We have excelled in conferences, symposiums, and retreats handsomely staffed by cheerleaders. The cheerleaders raise the banners, claim our superiority, and assert our manifest destiny. They aim to praise and adulate our intellectual defeat by singing, "Who needs an intellect, all we need is a handsome and luscious beard!" The cheerleaders live on euphoria and are as pretty as can be. But they have no knowledge of the score, nor the rules, and they seem to have forgotten that there is no game and no team. They seem to have forgotten that cheerleading is a brainless idiocy. Cheerleading is not a form of testimony before God - it is tribalism and perjury. What a sad state when a people come to rely on cheerleaders to lead their search for God's beauty, and for their measure of honesty.
-Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, "The Intellectual Refugee," Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam, p. 282
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