Khaled Abou El Fadl, Keynote Speech, 2022 National Muslim Law Students Conference, 26 March 2022

Reflecting on his own experiences from being the only Muslim law student at the University of Pennsylvania Law School on through his 30 year career as a law professor at UCLA, Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl speaks about the place of Muslims in the legal field and the world, offering advice to new, aspiring, and young Muslim lawyers at the 2022 NMLSA Conference.

BIO: Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl is one of the world’s leading authorities on Shari'ah, Islamic law and Islam, and a prominent scholar in the field of human rights. He is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law where he teaches Public International Law, International Human Rights; Islamic Jurisprudence; Political Asylum and Refugee Law; The Trafficking of Human Beings: Law and Policy; Political Crimes and Legal Systems; and Muslims, Race and Law. He was also formerly the Chair of the Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program at UCLA. He is the founder of The Institute of Advanced Usuli Studies (“The Usuli Institute”), a 501c3 non-profit educational institute dedicated to ethics, beauty and critical thinking in the Islamic intellectual tradition.

Dr. Abou El Fadl received the American Academy of Religion (AAR) 2020 Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion and the University of Oslo Human Rights Award, the Leo and Lisl Eitinger Prize in 2007. He previously served on the Board of Human Rights Watch. He regularly serves as an expert in cases involving human rights, terrorism, political asylum, and international and commercial law. He was recognized in LawDragon’s Top 500 Lawyers in the Nation (2005, 2017, and 2018), and named in “The 50 Smartest People of Faith” by TheBestSchools.org (2013). He has been ranked among “The Power 500 List of the World’s Most Influential Arabs” and “The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims.”

His latest book is entitled, The Prophet’s Pulpit: Commentaries on the State of Islam (forthcoming). His other books include Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari'ah in the Modern Age; The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists; Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women; Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law; And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses; Islam and the Challenge of Democracy; The Place of Tolerance in Islam; and The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of the Books.

Dr. Abou El Fadl holds a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University, a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Islamic law from Princeton University. He is a classically trained Islamic jurist, having received 13 years of systematic instruction in Islamic jurisprudence, grammar and eloquence in Egypt and Kuwait. After law school, he clerked for Arizona Supreme Court Justice James Moeller, and practiced immigration and investment law in the U.S. and the Middle East. He previously taught Islamic law at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, Yale Law School, and Princeton University.