Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?
by Paul Berman
Post date: 05.29.07
Issue date: 06.04.07
To Be a European Muslim
By Tariq Ramadan
(Islamic Foundation, 273 pp., $19.95)
Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity
By Tariq Ramadan
(Islamic Foundation, 352 pp., $35)
Western Muslims and the Future of Islam
By Tariq Ramadan
(Oxford University Press, 272 pp., $16.95)
Click here to purchase the book.
In the Footsteps of the Prophet:
Lessons from the Life of Muhammad
By Tariq Ramadan
(Oxford University Press, 242 pp., $23)
I.
Tariq Ramadan is a charismatic and energetic Islamic philosopher in Europe who has become popular and influential among various circles of European Muslims during the past fifteen years--originally in Geneva, where his father founded the Islamic Center in 1961; then in Lyon, the French city closest to Switzerland, where Ramadan attracted a following of young people from North African backgrounds; then among French Muslims beyond Lyon; at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, in Britain, where he spent a year on a fellowship; among still more scattered Muslim audiences in Western Europe, who listened to his audio recordings and packed his lecture halls, normally with the men and the women sitting demurely in their separate sections; among Muslims in various Francophone countries in Africa--and outward to the wider world.
Ramadan possesses a special genius for shaping cultural questions
according to his own lights and presenting those questions to the
general public, and he has demonstrated this ability from the start. As
early as 1993, at the age of thirty-two, he campaigned in Geneva to
cancel an impending production of Voltaire's play Muhammad, or
Fanaticism. The production was canceled, and a star was born--though
Ramadan has argued that, on the contrary, he had nothing to do with
canceling the play, and to say otherwise is a "pure lie." Not every
battle has gone his way. He taught at the college of Saussure, where
his colleagues were disturbed by his arguments in favor of Islamic
biology over Darwin. This time, too, Ramadan shaped the debate to his
own specifications by insisting that he never wanted to suppress the
existing biology curriculum--merely to complement it with an additional
point of view. A helpful creationist proposal. But the Darwinians,
unlike the Voltaireans, were in no rush to yield.
That was in 1995, and by then Ramadan had already established his
social base in Lyon, at the Union of Young Muslims and the Tawhid
bookstore and publishing house. These were slightly raffish immigrant
endeavors, somewhat outside the old and official mainline Muslim
organizations in France. Even so, the mainline organizations seem to
have welcomed the arrival of a brilliant young philosopher. He built
alliances. He attended conferences. His op-eds ran in the newspapers.
He engaged in debates. Eventually his face appeared on French
television and on the covers of glossy magazines, which introduced him
to the general public in France, a huge success. And yet--this is the
oddity about Tariq Ramadan--as his triumphs became ever greater, and
his thinking came to be more widely known, no consensus whatsoever
emerged regarding the nature of his philosophy or its meaning for
France, or Europe, or the world.
Some mainstream journalists in France were drawn to him from the start.
The Islam-and-secularism correspondent at Le Monde, full of admiration,
plugged him fairly regularly and sometimes adopted his arguments. At Le
Monde Diplomatique, he became a cause, not just a story; the editor
lionized him. Politis magazine promoted him. On the activist far left,
some of the anti-globalist radicals and the die-hard enemies of
McDonald's looked on Ramadan--because of his denunciations of American
imperialism and Zionism and his plebeian agitations in Lyon--as a
tribune of progressive Islam, even if his religious severities grated
on left-wing sensibilities. The Trotskyists of the Revolutionary
Communist League formed something of an alliance with him. A number of
Christian activists regarded him with particular fondness: a worthy
partner for inter-religious dialogues. A dike against the flood tides
of secular materialism. A religiously motivated social conscience
similar to their own, laboring on behalf of the poor and the oppressed.
Ramadan might even have seemed, in some people's eyes, stylishly trendy
at one moment or another--a champion of Islam who, because Islam has
been so badly demonized, held out a last dim hope for shocking the
bourgeoisie. Then again, some of the French experts on Islam, such as
the distinguished scholar Olivier Roy, who had no interest in shocking
anyone, likewise found something admirable in him: a thoughtful effort
to modernize Islam for a liberal age.
Still, in France other people recoiled, and did so without much
hesitation, and recoiled also at the people who had failed to recoil.
The critics were thoroughly convinced that Ramadan's friends and
admirers and supporters in the press were deluding themselves, and that
alliances with him were bound to backfire, and that, beneath the urbane
surface, he represented the worst in Islam, not the best. These critics
were drawn not only from the Christian conservatives and the political
right. The most prominent of his left-wing Christian allies turned
against him in a fury, as if betrayed. Some mainline Muslim leaders in
France grew reserved. Even the French anti-globalists were of two minds
about him. He had his fans, but there were many who watched with dismay
as Ramadan's pious followers filled the seats at anti-globalist
meetings and veiled women thronged the podium. In France his loudest
enemies were left-wing feminists, who took one look and shuddered in
alarm. Feminists from Muslim backgrounds denounced him in
Libération, the left-wing newspaper. The Socialist Party
politicians in France, who had every reason to seek out Arab and Muslim
voters, showed no interest in him at all.
Dark rumors spread. The Spanish police inquired into his Lyon networks.
In 1995 the French minister of the interior denied him permission to
re-enter France--which sparked a mobilization of petition-signers until
the order was rescinded. His detractors in the press--initially at Lyon
Mag, the city magazine in Lyon--speculated grimly about his personal
connections. He responded with a double lawsuit, against Lyon Mag and
against one of his critics, the Lebanese historian Antoine Sfeir. The
verdict ended up split: against the magazine but in favor of Sfeir. The
magazine kept on hammering nonetheless.
Books about Ramadan tumbled into the bookstores at a remarkable pace.
Caroline Fourest's Frère Tariq, or Brother Tariq, which appeared
in 2004, has been the most influential--an angry book, alarmed,
energetic in tabulating the naïve tropes and clichés of the
French press, indignant at the journalists who keep falling for the
same manipulations, indignant at the progressives who view Ramadan as
progressive. But hers was only the first, followed by six more books in
the last three or four years--among them Paul Landau's Le Sabre et le
Coran, or The Saber and the Qur'an, in 2005 (no less hostile and
accusatory than Fourest's); Aziz Zemouri's Faut-il Faire Taire Tariq
Ramadan?, or Should Tariq Ramadan Be Silenced?, the same year (which
affords Ramadan the chance to have his own say); and Ian Hamel's La
vérité sur Tariq Ramadan, or The Truth About Tariq
Ramadan, this year (mildly sympathetic to Ramadan, sometimes skeptical,
indignant at the hostility expressed by Fourest and Landau). And the
books, too, having contributed to the controversy, contributed to his
popularity.
Ramadan seems to have known instinctively how to respond to accusations
and innuendos, and his rejoinders succeeded in turning every new
setback into an advance. He suggested a bigotry against Islam on his
critics' part, amounting to a kind of racism. He argued that criticisms
of him represented a holdover from the colonialist mentality of the
past. He was angry, dignified, self-controlled, and unmovable. The
combination of his replies and his demeanor proved effective in the
conscience-stricken atmosphere of modern postimperial France. A good
many people, listening to his rejoinders, grew pensive. His supporters
waved their fists. And his critics became ever more fretful--not just
at Ramadan, but at the people who, in applauding or merely in growing
pensive, seemed to have accepted his categories of analysis, as if in a
stupor.
is entrance into the Anglophone world began quietly. The Islamic
Foundation in Leicester, where Ramadan studied and wrote in 1996-1997,
enjoys the distinction of having been the first and most vigorous
Muslim institution in Britain to rally against Salman Rushdie back in
1988, even before Ayatollah Khomeini issued his religious decree
authorizing Rushdie's assassination. The foundation published Ramadan's
book To Be a European Muslim in 1999, and it enjoyed a modest success.
To Be a European Muslim was regarded as a thoughtful argument for
healthy new relations between old-stock non-Muslim Europe and the
new-stock immigrant Muslim population. Daniel Pipes in the United
States was among the expert observers who offered applause--though, if
you visit Pipes's website, you will see that, ever since his initial
review, Pipes has been posting additional remorseful observations about
how wrong he was, and what could possibly have gotten into him? (You
will also see that Ramadan, for his part, together with a sympathetic
journalist or two, has promoted Pipes into the center of an
anti-Ramadan conspiracy on behalf of the Jews.)
In 2001, the Islamic Foundation published Ramadan's Islam, the West,
and the Challenges of Modernity, a philosophical text that attracted
less attention. Even so, controversy went on working its wonders, and
in faraway Indiana the University of Notre Dame offered him a
professorship beginning in 2004--partly funded, as it happens, by the
Kroc family, which means the McDonald's fortune. Ramadan accepted. He
obtained a visa. He arranged for his family to move. Then, at the last
minute, Homeland Security balked, and the State Department revoked his
visa. The ACLU, PEN, and a couple of academic organizations rallied to
his defense, as was their duty. But the man was barred, which generated
still more publicity, some of it hostile, of course, but much of it
sympathetic, as was only natural--a feeling of outrage on his behalf,
an exasperation at American provincialism, a fearful recollection of
the obtuse McCarthyite xenophobia of yore. Anyway, America's nay
triggered a British yea. St. Antony's College at Oxford stepped in with
its own offer of a fellowship for 2005. Ramadan accepted.
The London terrorist attack took place in July of that year. The Blair
government organized an advisory commission afterward to make suitable
recommendations. Ramadan was invited to participate. He accepted. And
with one incident piling atop the next--the defeats, the victories--he
was lifted, at last, to the pinnacle of American journalistic
recognition: the sort of full-length profile and full-page photograph
in The New York Times Magazine that half the writers and intellectuals
of Europe dream of receiving one day, in the hope of realizing the
impossible, which is to break into the American bookstores and the
American conversation.
So popular magazine in the United States has done more in the last few
years to illuminate the intellectual life of the Muslim world than The
New York Times Magazine--always in a serious manner, never flippantly,
always with major sources behind the journalism, always at full length.
In this instance, the Times magazine assigned its profile to the
well-known journalist Ian Buruma, and this was an impeccable choice.
Buruma published a book last year called Murder in Amsterdam, on the
assassination of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh by an Islamist
fanatic--and the book testified to Buruma's expertise on Islamist
dangers in Europe. Three years ago, Buruma and the Israeli philosopher
Avishai Margalit joined forces to write a book called Occidentalism, on
the historical appeal of European fascist and other anti-liberal
doctrines to people outside Europe, and this book testified to Buruma's
expertise on wayward and totalitarian ideologies as well: a pertinent
credential. Buruma produced his profile. The Times magazine published
it in February--though, because of the European controversy that has
broken out during the last few months over Buruma's journalism, the
profile has lingered in the public eye, and not just in Europe. The
profile bore the amusing title "Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue."
You can find it on the New York Times website.
The profile affected a quizzical tone. Buruma seemed bemused by his
difficulties in pinning his subject down--his difficulties even in
arranging for an interview, though he did finally get one. Buruma
dutifully rehearsed some of the political accusations that have been
leveled at Ramadan in France, in their more generalized versions at
least--dark rumors, feminist shudders, instinctive suspicions. In
Buruma's judgment, one accusation after another turned out to be
groundless; or exaggerated and unjust; or distorted because the context
had been omitted. Or Buruma expressed no opinion of his own and, out of
courtesy, permitted Ramadan to rebut his critics; and the rebuttals
seemed firm, or at least plausible, even if Buruma now and then raised
a skeptical eyebrow.
He marveled over Ramadan's mix of anti-globalist fervor and
ultra-conservative cultural views. "In American terms," Buruma
remarked, "he is a Noam Chomsky on foreign policy and a Jerry Falwell
on social affairs." Yet Buruma seemed to look on Ramadan much more
warmly than any comparisons to Chomsky and Falwell might suggest. He
explained that last year the French magazine Le Point invited him to
debate Ramadan and, in the hope of seeing sparks fly, urged him to be
aggressive. The debate took place. Ramadan was unflappable. The
discussion failed to stumble across any serious differences at all. "We
agreed on most issues," Buruma wrote, "and even when we didn't (he was
more friendly toward the pope than I was), our debate' refused to catch
fire"--which is a debate summary that, in its affability, is hard to
imagine if Buruma had come face-to-face with Chomsky or Falwell on a
public platform. "We agreed on most issues"--no, this would have been
an unlikely result of any encounter with the anti-imperialist from MIT
or the late evangelist of the Christian right.
All in all, Buruma judged that, despite the controversies and
accusations, Ramadan the philosopher offers, in Buruma's words, "a
reasoned but traditionalist approach to Islam" based on "values that
are as universal as those of the European Enlightenment." He judged
that Ramadan's values, although "neither secular, nor always liberal,"
offer "an alternative to violence, which is, in the end, reason enough
to engage with him, critically, but without fear." This was not quite a
ringing endorsement. Still, it was an endorsement. It conveyed the
unmistakable implication that Ramadan, the worthy interlocutor, stands
for more than himself, which is why engaging him might be useful--in
order to discover the human and philosophical principles that Western
and Muslim hearts and minds might share in common, and to bridge the
divisions, and at last to achieve, between the West and Islam, a
cultural peace: the goals that every reasonable person yearns to see
achieved, even if not everybody would assent too quickly to a vision of
the world that consigns the West to one corner and Islam to another.
Such were the conclusions in the Times magazine. They were tempered.
But they were confident. And here, in a single full-length magazine
profile, the entire well-established heap of European journalistic
platitudes about Ramadan that Caroline Fourest had catalogued and
deplored three years ago in France smoothly glided into American print,
as if landing at the airport. Nor was Buruma left standing alone with
his luggage of views and evaluations. The New York Review of Books had
already published an essay by Timothy Garton Ash, who is Ramadan's
colleague at St. Antony's College. Garton Ash lavished praise on Buruma
and, in passing, applauded Ramadan, too, precisely along Buruma's
lines, except without the cautionary notes. This spring, Oxford
University Press published Ramadan's latest book in English, a
biography of the Prophet Muhammad called In the Footsteps of the
Prophet. The New York Times Book Review assigned the book to
Stéphanie Giry, an editor of Foreign Affairs--a journalist who,
like Buruma, has contributed to The New Republic. Giry in her review
went so far as to invoke the authority of Buruma's profile in the Times
magazine, and she followed his argument almost to the letter.
It is not entirely obvious to me that Buruma has read very much by
Ramadan, nor that Stéphanie Giry has read more than a single
book, though she has met the man. As for Garton Ash, he confesses in
his New York Review essay that he bases his judgment on having heard
Ramadan speak, which may suggest that he has read nothing by Ramadan at
all. But no matter: a conventional wisdom has plainly convened. And in
this fashion Tariq Ramadan, by acquiring a brilliant fame and
refracting its rays in one country after another, has succeeded in
brightly illuminating two very different, murky, and related
developments during the last few years: a large new development among
select circles of pious Muslims in Europe, and not just in Europe; and
an equally new and still more remarkable development among the normally
impious journalists and intellectuals of Europe and America.
II.
Tariq Ramadan is nothing if not a son and a brother and, especially, a grandson, not to mention a great-grandson--family relations that shape everything he writes and does, or at least the perception of what he writes and does, which is an unusual fate for a writer on philosophical themes. His grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, born in Egypt in 1906 and assassinated by the Egyptian political police in 1949--a man who has cast a big shadow over modern events. At a very young age, Hassan al-Banna conceived a genuinely original project for the Muslim world, or at least a partly original one, as is always the case with new ideas. He gazed back on some late nineteenth-century thinkers--on Muhammad Abduh (under whom al-Banna's father, Ramadan's great-grandfather, studied at Al-Azhar University) and on Abduh's mentor and colleague Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. These were people who had wanted to overthrow the European colonizers--and at the same time to modernize the Islamic world. They wanted to join reason to faith, tradition to modernity, the Islamic achievements of the ancient past to the European breakthroughs of their own age. They called for an Islamic rejuvenation that was going to return to the pristine seventh-century, or "salafi," roots of Islam, while retaining a spirit of innovation--which made sense on the ground that, back in the seventh century, Islam itself was forcefully innovative.
Maybe there was something ambiguous in those nineteenth-century ideas.
It has even been suggested that al-Afghani was never entirely sincere
about his religious convictions, and used Islam for rhetorical
purposes. Then again, the nineteenth-century ambitions and ambiguities
ought to seem recognizable enough. In several places around the world
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--in Latin America,
in India, in China--nationalist-minded intellectuals labored earnestly
to bring their own autochthonous traditions together with European and
North American innovations, in the hope of overthrowing the
imperialists. That was an irresistible idea in those days. It is still
an irresistible idea. But how to accomplish any of this was never
really obvious. Hassan al-Banna's suggestion in the 1920s and 1930s was
to convert the proposed seventh-century-and-modern Islamic revival into
a forward-looking political force of a particular sort. He glanced at a
few of the European breakthroughs of his own time, which meant the
extreme-right political movements of the 1920s1940s, whose doctrines he
was happy to borrow so long as he could adapt them to his own purposes.
And in 1928, with these several wispy inspirations beginning to
solidify in his imagination, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood.
The organization was minuscule. It grew. It became a political
force--though the Muslim Brotherhood was always many other things as
well: rigorously pious and observant, intellectually vigorous,
educationally and culturally active, earnestly welfare-oriented,
athletics-oriented (the Boy Scouts were a direct influence), secretly
paramilitary (although cautious and legal-minded in appearance), and
not above staging the occasional assassination. Ultimately, al-Banna's
Muslim Brotherhood was revolutionary in the name of a Qur'anic
utopia--the Brotherhood's politicized vision of returning to the salafi
seventh century, as adjusted for the modern age. And yet the
Brotherhood was patient and even eager to endure the greatest of
sufferings, given that utopia was eternal and did not have to arrive
tomorrow. Al-Banna's Brotherhood was, in short, the original model for
what has come to be known as "Islamism"--with the "-ism" trailing after
Islam in order to distinguish Islam itself, the ancient religion, from
the modern political, and more than political, tendency that al-Banna
brought into the world.
The Muslim Brotherhood spread from Egypt to Syria, Palestine, Sudan,
and other places, and its inspiration spread even to Iran (via the
Shiite variation of al-Banna's idea elaborated by Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini and Ali Shariati) and India and Pakistan (via a sister
movement founded independently by Abul Ala Mawdudi, al-Banna's South
Asian counterpart) and beyond. In a small way, the Brotherhood even
spread to Europe, under the leadership of al-Banna's secretary and
son-in-law, Said Ramadan, who became Tariq Ramadan's father. Said
Ramadan was a loyal lieutenant--he was "the little Hassan
al-Banna"--and as a very young man he took on some big
responsibilities. Said Ramadan was in charge of spreading the Muslim
Brotherhood's message to Palestine (where he fought in 1948 in the war
against Israel) and to Pakistan (where he coordinated affairs with
Mawdudi's sister movement). And Said Ramadan published a monthly
magazine, Al-Muslimun, which introduced Mawdudi's ideas to the Arabic
public. In 1954, the Egyptian government under Nasser suppressed the
Brotherhood and threw its leaders and a great many other people in
jail, but Said Ramadan, having already done a month in prison, happened
to be in Jerusalem at the crucial moment, and he escaped the crackdown.
Then he fled from pillar to post in the Arab world, to Germany, and
finally to faraway Geneva, where he founded his Islamic Center and
settled his family. He started up Al-Muslimun again. Until his death,
in 1995, Said Ramadan persisted in his proselytizing labors among the
Muslims of Western Europe.
The number of people all over the world who have come to look on the
Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist legacies with ardent veneration has
by now become immeasurably vast, and this is true nowadays even in
Western Europe. The Muslim population in Western Europe numbered less
than one million in the 1950s, but it has lately swelled to something
like twenty million, though no one seems to have exact figures--and
this means that, in the eyes of huge numbers of European Muslims, a
more glorious ancestry than Tariq Ramadan's does not exist. Ramadan
himself, Swiss-born and Swiss-educated, has always exulted in his
family legacy, sometimes humbly, sometimes arrogantly; sometimes
presuming the right to speak for his long-gone revered grandfather;
sometimes carrying himself with the wounded air of a man who, through
his father, knows in the flesh the meaning of persecution and suffering.
And yet Tariq Ramadan's august background generates, all by itself,
still more controversy, and has done so from the very start. At the
University of Geneva, Ramadan wrote his thesis on his grandfather's
ideas--and his committee judged the work to be a partisan apologia,
unworthy of commendation. Ramadan protested. A Swiss Socialist rose to
his defense, and a second committee was convened, a rare occurrence.
Even then, the thesis was accepted without honors. This was an academic
dispute, but also more than academic. And it has never gone away. It is
a dispute over the meaning of Hassan al-Banna's Islamic revival and its
political and cultural legacies for today and not just the past--a
dispute over whether al-Banna's movement ought to be regarded as a
progressive force, in spite of every complaint or reservation that
could be lodged. Or is there something in al-Banna's legacy that ought
to worry us unto panic?
Everyone knows by now that Al Qaeda can trace its roots to a splinter
tendency within the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the 1960s and
even earlier, and this history raises an awkward question, which
Ramadan has had to answer more than once in the years since September
11. He answered the question one more time in Buruma's Times magazine
profile in February. He acknowledged that, yes, Al Qaeda emerged from
the Muslim Brotherhood. But not from Grandfather al-Banna's legacy. Al
Qaeda drew its inspiration, instead, from Sayyid Qutb (19061966), who
enlisted in the Muslim Brotherhood only after al-Banna's assassination.
About al-Banna and Qutb, Ramadan said, "They didn't even know each
other"--which is true, narrowly speaking. Buruma quoted the remark and
had every reason to do so (though it was odd of him not to mention how
misleading was Ramadan's observation, seen from a broader angle--a
point to which I will return). Still, Buruma did go on to quote
Ramadan's account of his grandfather's un-Qutb-like political goals.
Al-Banna, in Ramadan's phrase, "was in favor of a British-style
parliamentary system, which was not against Islam."
This second observation, though--is it equally correct, from a narrowly
factual angle? In the Times magazine, Buruma elected to be wryly
noncommittal. "This may or may not be an accurate representation of
Hassan al-Banna," he observed--which is the mark of Buruma's charm as a
writer, his gift for understatement and indirection. Even so,
understated indirection is not always the best way to inform the
public. He might have pointed out that Ramadan, in his book Aux Sources
du Renouveau Musulman, or The Roots of the Muslim Revival, in 1998,
devotes some two hundred pages to al-Banna and his visionary ideas.
Ramadan concedes that al-Banna did want to replace the multi-party
system in Egypt with a single national council, which might appear to
be a one-party state--but Ramadan explains that, because of the
fundamentally democratic nature of Islam, al-Banna's proposal was
tantamount to a multi-party system. Such is the interpretation in The
Roots of the Muslim Revival. And Buruma might have pointed out one of
the principal alternative interpretations of al-Banna and his ideas, if
only to offer a little perspective on Ramadan and his way of thinking.
According to this second interpretation, al-Banna is best described as
a fascist.
This used to be a fairly common judgment on the Arab left, not to
mention among European Marxists--maybe in some cases because "fascist"
is every left-winger's favorite insult, and for no larger reason.
Still, something called "clerico-fascism" (to use the traditional term)
is an old concept on the left, dating back to the 1920s in Italy, where
it used to refer to the militant wing of the Catholic extreme right.
And the applicability of that sort of label to al-Banna's new movement
in Egypt did seem, at least to some people in the past, hard to
miss--an obvious applicability based on the populism and demagogic
emotionalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, together with its
authoritarianism, intolerance, violence, invasiveness, and a certain
kind of giddy twentieth-century-style utopianism, not to mention some
of the direct influences that wended across the Mediterranean Sea from
fascism's original home in Europe. Then, too, in the eyes of a fair
number of scholarly and journalistic observers today, a fascist label,
or some reasonably similar term, seems faintly applicable--or more than
faintly--even now.
You can see a sophisticated political-theory presentation of this
analysis in the writings of Bassam Tibi, the Syrian-German scholar,
though in regard to al-Banna and his legacies, Tibi, in his precision,
prefers the loftier Arendtian word "totalitarian" (which, anyway, was
coined by Mussolini) to the label "fascist" (likewise coined by
Mussolini). A discussion of al-Banna's fascism turns up repeatedly in
the current literature on Tariq Ramadan. Paul Landau, in The Saber and
the Qur'an, describes al-Banna, in his position as chief guide of the
Muslim Brotherhood, as a figure comparable to Il Duce and the
Führer. Landau attributes a lot of importance to al-Banna's
friendship with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem--who, as
Hitler's ally, helped organize a Muslim division of the Waffen-SS and
then, after the war, when he was wanted for war crimes (owing to his SS
division), succeeded in escaping to Egypt, thanks to help from al-Banna
himself. Ian Hamel reprises Landau's point about al-Banna and the mufti
of Jerusalem in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan--though Hamel's purpose
is normally to knock down everything said by Landau, if he can. Even
Hamel describes al-Banna as a man with a "totalitarian organization and
an extremist program."
Caroline Fourest offers a more striking observation in Brother Tariq by
pointing to al-Banna's Epistle to the Young. The epistle lays out,
under the six clauses of his slogan ("God is our goal; the Prophet is
our guide; the Qur'an is our constitution; struggle is our way; death
on the path of God is our ultimate desire; God is great, God is
great"), the five stages of his program. To wit: the creation of a
properly Muslim individual person, in thought and belief; of a properly
Muslim family; of a properly Muslim people or community; of an Islamic
state; and, finally, the resurrection of the ancient Islamic
Empire--which al-Banna describes by referring admiringly to what he
calls the "German Reich" and to Mussolini's dream of a resurrected
Roman Empire, though naturally al-Banna regards his own resurrected
Islamic Empire as vastly preferable and theologically more legitimate
than anything Mussolini could have contemplated.
Back in the early 1940s, the British authorities in Egypt took this
sort of sentiment seriously enough and, in the hope of avoiding
anything resembling the pro-Axis coup d'état that took place in
Iraq in 1941, presided over al-Banna's arrest more than once. But the
pointed aspect of Fourest's discussion of al-Banna and his Epistle lies
in her observation that Ramadan, in presenting the Epistle in one of
his own popular audio recordings, has omitted the fascist
references--which raises anew the question about forthrightness.
Among the present-day commentaries on al-Banna and fascism that I have
lately stumbled on, the most eye-opening turns up in an essay by the
Iranian scholars Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand, which appears in
an anthology called Islam and Democracy in the Middle East, edited by
Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Daniel Brumberg. The Boroumands
(who are sisters) arrive at a grim evaluation: "The man who did more
than any other to lend an Islamic cast to totalitarian ideology was an
Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna." By "totalitarian
ideology," the Boroumand sisters have in mind the doctrines of the
Italian Fascists and the German Nazis, whose influence on al-Banna they
underline. And they point out the disastrous consequences: "From the
Fascists--and behind them, from the European tradition of putatively
transformative' or purifying' revolutionary violence that began with
the Jacobins--Banna also borrowed the idea of heroic death as a
political art form."
There is nothing especially novel or bizarre in noticing that al-Banna
displayed an eager interest in the aesthetic cult of death. The classic
history of the Muslim Brotherhood, The Society of the Muslim Brothers,
by Richard P. Mitchell, which appeared in 1969, was quite lucid on this
topic even then. Al-Banna came up with a double phrase about the
importance of death as a goal of jihad--"the art of death" (fann
al-mawt) and "death is art" (al-mawt fann). This phrase became, in
Mitchell's description, a famous part of al-Banna's legacy. Stringing
together his own paraphrases with al-Banna's words, Mitchell wrote:
"The Qur'an has commanded people to love death more than life" (which,
I might add, is a phrase that we have heard more than once in terrorist
statements during the last few years, for instance in the videotape
that was made by the Islamist group that attacked Madrid in 2004). And
al-Banna continued, in Mitchell's presentation: "Unless the philosophy
of the Qur'an on death replaces the love of life which has consumed
Muslims, they will reach naught. Victory can only come with the mastery
of the art of death."
But what might strike some people as novel or controversial is the
Boroumand sisters' observation that al-Banna borrowed these grisly
ideas from Europe, instead of deriving them, as al-Banna himself
claimed to have done, from Qur'anic tradition. Hassan al-Banna, seen in
this light, did something dreadful to Islam. He founded the modern
vogue for suicide terror--the cult of death as political art form par
excellence--and he attached this cult to Islam. This interpretation of
al-Banna corresponds to Bassam Tibi's view, though Tibi emphasizes that
al-Banna served mostly to clear the way for Sayyid Qutb, and it was
Qutb who played the crucial role.
Ian Buruma, as a co-author of Occidentalism, is a student of fascism's
influence outside of Europe, which means that he does know something
about these several arguments and points, and the knowledge at his
fingertips must surely have contributed to his skeptical response in
the Times magazine to Ramadan's description of his grandfather--though
Buruma tactfully refrained from sharing any of this information with
his readers. Buruma did remark that Ramadan's description of al-Banna
tells us "a lot about the way Ramadan presents himself." But what does
it tell us? In the Times magazine, Buruma confined himself to observing
that Ramadan is a builder of bridges, someone who sets about
"reconciling what seems hard to reconcile," and he confirmed the point
by quoting a professor at Notre Dame who praises Ramadan for "trying to
bridge a divide and bring together people of diverse backgrounds and
worldviews"--all of which does sound wonderful, though only so long as
everyone agrees not to mention or describe some of the worldviews being
bridged.
III.
But these are questions from a couple of generations ago, and Ramadan is not his grandfather, nor does he appear to be an agent of his grandfather's organization (though both Fourest and Landau do take him to be an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood). "What is past is past," as the Qur'an says more than once. And the past cannot tell us what Ramadan has been trying to achieve in the present. His own ideas and intentions--where do they point, finally? That is what everyone has wanted to know during the last dozen years or so. In the Times magazine, Buruma put it directly: "What does he stand for?" And, having asked, he stood aside to allow Ramadan to respond, and Ramadan used the opportunity to speak about philosophical principles.
He stands, he explained, for "universal values" that are in line with
the European Enlightenment. He stands for a rationalism seeded by
doubt, though Ramadan prefers to invoke these concepts and beliefs by
citing the wisdom of Islamic philosophers instead of their European
counterparts. "Doubt did not begin with Descartes," Ramadan instructed
Buruma. "We have this construction today that the West and Islam are
entirely separate worlds. This is wrong. Everything I am doing now,
speaking of connections, intersections, universal values we have in
common, this was already there in history." So he stands for the
commonalities linking the West and Islam--for the values that everyone
ought to share, except that, in his version, he prefers to give these
values an Islamic inflection.
His response is philosophically reasonable and historically defensible,
given the medieval sages and the influences of Aristotle this way and
that. On the other hand, it is worth asking why anyone should care
about what was "already there in history," in Ramadan's phrase. Why
bother with historical chronologies or with the matter of whether
Descartes came first? These are not trick questions. There might be
some obvious answers: to remind the hubristic and anti-Muslim Western
publics of Muslim contributions to world civilization. Or to hearten
the many publics of the Muslim world, who may feel a little discouraged
and beset. Or simply to draw an accurate timeline of the history of
ideas, which would be valuable in itself.
Then again, if Ramadan means to suggest, by pointing to Islamic
thinkers of the Middle Ages, that ancient roots are everything; or that
science and rationality come in different versions depending on one's
origins, a version for Muslims and a different version for everyone
else; or that universalism itself comes in different versions, and my
universalism may not be the same as yours, and truth varies from
culture to culture--then, of course, further questions arise. The
notion that science and rationality come in different versions is an
old idea: it is the notion that, taken to a logical conclusion, led the
Nazis to suppose that physics came in an Aryan version and in a Jewish
version, which were not identical, even if Jewish physics and Aryan
physics appeared to be identical; and led the Stalinists to suppose
that proletarian science was one thing and bourgeois science another,
in spite of every superficial resemblance; and so on. This kind of
argument is not hard to stumble across in Islamist literature: the
notion that science comes in a Western version and also in an Islamic
version, which are not the same. The same idea re-appears today in a
sweet-tempered postmodern variation, as a kind of multiculturalism
taken to the nth degree, in which every culture is pictured as
equivalent and unique, and each culture's claims to universal
principles ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as an agreeable
rhetoric that probably does not mean very much.
So, then, where does Ramadan stand on these philosophical matters?
Buruma did not inquire any further, but Ian Hamel does pose the
question in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan. Hamel provides a number of
isolated quotations suggesting that Ramadan draws a careful line
between religious outlooks and scientific ones; and that he does know
that medicine is medicine, regardless of its origins; and that his
notion of universality is genuinely universal. But it is hard to judge
the significance of those quotations when they are removed from their
original context. In The Roots of the Muslim Revival Ramadan presents a
quotation that makes al-Banna himself appear to have entertained a
lucid and un-fascist view of natural science. But then again, in Islam,
the West, and the Challenges of Modernity Ramadan finally makes plain
that, in his own view, Muslim universalism is not, in fact, the same as
Western universalism, and Muslim reasoning, with its acknowledgment of
doubt, is not the same as Western reasoning, with its own
acknowledgment of doubt. This might explain why Ramadan regards biology
education as merely an education in Western biology, which ought to be
supplemented by a bit of Islamic biology (though I might add that in
the Islamist literature there is a deeper argument against Darwin,
which Qutb presents, drawing on Alexis Carrel, the French Vichy
intellectual). In any case, Ramadan does believe that Islam and the
West are separate--even cosmically separate. At least he appears to
believe this in Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity. "We
are indeed dealing with two different universes of reference," he
writes, "two civilizations and two cultures."
On the topic of rational doubt and Descartes, he invokes the medieval
philosopher al-Ghazali, who, in Ramadan's interpretation, proposed
arguments that anticipated Descartes by several hundred years. This
must be what Ramadan had in mind in pointing out to Buruma that "doubt
did not begin with Descartes." But in Islam, the West, and the
Challenges of Modernity he goes into more detail, and the details
suggest that al-Ghazali's notion of doubt points in one direction and
Descartes' in another--an observation that accords with al-Ghazali's
reputation as the medieval philosopher who issued the most formidable
challenge to high Islamic rationalism. About al-Ghazali, Ramadan
writes, "At first, we can find innumerable correspondences between his
thought and that of Descartes. Such correspondences certainly exist,
but the frame of reference which gives the solution to going beyond
doubt is fundamentally different."
In Ramadan's view, ancient Greek influences on Islam have never allowed
for the kind of tension or difference between the sacred and the
non-sacred that exists in Western thought. The ancient Greek influences
on Islam have never allowed for a Promethean spirit of rebellion, and
have never allowed for a sense of the tragic. That is because in Islam,
as per Ramadan (and here he invokes the medieval philosopher Ibn
Taymiyya), the zone of the sacred contains only a single concept, which
is tawhid, or the oneness of God. Tawhid leaves no room for tensions,
rebellions, or doubts. A deep and tragic sense of doubt is not even a
conceptual possibility. Buruma in the Times magazine pursued this
philosophical matter sufficiently at least to ask Ramadan if he has
"ever experienced any doubts himself." Ramadan replied: "Doubts about
God, no." And Buruma seems not to have realized that, in responding
with this easy certainty, Ramadan was surely offering more than a
self-confident autobiographical observation. Doubt, in Ramadan's
interpretation, can exist only within the limits allowed by
tawhid--meaning that, for a proper Muslim, doubts about God are
literally inconceivable. A Muslim, in Ramadan's formulation, may
forget, but a Muslim cannot doubt.
Ramadan's harsher critics would argue that in speaking to Buruma the
way he did on these abstract and historical questions, not to mention
on his grandfather's ideals, he was cagily deploying a "double
discourse"--a language intended to deceive Western liberals about the
grain of his own thought. An accusation of "double discourse" has
dogged Ramadan for many years in France. It is a chief complaint
against him, and a big source of anxiety among his critics. Fourest, in
Brother Tariq, documents what appears to be rather a lot of "double
discourse," instances in which Ramadan appears to have said one thing
to the general public and something else to his Muslim audiences.
Landau, in The Saber and the Qur'an, offers his own documentation. On
the other hand, Hamel, in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan, will have none
of this. Hamel is a Swiss journalist from a Moroccan background, and he
does seem to have listened to a great many speeches and audio
recordings by Ramadan, and to have conducted many interviews, and
generally to be more at ease in Ramadan's European Muslim environment
than Fourest and Landau appear to be; and he earnestly believes that
Fourest and Landau, in their animosity, have wrongly allowed themselves
to think the worst.
And yet what are we to do, in that event, with the expansive puddle of
footnoted documentation that lies at the bottom of Fourest's pages, and
the additional puddle at the bottom of Landau's? I have no way to
resolve this quandary, except to hazard a guess that all these writers,
friend and foe alike, may have arrived at a truth. Islam, in Ramadan's
view of it, is a comprehensive system that takes in the universe, and
the comprehensive quality allows him--requires him--to view each new
thing in an Islamic light, as if from on high. I think that, from his
lofty Islamic heights, he ends up speaking in a naturally dialectical
language, secular (in a style descending from both Descartes and
al-Ghazali) and at the same time Islamic (in a style descending from
al-Ghazali alone). Ramadan's outlook allows him to speak on a level
that is true and on a level that is truer; and sometimes the two levels
are the same. Is there something deliberately deceptive in this way of
going about things? Some people are bound to think so. And yet someone
else, more willing to grant the presuppositions, might conclude that
Ramadan has stayed reasonably consistent all the while, and, if some
people cannot make sense of him, that is the fault of his
un-dialectical listeners.
I would suppose that, in the case of Buruma and The New York Times
Magazine, Ramadan might have figured that if the journalist required
on-the-spot instruction into the deeper meanings of words such as
"doubt" in their al-Ghazalian and Cartesian contexts, this was not up
to Tariq Ramadan. Nor was it Ramadan's obligation to explain how
Grandfather al-Banna's intention to abolish the multi-party system was
perfectly compatible with British-style parliamentarism, given the
democratic nature of Islam. I would imagine that from Ramadan's
perspective, with his notion of "two different universes of reference,
two civilizations and two cultures," there was not much point in
spelling out every last nuance to the cordial journalist, especially
since, in his books, Ramadan has already done so. Some things may be
ambiguous, but nothing is secret. Besides, Ramadan is generally not in
the business of making enemies. If the correspondent from The New York
Times Magazine was intent on coming away from their debates and
discussions with a feeling that, in Buruma's phrase, "we agreed on most
issues"--hey, how wonderful! Why pick a fight?
IV.
Ramadan's various opinions and interpretations ought not to be
conflated with Islam itself--and this point, as I have learned from
experience, requires emphasis, and even double emphasis. When I wrote
about Ramadan some years ago, I noticed that all too many non-Muslim
readers are quick to seize on any disagreeable or troubling statement
by a Muslim thinker and pin it on Islam as a whole--even if these
readers are warned not to do anything of the sort. So I stress the
point. Nor does Ramadan himself claim to be speaking for every last
Muslim on the planet. He identifies several modern currents of Islamic
thought or Muslim self-identification, even apart from the ancient
denominations that have transfixed everybody's attention right now, and
he knows that all these currents do not accord with one another. In the
Times magazine, Buruma very properly asked Ramadan to specify which of
the currents is his own, and Ramadan answered with a simple phrase. His
own current of Islamic thought is the one that goes under the
paradoxical-sounding label of "salafi reformist."
Which means? Buruma came up with a definition by plucking a sentence
out of Ramadan's Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. A "salafi
reformist," Buruma explained, quoting Ramadan's book, is someone who
aims at the following goals: "to protect the Muslim identity and
religious practice, to recognize the Western constitutional structure,
to become involved as a citizen at the social level, and to live with
true loyalty to the country to which one belongs." This quotation is
accurate, in a fashion--I have located it on page 27 of Ramadan's book,
as well as in a slightly different setting in To Be a European
Muslim--but, then again, less than accurate because of the way that
Buruma has severed the quoted words from some other remarks on the same
page and the previous one. Taken by themselves, the quoted words make
salafi reformism sound like an earnest and slightly dowdy do-good
effort to adapt Islam to the modern liberal world. But that is a
mistake. It is an old mistake, too, that journalists persist in making,
as both Fourest and Landau point out with a lot of exasperation in
their respective books. In a footnote on the topic of "reformism" in
his book The Roots of the Muslim Revival, back in 1998, Ramadan himself
halfway acknowledges the potential for misunderstanding, though he
thinks he is justified in using the term anyway.
Salafi reformism, in his usage, signifies something precise, which has
nothing to do with liberal reformism in the conventional sense. Buruma
asked Ramadan to list his two favorite Muslim philosophers. Ramadan
duly named Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh--the late
nineteenth-century figures whom Ramadan regards as the progenitors of
Hassan al-Banna's Islamic revival and the Muslim Brotherhood (though
other people would insist rather sharply that al-Banna's Islamism, in
its radicalism and rigidity, departed fundamentally from those
nineteenth-century thinkers). Anyway, not many readers of the Times
magazine are likely to have recognized these nineteenth-century names.
And yet if Buruma had thought to ask Ramadan about some more recent
thinkers in the salafi reformist mode, Ramadan could have gone on
listing names, and some of those additional names would, in fact, be
recognizable to a good many readers. Ramadan has already listed the
names in Western Muslims and the Future of Islam--has done this, as it
happens, in the paragraph directly preceding the one from which Buruma
has plucked his misleading definition.
Here, on page 26, is Hassan al-Banna; and Abul Ala Mawdudi from the
South Asian subcontinent, whose activities Tariq's father, Said
Ramadan, coordinated with the Muslim Brotherhood; and Ali Shariati,
Ayatollah Khomeini's fellow thinker in Iran. And here is Sayyid Qutb,
one more influential reformist among the others, listed without
comment--even if Qutb's legacy, in one of its offshoots, did lead to Al
Qaeda. In Ramadan's usage, salafi reformism turns out to be the
philosophical underpinning for modern Islamism in the sundry versions
that descend from al-Banna's (and Mawdudi's) original idea. Naturally,
these sundry versions do not always chime with one another, and this,
too, Ramadan carefully spells out. In Western Muslims and the Future of
Islam, he divides the descendants of the original reformist idea into
subcurrents or tendencies--though in order to distinguish among these
tendencies, you have to inspect his account rather closely, unto the
fine print, meaning the footnotes. And this kind of close inspection is
worth undertaking, not just to shed a little light on Ramadan's
philosophy but also to cast an extra glance at the related but
different theme of Ramadan's image in the press.
So, then, the subcurrents of salafi reformism, as per Tariq Ramadan.
One of these subcurrents turns out to be his own: the outspokenly
Western variant, the version whose particularities Ramadan defines with
the attractive language that Buruma has mistakenly applied to the
entire movement--a language of preserving Muslim identity and becoming
loyal citizens of democratic countries. Ramadan's subcurrent is not the
principal one, however. The principal subcurrent flourishes only in the
Muslim world (and, in Ramadan's book, only in the footnotes)--though
"flourishes" may give the wrong impression, since, as he observes with
a touch of bitterness, the organizations and movements within this
subcurrent "are almost everywhere, though in different degrees,
subjected to imprisonment, torture, and persecution." Plainly, Ramadan
is writing here about the Muslim Brotherhood, together with (I suppose)
its several national and sectarian variations and offshoots--the Muslim
Brotherhood in the Muslim countries themselves, where martyrdom has
come to figure as part of the movement's identity. The intention of
this, the most prominent current of the salafi reformists, is fully
revolutionary: it is to establish an Islamic society.
And then, in his honesty, Ramadan somewhat ruefully cites still another
sub-current that flows from the salafi reformist source--though, in his
view, this final tendency has emptied salafi reformism of almost all of
its original content. This final tendency, he tells us, has gone over
to "strictly political activism," joined to "a literalist reading" of
the sacred texts, leading to "radical revolutionary action." Ramadan
describes this tendency as "political literalist Salafism"--which
Buruma in the Times magazine mentions by name, though without
identifying it as an offshoot of the salafi reformist idea. Ramadan
explains that political literalist salafism has attracted "a lot of
public attention"--though it is represented in the Western countries
only "by structures and factional networks." This last phrase is
incomprehensible to me, but it communicates an impression that, in
spite of the public attention, political literalist salafism does not
count for much. Ramadan disapproves of this tendency, owing to its
textual literalism and its unspecified departures from salafi reformist
principles--though he also rushes to ascribe the tendency's errors not
to any elements intrinsic to its salafi reformist roots but to the
ghastly way that Muslim governments have suppressed the mainstream
salafi reformists.
As to why the political literalist salafists should have attracted "a
lot of public attention," Ramadan says nothing at all in his main text.
Only in a footnote does he mention "violent and spectacular actions,"
and not even there does he remark on any sort of radical departure from
basic morality. Nor does he define any relation that might exist
between this sort of thing and the legacies of Qutb. A veil of timidity
and euphemism hangs over the entire discussion, which could lead a
sleepy reader to miss his meaning altogether.
And yet it is obvious what Ramadan is talking about in this particular
passage. Political literalist salafism is the doctrine underlying the
terrorism that has emerged from salafi reformism--the vast wave of
random murder, the vogue for "violent and spectacular actions," that
has swept across so many regions of the Muslim world and beyond. That
is what he means by "radical revolutionary action." He does refer
somewhat cautiously in a footnote to "a section" of the Islamic
Salvation Front of Algeria, by which he must have in mind the people
who went about slaughtering whole villages in Algeria during the 1990s
and who are evidently not finished yet. But mostly he is the sphinx. At
least Ramadan does not deny the estranged sibling relation between his
own wing of salafi reformism and the champions of "radical
revolutionary action"--these different currents that descend from the
same source. Ramadan is, on this particular theme, more straightforward
than his Times profiler.
Still, Ramadan has left out a few details, and these do add up to
something. On the topic of al-Banna and Qutb, for instance, it is true,
yes, that in spite of being exact contemporaries, the two men never did
meet in person. Al-Banna was a salafi reformist from the start, but
Qutb, in his younger years, was a secular intellectual, a poet, and a
literary critic--which meant that al-Banna and Qutb disapproved of each
other. Still, they did not live on opposite sides of the earth. Qutb,
as I learn from a biography by Adnan A. Musallam called From Secularism
to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism, adhered
to a school of Romantic poetry in Egypt, influenced by Coleridge among
others, and his ideas about poetry led him to seek truth in his own
heart (as opposed to following the traditions of established schools)
and at the same time to yearn romantically for death. Qutb's poetry
took an apocalyptic turn as well--which, though his biographer does not
make the point, could be compared stanza for stanza with some of the
apocalyptic poetry of the fin-de-siècle European Symbolist
poets. And all of this, the Romantic and Symbolist literary impulses,
mirrored al-Banna's Islamic thinking pretty closely.
What was salafi reformism, after all, if not a belief that truth could
be obtained directly from the Qur'an and the seventh century (as
opposed to following the traditions of the established schools of
Islamic jurisprudence)? And what was al-Banna's phrase about "the art
of death" and "death is art" if not an Islamic variation on Qutb's
Romantic-poetry yearning for the eternity of the tomb? As for Qutb's
Symbolist-poetry apocalyptic fantasies--well! This was Islamism itself,
in its Mussolinian, Third Reichstyle yearning for the final showdown.
Seen from this angle, Qutb's Romantic secularism and al-Banna's
Romantic Islamism were variations on a theme. And then, in the
mid-1940s, Qutb began to drift in Islamist directions himself, and
al-Banna was anything but hostile. Sayyid Qutb and Naguib Mahfouz made
up a mutual admiration society in those days (Qutb, in his capacity as
literary critic, played an important role in bringing public
recognition to Mahfouz's talent), and in 1948 Qutb and Mahfouz and a
few other people launched a magazine, with Qutb as editor.
Al-Banna tried to woo the magazine for the Muslim Brotherhood. The next
year, al-Banna was assassinated. Qutb happened to be in the United
States at the time, and, in one of the stranger passages of his report
on his American experience, he recounted that Americans were jubilant
over al-Banna's death--which has got to be a fantasy, given that in
1949 hardly anyone in the United States had heard of Hassan al-Banna.
The fantasy nonetheless suggests that al-Banna's late-life appreciation
for Qutb had begun to be balanced by Qutb's appreciation for al-Banna
as a world-historical figure, even if they never met. Then Qutb
returned to Egypt and enlisted in the Muslim Brotherhood, and found his
way to al-Banna's son-in-law, "the little Hassan al-Banna," Said
Ramadan, the editor of Al-Muslimun. Said Ramadan's magazine presented
the ideas of Abu Ala Mawdudi to the Arabic-speaking world, and Qutb
adopted some of these ideas for what now became his own
ultra-revolutionary doctrine.
Qutb began to contribute his own monthly articles to Al-Muslimun. Some
of those monthly articles were eventually gathered together in a book
called Toward an Islamic Society. But Qutb's most important
contributions to Al-Muslimun consisted of commentaries on the Qur'an,
which were strikingly original--commentaries written not in the spirit
of traditional jurisprudential analysis but, instead, in the spirit of
Romantic literary criticism, drawn from the heart instead of from the
scholarly texts. These were the articles that, in book form, eventually
blossomed into Qutb's gigantic masterwork, In the Shade of the Qur'an,
which is widely regarded as the single greatest literary product of the
worldwide Islamist movement.
And so, yes--a third time, yes--Qutb and Tariq Ramadan's grandfather
never met, if only because of al-Banna's assassination. But Ramadan's
father, Said Ramadan, the editor of Al-Muslimun, not only knew Qutb; he
was, at the crucial moment, Qutb's most important supporter in the
world of the Egyptian intellectuals. Said Ramadan was the editor who
got Qutb started on what became his most important work. And at the
worst moment of Qutb's life--in 1965, when, having already languished
in prison during most of the time since the crackdown of 1954, he was
accused one last time of plotting a revolution, for which he would be
hanged a year later--his alleged conspiracy was said to include, of
course, Said Ramadan, the man who avoided a similar fate only because,
back in 1954, he happened to have been out of the country.
Ian Hamel in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan insists that, in his last years, Said Ramadan put some distance between himself and Qutb's legacy. But that is a late-life detail. The biographies of Said Ramadan and Sayyid Qutb are otherwise intertwined. And in this case what is past is not, in fact, past, and Tariq Ramadan's career has likewise twined itself around the Qutb legacy. Said Ramadan worked long ago with Mawdudi in Pakistan, and Mawdudi's British followers established their Islamic Foundation, and Tariq Ramadan published his first two English-language books at the Islamic Foundation and spent his year of study at its campus for reasons that were entirely natural and familial. The Islamic Foundation has been slowly bringing out a handsome edition of Mawdudi's own multi-volume Qur'anic commentary, Toward Understanding the Qur'an, translated from Urdu into English. And the foundation has also been bringing out Qutb's In the Shade of the Qur'an, likewise in a handsome edition--some ten volumes of which, out of what is promised ultimately to be eighteen, now sit on my own bookshelves. All of this makes perfect sense, given that salafi reformism does constitute a movement broad enough to stretch from al-Banna to his son-in-law to Mawdudi and Qutb and, ultimately, to Tariq Ramadan. The Islamic Foundation, from its British campus with its Al-Banna Hall, has done nothing at all peculiar in publishing Mawdudi, Qutb, and Ramadan, these several intellectual stars in a single constellation.
Only why did none of this, not even a trace, appear in the portrait of
Ramadan in the Times magazine? It's not as if Buruma skipped over the
issue of Ramadan's relation, via his grandfather, to Qutb. Buruma did
pose the question, even if he satisfied himself by publishing Ramadan's
remark about Grandfather al-Banna and Qutb not having known each other.
Nor did Buruma lack for information of his own. In Occidentalism he
discusses Qutb. He points out the Nazi influence on Qutb's thinking.
The editors of The New York Times Magazine (who some years ago
published my own essay on Qutb) had every reason to expect that on this
topic, as on many topics, Buruma knew what he was doing. He must have
arrived at the conclusion for some reason that in the Times magazine it
was good to ask the question about the relation to Sayyid Qutb, but bad
to answer the question.
In any event, the family ties between Tariq Ramadan and Sayyid Qutb
offer an analytic opportunity. Ramadan's reputation for
less-than-frankness raises a bit of a problem for anyone who cares to
figure him out. If you wanted to know the beliefs and opinions of any
number of public figures, you could go ask them, and you could publish
their replies with a reasonable certainty that you were getting the
real poop. Not so Ramadan. He poses a difficulty--the constant
possibility of an esoteric meaning. Still, there is a way to put his
doctrines into some kind of historical and intellectual perspective,
and this is to stand Ramadan next to Qutb--the father's son next to the
father's author, the Islamic Foundation's book-writer next to the
Islamic Foundation's book-writer, salafi reformist next to salafi
reformist. Ramadan himself devotes a chapter of The Roots of the Muslim
Revival to Qutb, just to show that nothing is illegitimate in proposing
such a comparison. And, with Ramadan standing next to Qutb, it ought to
be possible one more time to ask the question, which still has not been
answered: what does he stand for, in the end? Salafi reformism--what
does it amount to, finally?
V.
Salafi reformism, judging from Qutb and Ramadan, turns out to be a kind of Rousseauianism. There is a pure and authentic way of living, which is the Muslim way. And yet the Muslims, who were born free, are everywhere in chains. The Muslims are oppressed by what Ramadan calls "a Western aggressive cultural invasion"--which is the kind of language that Qutb liked to use half a century ago (and al-Banna before him). A very great danger arises from the Western "colonization of minds," in Ramadan's phrase, by which he means the influence of television. This was Qutb's worry exactly, even in the pre-television age, which he described as "the cultural influences which had penetrated my mind." And so the road back to the pure and authentic way of living must be found.
The road is textual, and it leads back to the foundational documents of
seventh-century Islam, which record the pure and the authentic before
the days of Western cultural aggression and the colonization of minds.
And yet neither of these men wants to reconstruct the seventh century
brick by brick. Both of them are convinced that, in its
comprehensiveness, the Qur'anic revelation is larger than the modern
world and can swallow it whole--convinced that, instead of
reconstructing the seventh century, they can reconstruct the modern
age, and do so along salafist lines. They can fill each element of
modern life with a proper Islamic meaning. Therefore they need to read
the ancient texts with an eye to the modern world and come up with new
interpretations: Islamic responses, point by point, to the challenge
from the West, which conventional Islam has failed to do. That is why
they are "reformists"--unlike the scholastic traditionalists (to use
Ramadan's term), who merely go on rehearsing the ancient Islamic
jurisprudence; and unlike the starker fundamentalists, who do want to
rebuild the seventh century.
It has to be said that, in regard to reading the ancient texts with an
eye to the modern world, Qutb is vastly more interested in the ancient
texts, whereas Ramadan appears to be mostly absorbed in the modern
world. Still, the principle remains intact. And then, since both men
are seeking a practical result--the reconstruction of a proper Muslim
community--they have no alternative but to give their project a
political aspect, which is the doctrine of al-Banna.
And the ancient-and-modern orientation leads to another common trait,
which is the tendency on the part of both men to grab hold of modern
political vocabularies and convert them to their own purposes--quite as
if a political vocabulary could be regarded as one more empty modern
reality waiting to be infused with Qur'anic meaning. Do modern
political thinkers speak about such-and-such? Qutb and Ramadan will
rush to do the same, only in versions that seem to them faithful to the
Qur'an. Qutb, following this instinct, sometimes sounds like an early
twentieth-century revolutionary anarchist. Then again, sometimes he
sounds (in one of his earlier books) like a New Dealer. "Social
security" figures among his ideals. Those are vocabularies from his own
time.
Ramadan, being a man of the post-modern era, prefers to sound like a
liberation theologian from Latin America. Or he sounds like one of his
anti-globalist allies, railing against the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. He cites the Greco-French philosopher
Cornelius Castoriadis, the philosopher of left-wing "autonomy," which
is Ramadan's way of indulging in his own anarchist-like flights of
fancy. Or Ramadan sounds like a moderate reformer in the conventional
civic and not the salafi sense--like someone who has a few practical
and well-intentioned proposals to make on behalf of marginalized
populations.
Yet the modern rhetorics always turn out to be translations, in one
fashion or another, of Qur'anic concepts. They are worldly exteriors
with Islamic interiors. Qutb, in launching his anarchistic odes to
freedom, means to say that, under his proposed resurrected Islamic
caliphate, human beings will no longer be tyrannously ruled by other
human beings but only by God, as interpreted by God's representatives.
The libertarian rhetoric turns out to be a theocratic argument against
democracy. By "social security," Qutb means the traditional Islamic
obligation to pay a charity tax. Ramadan invokes civil libertarian
arguments in order to defend the autonomy of his reconstructed Muslim
community. He invokes the anti-globalist rhetoric of his left-wing
allies in order to defend the mainstream Islamist movements in the
Muslim world. And so forth, throughout the entire modern terminology.
None of this is meant to deceive anyone. These people are trying to
conduct a thorough "reform" not of the world, but of Islam--a campaign
to ensure that Islamic thinking will expand to match each new
innovation of modern life without losing the connection to the original
revelation. So they look for modern concepts, and for Qur'anic
equivalents, and they fill the modern with the Qur'anic. And with all
of this in hand, they set about posing their challenges to the
unreformed Muslims, and to the modern, non-Muslim world.
The challenges they pose turn out to be different, however. Qutb wrote
his principal works in the decades between the 1940s and 1966; and,
like the fascists on the extreme right in those years, or the Marxists
and the anarchists on the extreme left, he pictured the entire world
hurtling toward a catastrophic crisis, which he interpreted along
paranoid and apocalyptic lines. His vision of the impending collapse of
both the West and the communist East Bloc, his vision of an Islamic
revolutionary vanguard establishing somewhere an Islamic state and
using it to export the Islamic revolution to the Muslim world and then
to everywhere else, his vision of the Qur'anic utopia to come--all this
was fairly wild: a grandiose version of al-Banna's already pop-eyed and
Mussolinian idea about resurrecting the Islamic Empire. Perhaps Qutb's
vision enjoyed one great advantage over the other mid-twentieth-century
revolutionary projects, and this was Islam, an exceptionally sturdy
base on which to rest his many novel ideas. Even so, his was a vision
in the mid-twentieth-century mode.
Ramadan bears no relation to any of this. He is post-paranoid and
post-apocalyptic. He thinks that Western-dominated globalization
produces the poverty of the underdeveloped "south," the Muslim world
included, and ought to be resisted. He is furious about Western
assaults on the Muslim world, which in his eyes seem to be taking place
no matter what the West happens to be doing or not doing--failing for
such a long time to intervene in Bosnia, or choosing to intervene in
Afghanistan (which strikes him as an American "retaliation against the
people of Afghanistan"). In the 1990s he swelled with indignation at
the sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and these days he
swells with still more indignation at the invasion that overthrew
Saddam. Everything the United States does strikes him as something of a
plot; but this is not unusual. He does not seem obsessed by the coming
catastrophe. He has no intention of launching revolutionary wars. He
adheres to the preaching, or dawa, school of salafi reformism, and he
wants to achieve his successes through persuasion and legal methods.
His dreams do not point to a utopian climax. Mostly he wants to
construct an Islamic counterculture within the West--his reconstructed
Muslim community, which instead of withdrawing behind ghetto walls will
take its place within the larger non-Muslim society.
Ramadan wants a share of the public space, not just a share of the
private sphere. Or more than wants: he demands a share of the public
space. A properly Muslim life has a physical and communal quality,
which must be lived in physical space, and this will require
modifications in the existing European secularism. Therefore he
wants--he needs--to stick a few sharp elbows into the larger society,
demanding his extra space. And does he dream in secret of something
larger? Maybe he does, on some theological level, which would not be
unusual. All great religions dream great (and dangerous) dreams. Still,
Fourest and Landau and some of Ramadan's other panicky critics suspect
something much more worldly. They suspect that clandestinely Ramadan,
too, entertains the larger pop-eyed more-than-theological project: a
world dominated by Islam, with his Muslim counterculture serving as the
future empire's fifth column within Europe, under the ultimate control
of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Exactly why the panicky critics harbor these suspicions ought to be
easily understood. The Muslim emigration has turned out to be one of
history's largest events, and in scattered regions across the whole of
Western Europe, old-stock populations nowadays wake up to discover that
people from the Muslim world have suddenly come to dominate this or
that neighborhood or town, and Arabic or Turkish has begun to outpace
some of the smaller European languages, and here and there Islamist
groups are demanding censorship of one thing or another, or are
demanding gender-segregated beaches, or the curricular demise of
Voltaire or Darwin, or an end to history instruction on the crimes of
Nazism. And there are always sermons by one or another exotically
costumed Islamic scholar fantasizing about a Muslim conquest of Europe
and the world, which therefore can be cited as evidence of a giant
conspiracy. And it is true that, in Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood and
similar groups are prospering among the immigrant populations, not to
mention Qutb's radical fringe groups, which are thoroughly terrifying;
and true that Ramadan is theorizing the Muslim advance; and true that
Ramadan wants his Muslim counter-culture to promote the mainstream
Islamists elsewhere in the world.
Only none of this needs to be interpreted as a fifth column acting on
the Brotherhood's secret plan. Mostly Ramadan's worldwide ambition
appears to be something else entirely: the dream of a Western Islam, in
his own salafi reformist version, taking the lead among Muslim currents
everywhere; the dream of Western Islam, in his version of it, becoming
the center, instead of a faraway outpost, of the larger Muslim world.
But that is not a millenarian eschatology.
Judged on strictly literary grounds, there is no comparison between these men. Qutb, even in translation, commands a prose style of his own, which is typically serene and discursive, and nonetheless capable of sulfurous outpourings. He has the advantage of a background in literary criticism, which allows him to comment easily on the Qur'an and its style and mood. Most of all he has the advantage of the Qur'an, which occupies his attention. Qutb shows no embarrassment at all in noting the seventh-century barbarities whenever they seem apropos--the cruel amputations and other punishments ordained by huddud, the penal code, which he carefully discusses ("In case of a third or fourth theft, scholars have different views as to what is cut off," and so forth). The barbarous passages add a peculiar thrill to his writings, a frisson of the weird and the forbidden that seems all the more powerful because his tone of voice never changes: the tone of a man speaking with tranquility and confidence about things that are cosmically true.
And Qutb is, not least, a writer capable of summoning up the passions
of hatred. He rains mighty blows upon the Jews of ancient Arabia. He
scrupulously acknowledges that, here and there, the Qur'an contains
passages that show compassion or kindliness to this or that individual
Jew, but he prefers the other, more numerous passages: the descriptions
of Jewish treachery and enmity during Muhammad's years in Medina, which
in Qutb's estimation represent the eternal Jewish trait. In Qutb's
commentaries (just as in Said Ramadan's Al-Muslimun, according to
Hamel), you stumble here and there on references to The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion, in a simple display of the continuing influence of
Nazi and Nazi-like influences from Europe, even in the period after
Nazism had been defeated; and in a simple display, likewise, of Qutb's
reformism, to use the right word--his willingness to interpret the
ancient texts on the basis of modern ideas. Not every modern idea is a
good one, after all; nor every reform, a forward step.
The Swiss professor, by contrast, who never languished in an Egyptian
jail, has never managed to work up a reliable prose style. Sometimes
Ramadan writes in a heated and emotional tone, personal, slightly
archaic, grim, tight-lipped; and this is startling to see. The very
first sentences of Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity
offer a breathless description of an unnamed person who turns out to be
the author's father: "I still have the intimate memory of his presence
and of his silences. Sometimes, long silences sunk in memory and
thoughts and, often, in bitterness. He had a keen eye and a penetrating
look that now carried his warmth, kindness and tears, and now armed his
determination, commitment and anger." At other times he lapses into a
faux esoteric and ecumenical guru tone, suitable for all denominations.
The first sentence of Ramadan's new book, In the Footsteps of the
Prophet: "In the hours of dawn when this book was written, there was
silence, meditative solitude, and the experience of a journey, beyond
time and space, toward the heart, the essence of spiritual quest, and
initiation into meaning."
More often, Ramadan produces a solid professorial expository prose,
unremarkable and clear, except for some obvious infelicities of
translation. He never even toys with the idea that pulses so
insistently within Qutb's Qur'anic commentaries--the idea that merely
by turning his pages you are performing a religious act, or are
engaging, soldier-like, in a bold and dangerous mission. Then again, if
Ramadan makes very few efforts to inspire a sense of spiritual
elevation, neither does he strain himself to incite his readers.
Ramadan is not a hater--not by Qutb's standards, certainly. Sulfurous
odors do not seep upward from the page.
But his books can seem a little bowdlerized. His own recounting of
Muhammad's life and teachings in In the Footsteps of the Prophet is
relentlessly bland, as if he has gone out of his way to avoid the
Qur'anic tones of florid exaltation. "Life went on in Medina." "The
situation had become difficult for the Muslim community in Medina."
"The Muslims had returned to Medina and daily life had resumed its
course, in a far less tense atmosphere than before." The Prophet
himself is a very nice person. Muhammad adores his first wife: "He
loved her so much." Also his other wives. Muhammad is reasonable. The
little contradictions that pop up in the Qur'an, which Qutb patiently
disentangles, pretty much disappear in Ramadan's account. On the topic
of the Jews--to stick with the controversies in Medina--Ramadan
presents Muhammad as thoughtful and just. Even when Muhammad orders the
massacre of all the males of a Jewish tribe, Ramadan makes it clear
that Muhammad has issued the order not because the hostile Jewish tribe
embodies an eternal quality of Zionist evil, but because Muhammad needs
to teach his numerous enemies, Jewish and otherwise, a stern lesson.
And because the massacre succeeds at doing this, no further massacres
of that sort need to be committed, thus demonstrating Muhammad's wisdom
and even his restraint.
The Jews themselves arouse nothing venomous in Ramadan's account of
Muhammad's life and experience of revelation. On the contrary, Ramadan
emphasizes the common God worshiped by Muslims, Jews, and Christians
alike. Naturally Ramadan acknowledges that, in Medina, Muhammad's
relations with the Jewish tribes take an unfortunate turn. And yet, in
Ramadan's version, "those developments by no means affected the
principles underlying the relationship between Muslims and Jews: mutual
recognition and respect, as well as justice before the law or in the
settlement of disputes between individuals and/or groups." From a
present-day political standpoint, Ramadan's presentation is more than
superior, it is altogether commendable.
Passages in Ramadan's account could lead you to believe that if
Qur'anic scholars ever wanted to spell out a scriptural basis for
Muslim recognition of a Jewish state, the prophetic revelations might
well prove to be, upon examination, more elastically flexible than
previously imagined. Anyway, a good story, like an inveterate thief,
can always be usefully amputated, in order to eliminate the
disagreeable antisocial aspects. But then the surgical amputations, and
Ramadan's spirit of uplift and multicultural piety, might prompt a
skeptical reader to wonder if, as in Ramadan's several remarks to the
credulous Buruma, something crucial may have been craftily withheld.
Something about the Jews, maybe? Violence? Women? I do not bring up
these three issues to be provocative. Ramadan's life during the last
few years, his history of polemics and controversies, has already
broached these particular matters--which drags me back one last time to
the double question of his Genevan opinions and their shimmery Lake
Léman reflections in the press.
VI.
In the Times magazine, Buruma did inquire into these three controversies--over Jews, violence, and women--and, in regard to the Jews, he did this by wondering about twenty-first-century France instead of seventh-century Arabia. This was appropriate. Four years ago, Ramadan launched a polemic against six well-known French intellectuals--Pierre-André Taguieff, Alexandre Adler, André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, and Bernard Kouchner--whom he grouped together as Jews. And he launched some accusations. In Buruma's summary of the affair, Ramadan complained that the various intellectuals had abandoned universal principles by becoming, in Buruma's phrase, "knee-jerk defenders of Israel." Buruma considered this complaint to be, in his word, "unfair," and that was because the several intellectuals in question, as he described them, "had all championed many causes other than Israel, including putting a stop to the mass murder of Muslims in Bosnia."
But then, in his even-handed spirit, Buruma went on to compare the
intellectuals to "many early neoconservatives" in the United States,
which is a description that five or six readers of the Times magazine
may have regarded as neutral and objective, but was bound to be viewed
by everyone else as pejorative, if not a withering condemnation. And
Buruma observed that at least some of those French intellectuals struck
back at Ramadan in ways that were, in Buruma's words, "shrill" and
"vastly overblown," namely, by accusing Ramadan of
anti-Semitism--which, in Buruma's view, they should not have done
because these kinds of attacks, in Buruma's words, "have a way of
sticking to their target." But did Ramadan deserve these attacks in a
non-shrill and underblown way? Buruma went out on a limb. Ramadan, he
flatly declared, "is in fact one of the few Muslim intellectuals to
speak out against anti-Semitism."
Such was the account in the Times magazine. It was not accurate. In his
polemic of four years ago, Ramadan's chief complaint about the people
he grouped together as Jewish intellectuals did not boil down to
calling them "knee-jerk defenders of Israel." Ramadan complained that
his group of intellectuals had abandoned what he called universal
values in order to advance their narrow community interests as Jews. A
retreat to Jewish tribalism: that was the accusation, and the communal
loyalties had to do, above all else, with French domestic politics.
Ramadan accused the intellectuals of making a false issue out of
anti-Semitism in present-day France, a false complaint that bigotry
against Jews has lately begun to revive in a novel form, different from
the Christian religious hatreds of the Middle Ages, and different from
the hatreds of the fascist era, though perhaps not entirely different.
The writer who has chiefly advanced this idea is Taguieff, the author
of a book called La Nouvelle Judéophobie (which has been
somewhat oddly translated as Rising From the Muck: The New
Anti-Semitism in Europe); and Taguieff's was the first name to come
under Ramadan's attack. Taguieff is the principal historian of racism
in France today, and, as it happens, he is not Jewish--a mistake on
Ramadan's part, which Buruma duly noted. Still, the question remains:
regardless of Taguieff's ancestors or religious affiliation, does his
notion about the rise of a new kind of French anti-Semitism, a "new
Judeophobia," reflect some kind of communal loyalty to the Jews on his
part, perhaps a loyalty that he has freely chosen for one reason or
another? The obnoxiousness of this question ought to be obvious. The
only proper question ought to be, is Taguieff a good historian?
This, at least, is answerable. A new kind of hostility to Jews does
seem to have cropped up in France, and the evidence for this
proposition, I would think, has the misfortune of being overwhelming.
It is confirmed by the flight of some French Jews from the immigrant
working-class suburbs; by the much-discussed difficulty or inability of
even non-Jewish schoolteachers in those same suburbs to teach students
about the Holocaust, out of fear of arousing Islamist anger; and by
some well-reported violent crimes. It is true that, for a couple of
years, the government in France, and the mainstream press as well,
stuck to the view that most of this was greatly exaggerated. And yet
after a while, when the problem failed to go away, the French
government organized its own advisory commission, and the commission
arrived at the conclusion--reported in The New York Times in March
2005--that 62 percent of the hate crimes committed in France during the
previous year were directed at Jews. This is the kind of pseudo-precise
statistic that can seem a little dubious, but it does suggest a trend,
especially when you consider that France's Jewish population amounts to
less than 1 percent of the total French population.
As to how sinister and dangerous the "new Judeophobia" may be: that is
a separate issue. Jumpiness is the modern French condition, and some of
the jumpier commentators have left an impression that France's Jews are
undergoing a horrific wave of hatred and ought to flee for their lives
to Israel. Ariel Sharon, not long before his health collapsed, advised
the French Jews to do just that--only to be rebuked by André
Glucksmann, as could have never have been predicted by anyone relying
on Ramadan's essay, or for that matter on Buruma's. The point of
Ramadan's essay, in any case, was not to argue about social realities
or the accuracy of Taguieff's scholarship, but to challenge the Jewish
communal loyalties that Ramadan imagined to be at work--which is still
another aspect, in the zone of intellectual debate, of what Taguieff
has done so much to identify.
Ramadan's second big indictment had to do with the Iraq war and its accompanying disputes, which Ramadan saw once again as proof that the Jewish intellectuals had acted on their tribal loyalties. He wrote that "intellectuals as different as Bernard Kouchner, André Glucksmann or Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had taken courageous positions on Bosnia, Rwanda or Chechnya, have curiously supported the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq." Another error turned up in this sentence. Lévy, back in 2002-2003, when the Iraq war was being debated, declined to endorse the intervention, though his endorsement would have counted for a lot. (This error was compounded by Stéphanie Giry's account of the same affair in the Times Book Review, which erroneously enlisted Alain Finkielkraut as still another Jewish supporter of the war.) Still, Kouchner and Glucksmann lent their endorsements--Kouchner, in a highly modulated version. But nothing was, in Ramadan's word, "curious" about this--at least, nothing suggesting a retreat from positions held in the past.
Kouchner, in his capacity as humanitarian activist, not to mention as a
veteran campaigner for the Kurds, has advocated humanitarian
interventions in any number of instances over the years, which makes it
hardly surprising that, in 2003, he would have seen a virtue in
overthrowing Saddam. The same logic applies to Glucksmann. Nor has
either of those men, Kouchner or Glucksmann, kept the public uninformed
about his reasoning. These are voluble men, at book length. They have
even acknowledged, both of them, an influence from their Jewish
backgrounds on their recent thinking, though the influence has zero to
do with Israel. They were influenced by their experiences as toddlers
during the years when Nazis ruled France--experiences that led both men
to conclude that powerful countries have a duty to protect populations
victimized by dictatorships.
Ramadan argued that, by intervening in Iraq, the United States
"certainly acted in the name of its own interests, but we know that
Israel supported the intervention and that its military advisers were
engaged among the troops." More: "We also know that the architect of
this operation in the heart of the Bush administration is Paul
Wolfowitz, a notorious Zionist, who has never concealed that the fall
of Saddam Hussein would guarantee a better security for Israel with its
economic advantages assured." It ought not to require an exceptionally
fine mind to detect the conspiracy theory at work in these remarks. I
cringe at having to add that Wolfowitz, whatever his other sins, has
never been known for his Zionism (though I realize that, given the
confluence of z's, hardly anyone will believe me). Ramadan's
description of the Jewish intellectuals in France pretty much
harmonizes, by the way, with his description in Western Muslims and the
Future of Islam of the American Jews as well--the American Jews who, en
bloc, are said by Ramadan to form a "lobby" (the word has been
internationalized) that advocates Jewish interests and the promoting of
Israel in lieu of standing for "right, justice, and ethics," which is
what he thinks that Muslims should do.
So, yes, Glucksmann and Lévy responded in print. Glucksmann
began his response by writing, "Mr. Ramadan says, in short: Glucksmann
doesn't think with his head, he thinks with his race" (though Buruma,
in the Times magazine, skipped over this line, which contains the nub
of the argument, in order merely to quote Glucksmann's insult: "What is
surprising is not that Mr. Ramadan is anti-Semitic, but that he dares
to proclaim it openly"). Lévy, as Buruma reports, adverted to
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But were these responses
especially shrill and overblown, as Buruma claims? Ramadan's polemic
did have the sound, in some people's estimation, of an ultra-right-wing
rally, with a demagogic leader calling out the names of Jewish
journalists to the jeers of a crowd--but perhaps this echo is not
widely appreciated outside of France. The anti-globalists in France
posted Ramadan's polemic on their European Social Forum website; but
once the anti-globalists had listened to the responses, they took it
down again, abashed, and not because they had been intimidated.
But never mind the Jews. The most striking comment in Buruma's Times magazine account of this affair is something else entirely--his plea, in Ramadan's defense, that "Ramadan is in fact one of the few Muslim intellectuals to speak out against anti-Semitism." It is as if, in picturing the modern Muslim world, Buruma can imagine only a landscape of bearded fanatics--the kind of people who, like Qutb in his Qur'anic commentaries or Hamas in its charter, do natter on about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And, to be sure, there are many such types, which is Taguieff's point. And Ramadan has indeed issued some excellent condemnations of anti-Semitism (which Hamel quotes at length), even apart from his genuinely commendable interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews of ancient Arabia.
But good grief! What can Buruma have been thinking of? You have only to
glance at your own bookshelves to see how absurd is Buruma's comment
about Ramadan as a lonely Muslim intellectual opposed to
anti-Semitism--your shelves full of books by this or that novelist or
literary critic or well-known political analyst, one book after another
demonstrating that liberal culture in our modern age has come to be
animated by no small number of distinguished and celebrated
intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds. Or was Buruma thinking only of
the Francophone world? Francophones are not so different. But I suspect
that, in speaking about Muslim intellectuals, Buruma was picturing
something other than ordinary intellectuals. I suspect that he was
picturing the kind of person who can claim deeper social roots than
book-writing intellectuals would normally care to have. He was
picturing leaders with mass followings in poor neighborhoods,
intellectuals whose audiences, in their folk authenticity, might enter
the lecture halls through separate doors for men and women. From this
point of view, Buruma might well be right. The number of demagogic
rabble-rousing Islamist preachers who denounce anti-Semitism is not
very large.
But let us not be too quick to assume that one person is authentic and
another is not. Nor should we assume too quickly that Muslim immigrant
neighborhoods are inherently deaf to liberal voices, even if Buruma's
description of Ramadan as a lonely Muslim voice against anti-Semitism
does seem to imply something of that sort. The "new Judeophobia" that
Taguieff has identified is unquestionably a large phenomenon, but it is
also, as Taguieff's coinage suggests, new. And yet the immigrant
neighborhoods are relatively old. Something has happened, then; and
Ramadan may even have played a role in bringing the something about. He
began to build his social base in the Arab districts of Lyon in 1992.
But those neighborhoods do have a history, and this history does not
begin with Islamism. In 1983, a tiny group of young Arabs in Lyon
organized something called a "March for Equality" to protest their own
social conditions and those of people like themselves. And the tiny
group set out for Paris. The march turned out to be a big event. The
young people from Lyon captured the popular imagination. By the time
they arrived in Paris, their numbers had swollen to 100,000, and the
protest had become known as the "March of the Beurs"--a slang word,
friendly and not at all racist, for young Arabs.
Here was a genuinely mass movement. It gave rise, the next year, to an
organization called SOS Racism. And SOS Racism likewise proved to be a
popular success, for a while. SOS Racism called a rally in the Place de
la Concorde in Paris in 1985. I happened to be there myself. Hundreds
of thousands of young people attended, Arabs and everybody else,
glorying in their multi-hued splendor--which SOS Racism made a point of
rendering fashionable. These were the avatars of 1980s anti-racism and
social equality, young people who were determined to shout down the
anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotries of the French extreme right, and
were determined to protest the disparities of wealth, and had good
reason to make these protests. But SOS Racism defined its principles
broadly, and was therefore the enemy of anti-Semitism as well.
Explicitly, no less. SOS Racism's slogan was "Touches pas à mon
pote!"--"Don't touch my buddy!"--and this was an affecting and popular
slogan for a trendy movement of the anti-racist young. People wore a
cheerful-looking button bearing that slogan, and in some neighborhoods
the button itself came into fashion, pinned to every lapel.
A number of media-savvy writers stood behind the movement, and
orchestrated the press and offered a bit of intellectual leadership.
And these people, who were they? Marek Halter, the popular novelist,
was one of them. The best-known was Bernard-Henri Lévy, the same
person whom the readers of Ramadan's polemic from 2003 could only view
as an agent of the notorious Zionist within the Bush administration,
and whom the readers of Buruma's piece in the Times magazine could only
regard as an incipient neocon. But SOS Racism was not a neocon
development. It was something new on the left, a wing of the larger
popular left that, in the 1980s, worked up an excitement for Amnesty
International, and for East Bloc dissidents, and for famine
relief--quite as if anti-racism, human rights, Arab rights, women's
rights, anti-totalitarianism, humanitarian awareness, the
rebelliousness of the young, a fashion for boldly colored clothes and
for certain kinds of music, and the cult of motorcycles could be
viewed, in a tizzy of trendiness, as one and the same.
Only what happened to that movement in the years that followed--the
movement that got its start among the "Beurs" of Lyon? It was defeated.
That is the big story lurking underneath all these current debates
about Tariq Ramadan and salafi reformism. SOS Racism was defeated by
its own errors and missteps, none of which were especially dreadful but
did give the impression that politicians in the Socialist Party were
pulling the strings, and SOS Racism had ended up a feel-good exercise
for softheads. But mostly the new movement was defeated by a newer
movement, which competed for support in the immigrant streets. The
newer movement (as I learn from the various biographies of Ramadan)
likewise got started in the immigrant zones of Lyon.
The newer movement was the Union of Young Muslims, founded in 1987,
four years after the March of the Beurs, precisely in order to fight
against everything that had come out of the March of the Beurs. The
Union of Young Muslims was, exactly like SOS Racism, a movement for
social justice--only, instead of being animated by the trendy mishmash
of 1980s left-liberalism, the new movement invoked seventh-century
Islam, in the style descended from al-Banna. And the two movements, the
brand-new Islamists and the left-wing liberals, went head-to-head in a
competition for support. SOS Racism campaigned to prevent nightclubs
from discriminating against young Arabs and blacks. The Islamists
campaigned to prevent young Muslims from going to nightclubs.
By the time Ramadan arrived in Lyon, the Union of Young Muslims was
five years old, and the Tawhid bookstore and publishing house were
reasonably well-established, and yet those were immigrant institutions,
a little rough around the edges, the bookstore filled (according to
Paul Landau in The Saber and the Qur'an) with anti-Semitic tracts, the
tape cassettes with rants. Ramadan added polish and eloquence to those
endeavors, even if, being a bourgeois from Geneva, he could never quite
make himself at home in the proletarian streets. And in the immigrant
districts of Lyon, the fiery refurbished hard-headed Islamists
outcompeted the politician-ridden soft-headed liberal left. Then again,
this was more than a local story. Islamists defeated leftists all over
the world.
There is another half to this story, though, which is what happened on the left in the wake of these defeats. The rise of Islamism in the 1980s and 1990s created a tremendous crisis on the European and even the American left--even if, for most left-wingers at the time, the crisis went unnamed and undiscussed. The crisis was unavoidable, though. What does it mean to be on the left, after all? I mean the larger left, the left that includes everybody marked by even the faintest and most attenuated of left-wing traces--the progressives, and the people who, with still more sophistication, shudder with savvy distaste at any ideological label at all. To be on the left: doesn't this mean a solidarity with the poor and the downtrodden?
The March of the Beurs excited support and acclaim in France in 1983
precisely because, for the first time on a national scale, the sincere
young anti-racists of old-stock France were offered a way to manifest
their solidarity with the oppressed immigrants. But once SOS Racism had
lost its sheen, everybody who identified even faintly with the left had
to pause and consider what new attitude to adopt. Here were the
Islamists, shouldering aside the liberal left, and shouldering aside
the dowdy mainline Muslim organizations, too--the Islamists, claiming
to be, at last, the true and authentic representatives of the poor and
the downtrodden. The Islamists, in spite of a thousand principles that
were otherwise unthinkable to the left. This required a left-wing
response.
In France--and in Britain and other countries, too--the first people on
the left to recognize that something big was going on proved to be the
tiny and ridiculous-looking Trotskyist sects. The Trotskyists saw an
opening. From a Marxist perspective, Islamism was strange, and it was
true that Trotskyism, back in the 1940s, used to have its own
literature (there was a famous essay by Tony Cliff) about the fascist
nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. But that was long ago, and
Trotskyists pride themselves on not being finicky. So the Trotskyists
reached out. Nor were they the only ones. Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamist
revolution in Iran came to power in 1979 by allying with the Marxists
of Iran, meaning the groups that were pro-Soviet, and this development
led communist parties all over the world, during the early 1980s, to
look on Iran's Islamists as a progressive movement: a force for
anti-imperialism and social justice. In its May Day parade, the French
Communist Party marched through Paris with an Iranian delegation called
Hezbollah, as Ladan Boroumand has pointed out--something that could
never have happened in the past.
These developments on the old-school Marxist left might appear of no significance whatsoever, given that, by the 1980s, old-school Marxism was beginning to fade ever more quickly into the past. In France the communists were undergoing the first stages of their collapse. As for Trotskyism, it was, almost by definition, a microscopic cause. Still, no one should be counted out. In the first round of the presidential elections in France in 2002, a lot of high-minded progressives wanted to register a protest vote, and Trotskyist candidates were on the ballot, and 10 percent of the electorate ended up voting Trotskyist (which is how, back in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen edged past the Socialist candidate in the first round of elections and ended up in second place). Something similar cropped up at the big anti-war marches in February 2003: the giant demonstrations in Paris and London, not to mention in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and many other places. The tiny Marxist groupuscules played an outsize role in organizing those demonstrations, either behind the scenes, as in the United States (where the groupuscules were exceptionally tiny), or front and center, as in Europe. And the Marxist organizers with their new alliances added a new and peculiar note to those gigantic events.
The march in Paris offered the most scandalous example, not just
because a contingent of Baathists marched by with their placards in
favor of Saddam Hussein, but also because a group of peace
demonstrators broke away from the march and beat up some Jews--a minor
event, universally condemned, but hinting of something new in the air.
Nothing even faintly resembling an attack on random Jews could possibly
have taken place at any previous left-wing demonstration in France
during the last many decades. The march in London proceeded without
anything shameful taking place, but this only made the situation in
London easier to identify, since everybody was well behaved. Britain's
Stop the War Coalition, which organized the February 2003 march and a
good many additional demonstrations during the next years, was visibly
dominated by the tiny Socialist Workers Party, in alliance with
Britain's version of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Association of
Britain. Trotskyists and Islamists: "an odd marriage," as the Economist
put it. Tony Cliff must have turned over in his grave.
Yet the marital oddity did not prevent millions of non-Trotskyists and
non-Islamists from tramping through the streets under the leadership of
this alliance, quite as if the millions felt confident that, no matter
what might come of the march, the Socialist Workers could reasonably be
ignored (a safe assumption) or even regarded with irritable fondness,
and quite as if the Islamists, whom nobody could ignore, authentically
represented the oppressed and the downtrodden, and therefore lent
majesty to the march. Such was the implication, anyway. Nothing like a
Trotskyist-Islamist alliance could possibly have mobilized millions of
Britons in the past.
And among the progressive intellectuals, the people who sound off in the magazines and write their books? Here, too, a shift got under way, and Buruma--not to beat a dead horse--has offered the clearest instance of it, stage by stage. In Occidentalism, in 2004, he and his co-author Avishai Margalit made a big point of demonstrating the influence of fascist and Nazi ideas on various radical thinkers around the world, the Islamists included. But this kind of sophisticated ideological analysis pretty much disappeared in Buruma's next book, Murder in Amsterdam, which was published in 2006. Murder in Amsterdam described the murder of Theo van Gogh by the Islamist fanatic Muhammad Bouyeri, but Buruma no longer seemed interested in extremist doctrines and their origins and trajectory--even though, to judge from his spotty descriptions, the murderer Bouyeri appears to be a reasonably consistent ideologue, clinging to Islamist doctrines descending from Qutb himself. And by February 2007, in his Times magazine profile, face-to-face with Tariq Ramadan and his slightly complicated family relation to Qutb, Buruma could hardly bestir himself to say anything at all about extremist ideas and their consequences.
Ramadan offered his misleading explanation that Qutb and Grandfather
al-Banna never knew each other, and Buruma left it at that. Salafi
reformism? Buruma failed to notice Qutb's prominence among its
intellectual leaders. Anti-Semitism? Ramadan is "one of the few Muslim
intellectuals to speak out." And why one of the few? It was as if,
without realizing what had happened, Buruma had quietly come to accept
Ramadan's overall thesis, and had begun to look upon Ramadan as the
voice of the masses, and the masses as a population hopelessly steeped
in the vapors of authenticity; and had come also to look upon the
liberal intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds as insignificant because,
in their liberalism, they are demonstrably inauthentic. Ramadan ended
up being "one of the few Muslim intellectuals" because the other Muslim
intellectuals, being liberals, did not count. Or worse, the other
Muslim intellectuals, being liberals, sometimes stood
shoulder-to-shoulder with the non-Muslim liberals, whom Buruma had
decided to dismiss as neocons.
This is a pretty big development, if you stop to think about it, and
one that might explain the oddly ingenuous press that Ramadan has been
receiving. For if people like Ramadan and the other Islamists do speak
for the oppressed and the downtrodden, and if Ramadan is a pretty good
guy compared with most of his fellow salafi reformists, then shouldn't
we make every effort to view Ramadan in the best of lights? He is
better than Qutb, after all--so why bring up the troubling parts?
Anyway, even if Qutb is a nightmare, wouldn't we be better off not
inquiring too closely into the views of someone like van Gogh's
murderer? Wouldn't we be better off trying to be, from a sociological
point of view, halfway sympathetic? Those millions of anti-war marchers
made exactly such a choice, at least on that single day in February
2003: to look on the march's Islamist leaders as the proper
representatives of an oppressed community. Shouldn't we ferret out an
upbeat definition of salafi reformism? Shouldn't we find a way to
conclude, along with Buruma, that "we agreed on most issues"?
A sincere person could stroke his chin for quite a while over these
questions. But then, the questions do express an attitude, which is
bound to congeal into a lens, sooner or later, which might not lead to
the sharpest of journalistic reportage. And if, in Buruma's journalism,
a degree of fuzziness seems to have obscured his view of Ramadan and
the Jewish intellectuals, what is likely to have happened in regard to
Ramadan and the question of violence, a much bigger issue--this
question that Buruma has resolved with the simple and confident remark
about Ramadan offering "an alternative to violence"?
VII.
It is true and it is wonderful that Ramadan has, on quite a few occasions, condemned any sort of terrorist violence. Better still, these condemnations seem consistent with Ramadan's larger program for the Muslim community in Europe, which ought to require many things, but nothing even remotely resembling a violent campaign. Anyway, the entire shape of Ramadan's career so far--the energy he has expended on projecting his own ideas and personality onto the public stage in Western Europe and beyond, instead of conserving his time and strength for strictly Muslim audiences--would make no sense at all, if the ultimate purpose was to mold his followers into some sort of force, capable of opening a violent breach in society. Ramadan is said to have been influenced by the example of Malcolm X in the United States, or at least by Spike Lee's Malcolm X--Malcolm, whose last letter in real life, left unsent at his death, is said to have been addressed to Said Ramadan at the Geneva Islamic Center. But Tariq Ramadan, who has something of Malcolm's air of touchy dignity, has nothing of Malcolm's demeanor of unstated threats.
Still, sometimes it is useful to inquire a little more closely into
what anyone means by violence or terrorism. Bomb attacks on random
crowds in the mass-transit systems of Madrid or London obviously count
as terrorist acts. But what about bomb attacks on random bus-riders in
Israel? Ramadan has expressed himself on this topic, too. He is keenly
anti-Zionist. He applauds the Palestinian resistance. And yet he has
sometimes raised an objection to some of the methods of the Palestinian
resistance: a careful distinction, well drawn. But then again, Ramadan
has offered more than one commentary on anti-Zionist themes, and, to my
eyes, one of those commentaries, in the introduction to Islam, the
West, and the Challenges of Modernity, nearly leaps from the page. It
comes in the course of an emotional tribute to his father, and to his
father's devotion to the principles of Grandfather al-Banna.
About his father, Tariq Ramadan writes, in a passage that has been
translated less than gracefully: "Often, he spoke of the determination
in his commitment, at all moments, against colonialism and injustice
and for the sake of Islam. This determination was though never a
sanction for violence, for he rejected violence just as he rejected the
idea of an 'Islamic revolution.'" The rejection of an "Islamic
revolution" in this context means the rejection of armed uprisings or
coups in favor of the slower, more cautious, yet still militant
proceedings of the Muslim Brotherhood. Violence does not offer the road
to success, from this point of view. But the passage continues. The
time frame is evidently the late 1940s:
The only exception was Palestine. On this, the message of al-Banna was clear. Armed resistance was incumbent so that the plans of the terrorists of Irgun and of all Zionist colonizers would be faced up to. He had learnt from Hassan al-Banna, as he said it one day: "to put one's forehead on the ground." The real meaning of prayer being giving strength, in humility, to the meaning of an entire life.
So there is an exception. It is violence against Zionists--against the
plans of all Zionists and not just the Zionist extreme right wing, the
Irgun (who were in fact terrorists, just as al-Banna says). But the
peculiar note in that passage emanates from a single word,
"incumbent"--a word suggesting that anti-Zionist violence is
obligatory. A duty, not just a tactic. Moreover, a duty linked with
prayer, forehead on the ground. A duty that gives meaning to an entire
life. A religious duty.
That is a heartbreaking passage. The entire tragedy of the Palestinian
people can be found in statements such as this one--the ideological
dogma that has led so many Palestinians to look on violence as a
principle, therefore as something that can never be abandoned. If only
the Palestinian national movement had been able to look on violence as
merely a tactic, the movement's leaders, and not just a handful of
freethinkers and pragmatists, might have noticed after a while that,
realistically speaking, violent tactics were proving to be
counterproductive and ought to be exchanged for better tactics--perhaps
something that might actually succeed in building a Palestinian state
side-by-side with Israel, as could very likely have happened years ago.
But if violence is obligatory, if it is "incumbent" on the partisans of
al-Banna's Islamic renewal, if violence is an obligation that (as
al-Banna observes) distinguishes anti-Zionist struggles from all other
struggles against colonialism and injustice, well, there can be no
question of surrendering a principle, regardless of the practical cost.
And so it has been, in the history of the Palestinian movement; and the
cost has been terrible, to the Palestinians above all.
There is something else in that word "incumbent," together with the
forehead bowed in prayer. Tactics speak to a given circumstance, but
religious duties address the universe. The notion of a religiously
mandated violence, an obligatory violence, therefore opens a door, and
it is hard to see what could prevent ever wilder yet equally pious
obligations from ultimately pushing their way through the open space.
Qutb's contribution to the notion of religious violence consisted
largely of determining that Muslim "hypocrites," quite as much as
Zionists or any other outright enemy of Islam, merited a violent
resistance. This notion opened the door to mass killings of Muslims, in
the name of Islam. And there is the example of Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi,
by all accounts one of the great scholars of Sunni Islam, a man with a
long and illustrious history in the Muslim Brotherhood who went on,
after his emigration to Europe, to help found the European Council for
Fatwa and Research--all this, even apart from his other career, thanks
to Al-Jazeera television, as the world's most visible expert on Islamic
jurisprudence. It was Sheik al-Qaradawi who directed the funeral prayer
at Said Ramadan's funeral in Cairo in 1995--as Tariq Ramadan proudly
reports in The Roots of the Muslim Revival.
And yet Qaradawi is also the person who, in 2003, issued the most
famous of the fatwas authorizing suicide terrorism by Palestinians. He
issued the gruesome fatwa permitting women to commit suicide terrorism
while, at the same time, giving women terrorists a dispensation from
the normal obligation to conceal their hair under a hijab--a bizarre
touch on Qaradawi's part, underlining the ritualistic nature of these
acts, and yet entirely in keeping with the sort of erudite matter that
Qaradawi normally concerns himself with: say, whether women must keep
to themselves when they are menstruating (a point that he rejects, on
authority) or whether they may have intercourse with their husbands
during that time (they may not, though other kinds of physical pleasure
are permitted).
Among the religious authorities who stand behind the vogue for
ritualized suicide terrorism in the Arab and Muslim world in the last
few years, Qaradawi, drawing on his jurisprudential learning, does
appear to be in the first rank--which is not an argument for
downplaying the historic role of Hassan al-Banna long ago. On the
contrary, the elderly Qaradawi himself has invoked, in one of his
sermons, the memory of al-Banna orating on the agreeable nature of
death in the cause of God. As for Tariq Ramadan, he reveres Qaradawi
above all other present-day Islamic scholars, and in one book after
another he has left no room for doubt about his fealty. If anyone in
the world offers a model of modern enlightened Islam, Ramadan plainly
judges Qaradawi to be that person. Ramadan has contributed prefaces to
two collections of Qaradawi's fatwas in their French editions, not to
mention other books written by people with one or another sort of
connection to the terrorist vogue--these editions published by the
Tawhid house in Lyon, which is Ramadan's publisher as well.
None of this alters the fact that Tariq Ramadan himself disapproves of
terrorism. But there is a cost in having it both ways, in noisily
affirming his place within the salafi reformist tradition while
pretending that terrorist components of the movement belong only to a
distant offshoot; or in affirming his own disapproval of violent action
while exalting his grandfather's memory; or in condemning the terrorist
aspects of the Palestinian resistance while still revering Qaradawi and
even, with his prefaces, bedecking himself with Qaradawi's prestige,
and bedecking Qaradawi with his own prestige. The cost is a little
smudge of ambiguity in Ramadan's own position. It is the little smudge
that makes the various allegations regarding the Ramadan family (in
connection with the al-Taqwa Islamic bank in Switzerland, accused and
later cleared of financing Al Qaeda, though the lawyers for some
families of September 11 victims have lodged a lawsuit; in connection
with a Qaeda financier who has been jailed in Spain since 2002, under
the authority of the great Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who
ordered the arrest of Augusto Pinochet; in connection with a Qaeda
militant who came from the Lyon region; and so forth) look not more
convincing than before, but also not outlandish.
The problem lies in the terrible fact that Ramadan's personal
milieu--his grandfather, his family history, his family contacts, his
intellectual tradition--is precisely the milieu that bears the
principal responsibility for generating the modern theoretical
justification for religious suicide-terrorism. Yet what can Ramadan do
about this horrific reality--turn against his family? He is his
family's prince. He has timidly offered jurisprudential proposals
contrary to Qaradawi's; but Ramadan, unlike Qaradawi, is a university
philosopher, a secular figure (in spite of everything), and not an
authoritative theologian. Ramadan's opinions are opinions; Qaradawi's
opinions are law. What is Ramadan to do, then? To challenge Qaradawi's
authority would mean challenging the system of authority as a whole,
which is something well beyond the salafi reformist idea. So Ramadan
writes op-eds, which are not fatwas. And he devotes his life to
burnishing the prestige of his father and grandfather and their works,
and to promoting the cause of salafi reformism, which means promoting
the authority of true and authentic Islamic scholars such as Qaradawi.
And his final message, therefore, ends up calling for--but what is his
final message with regard to violence? It is a double message. The
first message condemns terrorism. The second message lavishes praise on
the theoreticians of terrorism. I suppose he expresses a third message,
too, to the effect that around here nobody knows nothing about nobody,
and around here nobody would dream of ratting on family, and what are
you, a racist?
Caroline Fourest, in Brother Tariq, makes the argument that, in the
end, the ambiguity in Ramadan's outlook can only serve to confer
legitimacy on the revolutionary Islamist idea, which is willy-nilly
bound, in turn, to elevate ever so slightly terrorism's prestige.
Fourest pictures a young man from North Africa in France, attending a
lecture by Ramadan, and she wonders what ideas somebody like that might
take away. Hamel, in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan, scoffs at Fourest's
argument and observes that, for all the accusations against Ramadan,
nothing has ever been proved, and out of the many thousands of people
who have in fact attended his lectures, only a single person, a man
from the Lyon district, is known to have ended up in Al Qaeda's Afghan
training camps. Who is right in this dispute?
Hamel, the scoffer, would carry the day in a court of law. Still, it is
easy to imagine that, in a small way, Fourest may be on to something.
And what is Buruma's position on the Fourest-Hamel debate? The author
of Murder in Amsterdam seems to have missed this particular
controversy, which is odd. Theo van Gogh's murderer is precisely the
kind of bewildered young man that Fourest has asked us to picture: a
second-generation North African immigrant who has had to sort through
the doctrines coming his way, looking for the signs of prestige and
glamour, trying to estimate which of those many ideas might be deemed
to be exceptionally honorable, legitimate, dignified. Even obligatory.
Fourest published Brother Tariq in 2004. Muhammad Bouyeri murdered van
Gogh later that year. Buruma published his book in 2006.
VIII.
Buruma has not missed one other issue, though, and this is the biggest issue of all, though it may seem strange to say so, given how much we hear about anti-Semitism and terrorist violence. This is the question of women's rights. And it is here that Ramadan's dialectical language has proved to be exceptionally flexible, hitting notes that are ancient and modern at the same time--the tones of the Islamic renewal that wishes to return to the salafi past, yet wishes to do so with an eye to modernity and a willingness to innovate. In his conversation with Buruma, Ramadan said in regard to the relation between the sexes: "The body must not be forgotten. Men and women are not the same. In Islamic tradition, women are seen in terms of being mothers, wives, or daughters. Now woman exists as woman." This makes Ramadan sound like a traditionalist, and he certainly is one. Yet the traditions in question here are not the same as folk customs or peasant gowns. Ramadan's phrase "Islamic tradition" in this passage means Islamic law: a religious matter, not a folk habit. But then, since religious law bespeaks the eternal, there is no reason why Ramadan should not seek to express his views in a fully modern language, something up-to-date and readily understandable.
And so Ramadan considers himself to be--it goes without saying--a
feminist. Better: an "Islamic feminist," which is a traditional claim
in the Muslim Brotherhood. Islam itself, in his description, should be
regarded as a force for women's rights. At the time of the Qur'anic
revelation, cultural assumptions with regard to women's role in society
were extremely primitive, and Islam improved upon them. Islam, or at
least his own Islam, requires women to wear headscarves or veils, and
this, too, ought to be seen as a step in favor of women's autonomy. The
scarves and the veils, the separate entranceways and seating sections,
the general ban on intermingling the sexes--these rules of dress and
conduct uphold a spirit of sexual modesty, and this modesty removes
women from the oppression of male considerations. Modesty is
liberation, from this point of view. And all this, Ramadan's argument
for the rights of women, emerges finally as part of a larger battle,
which he likewise expresses in the modern language of rights. It is the
battle for individual liberty, for religious rights, for the right to
choose one's path.
His position on the headscarf law in France--the law in 2004 that
forbade the wearing of veils or headscarves (and other ostentatious
religious symbols) in the public schools--followed this line of
reasoning exactly. "Rights are rights," he told Buruma. "And to demand
them is a right." On Ramadan's part, this sort of argument has been
perfectly consistent. But it is strange--it ought to seem strange,
anyway--to see the journalists adopt the same position, and even the
same language. Ramadan presents himself as a defender of the rights of
Muslim women, and in the Times magazine Buruma likewise presents him as
a man who "promoted the right of Muslim women to wear the veil at
French schools." The description could have been written by Ramadan
himself. Once the terms for arguing an issue have been established,
there is no getting away from them. And so Stéphanie Giry,
Ramadan's reviewer in the Times Book Review, looked on Ramadan and the
headscarf debate in exactly the same light. Ramadan, in Giry's
presentation, opposed the headscarf law on what she described as
"classic libertarian grounds--the right of Muslim girls to choose for
themselves whether to cover up."
And yet all this ought to be fairly astonishing. A reader could almost
imagine from these accounts that, in the French debate over the
headscarf law, there were no other ways to present the issue. But there
were, in fact, other ways. Some of them were silly, or anti-Muslim, or
folklorically French, or a dozen other things, as in any national
debate. But there was a serious argument, which emerged in the course
of the hearings that were held and might even have produced the
overwhelming public approval of the law. The whole controversy over
headscarves in the schools is not anything old or traditional