01. September 2009

7. Islamic law, human rights and neo-colonialism Khaled Abou El Fadl My lecture will focus on the interface and tensions between the human rights tradition and the Islamic tradition, particularly Islamic law. What is the `Islamic tradition` and, more particularly the Islamic legal tradition? Islamic law stands in a paradoxical position vis-à-vis the human-rights tradition. Western scholars have argued that the roots of the human-rights tradition are to be found in Judeo-Christian natural law,...

22. July 2009

FASCISM TRIUMPHANT? OPINION by Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl, Professor of Islam and Citizenship, University of Tilburg; Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law. How do you address hate? How do you have a rational conversation with hate? In coming to the Netherlands to teach, as the professor of Islam and Citizenship at the University of Tilburg, I expected that I would have to struggle with this dilemma. But nothing could have prepared me for the level of hate, bigotry, and prejudice that apparently...

29. June 2009

By Khaled Abou El Fadl Every epoch of human history has suffered its share of jahl and jahiliyya. Jahl means ignorance, heedlessness, the lack of awareness, and even idiocy or foolishness, but with the clear connotation of the perverse, pernicious, the dark, foreboding, and inauspicious. In Islamic eschatology, it is common to refer to a people plagued by ignorance, injustice, cruelty, and hatred as a people living in a state of jahiliyya. Ingratitude, selfishness, and arrogance are all thought...