Saudi Arabia Promotes Wahhabism And Militant Islam Not Only In Islamic Countries But Also In Western Countries
New Age Islam Staff Writer
30 June 2023
Egyptian Islamic scholar Abou El Fadl fights Saudi
Wahhabism in the West
Main Points:
1.
Saudi Arabia
Wahhabised once moderate Al Azhar.
2.
It subsidised
publications on militant Islam.
3.
It offered grants of
millions of dollars to scholars promoting Wahhabism.
4.
It supported Al
Qaradawi who defended suicide bombings.
5.
Saudi Arabia granted
millions of dollars to western universities to start 'Arab Studies'.
Abou El Fadl is a scholar of Islam
-----
The story of an Egyptian Islamic scholar Abou El Fadl gives
an insight into the Saudi Arabia's efforts to promote Wahhabism the intolerant
school of Islam, not only in Muslim majority countries but also in the West. To
achieve its objective, it pumps millions of dollars in publication of books on
militant Islam that justifies suicide bombings, on construction of mosques
throughout the world and Islamic Studies Departments in the universities of the
West. On the other hand, the Saudis silence the critics of Wahhabism either by
luring them into its fold by offering large amount of grants or by making them
disappear.
Abou El Fadl is a scholar of Islam who belongs to Cairo of
Egypt and has studied in Yale. He has also studied Islamic jurisprudence and
has done research work on hadith authentication. He believes in the democratic
values of Islam and is worried about the ascendance of Wahhabism not only in
the Islamic countries but also in the West thanks to Saudi money. Ahlal Hadith,
following the Wahhabi ideology was promoted by the Saudi government. Abou El
Fadl belongs to the Usuli school of Islamic thought that is a conservative
tradition and believes that the Islamic sharia should only be built on edicts
that are unambiguously stated in the Quran and the Sunnah. This principle will
minimise the chances of the opinions and interpretations of extremist Islamic
jurists and exegetes being included as Sharia laws. Since, the Quran and Sunnah
do not justify violence, gender discrimination and persecution of minorities,
the militant and intolerant sects and the scholars associated with use the
interpretations of extremist exegetes to justify their militant and intolerant
ideas.
While studying in the US, Abou El Fadl started writing
articles on Islam which were published by a magazine named Minaret. He also
wrote two books: And God Knows, and Speaking in God's Name. His writings
disturbed the Saudi system that had been promoting Wahhabi brand of Islam. He
realised that Islam had been rendered subservient to political expedience. He
started an academic and intellectual campaign against Wahhabism. He became an
active member of an international movement of Muslim intellectuals who opposed
Wahhabism. The group included Egyptian jurist Muhammad Imara, Italian Imam
Abdul Hadi Palazzi and Syrian theologian Mohammad Shebrour.
During these years, he came to know that the renowned
Egyptian theologian Al Qaradawi defended suicide bombings. He participated in a
debate in Qatar along with Al Qaradawi in which he pointed out inconsistencies
in his arguments in favour of suicide bombings. Over the years, Al Azhar
university was turned into a centre of Wahhabi school of Islam and most of
Azharis have become supporters of Wahhabism. Those who do not toe the official
line are expelled on various pretexts. Some are tortured and harassed until
they start supporting militant Islam.
Abou El Fadhl observed that the spread of Wahhabism in the
East and the West was rapid because of huge Saudi money that was difficult to
refuse. Some western scholars like Vogel embraced and taught Wahhabism because
they have no qualms about accepting Saudi money.
Abou El Fadl was tortured for his anti-Wahhabi ideas and for
his books on the topic. In 1985, when he returned to Cairo after finishing his
first year in Yale University, he was picked up by plainclothes policemen and
tortured. He was suspended by the ceiling and for hours and given electric
shock. He was then transferred to a desert prison.
After being released, he returned to the US. But he found
that the Muslim community of the US has also been Wahhabised. The Muslims there
did not tolerate any criticism of the clergy and their militant ideas. This was
thanks to the Saudi money pumped into the universities of the US to promote the
studies of Wahhabism on the pretext of promoting the studies of Islam. For
example, Oxford University got $30 million for its Islamic Studies Centre.in
1994, University of Arkansas got $ 20 million grant to begin King Fahd
Programme for Middle Eastern Studies. U.C. Berkeley got grant of $5 million for
Sultan bin Abdel Aziz Programme for Arab Studies. Harvard University got $5
million for the Chair of Islamic Legal Study chaired by Professor Vogel.
Apart from all this, Saudi Arabia also offers millions of
dollars to scholars to write books on its desired version of Islam. It also
spends huge money on publication of books and on conferences refuting books
against Wahhabism. When Abou El Fadl wrote a book The Sunnah of the Prophet:
Between the Legists and Traditionalists, the Saudi Arabia subsidised the
publication of seven books and held three conferences to trash his arguments
against Wahhabism.
While his stay in the United States, he got offers from
Saudi government to write a book on Islam on the condition that the government
will hold the right to edit. He turned down the offer. Next he was offered
nomination of $2,00,000 King Faisal Award.
When all these efforts of the Saudi government failed, he
started getting death threats from Muslims in the United States. On two
occasions, he was attacked. He feels that the Saudi contribution has
exacerbated the shift in Middle Eastern studies away from critical, secular analyses
of modernisation towards celebration of Islamic civil society.
Today, the West has witnessed a rise in militant Islam
because of the promotion of Wahhabism and extremist Islamic ideology on
university level. Muslims graduating from these universities spread the violent
ideology including the idea of suicide bombing as a means of protest and fight
against injustice. These graduates join Islamic centres and mosques in the US,
Germany, France and elsewhere and preach violence and present the followers of
other religion as the enemies of Islam. Abou El Fadl's story is a case study of
how the Saudi Arabia has spread the violent ideology in the East and the West
with the power of its oil and tarnished the image of Islam.
-----
By Franklin Foer
November 18, 2002
The death threats began shortly after September 11, 2001.
Every few days, for about four months, Khaled Abou El Fadl would receive an
angry, anonymous phone call at either his San Fernando Valley home or his UCLA
office. In his e-mail inbox, he found ominous messages from obscured sources
with warnings such as, "You know what we're capable of." At first,
the pudgy, 39- year-old professor of Islamic jurisprudence dismissed the calls
as harmless outbursts at a tense moment. But, as the fall of 2001 progressed,
Abou El Fadl began suspecting that the threats were more serious than he had
initially assumed. Twice in November, he noticed a van that inexplicably
lingered outside of his relatively isolated home but then disappeared after he
called the police. A few months later, he found the windows of his family's SUV
smashed at a crowded movie theater parking lot. Neither the radio nor the cash
in the car had been stolen; no other vehicle in the lot had been touched.
When he brought these incidents to the attention of police,
they requested-- and he granted--permission to tap his home phone. UCLA
installed a red panic button next to his desk, ensuring that campus cops could
respond within minutes to any crisis in his office. The FBI even assigned an
agent to track down his tormenters. (To date, they have not been found.) All of
this might sound like the prelude to a textbook hate crime, but the Abou El
Fadl case has a twist: The callers weren't angry white men accusing him of
terrorist sympathies; they were fellow Muslim Americans accusing him of selling
out the faith. On September 14, 2001, Abou El Fadl had published an op-ed in
the Los Angeles Times. Many Muslim Americans had condemned the week's attacks
as un- Islamic. But Abou El Fadl felt this response amounted to an evasion. The
attacks, he worried, didn't represent a deviation from mainstream Islam; they
reflected a crisis at the core of the faith, the logical conclusion of "a
puritanical and ethically oblivious form of Islam [that] has predominated since
the 1970s." Centuries of Islamic intellectual development had been
destroyed by the "rampant apologetics" of Muslim thinkers, which had
"produced a culture that eschews self-critical and introspective insight
and embraces projection of blame and a fantasy-like level of confidence and
arrogance." Abou El Fadl had, for years, made essentially the same
argument in his scholarly writings, particularly the books And God Knows the
Soldiers (1997) and Speaking in God's Name (2001). With imams justifying
suicide bombings in Israel and elsewhere, Abou El Fadl had voiced concern that
Islam had been "rendered subservient to political expedience and symbolic
displays of power." And he'd railed against the ascendance of Wahhabism, a
rigidly puritanical brand of Islam exported and subsidized by the government of
Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabis insist that Islam must recover the practices of the
"golden age"--the decades that followed the prophet's death--and
dismiss subsequent centuries of interpretation and intellectual exploration as
devilish sophistry. It is that thoughtful, pluralist tradition that Abou El
Fadl wants to recover, an "ethos where the numerous traditions ...
emphasiz[ed] that pursuit of knowledge is an act of permanent worship."
Whereas the thrust of modern Christian history has been toward
decentralization, Sunni Islam has undergone a rapid period of theological
consolidation.
In the faith's first century and a half, Abou El Fadl
estimates that 135 legal schools competed to influence the religion. Even up
until the last part of this century, Greek-inspired rationalists (Mu’tazila)
argued against puritanical literalists (ahl-al-hadith) and strict
constructionists (usulis). But with Saudi money, and in the guise of Wahhabism,
the ahl-al- hadith have of late won the upper hand. And, unlike other
traditions that accommodate dissenting views, the Wahhabis claim to possess an
undebatable vision of "true Islam."
Abou El Fadl, by contrast, comes from the ever- shrinking
usuli school. As he describes usulism, it is a conservative tradition. To
protect the Quran's integrity, usulis impose a stiff test for the derivation of
God's laws. For edicts to carry divine imprimatur, they must be unambiguously
stated in the Quran or Sunna (the body of literature that includes the sayings
and biography of the prophet). "You have to be willing to bet your soul
that law is God's will," he argues. "Otherwise you might be guilty of
arrogance in the eyes of God." Paradoxically, the usulis' theological
conservatism makes them quite liberal relative to much of the current Muslim
world. While Wahhabis assert the necessity of veiling women, for example, Abou
El Fadl and other usulis point to texts casting doubt on God's intention that
women's faces be constantly covered. (The Quran urges the veil specifically to
protect against molestation, notes Abou El Fadl; if there's no threat of
molestation, there's no need for the veil. ) Likewise, the usulis reject many
of the Wahhabis' other proscriptions-- guidelines for sex, prohibitions against
keeping pet dogs and women attending funerals--as passages plucked from context
that ignore vast chunks of the holy books. But what bothers Abou El Fadl most
about Wahhabism isn't simply its textual distortions.
It is the tradition's denigration of morality, which the
Wahhabis argue shouldn't affect the implementation of Quranic law. Abou El Fadl
insists that his usuli tradition naturally leads Islam to an ethical humanism--
a set of ideas about justice and beauty that help to achieve God's will.
"If the intent and moral vision do not exist, then the rules become
meaningless pedantry," he argues. Indeed, he considers much of modern
Islam to be a tyranny of the picayune. As he wrote in the introduction to his
2001 collection of essays Conference of the Books, "I pray that this is a
passing phase in the history of Islam and that Muslims will regain their
intellectual vigour and enlightened spark." Abou El Fadl is part of an
international movement of Muslim intellectuals who oppose the extremism of the
Wahhabis. It includes the Syrian theorist Mohammad Shahrour, the Italian imam
Abdul Hadi Palazzi, and the Egyptian jurist Muhammad Imara.
Abou El Fadl has his own informal cluster of American
dissident scholars, which self-deprecatingly calls itself the "consolation
club"--in e- mail and phone calls, they console each other. They trade
stories of receiving death threats, being protested by their own radical
students, and being constantly tempted by the enticements of Saudi emissaries
who offer grants and endowed chairs in exchange for their theological
conformity. Even in the West, dissident thinkers like Abou El Fadl have been
shut out of mainstream Islamic institutions. To find an intellectual home, they
reside in secular academia, where they grow even further removed from potential
constituents. It's a condition that breeds depression and deep cynicism. When I
ask Abou El Fadl about his hope for the future of Islam, he pulls a Diet Coke
from the mini- refrigerator next to his desk before lighting a cigarette and
smoking it out his window. "The chances are that I would be appreciated by
a rabbi interested in interfaith discussions far more than I will be by a
leader of a Muslim organization," he says. After a few puffs, he rubs the
cigarette into the sill and throws it from the window. "It's very
disheartening and discouraging. The reason I'm speaking so openly is that I'm
fed up to the core."
For centuries, the Abou El Fadl family included jurists who
studied in the schools affiliated with Cairo's Al Azhar mosque, the venerable epicentre
of Sunni Islamic thinking--Islam's Oxbridge. But for the epicentre of Sunnism,
it had a strange history: The mosque had been founded by Shia from Tunisia in
the tenth century. Perhaps, because of this lineage, Al Azhar tolerated
dissident sects long after the Shia vacated the mosque in the twelfth century.
Proponents of nearly all varieties of Islamic legal thinking--Mu’tazila, ahl-al-hadith,
and usuli alike--found intellectual homes in Al Azhar. To be sure, Al Azhar
shifted with the politics of the times. After Napoleon conquered Egypt in 1798,
the mosque's leaders made slandering the French occupiers a religious crime;
during the Ottoman era, the school excelled at producing pliant scholars versed
in the empire's favored hanafi legal school. But, for the most part, Al Azhar's
acceptance of intellectual diversity continued regardless of fluctuations in
Egypt's political leadership.
At least up until the post-colonial era, that is. In 1961,
Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the school. Sheiks at Al
Azhar became government-paid functionaries--and were expected to conduct
themselves as such, promoting Nasser's vision of a secular pan-Arab socialism.
As Gilles Kepel, the French historian of political Islam, writes in his book
Jihad, "By linking the reformed Azhar institution too directly to the
state, Nasser's regime deprived it of credibility. ... A vacuum had been
created, to be filled by anyone ready to question the state and criticize
governments in the name of Islam." The vacuum was filled by proponents of
radical Islamism--first by theorist Sayyid Qutb (who was hung by Nasser in
1966) and his comrades in the Muslim Brotherhood and then, more gradually, by
Wahhabi clerics supported by Saudi Arabia. In 1962, Saudi Arabia founded the
Muslim World League to fund the distribution of Qurans, the production of
Wahhabi scholarship, and the building of mosques throughout the globe. And,
over the course of the next four decades, the Saudis steadily purchased the
ideological direction of Al Azhar. It started subtly, with cushy Gulf
sabbaticals for scholars. "In six months on sabbatical, they would earn
twenty years' salary," says Abou El Fadl. As these contributions became
more customary--and scholars became increasingly eager to supplement their
$40-a-month salaries--the Saudis expanded their influence. Through the Muslim
World League, they began endowing chairs for scholars and funding departments.
By the late '90s, it was growing difficult to find an Azhari
who hadn't benefited from Saudi largesse--and who hadn't returned the favor
with pro-Wahhabi scholarship. When Abou El Fadl began studying with the Azhari
sheiks, in 1969 at the age of 6, the mosque was in the midst of this transition
from religious diversity to Wahhabi predominance. Signs of moderation still
existed: Following Abou El Fadl's adolescent flirtation with Islamism--during
which he destroyed his sister's Rod Stewart tapes and fulminated against mixed
gatherings--the sheiks persuaded him to adopt a more moderate path. But, over
the years, Abou El Fadl noticed the increasing presence of Saudi money and of
Wahhabism. For years, one of his most beloved teachers, Muhammad Jalal Kishk,
had mocked the ignorance of Wahhabi Islam. But, in 1981, after Kishk received the
$200,000 King Faisal Award and the $850,000 King Fahd Award from the Saudi
government, he published a pro-Wahhabi tome called The Saudis and the Islamic
Solution.
Today, the takeover of Al Azhar is largely complete. The
highest-ranking sheik in the once-moderate institution, Muhammad Sayyed
Tantawi, endorses suicide bombings. And Al Azhar has bullied the Egyptian
government into granting it power to censor all books on Islam. As the
university's president told Al-Ahram Weekly last year, "Freedom is restricted
by respect for God, his prophet and all religious values."
Many Azharis who refused to toe the Wahhabi line have been
purged from the institution. Abou El Fadl tells the story of another of his
teachers, Muhammad al-Ghazali. Even though al-Ghazali was among the more
conservative Azharis, he grew impatient with the rising anti- intellectualism
at the school. In 1989, he published a book called The Sunna of the Prophet:
Between the Legists and Traditionalists, accusing the Wahhabi of justifying
fanaticism and defiling Islam's reputation. Within two years, the Saudis
subsidized the publication of seven books trashing al-Ghazali.
At three Muslim World League-sponsored conferences in Saudi
Arabia, scholars lined up to dismiss his arguments. Even the Saudi newspaper,
Al-Sharq al-Awsat, issued its own lengthy rebuttals. But, what most pained
al-Ghazali, according to Abou El Fadl, was not the Saudi smear campaign but
watching his old students--many of whom had received Saudi fellowships and book
advances--remain silent amid the uproar. At the time, al-Ghazali told Abou El
Fadl, "I never realized how bad it has become until this instance. I
realize that the foreseeable future is lost." After years of suffering
polemics, Abou El Fadl told me, "al-Ghazali died of a broken heart."
In May 1985, after Abou El Fadl completed his junior year at
Yale, he returned home to Cairo for the summer. A few weeks earlier, Yale had
named him "Scholar of the House," an award that Al-Ahram celebrated
in its pages. In addition to his academic work, Abou El Fadl had spent the year
studying for certification in a top-level field of Islamic jurisprudence called
hadith authentication. Now, at home with his Azhari teachers, he put the final
touches on his preparation. One evening, as he left his study circle, however,
two plainclothes Egyptian policemen approached him. Without explanation, they
shoved him in a truck and blindfolded him.
Abou El Fadl later discovered that they had taken him to the
basement of a detention center called Lazoughli. "You think that you're
scholar of the house," his interrogators declared sarcastically as they
beat him. Next, the police transferred him to a notorious desert prison called
Tora, rumored to be surrounded by the makeshift graves of torture victims. Abou
El Fadl was suspended from the ceiling by his left arm for six-hour intervals;
guards shocked him with electricity and pulled out his fingernails. After three
weeks, and without a conviction, they released him.; "Naively, I had
assumed that the freedoms afforded in the United States, and the relative
absence of political persecution, would allow for a Muslim intellectual
rebirth." This was not the first time Abou El Fadl had been targeted by
police. As a teenager, he had published ant regime poetry and stories in the
opposition dailies and had twice been taken in for beatings. But, whereas many
of Abou El Fadl's contemporaries responded to such police-state tactics by
embracing militant Islamism, the abuse only magnified his desire to find a
community where he could speak his mind without fear of retribution from either
secular or religious authorities. And so, after his 1985 visit, Abou El Fadl
returned to the United States in self-imposed exile. He had high hopes for the
Muslim community in the United States.
Unlike the scholars at Al Azhar, they didn't have to contend
with government censorship and Wahhabi oppressiveness, he imagined.
"Naively, I had assumed that the freedoms afforded in the United States,
and the relative absence of political persecution, would allow for a Muslim
intellectual rebirth," he writes in the introduction to And God Knows the
Soldiers. He even daydreamed that American Muslims might form a diaspora
movement that would return to remake the Middle East. But, instead of tolerance,
Abou El Fadl found a community that wasn't significantly more open than the one
he'd left behind. Where he expected vibrant intellectual debate, he found rigid
conformity to Wahhabi-like practices. "As I move from mosque to mosque, I
encounter Muslims who seem to think that the harsher and the more perverse the
law, the more it's Islamic," he says. He noticed that American imams often
lacked even the rudiments of Islamic education. And he noticed that community
leaders worried more about combating criticism of their organizations than
about building educational institutions. "Despots," he calls them.
After finishing graduate school at Princeton in 1995, Abou El Fadl began
publicly criticizing mainstream Islam, and it was not long before it got him in
trouble.
In 1997, while teaching at the University of Texas, he was
driven from his mosque, the Islamic Center of Greater Austin. Finishing Friday
supplications, he was interrupted by a man who "kindly invited" him
into the building's boardroom. Entering the room, he found 15 men sitting
around a long table. They took turns condemning his scholarship as heretical. A
board member stood up and pronounced him "the great Satan." Abou El
Fadl left the room. But congregants began to trail him on the street. One took
off his shoe and began swinging it at him. The attack only stopped after the
intervention of a passing graduate student. But the post-September 11 backlash
was much greater. The criticism that followed his Los Angeles Times op-ed was
not limited to anonymous threats; it came from good friends, too. This past
summer, he was banned from The Minaret magazine, a publication to which he had
contributed a monthly column for nearly 20 years. "Good luck with your
career that is based on self-promotion and self- aggrandizement," the
magazine's editor wrote in an e-mail. The Los Angeles- based Muslim Public
Affairs Council (MPAC) posted condemnations of Abou El Fadl on the American
Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism (AMILA) Internet site. And, several days
after he published another contentious op-ed this summer, a lawyer with ties to
MPAC began representing Abou El Fadl's ex-wife of ten years in a custody
battle. "My son has been living with me for the past ten years. Suddenly,
their lawyer is representing her in her lawsuit filed against me," he
says. "They've made it personal." In an e-mail to Abou El Fadl, MPAC
denied all involvement in the custody suit. Last month, Abou El Fadl had been
scheduled to lecture at the University of Kuwait on the subject of Islam and
democracy. He'd been looking forward to the talk, a rare opportunity to address
Islamic intellectuals in the Middle East. But, a week before the lecture, he
caught wind of a disturbing rumour. A dissident within the Saudi government
told a friend of his that the Saudis planned to pick him up and make him
disappear. "The Kuwaitis would say, `We don't know what happened,'"
he explains. "Everyone would be interested for a while; then, it would be
forgotten like everyone else." Abou El Fadl cancelled the trip. Even
within the confines of Western academia, the Saudis have attempted to impose
their Wahhabist interpretation of Islam, to re-create their takeover of Al
Azhar. And, just as with the Azharis, their primary inducement has been
monetary. There's no better way to gauge the Saudi effort than by reading off
the names of prominent Middle Eastern studies departments and the gifts they
have received from the Saudi royal family.
Five years ago, King Fahd gave Oxford University more than
$30 million to its Islamic Studies Centre. In 1994, the University of Arkansas
received a $20 million grant to begin the King Fahd Program for Middle East
Studies. Thanks to a $5 million gift, U.C. Berkeley now houses the Sultan Bin
Abdel Aziz Program in Arab Studies. Even Harvard has a chair, currently
occupied by legal scholar Frank Vogel, called the Custodian of the Two Holy
Mosques Adjunct Professor of Islamic Legal Studies--and subsidized by at least
$5 million from the Saudis. Ever since Abou El Fadl's days as a graduate student
at Princeton, the Saudis have plied him with similar offers of wealth. In 1991,
before he'd finished his dissertation, the Muslim World League offered him
$100,000 to write a book on Islam; in return, however, it demanded "final
editorial control. " Abou El Fadl rejected the offer. Seven years later,
the Saudis offered to nominate him for the $200,000 King Faisal award. After a
preliminary phone call, Abou El Fadl stopped returning the Saudis' messages;
they'd made him uncomfortable with too many leading questions about the
"enemies of Islam." But, despite his past rejections, the Saudis have
kept trying. Last year, they offered Abou El Fadl and his "guests" an
all-expenses-paid "VIP" trip to Mecca for Hajj. Abou El Fadl has
rejected the offers because he's seen what Saudi patronage has done to the
scholarship of his colleagues. He calls Vogel's book on Saudi law, Islamic Law
and Legal System: Studies of Saudi Arabia, "an embarrassment." (Vogel
says he has no qualms about accepting Saudi money. "I saw it as something
very much in the greater good of the Muslim world and particularly of Saudi
Arabia," he told NPR in 1993.)
In Abou El Fadl's view, the Saudi contributions have
exacerbated the shift in Middle Eastern studies away from critical, secular analyses
of modernization toward celebrations of Islamist "civil society." As
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Martin Kramer puts it,
"The last places to look for anything critical are Berkeley and Harvard.
There's nothing out there on opposition trends in Saudi Arabia. Because even if
you aren't getting money, you're trying to get in the game." To give me a
sense of the Saudi advantage on the intellectual battlefield, Abou El Fadl took
me on a tour of his massive home library. First, he showed me a Saudi-published
five-volume set listing Islamic texts that good Muslims should never read.
According to Abou El Fadl, the Saudis have even banned some of the works of
their most important ahl-al-hadith jurist, the thirteenth- century Syrian Ibn
Taymiyyah. Next, he pulled several books from the shelves. One, a volume from
Riyadh, is leather-bound with a gold-leaf pattern on the spine that, when lined
up with other books on the shelf, makes up a lovely mosaic. Next, he showed me
the work of an important moderate jurist from Cairo. The pages have a quality a
bit higher than toilet paper, and the printing looks like it was run off a
mimeograph machine. Only 100 copies of the book exist, and, despite its low
quality, it is expensive.
The Wahhabi texts, by contrast, are not only beautiful,
they're cheap, thanks to heavy subsidies from the Saudis. "Islam is about
the subjective engagement," Abou El Fadl told me, neatly encapsulating how
his theological vision differs from the strident absolutism of Wahhabism. But,
because he believes the true meaning of Islam should be continually debated,
hashed out in arguments between jurists, he finds himself rhetorically
disadvantaged when facing opponents who lay claim to ultimate truth. This
asymmetrical warfare was on display last month, when Abou El Fadl went to Qatar
to debate the morality of suicide bombings with Islamist Sheik Youssef
al-Qaradawi, who preaches on the TV network Al Jazeera. (Al-Qaradawi had
previously announced that those who shook hands with Shimon Peres should wash
their hands "seven times, one time with dirt.") Abou El Fadl only
agreed to the trip because the State Department had helped organize it and
guaranteed his safety. Bodyguards maintained a constant watch over his hotel
room. In a conference room at the Doha Ritz Carlton, Abou El Fadl pointed out
the logical inconsistencies in al-Qaradawi's defence of suicide bombing and
cited pre-modern Islamic jurists on the ethics of revenge. But such details
were of no interest to al-Qaradawi. According to Abou El Fadl, al-Qaradawi told
the crowd of Muslim intellectuals and foreign journalists, "I don't know
why brother Abou El Fadl keeps needlessly complicating things; Islam is against
such complications," before going on to cite statistics about the murders
of Palestinian children.
By the end of the debate, Abou El Fadl felt that he'd been
mocked, ignored, and rhetorically run over. Al-Qaradawi stopped addressing him
by his proper title--sheik--and, as he left the stage, refused to shake hands.
"It wasn't a fair fight," one participant told me later. Two weeks
after he returned from Qatar, Abou El Fadl got a visit from the FBI. The State
Department, the agents told him, had asked them to set up a meeting: It wanted
to ensure that his criticism of al-Qaradawi didn't result in any physical harm.
Already, al-Qaradawi had mentioned their debate on his website, and it had
unleashed a torrent of response. A group of social scientists in Egypt had
e-mailed Abou El Fadl to tell him that they "prayed God would return him
to a straight path." And he received similar messages from Jordan and
elsewhere. A few days before the FBI visited, we had discussed the debate and
the consequences of challenging popular imams. As he spoke, he stroked his
blind terrier, Lulu. With a resigned tone, he told me, "There may need to
be sacrificial lambs. I'm going to play this role and speak my
conscience."
-----
Franklin Foer is the former editor of The New Republic.
Source: Moral Hazard
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/saudi-arabia-wahhabism-militant-islamic-western/d/130107
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