Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl -- Pernicious Peddler of Poisonous Piffle?

Dear Dean Moran:

I am an alumnus, a graduate of the 1976 class at the UCLA School of Law.

I am outraged to have learned that a champion of Sharia law, Prof. Khaled Abou El Fadl, is presently a law professor at my law school. Dr. Abou El Fadl is a softsoaper and whitewasher of Sharia Law, a legal system that is as anti-American as can be, based as it is on entirely different principles than our laws.

Whatever the topic -- women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights, tolerance/diversity/pluralism, family law, the laws of inheritance, the rights of a non-Muslim (known as a Kaffir, a Sharia term of art that means a physically and spiritually nejis/filthyuntermensch, predestined for Jahunum/Hell by Allah, per the Koran and the Sunna (the Hadith and the Sira, holy books about the teachings and life of Mohammed), jihad, the Dhimmi (the legal class the Sharia assigns to all non-Muslim subjects, which constitute not “second-class citizenship,” but in actuality semi-slaves in the subject Muslim-majority polity), slavery (only “officially” outlawed in 1962 in Saudi Arabia [there are credible reports of public slave auctions into the 1980s, however] and in 1981 in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania!), freedom of expression and ideas, individual rights and liberties -- the Sharia has a totally incompatible view with American law and the Judeo-Christian values that undergird it.

In short, American law values the rights, liberties and freedoms of the individual; Sharia law requires the individual to “submit” (“Islam” means “to submit”) to the Caliph, the clerics and the expositors of the Sharia. Under Sharia law there is no (from Warner,Sharia for Non-Muslims, p. 3):

• freedom of religion
• freedom of speech
• freedom of thought
• freedom of artistic expression
• freedom of the press
• no equality before the law of all peoples--a non-Muslim, a Kafir, is never equal to a Muslim
• Equal protection under law for different classes of people. Justice is dualistic, with one set of laws for Muslim males and different laws for women and non-Muslims.
• Equality between men and women (e.g., women can be beaten)
• right to bear arms for non-Muslims
• liberal secular-humanist democracy, since such would require a non-Muslim be equal before the law to a Muslim

Furthermore, our Constitution is considered a man-made document ofjahiliyah/ignorance, that is inferior to the Sharia, and must ultimately submit to it. Under a Sharia-based polity, all non-Muslims are dhimmis,legal semi-slaves or third-class subjects [as contradistinguished from “citizens”] (Muslim women being second-class subjects). Because the Sharia is supremacist, it holds that all governments must be ruled by Sharia. When I attended the UCLA School of Law, I took a class in Jewish Law (you hereby have my permission to check my records on this), taught by a rabbi. Jewish law does not apply to non-Jews. Thus, for example, an Orthodox rabbi who sees a gentile enjoying a ham sandwich in a public space couldn’t care less, as the Jewish dietary laws explicitly do not apply to non-Jews. A Muslim cleric, on the other hand, would be deeply offended, as Sharia norms are considered superior to all other legal norms, and should be supreme--everyone should “submit” to them! Interestingly, it is a venerable Talmudic principle of Jewish Choice-of-Law doctrine that Dina d’malchuta dina(“the law of the land is law”); in other words, the law of the polity in which a Jewish community resides in most all cases trumps Jewish law! Just the opposite avails in the Sharia. My concern is the faux scholarship and outright intellectual dishonesty of Dr. Abou El Fadl. I ask that you look at these pieces, which deal with this issue>

• http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11248
• http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/10523
• http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/31490

My ancestry is from what was the oldest continuing Jewish community on earth -- the Baghdadian community, dating back some 2,500 years. My maternal and paternal grandparents lived under the living hell of the Ottomon Turks, those same jihadis who committed the Armenian Genocide (after all, Armenians are filthy sub-human Christian Kaffirs, per the Sharia, which in turn is based on the Koran and the Sunna), and whose governance was Sharia-based (the Caliphate only ended in 1924, thanks to Kemal Attaturk). Today Iraq is reverting to its intolerant Sharia-tinged past (Sharia is officially part of the Iraqi constitution, thanks in part to Noah Feldman, Esq., another lawyer-softsoaper of the Sharia), with terrible ongoing subjugation and oppression of the ancient Assyro-Chaldean Christian population.

I ask that your office conduct a thoroughgoing investigation into what I allege to be multiple deceptive and dishonest lectures regarding Islamic law, the Sharia, by Prof. Abou El Fadl. I intend to publish this letter, both amongst my fellow alumni as well as in the public domain, as I greatly fear that my alma mater has an unstated policy of political correctness in this most important matter, and will not look into these serious allegations of scholastic misfeasance and malfeasance with the requisite rigor.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated good faith attention to the most serious allegations contained herein. I await your considered response.

Respectfully,

George Aaron

Class of 1976

Dear George,

Thank you for your note regarding Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl. As you know from your time as a student here at the Law School, academic freedom is a core value of American higher education in general and the University of California and UCLA in particular. The free exchange of ideas is precisely what academic freedom is designed to promote and protect. Professor El Fadl is a distinguished scholar of Islamic Law, and writing and speaking about that subject on occasion may generate controversy and debate. The quality of teaching and research at the University and the Law School would suffer, however, if a faculty member were to be sanctioned every time he or she expresses controversial ideas or makes statements with which people disagree or find fault.

I hope this response is helpful to you and that you will continue to be engaged in the life of your alma mater.

With best regards,

Rachel

Dear Dean Moran:

Thank you for your prompt reply.

I have no problem with the free exchange of ideas, inclusive of a legal system -- the Sharia -- which in present-day Iran’s Islamic Penal Code mandates the lapidation of sex criminals, and even prescribes the size of the stones (they should not be too large, elst the sex-felon may die too quickly, nor too small, because the criminal may not die, or just may take too long). But it is the duty of a scholar to seek clarity, especially when it comes to contrasting different legal systems, such as the Anglo-American Common Law system, which focuses on personal freedoms and liberties, as well as civil and human rights, and the Sharia, which was behind the first official act of the Ayatollah Khomieni when in 1979 he lowered the legal age of marriage in Iran from 18 to nine (here the Sharia is based on the holy example of Mohammed [Sunna], who consummated his marriage to Aisha at the age of nine).

I still recall my first day of criminal law in the Fall of 1973 with Prof. Norman Abrams, the former Acting Chancellor of UCLA, where I received by B.A. degree), wherein he brought up the role of multi-culturalism in American law by querying how an American court should deal with a murderer who kills his daughter in the context of what we now refer to as honor killings, prevalent in Arabic-Muslim polities. Although the Sharia does not directly sanction such deeds, the legal second-class status of women under Islamic law takes us 80% of the way down the road.

In Saudi Arabia, also a Sharia state, women are not allowed a driver’s license, no religion other than Islam may be openly or publicly practiced, there is no freedom of religion or conscience, nor freedom of expression (the Saudi national airline has banned Bibles!). Dr. Abou El Fadl has pretended that non-Muslims have no reason to be interested in the Sharia. However, the Sharia is very interested in non-Muslims (the Sharia legal term of art is Kaffirs, nejis/filthy untermenschen pre-destined by Allah for Jahunum/Hell, in running their lives, in their submission to Sharia norms) -- witness the move by the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference to abrogate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the move to pass a worldwide blasphemy law. Where is the intellectual honesty of a scholar who does not squarely and fairly deal with these issues?

It is one thing for a legal scholar to cause controversy and debate by taking an unpopular position; it is quite another when the scholar obfuscates rather than clarifies by engaging in subpar scholarship and outright deception (known by the Sharia as taqqiyah/sacred lying or deception in the cause of Allah).

I am thus very concerned that the reputation of my law-school alma mater is being tarnished by Prof. Abou El Fadl’s continued professorship at the UCLA School of Law.

Respectfully,

George Aaron