Current Affairs / A Walking Litmus Test [incl. Tariq Ramadan]

This damning, if largely circumstantial, critique of Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan also takes aim at Western thinkers who are excessively forgiving of Islamic fundamentalism

On September 11, 2001, Paul Berman watched the World Trade Center towers burn and crumble from his rooftop in Brooklyn. “I can hardly believe what I see,” he wrote that day. “I see nothing. Smoke and sky. It is the symbol of absolute evil.” Over the next few years, he searched for the origins of that evil. But while most writers looked East, to the chronic dysfunctions of the Arab and Muslim world, Berman, who did not disregard those dysfunctions, glanced Westward, and he saw that some of the lunatic political ideas of the 9/11 terrorists had roots closer to home - in Europe, in fascism, in totalitarianism, in Jew-hatred. “Terror and Liberalism,” published in 2003, is Berman’s eloquent reflection on how peoples and movements, as he put it, “get drunk on the idea of slaughter.”

“Terror and Liberalism” ranged widely - from Albert Camus and Abraham Lincoln to Sayyid Qutb and Mohamed Atta - and on one or two pages Berman took note of an Islamic philosopher from Switzerland named Tariq Ramadan. To his admirers, the urbane and handsome Ramadan embodies a modern, progressive Islam, a partner for interfaith dialogue. The author of several books and a prolific public speaker, Ramadan is probably Europe’s best-known Muslim intellectual. He has held a variety of academic appointments, including his current post at Oxford University. In 2004, the University of Notre Dame offered him a tenured position as the Henry R. Luce professor of religion, conflict and peacebuilding. Ramadan accepted; the United States government, however, revoked his visa, citing several donations that Ramadan made between 1998 and 2002 to pro-Palestinian groups that backed Hamas.

The evidence against Ramadan was unimpressive - for starters, Hamas was not put on the government terror list until 2003 - and the Bush administration’s policy turned him into an object of sympathy. The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Association of University Professors and the PEN writers group all objected to the ban. Meanwhile, Ramadan’s reputation grew. He was profiled in prestigious publications. He ranked eighth in a 2005 Prospect Magazine poll of the world’s most important intellectuals. This past January, the State Department lifted the ban. In April, Ramadan began a month-long series of lectures in cities including Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.

As Berman writes at the outset of his important new book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals,” Ramadan now occupies “the very spot where half a dozen major conflicts and controversies converge” - conflicts and controversies about terrorist violence, about Jews and about the response of Western intellectuals to the rise of the Islamists.

Berman, a professor at New York University, is perhaps at times too inclined to believe the worst about Ramadan. And the nuanced case - so nuanced that it defies easy summary - that he patiently builds against Ramadan is largely circumstantial. That said, it is damning.

Death for the sake of God

The suspicious odor that surrounds Ramadan is, in part, hereditary. In 1928 his maternal grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood, whose slogan is: “God is our objective; the Koran is our constitution; the prophet is our leader; struggle is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.” The Brotherhood’s blend of Islamic revival, hostility toward the West and charitable outreach has inspired groups across the Middle East, especially Hamas.

According to Berman, Ramadan “has always exulted in his family’s legacy” and depicts his grandfather as “the Mahatma Gandhi of the Arab and Muslim world.” And yet Banna wrote things like this: “Degradation and dishonor are the results of the love of this world and the fear of death. Therefore prepare for jihad and be the lovers of death.” And Banna, who opposed the partition of Palestine, in 1946 released a statement to the Arab League in support of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who spent World War II collaborating with the Nazis and imploring the Arabs of Palestine to “kill the Jews wherever you find them.” Here is Banna on the mufti: “This hero ... fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle.”

Ramadan is not a Nazi sympathizer. And Berman makes no such reckless allegations. Ramadan, moreover, isn’t responsible for what his grandfather did or said. He is, however, responsible for his own words. And about his grandfather’s alliance with the mufti, he says disappointingly little, glancing at the issue in two sentences in and two short footnotes of a 1998 book. He merely writes that his grandfather helped “prepare and organize” the mufti’s “political exile in Egypt in 1946.”

Berman is rightly galled. “A reader of Ramadan’s book could only assume that Amin al-Husseini was one more stout-hearted anti-imperialist firebrand, like Banna himself. On the topics of the SS, the Holocaust, Hitler, and the Nuremberg trials, someone reading Ramadan’s account of the mufti and the mufti’s debt to Banna would learn nothing at all.”

Ramadan has repeatedly condemned terrorism. But when it comes to terrorism against Israelis, a disturbing ambiguity creeps into his rhetoric. Consider this statement: “One cannot place all the blame for these acts on the women and men, denied and oppressed, whose only recourse is to sacrifice their lives in attacking the civilian targets they can reach (recognizing the incredible Israeli military arsenal ), and forget to condemn the Israeli policy that has been the prime producer of this violence.” Read that sentence again, carefully. Is Ramadan saying that suicide attacks against Israeli civilians are the “only recourse” for Palestinians? In this and other instances, Ramadan leaves much too much open to such an interpretation.

Ramadan has also repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism - though not all anti-Semites. Meet Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is the host of a popular television program on the Al Jazeera satellite network. Ramadan, according to Berman, regards Qaradawi as the greatest living scholarly authority on Banna and his thinking. Ramadan is not alone in his high regard for the 83-year-old preacher, who has repeatedly been offered - and turned down - the position of Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, the office once held by Banna himself.

Qaradawi is widely considered to be a moderate, but he has said many immoderate and despicable things. “I support Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah,” he announced on television in 2007. “I oppose the peace that Israel and America wish to dictate. This peace is an illusion. I support martyrdom operations.” Qaradawi has issued fatwas explicitly authorizing suicide terrorism by Palestinians. Khaled Meshal, the political leader of Hamas, has appeared on Al Jazeera to thank Qaradawi for his support. Berman writes that Qaradawi has “outdone everyone else in rendering the concept of ritual suicide and terrorism acceptable and even admirable.”

What is it about the current political culture that allows thinkers with a soft spot for suicide terrorism and anti-Semitism to be regarded as moderate? How, moreover, do such men become mainstream moral and religious authorities? “It is an old mystery,” Berman writes. “Charismatic people with grotesque ideas end up wielding prestige and authority because other people, the ones who appear to be sober and sensible, offer public displays of deference and homage.” Berman goes on: “This has been Tariq Ramadan’s role.” Berman records instance after instance of Ramadan’s reverence for Qaradawi - the frequent and approving citations of Qaradawi in Ramadan’s own books, the two prefaces that Ramadan has written for French collections of Qaradawi’s works. “Tariq Ramadan remains a man who cannot see that a monstrous figure like Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a monstrous figure,” Berman concludes.

Hints of zealousness

There is another aspect to “The Flight of the Intellectuals,” and that is, well, “the flight of the intellectuals” - the diffidence of some liberal thinkers’ response to Islamic fundamentalism. Why, for instance, have some intellectuals failed to vociferously support Muslim dissidents? The specific targets of Berman’s ire are Ian Buruma, a professor at Bard College, and Timothy Garton Ash, a professor at Oxford University. They are, as Berman himself writes, “two of the most admired, sophisticated, accomplished and influential intellectuals in the English-speaking world"; and they both are perhaps too generous to Ramadan, and too critical of figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born memoirist and former member of the Dutch parliament who relocated to the United States after Theo Van Gogh, with whom she was collaborating on a film project, was murdered on a street in Amsterdam. Appended to his chest with a knife was an “Open Letter to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.” In Berman’s eyes, “A more classic example of a persecuted dissident intellectual does not exist.”

Buruma, however, detects “hints of zealousness” in Hirsi Ali, and Garton Ash has described her as “a slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist.” Worse, he has suggested that Hirsi Ali’s appeal is wrapped up in her looks. “If she had been short, squat, and squinting,” Garton Ash wrote, “her story and views might not be so closely attended to.” (He later apologized. )

One need not embrace Hirsi Ali’s at times too-sweeping indictment of Islam to raise an eyebrow at how she has been treated in some quarters, and wonder if that treatment is indicative of, as Berman puts it, a “reactionary turn in the intellectual world.” Consider that in 1989 when the Ayatalloh Khomeini issued a fatwa for the murder of the novelist Salman Rushdie, the liberal intelligentsia rallied to the author’s defense. Today intellectuals respond to such threats with “bumbles, gaffes, timidities, slanders, miscomprehensions, and silences,” Berman writes. What happened? Berman points to two ominous developments at the end of his lucid, elegant book. “The first of those developments is the spectacular and intimidating growth of the Islamist movement since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second development is terrorism.”

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