Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Jonathan E. Brockopp, ed., Islamic 

Ethics of Life: Abortion, War, and Euthanasia (Columbia: 

University of South Carolina Press, 2003); especially 

the chapters by Marion Holmes Katz, Donna Lee 

Bowen, and Vardit Rispler-Chaim; Basim F. Musallam, 

Sex and Society in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1983).

abortion

  

7  J

---

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 e

gypt

. In his 

youth, he was attracted to the strict, literalist ten-

dency in contemporary i

slam

, 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 s

aUdi

  a

rabia

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 q

Uran

 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

; 

s

alaFism

; 

secUlarism

; U

nited

 s

tates

; W

ahhabism

.