In this paper, using the concept of sliding mode control SMC, a fuzzy sliding mode controller FSMC, which is synthesized by linguistic control rules, is proposed. Two sets of fuzzy rule bases are utilized to represent the controlled system. The membership functions of the THEN-part, which is used to construct a suitable equivalent control of SMC, are changed according to adaptive law. In particular, only one adaptive factor is characterized to adapt the membership functions instead of several ones in conventional adaptive approaches. Under this design scheme, we not only maintain the distribution of membership functions over state space but also reduce considerably computing time. The proposed indirect adaptive FSMC is synthesized through the following stages. First, we construct the fuzzy rule bases according to the common sense of SMC to describe the model of the controlled system, and define the fuzzy sets whose membership functions are equally distributed in state space. Then, the derived adaptive law is used to adjust the membership functions of the THEN-part to approximate an equivalent control without knowing the mathematical model of the controlled system. Third, a hitting control is developed to guarantee the stability of the control system. Finally, we smooth the hitting control via proposed heuristic control rules. We apply this FSMC to controlling a nonlinear inverted pendulum system to confirm the validity of the proposed approach.