Owing to his famous grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, Tariq Ramadan has endured hostility, travel restrictions and charges of ‘double-talk’ - the accusation that he says one thing to his Western audience and another behind closed doors to his Muslim brothers.
In 2003, he became embroiled in a heated debate with Nicolas Sarkozy on French television, where the minister accused Ramadan of supporting stoning under Islamic law. But his central argument is that lasting change in Islam must come from internal debate, rather than outside imposition. For this reason he argued for a moratorium on such practices.
Raised in Switzerland and educated in Geneva and Cairo, his work on reconciling European and Islamic identities has led others to laud him as a ‘Muslim Martin Luther’. This places him within an Islamic Reformation, where the traditional religious authority is replaced by the new religious intellectuals.
Ramadan calls for a radical reform of Islam to meet the needs of majority Muslim and minority Muslim states. In his view, Islamic law is a “universe” of referents that exist to help the believer to answer life choices. More recently, he has called for a radical reform of Islamic law, positing this universe as a legal source alongside the Qur’an and Sunna, the prophetic tradition.
Rather than a religion which merely adapts to Western society, Ramadan seeks to create a “transformational reform” whereby Muslim professionals, scientists and religious scholars will contribute to the modernity of which they are a part.
On reforming Islamic law:
We can no longer leave it to scholarly circles and text specialists to determine norms (about scientific, social, economic, or cultural issues) while they only have relative or superficial, second-hand acknowledge of complex, profound, and often interconnected issues.