Reasoning with God by Khaled Abou El Fadl

Author:Khaled Abou El Fadl [Fadl, Khaled Abou El]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2014-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

So it was not till I went to Arabia that, I came into contact with what seemed to me undeniably a pure form of Islam, deriving exclusively from the original sources of its inspiration, the Quran and the Traditions of the Prophet, and owing nothing to subsequent theological interpolation and exegesis. The Wahhabi creed seemed to me, as the result of deep study, to be the ideal form of religion, and the fanaticism of its followers did not displease me. They had the merit of practicing what they believed and preached, while their religion seemed to be admirably suited to the needs of human life and society in their simplest form. It was a religion which one could accept without intellectual dishonesty as a guide to life and conduct, and whose ethical standards seem to conform better than those of other religions—Christianity for instance—to the basic needs of humanity.[151]

Philby goes on to note that even if the “code” of Islam might appear strict, for him this is not troublesome because Islam refuses to countenance “bastardy,” and its moral order is superior to the Ten Commandments.[152] It appears callous and even rather dissolute for Philby to treat the atrocities of Wahhabism in such a perfunctory manner. Philby was well aware that this “strict” Wahhabi code resulted in the commission of mass atrocities and many massacres in the towns and cities they invaded. And during the period that Philby so ably helped King Ibn Saud spread and consolidate his power, the mutawwa‘un (religious enforcers) carried out hundreds of decapitations and thousands of amputations in addition to countless numbers of beatings and incidents of degradation.[153] Indeed, we know from historical sources that the Wahhabis would inspire such terror and hate in the towns they invaded that shopkeepers would be forced to close their shutters and attempt to hide.[154] Of course, being a British subject and a close advisor to King Ibn Saud, Philby never had to concern himself with the risk of being on the receiving end of Wahhabi fanaticism. One cannot escape the feeling that Philby’s apologetics on behalf of Wahhabism are self-indulgent in the extreme. For his apologetics, Philby enjoyed wealth, power, and even slave girls, gifted to him by King Ibn Saud. Although by his own admission Philby encountered many sophisticated and nuanced Muslim cultures in India, Egypt, Istanbul, and other places, nevertheless he persisted in the belief that the interpretive and intellectual heritage of Islam is but a corruption of the pristine nature of the faith and that it is the primal and simplistic but brutish savage that best represents the true Islam.

In one of his well-known and typically frank assessments, a report presented to the British government titled The Reconstruction of Arabia, T. E. Lawrence cogently noted that after the First World War, British policy was driven by “the urgent need to divide Islam” and “to create a ring of client states, themselves insisting on the patronage of the British Empire.”[155] To an extent, this statement cuts through

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