RHETORIC BECOMES REALITY:

The Faces of Tariq Ramadan: a review of IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE PROPHET: Lessons From the Life of Muhammad By Tariq Ramadan (STÉPHANIE GIRY, 4/01/07, NY Times Book Revieew)

In his new book, "In the Footsteps of the Prophet," a biography of Muhammad, he seeks to illustrate that Islam and Western democracy are inherently compatible by extracting lessons from the prophet's life. Returning to the roots of Islam, he believes, makes the parallels clear. Ramadan's Muhammad is a kind man and a wise leader. He is fair to his wives, openly affectionate with his daughters, generally good to women -- he lets them into the mosques. ("Gentleness" is one of Ramadan's favorite words.) Muhammad knows when to encourage patience and faith in his followers and when to indulge their craving for rest and sex. He consults before making decisions, and wages war only when necessary. He is tolerant of non-Muslims and fair to his enemies. His faith is unflappable, but he is also a critical thinker: he uses reason to translate the word of God into a practicable ethics. If Muhammad is the embodiment of Islam, Islam is a religion of moderation, common sense, resilience and love.

Some will challenge Ramadan's understated, if not euphemistic, treatment of the Muslims' conquest of the Arabian Peninsula and his claim that armed jihad is justified only in self-defense. But judging this avowedly interpretive biography by its historical accuracy or the quality of its Koranic interpretation is to miss the more relevant question: What does the book reveal about Ramadan's political philosophy?

Ramadan's vision of Islam comes down to just a few universal principles. Everything else -- the cultures of Muslim countries, the politics often pursued in Islam's name -- is historically contingent, and so up for negotiation. (Elsewhere, Ramadan has said, "Arabic is the language of Islam, but Arabic culture is not the culture of Islam.") For just this reason, Islam can be a complement to modern democracies. "Islam does not establish a closed universe of reference," Ramadan argues, "but rather relies on a set of universal principles that can coincide with the fundamentals and values of other beliefs and religious traditions."

In other words, "In the Footsteps of the Prophet" is a brief. But it is also an apologia for some of Ramadan's most controversial positions. In 2003, he was criticized for calling for a moratorium on the stoning of adulterers rather than condemning the practice outright. He replied that while he personally opposed the sentence -- and the death penalty in general -- advocating a sweeping ban might have alienated hard-liners in majority-Muslim countries and delayed reform there. This claim seemed feeble to his detractors, but it was probably less sinister than it sounded. As this book suggests, Ramadan's response wasn't a tacit endorsement of stoning so much as an expression of his view that each society must decide for itself how to put into practice the values of Islam.

Likewise, his portrayal of those values as universal may shed a different light on his alleged bigotry. He was called an anti-Semite after he wrote an article in 2003 chiding French-Jewish intellectuals like Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Bernard Kouchner for reflexively backing the war in Iraq and Israel's foreign policy. He didn't help his case by including on his list the sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff, who isn't Jewish. Yet even prejudice, if that's what accounted for the slip, needn't have undermined his warning about the danger of sectarian politics. Ramadan was making the point about these writers as a prelude to discouraging Muslims from resorting to ethnic politics themselves -- even though, as Ramadan told me when I interviewed him in 2005, their greater numbers in France suggest it's a strategy that might serve them well. By invoking universalism -- a mantra of French republicanism -- as a higher good, Ramadan has tried to show that even as a practicing Muslim he can be a better citoyen than his critics.

So why the controversy? To those who say his discourse is double talk, Ramadan responds that they practice "double hearing" (and sometimes it does seem as though they have a stake in his not being what he claims). More important, Ramadan's intentions -- whatever they are -- ultimately matter less than the arguments themselves. Taking him literally could be one way to get beyond his critics' accusations, as well as the paranoid legalism of the State Department. In fact, it could yield just the kind of accommodation that the secular establishment in France and the multiculturalists in the Netherlands are struggling to reach with their growing Muslim populations. Ramadan's universalist, apolitical view of Islam could actually facilitate the pragmatic resolution of social frictions.

The point is that we can Reform Islam in any shape we choose to.

MORE:
Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue (IAN BURUMA, 2/04/07, NY Times Magazine)

Tariq Ramadan, Muslim, scholar, activist, Swiss citizen, resident of Britain, active on several continents, is a hard man to pin down. People call him "slippery," "double-faced," "dangerous," but also "brilliant," a "bridge-builder," a "Muslim Martin Luther." He wants Muslims to become active citizens of the West but four years ago was himself refused permission to enter the U.S. He could not take up the teaching position he'd been offered at the University of Notre Dame. Oxford University took him on as a visiting fellow instead.

To his admirers, he is a courageous reformer who works hard to fill the chasm between Muslim orthodoxy and secular democracy. Young European Muslims flock to his talks, which are widely distributed on audiocassettes. A brilliant speaker, he inspires his audiences, rather like Black Power leaders did in the 1960s, by instilling a sense of pride. A friend of mine saw him last year in Rotterdam, talking to a hall packed with around 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. To them he had the aura of an Islamic superstar. Even my friend, an Iranian-born Dutchman with entirely secular views, was impressed by the eloquence of this Muslim thinker, who wishes to press his faith into the mainstream of European life. His critics see things differently: they accuse him of anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, promoting the oppression of women and waging a covert holy war on the liberal West. [...]

The main thing, for him, is to find a way for Muslims to escape their minority status and play a central role as European citizens. "The fact that Western Muslims are free," he said, "means that they can have enormous impact. But it would be wrong to claim that we are imposing our ways on the West. New ideas are now coming from the West. To be traditional is not so much a question of protecting ourselves as to be traditionalist in principle."

Traditionalist principles, for Ramadan, apply to politics as much as to religion. Muslims, he says, should not try to create a "parallel system" to Western democracy, let alone aspire to building a Muslim state. "There is no such thing," he says, "as an Islamic order. We have to act to promote justice and inject our ethics into the existing system." According to Ramadan, the global order of neoliberal capitalism allows the wealthy West to dominate the world. Resisting this order is part of his task as an activist professor, who derives his "universal principles" from his Muslim faith. This message not only provides educated European Muslims with a political cause but is also pushed with considerable success at such international leftist jamborees as the World Social Forum, where the world's antiglobalists meet. [...]

In his book, "Western Muslims and the Future of Islam," published in 2004, Ramadan lists various approaches to Islam, from "political literalist Salafism" -- militant, anti-Western, in favor of the Islamic state -- to "liberal reformism," which sees faith as an entirely private affair. I asked him at the mosque where he placed himself. "A Salafi reformist," he said, which might seem a contradiction but is explained in his book as follows: "The aim is 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."

Ramadan's favorite Muslim philosophers are the late-19th-century reformists Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who tried to revive Islam under Western colonial rule by rational interpretation of the holy texts. They were skeptical of religious tradition, accumulated over time, and looked for core principles in the Koran that spoke to reason. For them there was no contradiction between scientific reasoning and their Muslim faith. And female emancipation or democratic government could be reconciled with the original principles of Islam. Both had lived in Europe. Both were harsh critics of colonialism and Western materialism. In Ramadan's words, "They saw the need to resist the West, through Islam, while taking what was useful from it."

Speaking about his grandfather, Ramadan observed: "People say that his ideas formed the basis of Al Qaeda. This is not true." The spiritual father of revolutionary Islam, according to Ramadan and others, was another Egyptian Muslim Brother, Sayyid Qutb, who advocated a holy war against the idolatrous West. Ramadan pointed out that "Qutb actually joined the Muslim Brotherhood after my grandfather was killed. They didn't even know each other. My position on Hassan al-Banna is that he was much closer to Muhammad Abduh. He was in favor of a British-style parliamentary system, which was not against Islam." [...]

"Western Muslims and the Future of Islam" throws some light on Ramadan's idea of "Islamic socialism," an ideology, combining religious principles with anticapitalist, anti-imperialist politics, that goes back to the time of the Russian Revolution. (Libya's strongman, Muammar el-Qaddafi, is one who claims to rule according to these principles.) The murderous tyranny to be resisted, in Ramadan's book, is "the northern model of development," which means that "a billion and a half human beings live in comfort because almost four billion do not have the means to survive." For Ramadan, global capitalism, promoted by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is the "abode of war" (alam al-harb), for "when faced with neoliberal economics, the message of Islam offers no way out but resistance."

To be a sworn enemy of capitalism does not mean you are a communist, a fascist, a religious fundamentalist or indeed an anti-Semite, but it is something these otherwise disparate groups frequently have in common.

Importing the worst of the West is unlikely to help Islam.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 1, 2007 6:19 AM