" Battling Islamic 'Puritans' and their mummification ossification and fossilization of Islam " part IV cont'd
latimes.com
Library Illustrates Vast Traditions
Abou El Fadl's most important weapon is books. They line the walls of his home, fill an entire room on the second floor and spill out into another detached room outside. His annual book budget is more than $60,000. His entire collection surpasses 40,000 volumes on law, theology, sociology, philosophy, history, literature.
His mother, Afaf El Nimr, says her eldest son was drawn to the written word from the time he was 3, every day spreading out the newspaper and studying it in deep concentration.
By the time he was 9, he had begun reading his father's tomes on Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru. Young Khaled would sell off his underwear to raise money for more books, according to his mother.
The 10,000 volumes in his Islamic law library illustrate the vastness of the faith's traditions--and some of its problems. The collection, some of its items eight centuries old, includes writings from every school of thought in the majority Sunni and minority Shiite traditions, some extinct. They run the gamut from works by Muslims whom Abou El Fadl reveres, such as the 11th century Baghdad jurist Ibn 'Aqil, to those by writers he abhors, such as Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik serving a life sentence in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
"Imagine how many intellects are deposited in here," he says, "how many glimpses of perception."
He agonizes over a rising tide of censorship. He blames it directly on the 1970s rise in oil prices that gave Saudi Arabia the financial resources to control the Islamic book market and propagate the nation's puritan creed.
During a recent trip to an Arabic bookstore in Anaheim, he pointed out numerous books banned in the Mideast, including such classics as "1001 Nights" and other books on theories of human rights, homosexuality and Islam, and a treatise on Sufism.
Abou El Fadl's own books--he published four in just the last year--are banned in Saudi Arabia, although Din of the opposition student group says bootleg translations are making the rounds in Medina and scandalizing devout Muslims there.
Recently, Abou El Fadl says, puritan Muslims have even begun cleansing the sacred texts of passages they deem offensive. He exposes the practice in an essay, "Corrupting God's Book," citing as one example a popular English translation of the Koran, widely distributed in the United States, that he says skews the Arabic text to claim women must cover their entire body except for one or both eyes.
"The agony of the Muslim plight in the modern world cannot be expressed either in words or tears," Abou El Fadl writes in the piece, published this year in a collection of critical essays titled "Conference of the Books." "What can one say about those people who, in their utter ignorance and maniacal arrogance, subjugate even the word of God to ugliness and deformities?"
Some Muslims are offended by such searing self-criticism, believing that it only aids enemies of Islam. Others, such as University of Michigan Islamic studies professor S. Abdal-Hakim Jackson, say Abou El Fadl's boldness is needed, but they worry that it alienates the very audience the scholar is trying to reform. Still others embrace the candor as a sign of the Muslim community's maturity.
"You have to be confident in your place in society to begin airing your dirty laundry," says Rick St. John, a Muslim convert and Los Angeles attorney who believes that Abou El Fadl is "trying to improve the religion and return it to something better and beautiful."
On his good days, such comments encourage Abou El Fadl to believe that he is making a difference. On his bad days, when he encounters death threats, back-stabbing, censorship or indifference from his fellow Muslims, he is plaintive in his pain.
"I am so lonely," he blurted out one night. "God gave me this affliction of law. I learned all of it, and there is nothing I can do with it, and if I don't preserve it, it will die."
He needs to pray. It is 1:25 a.m. In the darkened silence, for more than an hour, he offers supplication to his creator, moving his lips in silent worship. Then he rises. He kisses the Koran, touches it to his forehead and lets out a soft whisper.
"And everything looks beautiful again."
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
ISLAMIC TERMS
Sunni Muslim: A follower of the main branch of Islam, which accepts the legitimacy of the four "rightly guided" caliphs who were the companions and immediate successors of the Prophet Muhammad: Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab, Uthman ibn Affan and Ali ibn Abi Talib.
Shiite Muslim: Historically, a follower of those who called for the rulership of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the prophet's cousin, after the prophet's death. Today, the Shiites constitutes the second-largest branch of Islam after the Sunnis.
Sufi Muslim: Those who seek to achieve higher degrees of spiritual excellence or pursue Islamic mysticism.
Wahhabi: A follower of the strict teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Adherents, who object to the terms Wahhabism and Wahhabi, say they observe the "one true Islam." They are hostile to the intercession of saints, visiting tombs of saints, Sufism, Shiite Muslims and rational methods of deducing law. The creed dominates in Saudi Arabia.
*
Source: "Islam: A Short History," by Karen Armstrong; "Conference of the Books," by Khaled Abou El Fadl.
For information about reprinting this article, go to lats.com
*** Link to this article was compliments of the Atheist Foundation of Australia atheistfoundation.org.au |
