What Is Shariah? And What Really Happened on 9/11? Interview with UCLA Prof. Khaled Abou El Fadl

Audio archive

Introduction from this interview, originally published in 2017:

Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl is one of the world’s leading authorities on Islamic law and Islam, and a prominent scholar in the field of human rights. He is author of 14 books (five forthcoming) and over 50 articles on various topics in Islam and Islamic law. The Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor in Islamic Law at the UCLA School of Law, he teaches International Human Rights, Islamic Jurisprudence, National Security Law, Law and Terrorism, and other subjects.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: Hi. I’m Kevin Barrett and I’ve been doing this show since 2006. A whole lot of heavy hitters have chosen to come out for 9/11 Truth on my Radio Show. These folks include Alan Hart, the former BBC Mid-East Correspondent; Alan Sabrosky, the former Director of Strategic Studies at the US Army War College; and many, many, more. Well, today we have a whole new illustrious personage coming out for 9/11 Truth on my show: Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, who is recognized as one of America’s leading academic Islam experts. Many would say he’s the leading academic Islam expert. And he chose my show to make his statement and to withdraw his previous support for the 9/11 official story.

So welcome to Truth Jihad Radio, the radio show that follows the hadith “the best Jihad is a word of truth flung in the face of an oppressive ruler.” I’m Kevin Barrett, doing this show since 2006. And we have a wonderful show coming up today. My guest is one of America’s leading authorities on shariah, the boogie-man word that refers to God’s Law according to Islam. And his book Reasoning with God; Reclaiming Sharia In The Modern Age is the best place to go to for an intelligent conversation about this very topical topic. So without further ado we should begin by saying that Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl is not only a leading authority on Islamic Law but also an authority on a lot of (related) issues. He teaches at UCLA. Has won a long list of awards, and published many wonderful books. So let’s get right down to it. Welcome Professor Abou Fadl. How are you?

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: alhamdulilliah. I’m very happy to be here. Thank you.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: Well. I’m very happy to have you. I’m kind of on the margins of Islamic Studies myself, and you’re pretty central. If well-informed, educated Americans were looking for someone to talk to about sharia, they should put you at the very top of their list. And you have had a number of very insightful things to say, not only about the current controversies around sharia, but also what sharia is really all about, and the Islamophobia that’s raging out of control today. So should we start with the issue of sharia and debunking a couple of the misconceptions among the millions of misconceptions about it?

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: Sure.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: Well, let’s go ahead and define shariah. A lot of Americans who get their news from FOX and worse sources think of it in terms of head-chopping and hand-chopping and all sorts of scary stuff like that. They’re afraid it’s going to take over America. And of course you have a somewhat different view.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: Yeah. Linguistically it means the path to the source for goodness or the water fountain, the source for life, for being. And beyond the linguistic meaning, in the Islamic tradition it is what leads to God and what leads to Godliness. The path to God and Godliness is not any particular instrumentalities of laws. It’s not any particular set of positive laws. But Godliness is the concept of the Merciful, the Compassionate, The Loving, The Giving. The Charitable, The Empathetic. And so, in its core, sharia is the path to the Godly life, the life of metaphysical attributes, moral attributes, that are beyond the selfish, temporal impulses that often take over human beings. And so the closer one elevates oneself to attainment of moral status, the status of basic goodness, the closer one comes to sharia.

Now sharia has…I don’t like the word ritual but basically (they’re) the laws of worship. And these laws are (like) basic required exercises that help the human being attain the supreme state of consciousness, the consciousness that elevates one to the Godly life—the life of Godliness, as opposed to Godlessness—such as praying five times a day, fasting during the month of Ramadan, and giving generously to the poor and to the needy. But beyond that, there are laws that require one to be respectful and kind to parents, kind and empathetic towards neighbors, and so on. There are criminal laws, public laws, the various procedural laws. (These are) historical practices that arose at one point in time. Muslims who were interpreting the path to God, the sharia, thought they were a good idea. They thought that these were consistent with what God would want for a just and fair society. The whole point of Reasoning With God is that they are historical manifestations. They are not binding upon today’s Muslims.

So, if I was to sum it up: It is essential that we remember that sharia is an aspiration towards the ethereal. Is an aspiration towards getting beyond our own base selves as human beings. The Prophet (peace upon him) said that the greatest jihad is the jihad against the self, against one’s own base desires, one’s own weaknesses, one’s own oppressive desires; against anxieties and weakness and humiliation and submissiveness to other human beings. And so sharia is to liberate oneself as a necessary step—but beyond that, become a Godly human being, a human being that lives for the basic value of goodness! That is what sharia is.

There are numerous theological writings that you find throughout Islamic history that search for the path To God. And as they usually say the path is to God, from God, and ends with God. And the most successful of us is the one that can attain such a state of liberation that that person no longer fears oppressors, no longer fears poverty, and is not oppressed by the physical needs that bind us as human beings. That is what sharia in its truth is.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: That’s a beautiful summary. Thank you.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: You’ve read Reasoning with God. (It is a) heavily cited and documented book, because I am reminding Muslims and non-Muslims that this is a 1400-year-old discourse. And this arises from the very bases of Islam itself. Islam was revealed to Mohammad. It was revealed in a fairly unjust and inequitable society and it was embraced as a message of liberation, mostly by the oppressed in society against the extremely obscene inequities that prevailed in the Meccan society. It was in every sense of the word a revolution against oppression.

And when Islamophobes try to lie (about it) they keep talking about the violence of the Prophet. I find it quite ironic that if you go to any Hollywood movie, whenever there is a story of a heroic figure who liberates the oppressed, everyone cheers. Everyone cheers! This marvelous superman or superwoman leads the oppressed against their oppressors, and they arise and throw off their shackles, and everyone thinks that’s beautiful. Well, that’s precisely what Mohammad did! That’s it exactly. If you would create a Hollywood movie, The Story of Mohammad, that’s exactly what he did. He led the oppressed in an uprising against their oppressors and it led to liberation.

But what is remarkable is that the Qur’an, in assuaging and comforting the oppressed and assuring them that their rebellion against their oppressors is a just cause and that they will be victorious and God is with them and so on, at the same time, keeps reminding them that there is something beyond this rebellion: There is a greater jihad and a greater cause, and that is the jihad against your own self. Be warned that once you are liberated from your oppressors, you are going to have your own oppressive self there waiting to take you down. And that is a greater jihad. And that’s why the “greater jihad” is that you are now going to have to fight against your own base desires, your desire to enjoy wealth and own property. And now you become powerful even to oppress other human beings. And that becomes the essence of sharia: Liberate your own self from your self. Do not accept oppression because oppression is by definition something demonic, something un-Godly. But the greatest state of Godliness is a just society and a just life that is centered in moral virtues. And I use the word virtues very purposely because if you create a life in which you enjoy financial security but your neighbor is in a threat of becoming homeless, if you create a society in which you are healthy but you care little for the ill and the sick, and you and you hardly occupy your mind (with them) and you pretty much abandon them, if you create a society in which there are deep inequities in wealth, all of that is a move toward the demonic, toward Godlessness rather than Godliness. And that would be contrary to sharia. And so sharia is a constant moral aspiration. It is a constant moral challenge. We can never assume that we’ve fulfilled haria. As human beings, we’re imperfect, incapable of doing that. But we must always be challenged by sharia to reach out for these moral virtues in a constant challenge to our own beings.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: So sharia is a kind of ideal that basically is providing us with kind of a moral framework and a path to the good, while actual practice of Islamic law involves things like fiqh and jurisprudence and positive law and those sorts of things. But those things are not primarily what sharia is.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: That’s precisely right. And the important thing to remember is that it’s temporal and changeable. There are various technicalities that you can get into, but the error that people like ISIS and the extremists often fall into is that they take rules they find in positive law and for various reasons they think that applying these laws will fulfill sharia regardless of the empirical consequences, regardless of the actual human consequences, the actual suffering on the ground. And that’s never correct. No positive law can be applied regardless of its empirical consequences in realities on the ground. And this is a maxim of law in Islamic jurisprudence: that if a law causes human suffering or hardship, it must be suspended or changed. And so you cannot ignore empiricism. And you cannot ignore consequences. And this extends from everything from criminal law to family law. In Reasoning With God I even make a systematic argument that this would even extend to the positive laws that were mentioned in the Qur’an. The extent to which we as human beings, as God’s viceroys, God’s agents on Earth, have been delegated with this very serious trust (amana) and this very serious trust called sharia and the moral virtues that are embedded in the core of sharia, is such a serious obligation that we cannot use any positive law, even if it is a law that the Qur’an mentioned or uttered, as a solution for a particular historical set of circumstances. We can never use that as an excuse to relinquish our moral obligation to fulfill the purposes of sharia, the virtues of sharia. And I think that you’ll find the greatest Islamic moral thinkers, the greatest ethical thinkers, have all reached that same conclusion.

Islam is not a tribal creed. Islam is not some type of nationalistic identity. It is not a racial identity. Is not a class affiliation. It’s a message of liberation to humanity. And in order for it to fulfill that there are various obligations and trusts. The trust that Muslims do to witness for God, in truth, even if it’s against themselves, must mean that you must read reality precisely and truthfully and not allow yourself to become self-deluded: “Well, you know, I’m an Egyptian so I testify here as an Egyptian; or in America I’m American so I’ll testify in favor of America.” You have to have a moral vigilance about you. And that moral vigilance is the only way you can really testify in truth, even if it’s against your own self. And the Qur’an actually says, even if it’s against yourself or against your own parents, your loved ones, your tribe, your clan, or your friends. That’s your moral vigilance. (…)

“The truly virtuous person is the one who is so preoccupied by his own moral failures that he doesn’t see the moral failures of others.” And the Prophet Mohamed SAAS repeatedly teaches the companions: Even if you see the moral failure of another human being, help him or her to cover it up. Don’t put them on the spot. Don’t shame them. Don’t embarrass them if you know that they are trying to be a good human being, (if) this is not an oppressor on Earth, this is not someone who is fundamentally foul but someone who is trying to be good and has slipped here and there. Help them to cover it up. Don’t go after them like a bloodhound.

There’s so much of the Qur’an that is a micro-study of this about human beings. It says that they are like those who have been deceived and tricked by demons so they walk on the face of the Earth as if lost. So the message of sharia is: Don’t be like that. Don’t become so alienated from yourself, alienated from existence, that you don’t know why you exist anymore. And you ask yourself: Why was I created? What is the point of life? What is the point of all of this? Don’t allow yourself be in such a subservient and oppressive condition where you are controlled by debt and the high and mighty in society where you are afraid to say anything because you owe people so much that they in effect own you and own everything you have. Don’t become like that. Don’t become a human being that is so afraid of what other people do to you that you think a million times before you speak the truth. And that is why in the Qur’an, and in all God’s messages to human beings, we are repeatedly reminded to testify in truth. Testify in truth! False Testimony is such an enormous sin. And so false testimony is often against your own self, when you are unjust to yourself.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: Well, can I interrupt you here, Professor? Because this an issue I’ve been pursuing since late 2003 when I learned that one of the greatest minds in American philosophy and religious studies, Dr. David Ray Griffin, was reviewing the evidence around 9/11 and finding that it was a preposterous fraud. I looked into that and found that he was right, and that, indeed, the three World Trade Center skyscrapers had been demolished with explosives, that the alleged hijackings could not have happened, that none of the alleged hijackers were even on the planes, and so on and so forth. And that led me to really have to testify against myself as an American. And in your work, the one issue that I have with it is that I think in a sense you are letting yourself, as an American, get away with not testifying against yourself by basically embracing the official story of 9/11 in your critique of Wahhabism and (Islamic) puritanism. It is an absolutely valid critique and a beautifully-put critique. But there’s this big lie that’s there. Have you looked into this issue?

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: Yes. And I thank you for that, because it’s a fair criticism. And you’re right. We have to look deep into ourselves. I have to admit, I have undergone a process of moral growth after 9/11. I have to say that my critique of Wahhabism started long before 9/11. I was the first Sunni Muslim to notice the very destructive impact of Wahhabism on the beautiful tradition of sharia and I started that critique in the early 90’s. My first published critique of it was in ’95.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: And that’s courageous because there is a lot of power and money power against that.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: And it was at a time when there was absolutely. Wahhabi hegemony and no Sunni voices dared to be raised against it. And the cost that I paid for that has been enormous at so many levels. Only God knows the cost that I and my family had to pay for speaking up at that time. Wahhabis, and Saudi Arabia, were not accustomed to anyone in the Sunni world raising their voice like that. But when 9/11 occurred, I was so shocked by it. And as I’ve said in other interviews, my father and I were in the World Trade Center days before it happened. We had just caught a plane back to Las Angeles one day before the attacks took place. And so it was an absolute shock! And initially I completely embraced the official story because of what I had an opportunity to see at the time and what I knew about Bin Laden; but what was very powerful and bad for me was a videotape in which Bin Laden and his friends are celebrating and congratulating themselves and saying “we’ve done it and we were very successful” and so on. And I believed what they were saying about how they planned and executed it, at least in that tape. As the years went on I became very disillusioned with the Bush Administration and even later on with the Obama Administration. And I started reading one of the books—I’m not sure if it is the same Dr. Griffin, who was a Professor at Notre Dame…

Dr. Kevin Barrett: Dr. (David Ray) Griffin was at Claremont and he published 13 books on 9/11. I’m not sure which one you read.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: No, I’ve actually read one from a professor from Claremont. No the book that I read from the Professor from Notre Dame said: Listen, I don’t know who did 9/11 or what the story is. But I am going to, in a systematic, logical fashion, present the evidence for and against. And in doing so, I have some very serious questions about the official story. Here are all the answers that I’ve tried to get to try to resolve these serious questions, and here is how I was shut down, every step along the way. And he said, you know, I’m not going to reach conclusions. I’m just going to share my disillusionment and my complete loss with the reader. And I’m sorry I can’t remember the name of the author. But I know he is a Professor at Notre Dame.

And then later on I did read a book by a professor from Claremont. So it must be Professor Griffin. And at this point I realized—and I know that, of course, Islamophobes call me a stealth Islamist and are going to jump on this. And as you probably know, they waged several campaigns to try to get me fired from my position in UCLA. But my duty is to testify to truth and my trust in God as the owner of one’s estate. I can probably say that at this point in my life I no longer accept the official story. What I witnessed with my own eyes as a White House appointee is that the Bush administration was so rabid about invading Iraq and so angry about Iraq changing the base of its monetary dealings from the US dollar to the euro, and saw that as such a dangerous precedent and such a threat—in my mind exaggerated. There was such a colonial-like frenzy about, “We’re going to go in there, we’re going to fix the Middle East, we’re going to teach these people who’s the boss. And the problem is that those Arabs; those Muslims only understand force and power. And when we go in there, they’re going to learn who’s the boss. And they’re all going to be good boys and girls in dealing with Israel and in accepting our way of life as the supreme way of life.” And what was quite remarkable is people like Condaleeza Rice and Ashcroft and Cheney were so enthralled by the Huntington thesis of the clash of civilizations, which later on became the basis for a lot of the Trumpians, the supporters of Trump: the idea that those people, meaning Muslims, must realize that the West is triumphant. That it’s over, the huge long battle between civilizations. And the West won. And the sooner Muslims realize the West has won and we’re in control, the better it is for them. They will just accept the facts and the finality and change themselves the way the Japanese did and the way the South Koreans did.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: This is all a neoconservative discourse, basically.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: Yes. But the thing is that I realized that as the evidence accumulated and built upon itself… And there’s a book, right now that I’m writing on human rights where I basically come out and say: If we want to talk about the West, while there are many philosophers that understand the principles of human rights, when we come to the way Western governments have functioned, they really understood the concept of civil rights when it’s come to certain classes and certain races, but they never really understood or comprehended what human rights mean. And so human nights is a failure because its purported parents have disowned it and left it at the orphanage. So the concept has lacked coherence, and lacked foundation, exactly because of the kind of criminal conduct that we so easily just classify and call “national security issues,” such as 9/11 questions.

All I know is that the evidence doesn’t stand up. Now, do I know exactly who is responsible for what? No, I don’t. But the official story does not jibe. And any fair-minded person who reads the evidence, the empirical evidence, will come to the conclusion that the official story…

And if we were serious about finding out the truth as a democracy, we would launch a serious investigation that officially looks into these remarkable discrepancies. And second, that would investigate who was exactly responsible for what. There are so many possibilities, in terms of agencies that could have been involved in something like that. And when the evidence exists that Muslims have committed an act of terrorism, I have no problem in saying they are reprehensible, disgusting, and the first thing they violated is the law of sharia itself. I have no problem with that. But with 9/11, the evidence doesn’t add up, people. It just doesn’t.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: Absolutely. How about the related deep state issues? I know we only have one lifetime to try to be specialists in however many things we try to learn about, but since I got run out of the University of Wisconsin for questioning 9/11 in 2006, I’ve made quite a journey of discovery. And I’ve learned that it isn’t just Egypt and Turkey that have a deep state, that the assassinations of the 1960s appear to have been carried out by essentially the same kind of forces that did 9/11 and the whole series of alleged Islamic extremist terror events in the West—not just 9/11 but before and after as well. The Cole bombing the African embassy bombing before that, and of course the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing, where we have a tape recording of the FBI informant talking to his FBI handler about how the FBI built the bomb. And then after 9/11 this whole series of big spectacular events that appear to very likely have been orchestrated by a sort of Gladio program like the one that orchestrated most of the left-wing terrorism during the Cold War. Have you looked into that and what are your thoughts?

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: I have not in any way, adequately, studied this. As you said, “We have one lifetime.” The testimony that I can give is that I did work on the (“Blind Sheikh”) Omar Abdel-Rahman case that is related to the 1993 bombings. And there are numerous discrepancies there as well: Everything from this fellow being given a visa to enter and live in the United States, knowing full well that he was a very radical cleric and extremist in his views, to the role of the Egyptian Mukhabarat intelligence agent who pretended to be his closest disciple and played a central role in the events. And I did work on this case with the very unfortunate and sad, in so many ways, story of the attorney, Lynn Stuart. As your listeners might not know she was representing Omar Abdel-Rahman. The government went after her in the most inhumane way and in absolute violation of her human rights and the human rights of all Americans, in throwing her in prison and only releasing her after she was diagnosed with cancer and was near death. And she died shortly after being released.

I worked with Lynn Stuart and Ramsey Clark, the former US Attorney General on this case. And the evidence was rather shocking. There were clearly Muslims who were involved in this case, but the role of intelligence agencies in facilitating violence leaves very serious questions.

Another situation that is very suspicious is the rise of ISIS, itself: the arming of ISIS, the training of ISIS the funding of ISIS. It is so remarkably suspicious! If we take a step back, we know the history of the involvement of the CIA, Israeli intelligence, British intelligence and French intelligence, especially in Africa. We have numerous historical examples in which these intelligence agencies organized acts of violence to destabilize a situation, engineer the overthrow of democratically elected governments and bring in absolutely corrupt and disastrous governments, as the French did in Madagascar, for instance. It is an unbelievably sad story.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: The CIA has done that to dozens of countries.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: I mean, that’s not even disputed—the historical issues. All types of CIA agents have come out and written their diaries and written… even the declassified material. So we know there is a culture of impunity and a sort of a jaded culture in which they mock the stupidity of people. And so they act with impunity and commit horrendously inhuman acts all under the rubric of “we’re promoting the national interest of our nations.” However they define it.

And so, if you study history…History is an essential roadmap. Without history we cannot understand the present. And history is a critical roadmap for mapping out our present moment. And studying history makes me realize that the real story about so much of what we see today in our lifetime unfortunately will only be exposed and conclusively read by historians long after we’re dead. But that should not be a moral cop-out for present living human beings.

If you read history you have to be suspicious, and you have to be morally vigilant. Look at what happened in Egypt! Look at the way the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, with the full support of various intelligence agencies, including the US and Israel, completely preempted and destroyed the democratic Impulse that overcame the entire Middle East. And we have a publicly known individual in Libya who is a very well-known CIA prize, General (Khalifa) Haftar, who is destabilizing Libya to overthrow the democratically elected government. It is a matter of public record what we’ve done in Tunisia to destabilize the nascent democracy there. It is a shameful tragedy, what we’ve done in Egypt in completely covering up one of the most horrendous massacres in Rabaa.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: Americans hear about the Syrian government’s massacres but the Egyptian government’s massacre of thousands of unarmed demonstrators doesn’t seem to really register here.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: Yes. It’s been completely ignored, as if it’s of no consequence. Although anyone can go on the net and see films. And (mainstream leaders and media) want to talk about how Trump was supposedly so touched by the pictures of dying babies in Syria that he ordered the strike (on Shayrat in 2017) and so on and so forth. Well, the pictures that came from Rabaa of the massacre by the Egyptian government, the Egyptian military, against the demonstrators in Rabaa is no less horrendous. The number of children and elderly and so on that were mowed down and butchered! But, even beyond that, the remarkably oppressive government in Egypt is fully supported by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and the US. We completely ignore the Saudi massacres in Yemen. You rarely hear anything about what the Saudis have done in Yemen, and in Bahrain before that—the atrocities committed.

So if you ask me what is the role of Muslims in this country? It is not to impose some silly laws about chopping hands or some family laws or inheritance laws. I mean, all of that is just historical curiosities. But the role of Muslims in any place, as it should be in this country, is to be a vigilant party testifying for the truth. They should be, if they are to follow sharia, the party of the truth, the party that speaks against power and for the oppressed—and not enter in an incestuous relationship with power, because then there’s no sense in sharia at all. (Their goal should be) not to get themselves invited to breakfast in the White House and to compete to see who can be on the list at the White House. I am proud that I have never accepted a White House breakfast invitation. And I’m no longer invited.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: Well, after you’ve come on this show, you definitely won’t be invited.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: (laughs) Big time. The point is: If you are committed to the values of sharia (it’s) not (about) overthrowing the government or any nonsense like that. Sharia is not oppressing others or killing others or harming others. Sharia ismoral vigilance in speaking out against yourself and for the truth. And recognizing your moral failures. And I recognize my own moral failures in not seeing, in failing to see, the incoherence of the 9/11 narrative sooner than I should have. And that’s a moral failure. And we must confess our own moral failures and stand up for truth and virtue.

And that is the relationship between the Muslim and sharia: (It should be such) that every oppressed human being and every human being that has suffered injustice would think of Muslims: “These are the people who are constantly testifying for truth and suffering for it.” And suffering the same way that so many companions of the Prophet suffered persecution and ended up expiring. Dying because of that, and not because of violence. And I want to repeat. Not through violence. The rebellion of the Prophet, the liberation (struggle) of the Prophet (occurred) in a Meccan society that had its own historical circumstances. But you have to understand that he suffered in silence and testified in silence for half of his life as a Prophet, for a decade, before God gave him express permission to move from non-violent protest to violent protest. But it needed the intervention of the Divine to say okay, use arms. No human being can take this matter lightly and assume that they have the permission of the Divine to use violence. And if they understand sharia, they would understand there are so many conditions. The most simple condition is that you harm no innocent human beings. Otherwise you are guilty of the crime of hirabah which is the crime of terror, spreading corruption and terror on Earth, which is a huge sin. Any God-fearing Muslim would think a million times before they would even think of committing it.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: This is not completely lost on today’s Muslims. Polls show that Muslims approve of terrorism at a considerably lower rate than non-Muslims.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: That’s part of what gets, again, ignored. Every time there’s a terrorist attack, the first people that cringe in disgust are Muslims, and I can testify to that. Not just in Islamic centers in the United States but, even when I talk to my family in Egypt, I talk to my friends in Europe, there’s just this visceral reaction: “Who would do that? Who is the animal that would do that?””

By the way, I actually hadn’t realized that you were ousted from the University Of Wisconsin because of your writing.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: It’s kind of a long story. I could send you a couple of links about it. But basically, what happened was that a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth formed at the beginning of 2006. By late spring there were about a hundred signed up. And at that point, whoever is charged with pushing back against such things apparently decided they would change from ignoring the 9/11 truth movement to pushing back against it. And somehow I got selected as the whipping boy to discourage the others. So I was ambushed by a talk radio host and then attacked by the state legislature here in Wisconsin. I had a very interesting six months of debating with Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly on FOX News, and having non-stop media coverage while I was trying to teach an Introduction To Islam class.

And I’m not the only one. There are a number of other people who’ve been pushed out of the academy for talking about 9/11. Stephen Jones, the physics professor at Brigham Young University, was ousted immediately after some high level Bush Administration official went and conferred with the president of BYU. And there have been a number of others. And just recently Joy Karega was booted out of Oberlin. Professor Tony Hall has been suspended up at the University of Lethbridge. And so on. So there’s a bit of an inquisition going on around these issues and it’s been kept pretty much off the mainstream radar.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: Isn’t it ironic! Because recently, on campus, we’ve had this harping on the theme that the enemies of freedom of speech are Muslims, because of the Danish cartoons and their reaction to the maligning of the Prophet. And there is a complete failure to see the utter hypocrisy in pointing the finger at Muslims as fundamentally incapable of understanding the concept of freedom of speech, when our own universities still engage in these witch hunts. And of course we all know the history of witch hunts in academia during the so called red scare and after the Civil War and before and after World War 1, then again before and after World War 2, and then during the Cold War. But the fact that we still do it, and then we point the finger at Muslims as the ones entirely incapable of understanding freedom of speech, is bewildering.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: It’s doubly ironic because the great witch hunt that’s going on right now is primarily focused on 9/11 truth and anti-Zionism. Those are the two issues that will get you harassed, railroaded and maybe even booted out of your university. And these are the two issues most closely related to the so called clash of civilizations and all of the engineered Islamophobia that has come with it.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: I know that even in the University Of California system there’s a systematic effort to basically say that speech of anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, to the extent that a critique of Israeli policies is anti-Semitism. There has been a faculty union, which I am proud to belong to, doing everything in our capacity to resist this. How could you say, under any moral standard, that a critique of the policies of a government in systematic violation of international law by being an occupying force is equal to anti-Semitism? And how could you say that a critique of any ideology. Unless you want to extend that to those who attack Islamism and say that is equal to racial bigotry. Then we might have something to talk about. It’s astounding, the amount of inequities.

I always come back to this because I always have to come back to my center point. I recently gave a sermon at Islamic Center of Southern California in which I talked about Allah ul-Haqq, God is the Truth is the center for all of us, and that we are met with so many falsehoods and shades of untruths and semi-truth and supra-truth and whatever you want to call it that in life we are taken whichever way. But we must always go back to that center that Allah ul-Haqq, Allah is the Truth, and to center ourselves on that. I go back as a sharia scholar and say that there is so much inequity that if you understand fidelity to sharia, you have an obligation of moral vigilance in speaking out against this inequity and recognizing it and not simply saying, well, as long as I’m doing my five prayers and my rituals, I can just live in oblivious hedonism. Sharia existence does not allow for a hedonistic existence. It is fundamentally inconsistent with it. And it makes people like myself get accused of being a stealth Islamist, and they go through these cyclical attempts to get one fired, and so on in a life of consistent struggle. But that’s the true jihad. A true jihad is a truth struggle—true persistence on a path of truth. The true jihad is not blowing off bombs that kill off innocent people here and there. That’s a proof of the demonic, a path of the demonic. It is not Godly. That is a path of everything that is not beautiful. Sharia is the pursuit of beauty.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: And that is one of the great things about your book. The two things that I especially appreciate are first that you’re bringing talk of beauty into the discussion of sharia; the ihsan (beauty) dimension is such a crucial dimension of Islam. And you also have a discussion of oppression of the mustadafin (the weak and oppressed) and our duty to fight oppression. These are beautiful. Do you think that the work of thoughtful Muslim Scholars like yourself could eventually help re-center global civilization? Because it seems like the power elite, which has always been corrupt, everywhere, has gotten much worse, that the West is on a downward civilizational arc, that the kind of immense corruption that we’re seeing is tied into a school of thought that uses Machiavelli, Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss—these people who not only tolerate lies but they exalt in lies, big lies, the bigger the better. They say that the elite has not just the right but the duty to lie to manipulate the masses, that there’s no such thing as Good and therefore the happy man is the man that appears to be good on the outside but is evil on the inside, looking out for himself. This is their philosophy. And that’s where Western civilization has arrived at. And maybe it’s partly because they have no more metaphysical foundations, because Christianity has eroded. Do you think that this Islamic discussion that you are pioneering could contribute to bringing back that lost spiritual and metaphysical foundation for goodness and truth and beauty, (all three) being the same thing, giving us a basis for morality?

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: Yes. It is quite remarkable. I would add to that list Ayn Rand, because, she, especially among many Republicans, is sort of like a prophet. And her philosophy is that somehow if you take care of number one—basically, yourself—a philosophy of selfishness. It is astounding to me. One of the things I was amazed at is that some of my law students are hired by prestigious law firms and they’re told “it’s a prerequisite before you start for me, you have to read Ayn Rand.”

We had an event recently in the law school. It was basically an Islamophobic event about the Danish cartoons and how Muslims are the major threat to civilization. And the display table had all the books of Ayn Rand and the role of the campus Federalist Society thinking that this is the foundation of morality. And yet, at the same time we have philosophers like Charles Taylor that readily admit that modern human beings are fairly alienated and uprooted, morally uprooted. When they tried to enter themselves in the philosophy of Ayn Rand and Strauss, Hobbes and Machiavelli, it works for the select few, the elite that are born with all the power and wealth. That works fine for them in a very demonic sense, an ungodly sense. It comforts them. But for the vast majority at one point or another in their lives they feel, basically, what is the purpose of existence? What does it all mean?

And sadly, Christianity at its present moment has been co-opted into being basically a placebo, a false consciousness, by people basically saying: “It doesn’t matter. Jesus loves you.” And that sort of gives you comfort. But I don’t believe that’s true Christianity, because the true Christianity can be seen in a lot of the liberation theology writings in the Christian tradition. But the Christianity that prevails in so many of our US churches is: “It’s fine to embrace all this materialism. It’s fine to be in debt up to your ears. It’s fine to live in an effortless society. But what matters is that Jesus loves you and you go to church on Sunday and you sing and you feel good and then you go back to the rest of your week, without really…And that is, I think, what the conscientious moral theologians have condemned repeatedly.

I can only pray that my writings, especially, Reasoning With God and my book The Search For Beauty In Islam have found a very receptive audience with Muslims and non-Muslims. I’ve received so much support from Jewish theologians and Christian theologians that found what I’ve said about Godliness and beauty and the essential role of beauty as a moral virtue and a deeply struck idea that it’s an esthetic value. And it resonated with them.

And I’m also very comforted by the fact that there have already been translations of Reasoning With God in Indonesia and Malaysia and Singapore, and there is a contract to translate it to Persian. Reasoning With God has not been translated to Arabic yet but The Search For Beauty and Speaking God’s Name and many of my other Books have been translated into Arabic, have done exceptionally well, al-hamdullilah, more than I would have ever dreamt.

I think that if there is any power to this message it is because it is within us. It is inside of us already. When we are reminded…Forget those who are deluded and allow their eyes to be covered by the trappings of wealth and power. Until they meet the moment of weakness, often the covers over their eyes are not lifted. But for so many, when you reach out to them with a message of beauty and a fundamental core value of beauty, and that God doesn’t make sense if God is not a moral energy and a moral power that propels us towards beauty and calls us towards beauty and calls upon us to come to beauty. I think it resonates in the intuitive and native hearts of so many people and they say “yes, that makes sense. That’s what we are, as human beings.” You know alcohol is not going to do it and drugs are not going to do it and our numerous distractions, like rushing to pornography, are not going to do it. Our various distractions that we employ fundamentally because our hearts ache because we want this beauty and we can’t locate it. So we medicate ourselves through demonic means and ungodly means: everything from pornography to alcohol to drugs to picking fights with our neighbors, trying to enrich ourselves through means that are iniquitous, unfair, become addicted to reality TV and this form of cheap voyeurism, and so on. We know in our hearts that we are aching for something more substantive and more real. And so, yes, I pray that—maybe not in my lifetime—but I pray that these writings do help re-center human civilization to something more meaningful than the trajectory we’ve taken (by following) people who have a very dim view of the nature of human beings, like Strauss and Ayn Rand, who have a very jaded understanding of what the human being is. Or those who—I was in a debate with Roberto Unger who said, well, the solution to uprootedness and alienation is for human beings to strive to become God. And (my) response was this, and the Ayn Rand delusions, is exactly the problem with human beings: Theyaspire to become gods, not Godly. And there’s a huge difference between Godly and gods. For those who do fall into that, and accept that falsehood that we are now gods, they feel justified in cheating other human beings, (treating them like) absolute garbage, and bllaming (those) human beings for the way that they are being treated. Basically they portray human beings who are not as wealthy, not as privileged, as losers, and so “you deserve what you get because you are just losers.”

Dr. Kevin Barrett: These people trying to become Gods are really becoming demons.

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: Yes, that is the reality that we see. The nature of the demonic is that it is incapable of seeing its own ugliness, or the ugliness that it perpetuates…That it perpetuates because it doesn’t consider it ugly. It doesn’t, metaphysically, see ugliness as ugliness. And it deconstructs the very idea of beauty in the same way because it deconstructs the idea of the Divine. And that’s demonic. And that’s precisely what we see in so many of the celebrated philosophical paradigms in academia. Deconstructionism, I’m sure you know, is very easy intellectual exercise, and I think a cheap intellectual exercise. It’s much harder to construct an alternative. But yet, the extent to which we celebrate hedonistic deconstructionism and the tearing down of values and just leaving a metaphysical wasteland, this has gotten us into the Trumpian moment. If that’s not a concrete manifestation of what this wasteland does. I mean Trump talking about Christ and being considered, somehow, a champion of Christ! How more paradoxical can you get? For any decent Christian who reflects upon that says: This does not make sense! Christ was not anything like a Trump. (Jesus as) a prop for the character Trump—this cannot be right!

Dr. Kevin Barrett: Yes. How do people miss that? One of the things your work has is this wonderful appreciation for a kind of common sense, for the basic human nature that can see what’s good, the ma`ruf, what’s accepted as good, and themunkar, what is accepted as bad. We have the innate ability to see that. But sometimes I wonder how people miss it with Trump the Christian. And I think that is tied into the inability to see beauty vs ugliness, a theme you harp on quite a bit. And in Islam today an obvious example of this is the power of the Saudis who are bulldozing all of their monuments. They hate art, they hate esthetics, they hate beauty. They’re almost like parodies of the worst kind of American attachment to ugliness. Mecca is turning into another version of Houston. How did that happen?

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: I’ll just say one of the saddest things is that Mecca looks like Las Vegas, except without gambling establishments; but basically if you’re wealthy and you go to Mecca, you can live in absolute luxury. And if you’re not wealthy, then you’re out in the desert in tents. This is fundamentally inconsistent with Islam, people! This is not the Mecca of sharia. This is not the Mecca of The Prophet. This is not the Mecca of the companions. If I have a message to part with, it’s: Muslims, wake up! What more do you need than seeing Mecca, the heart of where Islam is, where there is absolute equality between races, between classes, between genders, as we all wear the same attire and go around the Kaaba. But yet you have these luxury hotels, they’re all Western Hotels. Western companies have basically opened branches in Mecca. And this is obscene. And if that is not a wake-up call that we have drifted so far away from what is Godly, what else can be?

Dr. Kevin Barrett: Well Thank You so much. Barak Allahu fik, Khaled Abou El Fadl. I appreciate your amazing work. And I think your work amounts to wake up call, not just for Muslims, but for thinking and sensitive non-Muslims as well. I highly recommend your book Reasoning With God to anybody who has the slightest curiosity about what the word sharia means and what’s at stake with the state of Islam. So once again….

Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: It was a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak from my heart.

Dr. Kevin Barrett: Well, thank you so very much and I really appreciate you speaking from the heart and taking those risks that truth speakers always take. And may God Bless you and Protect You. As-salaamu alaikum and hope to speak with you again someday.