More about Khaleel Mohammed

I wanted to learn more about Professor Mohammed whose e-mail from Arabs for Israel is under my post "Germans sing Happy Birthday to Israel", from May 11, 2005.


I found this article, The Dissenting Muslim, about Dr. Mohammed at Campus Watch which is an organization within the Anti-Defamation League. He is a Islamic scholar that is accepted by both Shi'a and Sunni Muslims. In the article he states:

As Dr. Mohammed leans back in a chair in his SDSU office, where the walls are lined with religious texts and posters of Bob Marley and Muhammad Ali, he explains that, contrary to popular opinion, history backs him up. "If you're going to take it from a secular point of view," he says, "you must involve history, which states very clearly that in 70 A.D. the Temple burned, and in the year 135 the Jews were exiled. And in 638 the Muslims full well knew whom the land rightly belonged to…. Muslims left the borders of Arabia to enter a land that according to their own scriptures, belongs to the people of Moses." He likens Muslim occupation of the land – and failure to help Jews reacquire the land – to complacency in the face of a crime.

In April, Dr. Mohammed, Robert Spencer, & Bat Ye'or discussed in a symposium at Front Page Magazine the Qu'ran. It was a very interesting read and at times very contentious. Dr. Mohammed appears to be one of a very Islamic scholars who uses exegesis to discuss the Qu'ran. He's views are controversial to say the least.

In one comment he stated:

that there are several approaches, and that over the last century, the once normative traditional position has shifted to acknowledgement about time and place context. This, I may point out, is the same with the Bible.

I am an academic first, activist second. The mosques have largely prevented me from doing that which I love, so unfortunately, I am in a bind. Yet, I persist in my method, because the Muslim youth respond more to my approach than what is slowly, but surely, becoming recognized as largely traditionalist, ossified nonsense.

There is a need for reform within Islam, and this pressing need is not being responded to from within the Muslim community with the required commitment.

He also stated that punishments such as stoning for adulterers was gleaned from the Bible, though Bat Ye'or states that at the time of the Prophet Mohammed was alive, Jews had stopped many of the practices.

However you may view some of Professor Mohammed statements, he is trying to place the Qu'ran in a contextual basis and to point out that what many Muslims are learning is not the truth.