Friday sermon,” which “has always been a contested political/religious/cultural space,” he stated.
A “basic tenet” in the Middle East is not “to allow that space to be articulated out of the control of the state,” Abou El Fadl explained, and in Egypt, the “state literally writes the sermon” for imams to read, a “suffocating dynamic.” Even in Western countries such as the United States, “significantly self-censored” imams avoid a “series of taboo topics” lest they “become a pariah in institutional circles,” he added, leaving people to worry just what exactly unleashed imams might say. After listening over thirty years to “entirely safe” American sermons, “my general experience is that I’m bored out of my skull.”
Sharif noted how Abou El Fadl discussed Islamic sharia law as a “boogeyman” in the book. Here Abou El Fadl claimed to distinguish how a “historical, technical sharia, a product of the legal mind, coexists with” a “normative, ethical system about how to integrate divinity into human life.” Aspects of sharia such as its brutal hudud corporal punishments are “medieval . . . premodern means . . . foreign to the modern consciousness” and “it doesn’t surprise me that it would elicit such a panicked response,” he explained.
Despite egregious historical human rights abuses under sharia, including slavery and subjugation of non-Muslim dhimmis such as Jews, Abou El Fadl asserted a deeper humane essence in sharia underneath harsh formal legalisms. He found “very frustrating about modern Muslim sharia discourses” that “it often sounds like superimposing the technical language that existed in one age upon another in highly artificial ways that just seem unreal.” By contrast, Islam should be a “theology of protest against injustice and against oppression.”
Yet the devil is clearly in the disturbing details of Abou El Fadl’s “theology of protest” as Sharifnoted to him how “you in the book meticulously turn our attention to grave ‘Islamophobic’ human rights violations.” This included the “persecution of Muslims in Jerusalem who are unable to pray in peace during Ramadan,” she said, a common anti-Israel canard reflecting Abou El Fadl’s animus, even as Israel has protected Jerusalem’s holy sites despite Muslim violence. She also reflected anti-Indian Islamist propaganda with the falsehood that “we are reaching the pinnacle of the condition for Muslims in India that is bordering on genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
Sharif’s accusations complemented Abou El Fadl’s absurd description of a post-Cold War Western “aggressive reassertion of modern forms of colonialism, of colonizing Muslim societies” that “very openly seeks to reengineer Islam.” Egyptian dictator Abdul El-Fattah Sisi, for example, often speaks of “renewing Islamic thought,” but in “everything he says, it’s clear that his audience is not his fellow Muslims, it’s the West,” Abou El Fadl claimed, as if socioreligious reform did not concern Muslims. Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) is “even reengineering Mecca along the lines that are consistent with Western market values,” Fadl asserted without any explanation of what this means or why it is wrong.
Meanwhile under President George W. Bush, policymakers including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had the objective “that Islam stops being a problem” with concerns about the “rights of its indigenous population,” Abou El Fadl claimed. The only “indigenous” people he mentioned in this context were his ever-victimized Palestinians, who have never abandoned their longstanding jihad to destroy Israel. Then “Islam basically says no problem, go ahead, take whatever you want . . . as long as you continue allowing us to enjoy McDonalds and Burger King, whatever,” he stated, as if Muslims in a globalized world are somehow sellouts.
The West’s supposed evils also featured prominently in Abou El Fadl’s skewed discussion of racism among Muslims. “Core to the Prophet’s message was the rejection of racism,” Abou El Fadl stated while ignoring many racially charged statements attributed to Islam’s prophet Muhammad, as well as racist views of the medieval Muslim chronicler Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). Yet Abou El Fadl accurately bemoaned the fact that “many Muslims will have a problem to marry their child to someone who is dark-skinned.”
Responsibility for this paradox for Abou El Fadl absurdly lay with humanistic Western civilization, for many Muslims “unfortunately in the postcolonial era are deeply racist.” They “want Islam to become a white religion, because in their mind that’s progress,” a “part of the modern advanced world,” he argued, without any indication of what he envisages as a “white religion.” This “complete undermining of what Islam is” is “shameful,” he stated, again without specifying what is so depraved about Muslims in the West.
However enlightened Abou El Fadl or his followers might fancy him, anti-Western animus belies his otherwise appealing sentiments such as his rejection of Islamic death-by-stoning punishments. He continues to castigate Western countries as well as Israel as the source of Muslim ills among peoples such as the Palestinians, rather than recognizing their own responsibilities. Meanwhile he decries Muslim assimilation in the West as having crossed some indeterminate boundary line of Islamic authenticity. Well-endowed at places such as Stanford, the field of Middle East studies, a discipline that has emerged in the West precisely because of its commitment to critical inquiry, should spare itself Abou El Fadl’s rants.
