17. July 2018

Law And Ethics in the Islamic Normative Tradition The Encyclopedia of Islamic Bioethics, Oxford University Online by Khaled Abou El Fadl Introduction There is a wide range of jurisprudential and ethical prescriptions, under the broad rubric of Sharīʿah that apply to ever expanding issues raised by the field of bioethics. The Sharīʿah consists of ethical and legal normative duties and obligations binding to each Muslim individually and to Muslims collectively. The Islamic classical legal...

28. January 2018

Khaled Abou El Fadl on the Islamic Ethics that could guide issues of migration. A powerful talk in which Dr. Abou El Fadl explores what the Islamic message reveals about modern day issues of migration, refugees and the realities of oppression, and the potential to go beyond international law norms to elevate current standards of humanitarian practice. Dr. Abou El Fadl delivers the keynote lecture via Skype entitled, "Islamic Ethics, Human Rights and Migration" for the conference on "Migration...

14. August 2017

The question of how the law becomes known has occupied the minds of Muslim scholars for a long time. In the early centuries, the heated debates, and at times even hostilities, centered around the place and role of ethical principles and reason in the development of the religious tradition. Numerous reports in the Islamic tradition described the very mission of the Prophet Muhammad as part and parcel of an ethical project—a project that builds upon and develops people’s natural ethical...

24. January 2012

The Centrality of Sharī‘ah to Government and Constitutionalism in Islam Khaled Abou El Fadl* 1. INTRODUCTION Constitutionalism reflects embedded normative values that arise from evolved historical practices that are not easily transplanted outside their natural habitat. In many ways, constitutionalism must be practiced and not theorized.[1] Therefore, it is doubtful whether it is helpful to abstract the doctrines of constitutionalism from their remarkably diverse cultural and social...

01. January 2006

By Khaled Abou El Fadl The knowledge that is God makes all else tentative. The certainty that is God reduces all else to conjecture. The more one learns the more one asks, and the more one asks the more one discovers the Divine. In this Conference the only absolute is God; all else searches for the absolute. If one claims knowledge, humility before The All-Knowing makes the heart shudder. In this Conference, arrogance is the only ignorance and temporal knowledge is but a question. It is...

01. July 2005

By Khaled Abou El Fadl In answer to the question: “Is there a distinctly Islamic view of human rights, and if so, is it compatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?” one must begin by making some important distinctions in this discourse, which relate to identifying something one can refer to as belonging to “Islam” or the Islamic tradition. When one talks about the human rights tradition in the West, one can identify the Catholic and Protestant progression in discourses on...

01. May 1999

This paper focuses on the balance between functionalism and moralism in the pre-modern juristic discourses on the rules which apply to killing at war. Classical Muslim jurists distinguish between what they call harb al-bugha and harb al-kufar (war against Muslims and war against unbelievers). The rules which apply to fighting Muslims are different from the limitations set upon the conduct of warfare against non-Muslims.