By STÉPHANIE GIRY
April 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/books/review/Giry.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
For some years now, the Swiss philosopher and Muslim intellectual
Tariq Ramadan has been saying he wants to reconcile Islamic tradition
with Western democracy, conservative religious values with liberal
political ones. But not everyone finds him credible. And being the
grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt, doesn't help. Skeptics say he is a radical in disguise — a
Janus-faced rhetorician who presents a moderate's face to Western
audiences and a reactionary's to Muslim ones.
The government is taking no chances: it has twice denied him a visa to
teach in the United States, ostensibly for giving about $800 to a
charity later blacklisted by the government because of suspected ties
with Hamas. (Ramadan is now a fellow at Oxford.)
Ian Buruma concluded a recent profile of him in The New York Times
Magazine with this uncertain endorsement: "From what I understand of
Ramadan's enterprise," the values he espouses "are neither secular,
nor always liberal, but they are not part of a holy war against
Western democracy either. His politics offer an alternative to
violence, which, in the end, is reason enough to engage with him,
critically, but without fear."
Ramadan, meanwhile, continues to defend himself and his project. 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.
Ramadan, who encourages modesty among Muslim women, opposed the 2004
French law banning head scarves in public schools, for instance. But
he did so on classic libertarian grounds — the right of Muslim girls
to choose for themselves whether to cover up — and has been advising
girls forced to choose between attending class and wearing the veil to
"go to school and learn." He has said of last year's controversy over
cartoons lampooning Muhammad both that "Muslims have to understand
that there is an old tradition in secular Western society to make fun
of everything" and that "we should not forget wisdom and decency."
Sensible arguments all, whatever plans are lurking in the recesses of
the mind that produced them.
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.
Stéphanie Giry is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs.
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