But who is Tariq Ramadan? Is he a dangerous man, a fosterer of hate from the forked tongue, or is he the real moderate alternative to violent Islam? The long controversy which recently opposed the Somalian ex-refuge Ayaan Hirsi was not enough; Ayaan being an ex-Muslim believer, who today is fighting against injustices which Islamic women are forced to suffer only, as he says, because of the Quoran and Mohammed. It is a heated debate, because the choice between Ramadan and Hirsi Ali reflects the position the West has to take with regards the Muslim community (both the European one, and the Arabic one). So, should Europe and the United States support laic Muslims or the religious kind?
The inherited enlightenment and the separation between the State and religion should in theory push Westerners to converse especially with laic Muslims. But religion has not entirely disappeared from Western public discourse (as seen in cases in the United States and in Italy itself), so much so, that the German philosopher Klaus Eder has coined the expression “post-secular society”. What is more, due to a whole series of reasons, the Muslim world certainly recognises itself much more in religious intellectuals such as Tariq Ramadan (with an exceptional following) than in laic intellectuals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a small minority). So it is hardly surprising that those speaking up in Ramadan’s defence in recent months, included two laic intellectuals like the Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash and the Dutch writer Ian Buruma.
The first controversy was born thanks to Buruma’s book Murder in Amsterdam (Einaudi 2007), dedicated to the murder committed by a Muslim fundamentalist, of the Dutch director Theo van Gogh, of whose film Submission Hirsi Ali was the screenwriter. In the New York Review of Books Timothy Garton Ash, like Buruma, had described Hirsi Ali as “an Enlightenment fundamentalist”, attracting to the site signandsight.com criticisms by some intellectuals, including the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, who had accused Buruma and Garton Ash of “racism of the anti-racists”. Today the controversy has exploded once again for the portrait which Buruma has dedicated to Ramadan in the New York Times Magazine (Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue, February 2007). The Dutch writer, professor of Human Rights and journalism at Bard College, New York, even though he has some reservations, has absolved the Swiss philosopher from the main accusations against him by the international intellectual community in recent years, from anti-semitism to Islamic fundamentalism and even masculinism. All the accusations which had banished him from France (for having said that Jewish intellectuals such as André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard Kouchner, in defending the war in Iraq, had put the interests of their own Jewish community before the universal principles), and which had made him revoke a visa in the United States, where he was meant to teach at the University of Notre Dame.
The “credulous” Buruma
Buruma does not hold back on the criticisms on Ramadan, except for a pair of objections, but in the end his is a defense of the philosopher, grandson of the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) Hassan al-Banna. “As far as I know about Ramadan’s work – they are the conclusions in his article – these values (of Ramadan, ndr) are neither secular nor always liberal, but they certainly are not part of the holy war against Western democracy. His politics offers an alternative to the violence which, at the end of the day, is reason enough to install a dialogue with him. In a critical way, but without fear”. On the other hand, it is not reason enough for Paul Berman, left-wing intellectual who, however, often finds himself playing with the right-wing strip (see his support of the war in Iraq). In his extremely long essay, Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?, almost a book which came out at the beginning of June in the American magazine The New Republic (and in Italy in the Berlusconian newspaper Il Foglio), the author of Power and the Idealists bitterly criticizes Buruma’s article, which he dwells on even with less-than flattering observations, accusing him of being superficial, and voluntary omissions and also of being hypocritical (all of which can be summarized, for example, in the expression which he uses, “the credulous Buruma”.
It is not that Buruma brings different proof or remembers different episodes compared to Buruma. The distance between the two simply lies in the fact that Buruma trusts the answers, the explanations, of Ramadan’s self-defence, while Berman does not trust them at all, and this can be seen in an infinite series of inferences. It is the observed objection on Ramadan’s presumed falseness, which would stem from the Islamic dissimulation, the taqiyya, also professed by the founder of the MB, Al-Banna. Nevertheless, a certain number of accusations by Berman, do not seem to be matched in recent texts by Ramadan. How can Berman say that “Ramadan does believe that Islam and the West are separate – even cosmically separate”, when the philosopher’s last two books say the exact opposite? To say what he says, Berman produces an old quote from Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity (2000), but the last two, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam and In the Footsteps of the Prophet, try to say the exact opposite, that is to say that Islam and the West are not two separate entities.
It is well-explained in The New York Times Book Review by Stéphanie Giry, a Foreign Affairs senior editor, who with her recent review In the Footsteps of the Prophet, earned herself the same type of treatment which Berman saved for Buruma (for example: “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”). In fact, Giry wrote: “Muhammad may not have been as sober and sensible as Ramadan writes, but why take issue with this portrayal if it can help reconcile Islam with Western liberalism today? The project that Ramadan states is his own is worth pursuing even if, for some, Ramadan himself cannot be entrusted with it”.
The dark rumours and the fault of kinship
Instead, the author of Power and the Idealists fills his anti-Ramadanian harangue of “dark rumours”. From the start Berman makes it clear that he does not want to attack Ramadan through his family origins, which connect him to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamic movement: “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”. However, he then dedicates tens of pages to analyzing the thought and actions of the grandfather, Al-Banna, of Said’s father and of his brother, Hani (the first was the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the second was the representative in Europe, the third is a fundamentalist). As a last judgment, contradicting himself: “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”. But so: Ramadan “is not his grandfather”, or “is nothing if not a son and a brother and, especially, a grandson”? Here Berman interferes a little, probably because he knows that the parental accusation, on which his own text is based, is not worth very much.
Berman lingers for a long time on Al-Banna’s thoughts, “the original model for what has come to be known as ‘Islamism’”, and he then states: “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”. The design is clear: to trace a line between the MB and Al Qaeda, between Tariq Ramadan’s relatives and Al Qaeda, and finally between Tariq Ramadan himself and Al Qaeda, even though Ramadan has always declared that he is not part of the MB. In this way, the old accusation is pulled out, that which connects Ramadan’s family and the Islamic Swiss bank al-Taqwa, suspected of having links with Al Qaeda, only to then add that “None of this alters the fact that Tariq Ramadan himself disapproves of terrorism”.
All of this is seasoned, here and there, with the association between fascism (and Nazism) and the MB, and between fascism and Tariq Ramadan (like when Berman attributes to him the belief in a double science, one for Westerners and one for Muslim: “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”). A real obsession, seeing as the words “fascism” and “fascist” recur in the text 24 times, and the word “Nazi” 12. The point is not so much the possible association between the cleric-fascists of the first Muslim Brotherhood and the cleric-fascists of the 1920s in Italy. The point is that Berman keeps quiet on the evolution of the MB. In this way when an unwitting reader is fed this association between Ramadan and the MB, they will be tempted to think of people such as Sayyid Qutb, who terrorized the holy war against Westerners. But in this way Berman ignores the fact that the MB today, are considered to be a hope for Egyptian democracy by the Bush administration, as they showed in the March-April 2007 edition Foreign Affairs the scholar at the Nixon Centre Robert S. Leiken in the article The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood (see also the interview of Leiken on Resetdoc), and in the New York Times James Traub (Islamic Democracts?, 29th April 2007). Borrowing an illation of two other writers who occupied themselves with Ramadan, Caroline Fourest and Paul Landau, Berman reminds us of the suspicion that Ramadan’s project is really “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”. The apocalypse is, in fact, always round the corner.
Unfortunately for the American writer, Ramadan is much more than “a son and a brother”, and it would be more accurate to judge him by his books, especially the last two, the most recent, rather than making inferences based on blood connections, which were punishable only under Nazism and fascism (the so-called Sippenhaft). But the last two books by Ramadan are not mentioned at all by Berman! There is no accusation proposed by him which can be matched in the Genevian philospher’s recent writings! The author of Power and the Idealists (Baldini Castoldi Dalai 2007), in fact, prefers to leaf through old pieces of work and malignantly interpret every phrase of his, with the same amounts of attention with which analysts from the CIA analyse the details of the speeches and videos of Osama Bin Laden.
Osama Bin Laden or Benedict XVI?
The conversation could not not come back to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Berman defends him and is surprised that Buruma uses for herself the same expression which she used for Ramadan: “We agreed on most issues” (referring to the Swiss philosopher), and “I admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and agree with most of what she stands for”. Berman is surprised, letting us understand that this would be another proof of Buruma’s unreliability. But there is no need to be amazed. Outside of the ideological fury, outside of the world of extreme opposites, it is possible to share part of Hirsi Ali’s battle, and part of Ramadan’s battle. How can we not sympathise with the atrocities Hirsi Ali has suffered? How can we not see, also, that Ramadan’s religiosity is of the same nature as that which we breathe in our Christian churches.
Even a non-Muslim laic which, for want of faith, feels closer to the laic Hirsi Ali, should recognise the fact that the Somalian ex-refugee represents a minority in the Muslim world, and that if we want to open ourselves up to the other, to the Muslim world, we have to look for representative interlocutors, not the interlocutors which we choose, those who are most similar to us (and therefore to laicity). Moreover, as far as the means of discourse are concerned, Ramadan’s serene moderation helps with the dialogue with regards Hirsi Ali’s provocations much more (recently she had been asked, in person: You defined Mohammed as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘pervert’. Do you think that such provocative language can be counterproductive?”). It is not by chance that, out of his Italian friends, Berman quotes Magdi Allam and Fiamma Bierenstein, two figures for whom it is difficult to make reference to as champions of dialogue or as witnesses of an impartial attitude. It is not even by chance that, with regards the much-discussed request of a moratorium on lapidation and for corporal punishment in the Islamic world, obviously rejected by Berman, Jonathon Laurence wisely wrote in Foreign Affairs, in the May-June 2007 edition: “By calling for a moratorium, Ramadan avoids the Islamic equivalent of excommunication. As a result, his books are far more likely to influence the thinking of observant Muslims than are the proliferating ‘ex-Muslims testimonials’ available in Western bookstores”.
But on the other hand, contrary to what Giry believes, for Berman Ramadan is never ok. He is not even ok when he is defending the Israeli state (“Passages in Ramadan’s account (Ramadan’s most recent book on Mohammed, ndr) 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”).
In the end, Berman rebukes Ramadan for being no-global, his pacifism, and for his doubtless faith. But his being no-global never reaches the point where he denies his belonging to European society and in some way, to the West. And it is for this that he seems more moderate and more western compared to many other extreme left-wing exponents, who often have shared his battles. Moreover, in the second war between America and Saddam Hussein, his pacifism was shared by Pope John Paul II and by the majority of the public opinion in the West and worldwide. And how can we blame him for his lack of doubts as regards God, as professed by Ramadan? Also here, deep down, he shows himself to be very similar to an Orthodox Christian. Tariq Ramadan, and this is where Berman is wrong, is definitely much closer to Pope Benedict XVI than to Osama Bin Laden.
What has changed
Berman’s long essay does not add much to the discussion, even if it is very accurate and especially well-packaged. Nevertheless, what is very interesting is his last question: how can it be that yesterday Salman Rushdie was defended by everybody, when he received a death threat, and today Ayaan Hirsi Ali is very criticized by one part of the international intellectual establishment, including the New York Times? Berman says that “something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world”. And then, as regards defending Ramadan: “How did this happen? What can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?”. The American writer gives as an explanation: “the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa” and terrorism. Now, apart from the fact that when a writer who is loved the world over receives a global fatwa from one of the worst regimes in the world, attracts much more sympathy than a much debated local politician, even in his home country, as was the case for Ayaan hirsi Ali at the time of the Dutch threats. However, explaining everything with the increase of terrorism, as does Berman, is not enough.
The need to have a dialogue with the Muslim community, and to accept it and help it integrate in Europe, leads to the need to find representative leaders in this community. Leaders such as Tariq Ramadan, not like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Berman also forgets how much damage the war in Iraq has done to the relationship between the Muslim world and the West. A war which certainly cannot be an alibi for terrorists, but which helps to explains some of the tensions of the relationship with the Muslim world. But Berman ignores this fact: the word “Iraq” is quoted only seven times in his long essay (and mainly refers to Ramadan’s French querelle). The word “Bush” comes up only twice. Perhaps, in response to Berman’s question, this has also changed since the days of the fatwa against Rushdie: the Muslim communities in Europe have become more consistent, and the war in Iraq has increased the tensions in the two worlds. It is also for this that, today, holding a dialogue with leaders such as Tariq Ramadan simply means to take note of the reality which surrounds us, and to try to give realistic answers.
Translation by Sonia Ter Hovanessian