As I have pointed out somewhere else, the intellectual dustup surrounding the varied reception of Muslim thinkers Tariq Ramadan and Hirsi Ali, mentioned in Paul Berman’s The Flight of Intellectuals, has taken place mostly in the rarified heights of our smarter periodicals. Carlin Romano has his say, commending Berman for raising difficult questions that Ramadan is obliged to answer: “It now behooves Tariq Ramadan to address his own praise of thinkers who make a mockery of his kinder vision if he wants readers and peers to continue to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
Ron Rosenbaum, in a piece entitled “Bonfire of the Intellectuals,” rehearses the whole issue, but mainly from a point of indignation at the treatment of Hirsi Ali by progressives and other camp followers, concluding,
Of the writers joining this brouhaha, I have found Pankaj Mishra’s “Islamismism” the most enjoyable read (who said these issues can’t be fun?), perhaps because of Mishra’s citations, leavened with a subtle humor:
Berman’s hopes for delivering reason and freedom at gunpoint have proved calamitous. Lamenting many similar flights of the intellectuals in the long twentieth century—their noisy ideological identifications and terrible political choices—the late Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski once pointed out that, however much intellectuals yearn to be both “prophets and heralds of reason,” those roles cannot be reconciled. “The common human qualities of vanity and greed for power” are particularly dangerous among intellectuals, he observed, and their longing to identify with political causes often results in “an almost unbelievable loss of critical reasoning.”
