On the day a Federal District Court judge told the would-be Times Square bomber that she hoped he would spend his life sentence thinking about whether “the Koran wants you to kill lots of people,” Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan took the stage at the 92nd Street Y to debate the question, “Is Islam a religion of peace?”
Neither man liked the question.
“This is not the right question to ask,” Ramadan said in his opening remarks. “It doesn’t mean anything.” It didn’t mean anything when George W. Bush called Islam a religion of peace, said the Swiss scholar, barred by the Bush administration from entering the United States on anti-terrorism grounds in 2004.
The right question, he said is “do we have something helping us toward peace?” Ramadan seemed to be saying that Islam served that purpose, though he never said so outright. “The Koran is the word of God,” he said. “The problem is not the book. The problem is the reader.”
In his rebuttal, Hitchens would agree with Ramadan about the perils of reading, but said that the fault did not always lie with the reader. “In reading the Koran,” Hitchens said, “I can’t tell if it’s the word of god, but I can hope it’s a sign of god having a bad day.”
Ramadan argued that religion was “instrumentalized” (he used the word five times) by bad actors who distorted it. With a penchant for becoming emphatic when stating the obvious, Ramadan said, “Islam is a religion for human beings. But we are not peaceful human beings.” The “diversity” within Islam—"Maimonides spoke Arabic better than me,” he said—led to the risk of “lots of wars.” Turning to Hitchens, a former Trotskyist and trade union organizer, Ramadan said, “You see what some did with Marx. Is therefore all Marx bad? No.”
(When he spoke next, Hitchens seemed to pause as he considered how far to take the bait about Marx, and then declined to do so at all.)
“You don’t give the people all the interpretation,” Ramadan told Hitchens. “It’s not serious to say all Muslims are acting in the same way. Don’t tell me you didn’t hear the Muslim condemnation of September 11.”
But Ramadan went on to complain that in fact Muslim appeals for reason do go unheard. Speaking of himself, he said, “When what he’s saying is good, he’s alone. When they don’t like what I say, it’s, ‘He has a huge following.’”
But he did not think that history should be any guide to reform. “Don’t rely on history,” he said. “With history you prove whatever you want.” He then drew a parallel between Islamist terror as a distortion of Islam and the American campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. “In the name of human rights we kill innocent people,” he said, his soft, French-inflected voice rising as he leaned over the podium. “The blood of an Iraqi or an Afghan is as good as American blood.”
In his rebuttal, Hitchens pointed out that though he didn’t think “the motion was a particularly good one, I knew about it as long as Professor Ramadan did, and I agreed to speak to it. Not to make it a point of self-pity.”
After rebuking Ramadan for his remark about American and Middle Eastern blood, Hitchens asked, “What has the United States done in Iraq that was as criminal as the blowing up of the Golden Mosque in Samarra? Deliberately intending to start a civil war, which it did. Where is the Sunni outrage? Where is the Sunni fatwa against this conduct? I missed it. And so, apparently, did the followers of the prophet.”
Hitchens asked Ramadan, who has said that terrorism is never justified but that he could understand how, in certain circumstances, people could be led to commit terror, “who has the authority to issue fatwas?” Not to be misunderstood, Hitchens pointed out, “I’m certainly not going to criticize Islam for not having a pope. The Christian world is full of pope-types.” But, he told Ramadan, “in cities from Sweden to Spain” Muslims are calling for inclusion into a restored Caliphate. “That’s why you’re in the position you’re in.”
Ramadan admitted there was a “crisis of authority” in Islam, but told Hitchens that he could not “reduce” Islamic leaders who espouse suicide bombing, to that position alone. “I read what is said and I try to be selective,” Ramadan said. “We need to have a particular debate.”
“You seem to want to have that a little bit both ways,” Hitchens said, before rounding on the biggest applause line of the night, “If you want diversity, you need a secular state with a godless constitution. Secularism is the only guarantee of religious freedom.”
Returning to the evening’s assignment, Hitchens said Islam requires the belief that the prophet Muhammad was “a perfect human being” and that the Koran is “a perfect book.” “These are categories that do not exist,” Hitchens said. “Yet any challenge to them is heresy. The demands that you believe these imperatives do not lead to peaceful outcomes.”
In the evening’s one stirring moment, Hitchens pointed out that the Jews had “decided about the second messiah what they had decided about the first.” There was a note of despair in his voice when he asked, “Will they ever be forgiven for either?”
Having defined jihad as a “resistance to reform the world for the better and blamed “political instrumentalization” for the misunderstanding of Islam, Ramadan did not respond. Later, when Hitchens remarked that “Syria does fund the murder gang Hezbollah,” Ramadan reacted, with some relief, as if he’d scored his biggest point of the night. “You agree on the instrumentalization of religion,” he said. “That’s good enough for me.”
After the debate a viewer said of Ramadan, “He was very articulate, but it sounded like he was talking around what would have gotten him in trouble.” This quality was apparent several times in the evening, not least when the moderator, Laurie Goldstein of the New York Times, asked Ramadan if he really meant to say that Turkey was becoming “more progressive” as its government became increasingly Islamic.
Ramadan, who had said Turkey was “progressing” and “moving to become more democratic,” responded by saying, “We don’t know what to call the leaders now. Islamists? Ex-Islamists? They have new thoughts on the rule of law promoting what they are trying to promote.”
But he never said what new thoughts either the Islamist or ex-Islamists had in mind.
By now Hitchens, who had arrived on stage in a trim blue suit with a clipboard and a bottle of water (and, incongruously, a massive Flashman collection), was no longer taking notes. Ramadan, whose voice rises when he slips into jargon such as “Islam says your dignity is in your freedom,” went on to say “don’t reduce Turkey to levels… there are dynamics… Turkish women everywhere are promoting a better kind of Islam. This is what I promote.”
At the end of the debate, Hitchens was rolling his pen in the fingers of one hand and looking over his shoulder offstage. After shaking hands with his opponent, he stood and waited for Ramadan to leave the stage before he turned to leave on his own.
