THE LIBERAL MUSLIM OUTLOOK: KHALED ABOU EL FADL

THE LIBERAL MUSLIM OUTLOOK: KHALED ABOU EL FADL

After the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, many Muslim writers and scholars of a liberal persuasion came forward to denounce its perpetrators. They wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from what in the West has been called “radical Islam.” Liberals also emphasized that they share key assumptions with Western thinkers, such as the notion of progress that underlies much of modern Western thought.

Khaled Abou El Fadl is an excellent guide to the liberal Muslim orientation. His 2005 work The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists clarifies the nature of Islam, focusing on its social and political dimensions as well as theological matters. He believes that mainstream Islam is compatible with the modern world.

Abou El Fadl was born in Kuwait in 1963, received thirteen years of rigorous training in Islamic law, grammar, and rhetoric in Egypt and Kuwait, and was awarded a doctorate in Islamic law from Princeton University. He has taught at UCLA since 1998 and is the founder of the Usuli Institute, focusing on ethics, aesthetics, and critical thinking in the Islamic intellectual tradition.

The Modern Decline of Islam

In Abou El Fadl’s view, Western colonialism and its aftermath have greatly contributed to the modern decline of Islam. He sees an ongoing battle for the soul of Islam between moderates and extremists (puritans). In this contest, the clergy has not merely been a conservative force holding back social progress; it has had a positive social impact, serving to check the arbitrary power of military leaders and bureaucrats.

The institutions ensuring that only highly qualified scholars would speak on religious subjects of importance have been gravely weakened since colonial times. Military defeats at the hands of Western powers led to jurists’ loss of status, and the place of Islamic law in Muslim societies diminished once Western-style legal systems and lawyers became entrenched. At the same time, the state took over the endowments that financed religious schools, leading to the demise of many of them.

As religious scholars came under increasing state control and their training became more and more limited, they lost their ability to provide intellectual leadership. The resulting vacuum of religious authority was often filled by popular movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaida under the leadership of poorly trained and insufficiently educated men.

The Muslim Brotherhood

Abou El Fadl maintains that the real intellectual decline within Islam took place not in medieval times but with the advent of colonialism. Under the leadership of jurists employing rational methods of textual interpretation, medieval Islam remained vibrant. The decline in the status of Islam and the disappearance of religious autonomy have made it easy for self-proclaimed jurists to interpret the Islamic heritage in simplistic terms and for political leaders to use Islamic symbols to increase mass appeal. Demagogues have used Islam as a symbol of power to compensate for the actual feelings of powerlessness and weakness that prevail among their followers. Furthermore, their religious populist message attracts the masses who have lost faith in traditional authority, whether secular or religious.

Contemporary Challenges to the Islamic World

The Islamic world today is facing two related challenges: the attempt by puritans to turn Islam into an authoritarian and intolerant religion that can justify an anti-Western political orientation and the aggressive export of modern culture from the West. Although the first challenge is internal and the second external, they are not really separate. The militant puritan groups are populist movements that have reacted to widespread Muslim feelings of disempowerment in modern times due to harsh and despotic rulers, as well as the interventions of foreign powers.

Abou El Fadl does not see the distance between Western and Islamic cultures as insurmountable. The Islamic tradition upholds the right of all people to dignity and freedom and considers any form of oppression an offense against God; it is compatible with democracy and tolerates diverse viewpoints. Most Muslims respect the achievements of the West and appreciate the academic freedom and sense of civic duty found there. It is the foreign policy of Western nations, and of the United States, in particular, that draws their criticism.

Although Abou El Fadl recognizes that modern secular movements threaten the very existence of religion, he thinks the appropriate response is for religions to demonstrate their ability to make decisive contributions to human betterment and welfare within the modern world’s universal structures. His acceptance of modernity, however, does not mean he is a secularist in the sense of upholding the strict separation of mosque and state. Religion can play a positive public role so long as it is tolerant and does not oppress those with different views.

The vast majority of moderate Muslims judge Western ideas about them to be inaccurate and objectionable; they take strong exception to the view that there is a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. In their eyes, it makes no sense to maintain that Western and Islamic civilizations are opposites in terms of their basic values, with the West upholding democratic principles and Muslims supporting anti-democratic ideologies like those advanced by the puritans.

Abou El Fadl points out that many Muslims long for democratic governments, and Muslim intellectuals often accuse the US of keeping despotic governments in power because they are aligned with American strategic interests. This Western stance has great propaganda value for puritans, since it gives credibility to their claim that the West is unalterably opposed to Islam and out to destroy it.

Extremist Groups in Islam

Abou El Fadl, in The Place of Tolerance in Islam (2002), gives a brief but powerful answer to the question of whether there really is a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. The West uses Islam as an “other” upon whom everything that the West believes it is not can be projected: collective rights, intolerance, despotism, and legalism. Abou El Fadl admits that in the case of Muslims like Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, their theologies do come close to the caricatures of Islam that are popular in the West. But such extremist groups are not representative of Islam. They are puritans who would like to destroy all those who do not live in accordance with their interpretation of God’s law. Thus, their theology takes on a political and cultural flavor.

Such extremist groups have existed historically within Islam, although they have always been tamed and harnessed. But the institutional mechanisms for marginalizing such groups from the Islamic mainstream are no longer present. Islam is facing an unprecedented situation: its civilization has crumbled, and its traditional institutions have decayed. The independent jurists who were once the guardians of Islam have been turned into employees of the centralized state, and it is not clear who now speaks for Islam. In Islamic countries where religion plays a central public and cultural role, this loss of authority and legitimacy on the part of religious scholars is highly troubling and of major importance.

Contemporary extremist groups have not assumed religious authority within the Islamic world. But they do reflect puritanical trends within Islam, such as Wahhabism, whose influence in recent years is cause for concern. After the rise in oil prices during the 1970s, Saudi Arabia aggressively exported Wahhabism to the rest of the Islamic world. The doctrinal basis for such puritanical orthodoxy is that there is only one true Islam, that of the original teachings of the Prophet, and the Islamic practices that follow are all deviations from the correct path. They deny that divine law must be interpreted within the historical circumstances and context from which it derived, and, in Saudi Arabia, they have imposed their conservative culture upon Islam’s textual sources.

The disempowerment that many Muslims feel has made Islamic extremist movements violent and fanatical. There have been two major forms of disempowerment: the oppression of the people at the hands of dictatorial governments and their victimization by foreign powers that have dominated the region. The extremist groups using terror tactics have tried to deal with outsiders in a supremacist manner. They are populists whose only recourse has been to engage in symbolic acts of power that attempt to compensate for their actual disempowerment.

The Holy Quran

A Tolerant Islam

Abou El Fadl insists on interpreting Islam as tolerant and supportive of diversity rather than repressive and exclusive. Extremist groups have interpreted Quranic verses in isolation and without reference to the historical context and the moral sense of the believer. The result is a series of legal commands that take on a technical quality and lack any connection with a historically and morally grounded Islam.

A good example of such an impoverished reading of the Quranic texts concerns the meaning of jihad. In the Western media, jihad has assumed the meaning of a holy war that is fought against unbelievers under the banner of God. Yet, “Islamic tradition does not have a notion of holy war. Jihad simply means to strive hard or struggle in pursuit of a just cause, and according to the Prophet of Islam, the highest form of jihad is the struggle waged to cleanse oneself from the vices of the heart.”

Muslim theologians and the Quranic text do not use this expression because holy wars do not exist. Wars can be justified based on moral criteria, and it is only those who die in battle for a just cause that deserve to be called martyrs. Being a Muslim does not automatically mean that justice is on your side. Nor can Muslims engage in armed struggle without just cause. Just cause means to defend oneself against aggression, but even in this case, Muslims must respond in proportion to the offense against them and no more.

Abou El Fadl recognizes that there have been Muslim jurists who took an imperialist position and established a dichotomy between the world of believers and the world of war. These jurists justified war against nonbelievers. Yet this view is counter to the Quran’s statements against unlimited warfare and disproportional responses to aggression. Jurists held various positions on this issue, the subject of considerable debate in classical times.

The interpretation of the text will only be as good as the interpreter. When the moral level of the reader is inadequate (inhumane, intolerant, oppressive), then the interpretation of the text will show the same failings. Texts, including Islamic ones, offer possibilities for interpretation. This opportunity enables flexible responses to historical conditions, but also leaves open the possibility that the interpreter may not be equal to the task of interpretation.

In Abou El Fald’s judgment, the fanatical puritans of today are examples of moral failure. The notion of an intolerant Islam is at odds with the spirit of classical Islamic civilization, characterized by a moral and humanistic tradition. It kept Greek philosophy alive while advancing the sciences, arts, and humanities. The modern puritans are responsible for weakening the spirit that once inspired a great civilization, leading people to no longer view the Islamic tradition as tolerant and morally progressive.