Reasoning with God Reasoning with God Reclaiming Shari‘ah in the Modern Age Khaled Abou El Fadl ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannery Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom Copyright © 2014 by Rowman & Littlefield Cover image: The beautiful cover art is the masterpiece of Mr. Koichi Fuad Honda, acclaimed Arabic calligrapher and a Japanese convert to Islam. Titled The Blue Desert, it contains within its design the entire chapter of the Qur’an known as Surat Luqman, which is known to represent the universal wisdom and morality that should unite human beings in virtue. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abou El Fadl, Khaled, 1963– Reasoning with God : reclaiming Shari'ah in the modern age / Khaled Abou El Fadl. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7425-5232-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-3844-2 (electronic) 1. Islam— Customs and practices. 2. Islam—Rituals. I. Title. BP174.A245 2014 297.1'4—dc23 2014027855 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America The Floating Word The floating word Has a waterfall spine and dexterous Sky-scrying eyes which know The swank, sweet caritas of rose and Its physical temptation And the glitch of language scudding The rabbit’s hair Returned from the saturnine Swim of revision, amber-lit Like the exegesis of the sea. Blue A blue collected from the sky floats like a starfish in a green plastic pail of sea taken home by a child to a summer’s night in Omaha. Or someplace else equally named and distant. Harboring the sweet complacency of time cornered and undone. A studied blue slowly eroding in space, captive by the simplest taking like the fisherman’s catch in the old sea, a net rising out of that eternity into this one. —Laura Coyne This book is dedicated to ‘Afaf Ahmed El-Nimr, my Mama (May 2, 1930–December 28, 2011), whose wisdom and beauty needed the exegesis of oceans to expound, and who taught me to corner time and reason with the heavens. You believed in and waited for this book, but you were always ahead of the times! Contents Author’s Note xiii Preface xix Acknowledgments xxix An Introduction to Shari‘ah xxxi What Is Shari‘ah? xxxii What Is Islamic law? xxxii The Difference between Islamic Law and Muslim Law xxxiii The Sources of Islamic Law xxxiv The Nature and Purpose of Islamic Law xxxvii The Difference between Shari‘ah and Fiqh xl The Sacred and Profane in Islamic Law xlvii The Rights of God and the Rights of Humans l Modernity and the Deterioration of Islamic Law lii Part I: The Islamic Dream and the Chaos of the Modern Condition 1 Genesis: Negotiating the Muslim and the Islamic 3 Growing Up with the Islamic Dream 3 The Nightmare of 9/11 and Its Aftermath 7 Waking Up to the Truth 9 2 Awakening: Reasonableness and Islam 19 The Plight of Modern Muslims 19 Islam as a Complete Way of Life and the Reality of Realization 35 The Modern Challenge of Islamicity 44 Reasonableness, Socialization, and Contemporary Islamic Law 49 Musings on the Absurd 55 3 Crisis: Making Sense of Shari‘ah Today 63 Practicing the Pedantic and the Politics of Affectation 63 Muslims in the West as a Microcosm 75 ix x Contents 4 Repose: The Islamic between Harmony and Dissonance 87 Affectation as Public Performance 87 Stereotyped Forms and the Practice of Islamic Law 91 Nature of Authority in Islamic Law and Chaos 98 The Music of Shari‘ah, Silence of Tradition, and Dissonance of Modernity 99 The Dream Revisited 102 Part II: The Culture of Ugliness and the Plight of Modern Islam 5 Faulty Paradigms in Constructing the Islamic 113 The Recurrence of the Ugly in Modern Islam 113 The Muslim Response and Western Vilifications 120 The Origins of Western Hate 122 The Clash of Civilizations Thesis as an Explanation 125 Clash of Civilizations and the Expression of Prejudice 134 The Banality of Ugliness and the Dialectics of Sin 135 Islam, Cruelty, and Modernity 144 6 Beyond Islamophobia 151 The Jahiliyya of Modern Ignorance 151 The Imperative of Empathetic Knowing 153 The Critical Imperative 163 Islamophobia and the Danger to the World 171 7 God the Universal 183 Muslim Self-Criticism between Universalism and Exceptionalism 183 The Universality of Ugliness and Beauty 195 Universal Mercy and Extreme Acts of Ugliness 199 8 What Really Went Wrong 203 Postcolonialism and the Rise of Modern Apologetics 203 Wahhabism: The Puritans of Islam 215 Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Wahhab: The Founder and His Thought 227 Why Did Wahhabism Survive and Spread? 248 The Salafis 251 9 God, Shari‘ah, and Beauty 271 Puritanical-Salafism, the Authoritarian Specter, and Social Death 271 Classical Music and the Qur’an 282 Submitting to Infinite Divinity 285 Part III: Reclaiming Shari‘ah in the Modern Age 10 Shari‘ah as Reasoning with God 291 The Shari‘ah Predicament 291 Shari‘ah: Between Objectivity and Subjectivity 309 Do We Need Shari‘ah? 311 Reasoning with God 318 Shari‘ah and Virtue 328 Islamic Law and Reasonableness 338 11 Beyond a Reasonable Shari‘ah 359 Contents xi Beyond Reasonableness: An Ethical Approach to Shari‘ah 359 Godliness and Godlessness 366 Shari‘ah and Seeking Godliness 373 12 The Caliphate of Humanity 391 On Cursing the Devil and Other Memories 391 On the Ethics of Diversity 405 The Caliphate of Humankind: Ascending to an Ethereal Humanity 411 Concluding the Journey 415 Reclaiming the Path to the Self in God and to God in the Self 415 Notes 421 Index 487 Author’s Note This was a daunting book to write not only because it is inspired by a sense of urgency and perhaps a foreboding seriousness, but more so because it is intended to be a painfully personal book. I wrote this book as a Muslim who is also an academic scholar and not as an academic scholar who happens to be Muslim. And in so doing, I abandoned any pretense of speaking from the proverbial academic tower where I could contently analyze the world from a safe distance behind the veneer of objectivity. As a Muslim, I am deeply affected by everything that impacts Islam and Muslims, and I am also deeply affected by the way that Islam and Muslims impact the world. As a Muslim, I find the beliefs, doctrines, and conceptions of the Islamic faith intellectually and spiritually fulfilling and indeed thrilling; but also as a Muslim I feel a deep sense of frustration and alienation as to the way I interact with the world and the way the world interacts with me. On the one hand, I feel that the sense of spiritual and intellectual fulfillment that I find in my Islamic faith is widely shared by many of my coreligionists. Yet so much of the spiritual teachings of Islam and so many of its intellectual traditions have become fossilized or buried under layers of forgetfulness. While generalizing and stereotyping a people or faith tells us much more about the intolerance of those doing the stereotyping, it would be delusional to deny that, thanks to the behavior of many of my coreligionists, the sense of spiritual and intellec- tual gratification that I, and many others, find in Islam has become incompre- hensible and inaccessible to many non-Muslims. 1 While I personally, as well as so many others, find the Islamic faith to be a source of boundless wisdom and tranquility, it is difficult to deny that this same faith has become a source of anxiety and apprehension for many in the world today. On the one hand, I feel that my faith, and indeed many Muslims, are misunderstood and repul- sively mistreated by those who are ignorant or prejudiced toward Islam. On the other hand, I find it difficult to escape the conclusion that many Muslims have become shamefully unjust and iniquitous toward others, each other, and themselves. xiii xiv Author’s Note Having spent my entire life a humble student of Islamic theology and law, I fully sympathize when Muslims complain that non-Muslims are ill in- formed and ignorant about Islam. This without a doubt is true. But at the same time, the truth is that so many Muslims themselves are woefully misin- formed about their own tradition. I, like so many other Muslims, supplicate to God at least five times a day, pleading that we be guided to the upright path of virtue, but this pious plea does not negate the fact that something has gone awfully wrong with the actual path chosen and pursued by many Mus- lims. Fundamentally, I think it is fair to say that the sense of frustration and alienation that I feel as a Muslim is shared by many of my coreligionists throughout the world, and it is also fair to say that the primary source of these feelings is that we, as Muslims, live submerged in a profound set of contra- dictions.