Westerners have difficulty making sense of the Muslim faith. Khaled Abou El Fadl offers one reason why:
A seditious figure stood at the podium. “Why do I need thirty thousand books in my library? Is it because every single book says exactly the same thing?” wondered Khaled Abou El Fadl, the UCLA professor who adopted stray dogs to defy mean-spirited Muslims. “The way we Muslims treat our intellectual heritage is very much as if book after book should affirm the ‘simple truth’ that is Islam and we need not go beyond.” Today’s Muslim scholars “must be the most dull, the most boring products that humanity has known. Because each one of them can say, ‘What I’m going to do with my life is I’m going to write exactly the same things that were said for the past six hundred years.” (Quoted from The Trouble with Islam, by Irshad Manji. St. Martin’s Press. 2003. p. 187.)
For a brief biography of Khaled Abou El Fadl, click here.
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