In "UCLA's Professor of Fantasy" in the American Thinker, December 24, Cinnamon Stillwell and Eric Golub expose one of the most egregious academic liars and Islamic apologists on the scene today: Khaled Abou El Fadl, who a few years back said he was willing to "risk his reputation" on his prediction that there would be anti-Muslim hate crimes because of the Crusades movie Kingdom of Heaven (there weren't, of course; so much for his reputation):
The Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) at the University of California, Los Angeles and the UCLA School of Law's Journal for Islamic and Near Eastern Law co-sponsored a lecture (podcast available here) last month by Khaled Abou El Fadl, chair of the Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program, with the vague title "Shari'ah Watch: A View from the Inside."The flyer for the lecture promised "an informed discussion about Shariah and its role and impact in the West," yet Abou El Fadl delivered neither. Instead, his audience of 35 -- comprising mostly seniors and left-wing students -- witnessed a meandering, repetitive lecture that had little or nothing to do with the stated premise. Indeed, despite acknowledging the growth of Westerners' interest in Shariah in the wake of 9/11, Abou El Fadl expressed surprise that an intelligent person would find it a remotely interesting topic: "It's exciting for me, but it's rarely exciting for people who do not relish medieval legal discourses ... to say the least it's a rather odd position to suddenly find Shariah jumping into public discourses in the West."
What is odd is why more Middle East studies professors don't relish the opportunity to condemn the medieval practices sanctioned by Shariah -- stonings, beheadings, honor killings, and execution for apostasy, for starters.
Instead, Abou El Fadl spent over fifteen minutes describing alleged acts of violence worldwide against Muslims by non-Muslims, a trend he ascribed to "the effect of the Islamophobic hate tract."
When he did get around to discussing Shariah, it was only to claim that its detractors were motivated by bigotry:
We look at the history of anti-Islamic discourse, particularly in my field, a discourse in which Shariah is flattened to be a symbol of barbarism. ... This is what Edward Said responded to in his famous book, Orientalism. I describe it as a civil anti-Muslim discourse.Actually, most of its critics merely want to stay alive, for it turns out that barbarism does indeed come with the territory.
In what would come to constitute the bulk of his lecture, Abou El Fadl launched into a litany against what he called a "frenzy of self-appointed experts" -- individuals who have dared to criticize Shariah and who have opposed its implementation in the West:
[There is] a battle over the authority, legitimacy -- in academia, especially -- over who gets to speak for Shariah in the West. ... The various discourses that we find from the Steven Emersons, the Robert Spencers, the Daniel Pipes, countless 'watch' folks, the Jihad Watch folks -- various pseudo-experts on whatever they wish to be experts on. ... The idea is these people [Muslims] don't even respect each other's lives, so how can you expect them to respect anyone else's life? Now this fundamental message of Islam, which is argued to have been from the start to this day: one can politely ignore it, but the fact remains that it is a violent, totalitarian, dominating ideology.In fact, it's the apologist discourse emanating from the Abou El Fadls of the world that is the "dominating ideology" in universities across the country.
Abou El Fadl then proceeded to examine quotes by writers he believes exemplifies this alarming "discourse" and to which he attributed "serious consequences" and "challenges to the post-humanist ethos." They included Bruce Bawer, Michael Savage, Mark Steyn, Glenn Beck, and, again, Islam scholar Robert Spencer, who, El Fadl claimed:
[j]ust made $4,000,000 dollars last year. ... A lecture like this with him would cost the sponsors $10,000. Islam bashing is very lucrative. Shariah bashing ... is also extremely lucrative.To make $4,000,000 at $10,000 per speech would require four hundred speeches per year. When contacted by the authors for comment, Spencer confirmed that "I have never made $4,000,000 in a year, or anything close to it. I have never charged $10,000 for a talk, or anything close to it. Khaled Abou El Fadl is lying outright."
This statement points to Abou El Fadl's making things up -- shocking behavior for a professor of law at a leading research university. And it didn't stop there. Abou El Fadl went on to paraphrase a quote from one of Spencer's books:
Spencer summed it up: 'Sure, there are violent quotes in the Bible, but the difference is Muslims don't have an interpretative tradition.' ... But that's what being a Shariah scholar is all about: an interpretative tradition.To which Spencer has responded:
I never said that. I said that they don't have an interpretative tradition that mitigates the literal force of the Qur'anic verses inciting to violence. Obviously they have an interpretative tradition; I discuss it at length in several books.
Daniel Pipes responds here, and says that Stillwell and Golub "pay particular attention to Abou El Fadl's false statements about Robert Spencer and Steven Emerson - that's the 'fantasy' in the title. His falsehoods about them are so egregious, they deserve to get Abou El Fadl sacked."
Indeed.
I recommend buying El-Fadl's book, "The Search for Beauty of Islam," since it exposes his Islamist leanings and lies explicitly.
For example, he writes that Ibn Taymiyya was "tortured and imprisoned for [his] insistence on honoring the integrity of the word. [He] lived and died a martyr of the word."
Taymiyya, of course, is blamed by many Islamic apologists (namely Reza Aslan) as the "troublemaker" who inspired the "unIslamic criminal" Osama bin Laden -- see http://revuse.wetpaint.com/page/Book+Review:+How+to+Win+a+Cosmic+War
Taymiyya also calls ibn Kathir an "esteemed classical scholar" and writes that Ibn Kathir "is now considered the orthodoxy on the Qur'an." Ibn Kathir, of course, presents a crystal clear interpretation of Qur'an 9.29, here: http://www.tafsir.com/default.asp?sid=9&tid=20986
According to ibn Kathir, the dhimmis (Jews and Christians under Islamic rule) should feel "disgraced, humiliated, and belittled;" Muslims "are not allowed to honor" them. They are "miserable, disgraced, and humiliated."
And perhaps most shamefully, el fadl's book dedicates an entire melodramatic chapter to none other than Muhammad al-Durrah, the 12 year old child supposedly shot by Israeli troops -- which of course has been demonstrated as completely false. See http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_article=855&x_context=3
Yet in El-Fadl's words, "An Israeli sniper moves into position and shoots Muhammad four times and his father eight times. Muhammad first curls in his father's lap, then slumps to the ground, covers his face with those little hands, and dies... Muhammad, my child, in the embrace of the grave, there is no beauty, only the waste of the life left behind, and the abominations of decay... My son, the truth is that after living through an agonizing terror, you were pointlessly slaughtered."
"It's exciting for me, but it's rarely exciting for people who do not relish medieval legal discourses ... to say the least it's a rather odd position to suddenly find Shariah jumping into public discourses in the West."
Well, we find even older legal discourses in public discussion in the West; such as Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism. These are a major part of the foundations of our civilization. And since the medieval legal discourses of sharia are a good part of the foundations of Islam, and since Islam wants to impose itself on the West, it's not surprising that Westerners should take an interest in Sharia.
Ooops, it's El Fadl (not Taymiyya) who calls ibn Kathir an "esteemed classical scholar" and writes that Ibn Kathir "is now considered the orthodoxy on the Qur'an."
There are many ways to defelect criticism of evil. One of them is to assert that the ideology/intellectual tradition/ legal system, etc., associated with a particular evil is so abstruse, so complicated, that those who criticize it are mere amateurs who don't really possess a sound knowledge of what they're criticizing. Marxists have been doing this for a century and Muslims for fourteen centuries. Thus, the contention by El Fadl that hey, really folks, the only people who should be studying Sharia are those who "relish medieval legal discourses." Huh-uh.
This guy Khaled talks a lot of 'fiddle fadl'.
...and before any of you najis kuffars and Zionist stooges mention the T-word, I can categorically state, without fear of contradiction, that there is no such thing as Taqiyya.
The intellectuality of the typical Muslim intellectual is a form of warfare and violence against the intellect. When someone , in the midst of a supposed debate, simply lies blatantly, and doesn't even care that people know he's lying, he's committing the equivalent of violence, and telling us he has no respect for talking but really respects only violent warfare. He's a warrior only, and that's what he's proud of.
Well, if that's what he wants, we non-Muslims are capable of giving it to him. He should have just said as much at the start.
El Fadl agrees with at least one aspect of harsh classical sharia: He is against a Muslim female marrying a non-Muslim male. Knowing this, I need not waste any further of my time reading his textual camouflage. It's over. We've got him. Just keep hammering on the fact that he is against mixed marriages, until he slips and reveals something more damaging than that.
I have a couple of El Fadl's books. Not one of my other books is so heavily underlined, filled with question marks, arrows to and fro and back and forth ...in short, it is all impenetrable waffle to me. Except that he is in complete denial of many things Islamic that are perfectly clear to me.
Good point.
Khaled Abou El Fadl, who a few years back said he was willing to "risk his reputation" on his prediction that there would be anti-Muslim hate crimes because of the Crusades movie Kingdom of Heaven (there weren't, of course; so much for his reputation)
......................
I didn't see this movie—but from everything I heard about it, there was very little sense that Christianity was any sort of motive behind the Crusades at all. It was presented more as a sort of 'economic opportunity' for young Crusaders. I don't believe Muslim attacks on Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land was mentioned as a motive at all.
Again from I've heard, any excesses of war were carefully apportioned out between Crusaders and Muslims, with Muslims generally appearing if anything morally superior.
More than that, though—even if Kingdom of Heaven had been presented with heroic, chivalrous Crusaders and sneering, evil Saracens—there *still would have been no hate crimes against Muslims as a result*. (Never mind that such a film could never be made in Hollywood today)
Muslims may hold 1000-year grudges, but we in the civilized West *do not*.
...
Notice that Khaled Abou El Fadl, while complaining about "the Steven Emersons, the Robert Spencers, [and] the Daniel Pipes", *never actually refutes any of their assertions* about the brutality of Shari'ah law.