The battle for the soul of Islam

Khaled Abou El Fadl 's The Great Theft attempts to inform Muslims of a grave threat to Islam's moral centre

EMRAN QURESHI

From Friday's Globe and Mail

The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists By Khaled Abou El Fadl Harper San Francisco, 308 pages, $28.95

Today, there is a struggle for the soul of Islam, taking place between the loud extremists who have captured the headlines and Islam's silent, moderate majority. In the last few years, we have witnessed 9/11, Bali, Madrid, London and the orchestrated use of violence by a small group of Muslim radicals who seem to define Islam in entirely negative and reactionary terms.

Khaled Abou El Fadl is a professor of law at UCLA, trained in both Western and Islamic legal traditions. He is a believing Muslim. A graduate of Yale and Princeton, he is fluent in English, French, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Hebrew, Persian, Latin and Syriac. In The Great Theft, he attempts to inform Muslims of a grave threat to Islam's moral centre and to wrest control of the discourse on defining what being a Muslim is in the modern world away from the extremists.

To be sure, the term "moderate" Muslim may seem condescending, as no one appears to use the term to describe non-Muslims. But he states his case for its use in contradistinction to terms such as progressive, liberal or modernist. He retells the tradition of the Prophet Mohammed as a moderate man who avoided extremes.

Abou El Fadl traces the rise of Islamic extremism to the rise of the Wahhabi state, the precursor of modern Saudi Arabia. By now it has become something of a cliché, but here the author's original contribution is actually to explore the ideas of the sect's founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab through his writings, and the dislocations they produced. He calls Wahhabis "puritans" and demarcates their ethos and underlying world view from the moderate centre of Islam. Some critics may consider this to be too reductive. But one needs to ask: Has this interpretation of Islam influenced modern Muslim understanding of their faith, and if so, how?

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