Khaled Abou El Fadl’s Methodology of Reform

Abstract

Contemporary Islamic legal scholar, Khaled Abou El Fadl, proposes a coherent methodology for the narration of individually formed discourses within the Islamic community against their sublimation by both authoritarian fundamentalism and liberal relativism. In examining his work, this article identifies a tripartite methodology involving a process of de-legitimization for the current hegemonic narrative, a re-presentation of plurality both possible and existent, and an evaluation of this plurality in light of the broader tradition. Abou El Fadl’s work serves as the building block of a political and social form of resistance to the homogenization of identity and meaning within society, which allows for the narration of alternative discourses to those that are currently hegemonic, whether within the state as a whole or within a religious or social tradition. This resistance, brought about through the author’s structural methodology, aims to offer insights for the development of a notion of state-individual negotiation and identity formation.

Relationality and the Gadamerian “Horizontverschmelzung”: Khaled Abou El Fadl

“…As has hopefully become somewhat clearer, Abou El Fadl is not just concerned with challenging textual readings of authoritative sources, nor just with developing a social and community awareness of the nature of authoritative texts in producing authoritarian social outcomes, but also with the constructive development of an attachment to social beautification internally and externally to the community (Fadl 2014: 405-6). In doing so, Abou El Fadl is committed to the working through of texts to their social outcomes and the positioning of those textual and social choices within a broader ethical framework that connects the particular to the general, the individual to the social, and the textual to the ethical (Slater 2016a).…”