Vincent Schodolski reveals via the Chicago Tribune News Service that Furor surrounds professor who speaks out against radical Islam:
The death threats have stopped and the white van no longer lingers ominously outside his San Fernando Valley home, but the uproar Khaled Abou El Fadl unleashed a year ago has not abated.Our pals, the Sheikhs of Araby.
El Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at UCLA, has long been a moderate voice urging Muslims in the United States and elsewhere to speak out against radical elements of Islam.
So when he wrote an op-ed article published by the Los Angeles Times in the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he was expressing views he had aired for years - usually to Muslim audiences.
At the time the article was published, many Muslims were speaking out against radical Islam, the kind personified by Osama bin Laden. So what was it about El Fadl's views that provoked such a furious reaction?
"I am the biggest danger to their (version of) Islam, not to Islam, and they don't make the distinction," El Fadl said.
"They," he said, were people who, for various reasons, support a version of Islam that has roots in Saudi Arabia and which, El Fadl suggests, has gained wide sway because of the willingness of the Saudi Arabian government to spend money to export its views.
The FBI and police are investigating the threats and the vandalism of El Fadl's car while it was parked outside a San Fernando Valley movie theater earlier this year. Although the windows were shattered, nothing was taken from the car, the only vehicle vandalized there that day.Gratuitous reference to Christians and Jews alert! That's getting so old, but it's probably in their style manual.
Police tapped El Fadl's telephone but never were able to trace the source of the threatening calls.
At first he thought the threats were coming from non-Muslims angered by the terrorist attacks. But soon, El Fadl and authorities concluded that they were from Muslims angered by his criticism of those who failed to speak out against what he calls a "puritanical" form of Islam espoused by the Saudis.
That form of Islam, known as Wahhabism, is in some ways similar to fundamentalist views in Christianity and Judaism. Wahhabism, however, calls for a return to the Koranic interpretations that flourished in the decades that followed the death of Muhammad, the seventh-century prophet of Islam.
