REFORM FIRST, RULE LATER:

The reformer: To his admirers, Tariq Ramadan is Europe's leading advocate of liberal Islam.To his detractors, he's a dangerous theocrat in disguise. (Laura Secor, 11/30/2003, Boston Globe)

WHEN TARIQ RAMADAN delivers a lecture, the room is invariably packed to capacity. Afterwards, dozens of young Muslim men are likely to throng the stage, seeking his definitive guidance on everything from veiling to animal rights to how to live with dignity in a secular society.

"What I am doing with them is at the same time important and dangerous," Ramadan says of his work with these young men. "It could be dangerous if you let them think you have the answers. I try to tell them, `I am not what I'm saying. I'm only trying to be."'

At age 41, Ramadan, an elegant, Swiss-born intellectual, imam, and activist, has become a magnet for young Muslims in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. He's done it partly by making himself personally accessible to the devotees who purchase audiotapes of his lectures and often travel for miles just to hear him speak. And he's also done it with his unstinting criticism of their community's inclination toward insularity.

Outside the Muslim community, Ramadan is the object of both admiration and suspicion. He's the Muslim Martin Luther, the American and French press have sometimes rhapsodized: He advocates that European Muslims use their unique experiences to lead a movement toward reform within Islam. He is "two-faced," critics reply: He sounds like a moderate, having adopted a vocabulary that he knows will be accepted by secular Westerners, but he is actually herding Francophone Muslims down the path of extremism.

Traveling with Ramadan on a whirlwind November lecture tour in France, I found no particular discrepancy between the sermons he delivered to Muslim audiences and his published work. (Ramadan has written some 10 books in French, and Oxford University Press has just brought out his "Western Muslims and the Future of Islam.") Nonetheless, Ramadan's message is itself fraught with the complexities and contradictions of Europe's Muslim community, which often seems to occupy two worlds -- one traditional and religious, the other fast-changing and secular. [...]

Secular France can't seem to decide if Ramadan is friend or foe. He is, after all, an Islamist, meaning that he believes Islam furnishes a political as well as a spiritual worldview. For majority Muslim societies like those of the Middle East, Ramadan envisions a reformed, moderate, but nonetheless Islam-based political and legal system. In the end, such a system would look a lot like Western secular democracy, he says, though its legitimacy would derive from Islamic sources.

Ramadan's vision may be a radical improvement on nearly every existing Islamic system of government; indeed, he is a harsh critic of virtually all the world's Muslim rulers, and Saudi clerics have issued fatwas condemning him. But is Ramadan trying to square the circle when he says a reformed Islamic system is compatible with secular values?

Take, for instance, the harshest Islamic corporal punishments, such as stoning adulterous wives or cutting off the hands of thieves. Ramadan personally finds such penalties unacceptable and un-Islamic. He believes a moratorium should be called on them while Islamic scholars ask themselves three questions: What is in the texts? How does the contemporary context affect how we read the texts? Is the policy implementable?

Ramadan seems confident that this reevaluation will lead to radical reform. What's more, he believes he is providing language and tools to dismantle abuses from the inside, rather than simply flatly condemning the Islamic system from without, as secular critics do.

But what if the best efforts of Muslim scholars still reveal a God who insists on cruel and discriminatory punishments? There can be no recourse to extrinsic principles, such as human rights or equality. The final word lies in the Koran and with those who interpret it.

So are reformists like Ramadan mitigating the worst excesses of a cruel political system, or are they simply sugarcoating it? If the former, moderate Islamism is perhaps the greatest hope for human rights in countries ruled by sharia (Islamic law). If the latter, moderate Islamism, whatever its advocates' intentions, looks more like a potentially deceptive sales pitch.

Perhaps, at a minimum, we could demand that the radical reform of Islam precede its use as a basis for the State.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 30, 2003 3:27 PM