For years, the U.S. government has barred entry to Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Islamic scholar. This stupid policy began in 2004: Ramadan was about to assume a professorship at Notre Dame when the State Department revoked his visa. At first the government gave no reason, then pointed to Ramadan’s small donations to a couple of pro-Palestinian organizations that were suspected of funnelling money to Hamas. Since he gave the money between 1998 and 2002, and Hamas was not put on the official terrorist list until 2003, the argument made no sense on its face, and it gave rise to the suspicion, which Ramadan himself has often voiced, that he was banned because of his criticisms of U.S. policies.
I’m not convinced that this is true, but I am convinced—and wrote at the time—that shutting out this serious and widely influential intellectual was a self-defeating mistake. It made Ramadan’s sinister view of the U.S. seem all the more plausible. In the struggle for world opinion after September 11th, it made America look intolerant and narrow-minded and afraid.
Ramadan remained persona non grata throughout the Bush years, while his case, taken up by the A.C.L.U., PEN, and others, made its way through American courts. During this period, the missing Muslim scholar became the subject of a furious intellectual argument in the pages of the country’s major publications. Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash praised him as a thinker who can reach young European Muslims and help them to reconcile their religious identity with citizenship in secular democracies. Paul Berman wrote a long article for The New Republic, the basis of his new book “The Flight of the Intellectuals,” to be published this month, arguing that Ramadan is to be feared, not admired—that his writings reveal a strong kinship with the radical Islamist ideology of his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. To Berman, Ramadan is a false moderate, and in embracing him Western intellectuals like Buruma and Garton Ash have betrayed their own liberal principles. Buruma and Garton Ash argued back. Others joined the fray.
The Obama Administration, to its credit, didn’t wait for a final legal ruling on the Ramadan case. This past January, Hillary Clinton signed an order lifting the ban and, in effect, allowing the debate about Ramadan and his ideas to happen in person. And so this tale is background to what will be Ramadan’s first public appearance in America, at a panel discussion at 7 P.M. on Thursday night, at Cooper Union in New York. The subject could be none other than “Secularism, Islam, and Democracy,” and Ramadan’s co-panelists will include Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, Princeton’s Joan Wallach Scott, the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies’ Dalia Mogahed, and yours truly.
In case you can’t make it, Interesting Times will let you know what happened.
