Abou El Fadl, Khaled (1963– ) leading
scholar of Islamic law, religious reformer, and human
rights advocate living in the United States
Khaled Abou El Fadl was born in Kuwait in 1963
and was raised in both Kuwait and egypt. In his
youth, he was attracted to the strict, literalist ten-
dency in contemporary islam, but as he matured
he came to understand his religion in a less literal
way. He credits his parents for helping him to do
this. He went to the United States to attend college
in 1982 and obtained a bachelor’s degree at Yale
University in 1986, then a law degree from the
University of Pennsylvania (1989), and a doctor-
ate in Islamic studies from Princeton University
(1999). He has taught on the faculty of law at the
University of California, Los Angeles, since 1998
and lectures frequently to audiences in the United
States and abroad.
Abou El Fadl is an outspoken critic of terror-
ism and the puritanical Wahhabi understanding
of Islam that is promoted by an influential party
of Muslim religious authorities in saUdi arabia
and other countries, including the United States
and Europe. His views became known to a wider
public in the United States after the September
11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon through newspaper editorials, pub-
lications, and speeches. He condemns religious
fanaticism and supports religious and cultural
pluralism, democratic values, and Women’s rights.
His Muslim opponents accuse him of being a
tool of the West, serving the interests of Islam’s
enemies. What makes Abou El Fadl’s ideas so
powerful, however, is that he supports many of
his opinions with an encyclopedic knowledge of
the qUran and the sharia, enhanced further by his
training in the secular Western legal tradition. His
California home contains thousands of volumes
and manuscripts, including many classics on
Islamic subjects, which inspired the essays in his
Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in
Islam. For him, the search for the truth, or God’s
law, is an ongoing endeavor, one that involves rea-
soned argument, the weighing of different points
of view, and placement of quranic command-
ments in their appropriate historical context.
Abou El Fadl boldly maintains that this method
has been a norm in classical Islamic thought but
has been violated by religious fanatics, who base
their views on blind imitation and superficial,
erroneous interpretations of God’s will. In doing
this, Abou El Fadl is claiming a place for himself
squarely within the reformist tradition in modern
Islam. “A careful and reflective synthesis,” he
writes, “must be worked out between modernity
and tradition” (And God Knows the Soldiers, p.
115). Through his writings and his public service
on behalf of hUman rights, he is impacting both
American civil society and Muslim immigrant
communities. What remains to be seen is whether
he and other progressively minded Muslims will
be able to have a profound affect abroad in Mus-
lim-majority countries.
See also reneWal and reForm movements;
salaFism; secUlarism; United states; Wahhabism.Further reading: Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, And God
Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian
in Islamic Discourses (Lanham, Md.: University Press of
America, 2001); Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, Conference
of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam (Lanham,
Md.: University Press of America, 2001); Omid Safi, ed.,
Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism
(Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003).Abraham (Arabic: Ibrahim) one of the leading
Muslim prophets, believed to be the ancestral founder
of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
One of the most important figures in Islamic
sacred history is Abraham, who is considered a
patriarchal figure, a close “friend” of God, and,
above all, a prophet and founder of the kaaba in
mecca. Western scholars disagree about when
the historic Abraham may have lived—some
say as early as 2000 b.c.e., others say up to a
thousand years later (ca. 1000 b.c.e.). Muslim
understandings of Abraham drew significantlyK 8 Abou El Fadl, Khaled