NEEDED : A MUSLIM MARTIN LUTHER :

Defender of the Faith : Khaled Abou El Fadl (Jay Tolson, US News)

To understand why UCLA law Prof. Khaled Abou El Fadl has become a thorn in the side of reactionary Muslims around the world, you might begin with a personal detail: He likes dogs. The Kuwait-born scholar, a devout Muslim, not only likes them but has three as pets. Why is that a big deal? According to one Islamic tradition, the prophet Mohammed declared dogs "unclean" and therefore, many strict Muslims infer, fit only for strictly utilitarian uses, like guarding the house or protecting the flocks.

Abou El Fadl's rejection of the kind of rigid legalism that declares man's best friend unfit for human companionship is no whim: It is based on a deep understanding of Islamic law. And it is precisely his advocacy of a broad-minded, critical approach that has earned the wrath of so many of his less tolerant co-religionists.[...]

[A]bou El Fadl's six books go to the heart of the question facing modern Islam: What is the place of Muslim religious law in everyday life? As Harvardhistorian Roy Mottahedeh puts it, "Abou El Fadl is asking the question that people are interested in: how you can get from a divine Scripture to a principle that creates law according to the spirit of the Scripture rather than the literal legal meanings." [...]

Some scholars argue that the literal legalism that Abou El Fadl challenges has been the consensus view of most Muslims since the 19th century and is not just the product of recent Wahhabi proselytizing. "My view is that Khaled is a brilliant legal scholar but a self-interested historian," says Islam expert John Voll of Georgetown University. Abou El Fadl does not deny that traditional Islam began to suffer in the colonial period. But he says his greater concern is with the future. If Muslims do not recover the critical and questioning spirit of the much older traditions of Islamic jurisprudence, sharia-based law, he believes, not only will be incompatible with human rights, but it simply won't work. Even in Saudi Arabia, as he points out, members of the royal family either privately ignore the law as they wish or observe the letter and flout the spirit. He believes that Iran is closer to developing a critical, adaptive notion of sharia than Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Sudan.

"I just hope the conservatives don't break that spirit," he says, "because if they do, then the hope of Islamic civilization is lost."

It's becoming commonplace to say that this kind of Reform is simply impossible in Islam. If it is, then Islamic civilization truly is doomed. But if folks like Mr. El Fadl can show that it is possible to reconcile the religion of Islam with a "broader" understanding of what Islam requires under the auspices of the law and politics, perhaps they can offer an honorable way out of the self-destructive dead end that the Islamic world is currently hurtling down. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 24, 2002 12:00 PM