Posted on 11/16/2003 5:11:04 AM PST by Stultis
SAINT-DENIS, France, Nov. 13 — Of all the Muslim leaders in Europe, perhaps none has more visibility — and more faces — than Tariq Ramadan.
To many experts on Islam, Mr. Ramadan, a 41-year-old, Swiss-born philosophy professor, is a respectable scholar who promotes a moderate, tolerant version of Islam from his headquarters in Geneva and in his lectures around the world.
To his Muslim followers in the rough suburbs of France, he is a spiritual guide whose passionate speeches and cassette tapes inspire them to throw themselves and their beliefs into Western society like a "bomb," as he says on one cassette tape, even as he tells them to become model, law-abiding citizens.
To a number of French intellectuals, he is a dangerous demagogue whose words have multiple meanings and are laced with anger and anti-Semitism.
"So Who Is Tariq Ramadan?" reads Friday's front-page headline in the daily tabloid Le Parisien. Below the headline, there is a color photo of a pensive Mr. Ramadan, a hand on his bearded chin.
Ask Mr. Ramadan the question and he will say that he is a misunderstood man.
In an interview on Thursday in an office he keeps in this working-class Paris suburb, he fiercely denied that he was anti-Semitic and attributed the campaign against him to his popularity.
"I have so many students and followers in the States," he said, noting that his writings are used in American courses on Islam and that he is invited to lecture all over the world. "Look at my new book," he said, citing the Internet version of a book titled "Western Muslims and the Future of Islam," soon to be published by Oxford University Press. "It's the product of 15 years of work."
The problem, he said, is not he, but France. "They ask, `Who is he? What is he doing?' " he said. "There is so much suspicion. In the U.K., in Denmark, I am considered as a progressist and a reformer. It is very far away from that dynamic here."
Mr. Ramadan is the perfect hero and the perfect target in a country where the separation between church and state was codified into law nearly a century ago.
In 1928, his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, an Islamic revival movement that preached a return to Muslim values as part of the struggle against Western colonialism and decadence. (It is now banned in Egypt.)
In the 1950's, the family was sent into exile by the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Mr. Ramadan's father, Said Ramadan, moved with his relatives to Switzerland. There he created an Islamic center that became a place of pilgrimage for figures like Malcolm X.
Mr. Ramadan's brother, Hani, who lacks his brother's subtlety and international reputation, now runs the Islamic center founded by their father. Hani Ramadan won notoriety in France and was suspended from his job as a high school French teacher in Geneva after he wrote an essay for Le Monde last year that justified stoning women as punishment for adultery.
Tariq Ramadan's own message is potent precisely because he avoids the hatred and militant language of many of Europe's mosque leaders. Rather, he exhorts the 15 million Muslims of Europe to create a European Islam by embracing their European identity and demanding their rights as citizens. It is nothing less than a "silent revolution," he said.
"He is a very complex man, a provocateur who knows how to play media politics," said Olivier Roy, the French scholar of Islam. "He's emotional when he speaks to Muslim audiences and business-minded with non-Muslims. What he's trying to do is create a Muslim citizen identity." That goal, said Mr. Roy, "carries contradictions."
It carries misunderstandings as well. Mr. Ramadan touched off a verbal firestorm last month after he posted an essay on a Muslim Internet site suggesting that a number of French intellectuals (whom he identified as Jewish) took political positions because of their Jewishness.
Even before the most recent Israeli-Palestinian crisis, he wrote, "Jewish French intellectuals, who until then we had considered universal thinkers, started to develop analyses on the national and international front that were more and more biased toward the concerns of their community." Their interests "as Jews or as nationalists or as defenders of Israel" came before equality and justice, he added.
He criticized, among others, three of the most high-profile intellectuals in France — Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann and Bernard Kouchner — for supporting to varying degrees the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq.
In a country where one does not usually talk about one's religion and where the media thrive on intellectual debate, it was no surprise that the intellectuals struck back.
In an essay in Le Monde this month, Mr. Lévy, the author of the best-selling book "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" called Mr. Ramadan an "intellectual champion of all kinds of double-talk" with a "racist vision of the world." If he is not an an anti-Semite, at the very least he has written an anti-Semitic text, Mr. Lévy added.
In an interview, Bernard Kouchner, the foreign aid advocate and former health minister of France, called Mr. Ramadan "absolutely a kook with no historical memory" and "a dangerous man." He added, "The way he denounced some Jewish intellectuals is close to anti-Semitism."
France is also a country where the "republican ideal" is so strong that even the national census does not ask questions about religion or ethnic origin. So it was not at all surprising that in a joint essay in the news weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, three leading Socialists accused Mr. Ramadan of committing a "crime" against the Republic with his words.
"We cannot allow people to categorize French citizens according to their race, their origin or their religion," they said, adding, "What Tariq Ramadan has done is sow hatred and racial discord."
Mr. Ramadan, who is in France to take part in a major antiglobalization conference, has strongly denied all the charges. He explained that there should be nothing wrong in identifying people by their religion.
"They call me a Muslim intellectual in this country," he said. "Is it not possible to call someone a Jewish intellectual? Is it an insult? There is a double standard."
A former high school principal with a doctorate in Islamic studies from the University of Geneva, Mr. Ramadan makes no secret of his belief that girls who want to wear head scarves in public schools should be allowed to do so. He argues that the practice is specifically banned by law in France only when the display is ostentatious or disruptive.
Certainly his sermons, many of them recorded on cassette tapes that are on sale in Islamic bookstores, are more emotional than his lectures to general audiences. His message can be heard in different ways.
"You Muslims in France, what do I see?" he asked in one cassette recording sold at a bookstore next door to a mosque in Lille. He added, "We are in an electric situation. Something is not going well. We have the feeling that people here do not like us."
The solution, he said, is not to create a separate identity but to make France feel like home and to become a good Muslim citizen. That, he added, "will mean that we never will be bad Frenchmen."
Together at last. Last week, I wrote about every leftwing liberal's favorite Muslim, Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan, you'll recall, is the Geneva-based "thinker" (according to Time magazine) who looks alarmingly like Moby in an Armani suit. As part of the build-up to the European Social Forum meeting in Paris in mid-November, Ramadan had written an essay criticizing French Jewish intellectuals — such as Andre Glucksmann, who makes short work of the Euro-Islamicist in the Nouvel Observateur — for being way too Jewish.
Ramadan's document has pretzel-twisted the conglomerate of leftwing, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, anti-American, and, notably, pro-Palestinian groups who make up the ESF. You can see this humiliating spectacle unfold in the leftwing, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, anti-American, and, notably, pro-Palestinian pages of Liberation, where the paper embraces the fashionable notion of calling for the establishment of a secular, "bi-national" state in Israel. That way, anti-Semitism can be disentangled from anti-Zionism. This would allow the Jews who live there to be bludgeoned into submission by the pro-Palestinian left while keeping their hands clean of the stain of anti-Semitism. But the Israelis don't seem to want to cooperate, and the issue won't admit to such a simple solution anyway, so a subsequent edition of the paper explains how Ramadan's anti-Semitic remarks (he wasn't talking about French Jewish intellectuals being too Israeli, after all) are causing embarrassing fractures in the left.
I received some interesting comments after last week's column, including a very perceptive note from Eli Weinerman, a scholar and historian, who is working on a study of leftwing anti-Semitism. Weinerman notes that "anti-Semitism on the part of the non-Islamic left is not racial, ethnic, or religious, it is rather political. Therefore we see quiet a few Jews among its proponents." Historically, he writes, the same type of anti-Semitism was always present among those on extreme left, "including even Lenin. The truth is that there always was a very thin line between political anti-Semitism, which rejects Jews with ideas [unacceptable to the Left] and 'traditional' anti-Semitism, which hates Jews simply because they are Jews."
He must be right, because I heard from quite a few of both. The leftwing anti-Semites called me anatomical names and a "stupid, greedy Zionist." And bless my sainted Irish mother if the traditionalists didn't call me a "Heeb" and the like. One Dutch correspondent wrote: "[National Review Online] is enough proof that Jews are running your country. Sometimes I believe Hitler was right. More and more people believe this is true." For sure. Many of them are leftwing, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, anti-American, and, um, notably pro-Palestinian.
Benny at the ramparts. One of those French Jewish intellectuals Ramadan dislikes was the remarkable Benny Levy, who, for much of his life, was an atheist and a Marxist. As "Pierre Victor," Levy was one of the leaders of the violent student protests in Paris in the '60s. His revolutionary politics led him to help found Liberation and then to Jean-Paul Sartre, who, late in his life, collaborated with Levy on a series of interviews published as Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews. The book infuriated the French left because in it Sartre seems to dismiss nihilism and Marxism and embrace a form of messianic Judaism. After Sartre's death, Levy became an Orthodox Talmudic scholar. He died last week in Israel. Jean-Claude Milner, the linguist, eulogizes his friend in Liberation. The Daily Telegraph does the job in English.
Above all, the ESF provided a pluralist, fluid venue for social debate. The appearance of controversial European Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan at a round-table Saturday morning on religious discrimination was a case in point.The ESF organizers insisted Ramadan be allowed to participate, despite protests that he had published anti-Semitic remarks.
Ramadan, grandson of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan el-Banna, received the session's longest applause after denying he was anti-Semitic and declaring that all forms of religious discrimination must be eliminated. "It is everyone's business," he said.
This must be why all our Marxists find this a common cause.
This must be why all our Marxists find this a common cause.
Silly hegenomistic Western liberal! Stoning women to death for sexual transgressions (or after they are raped) is merely an indigenous tradition, part of the wonderful global diversity you seek to destroy. It is the "pure fascism" of Western societies that is the real problem, as a Turkish protester marching in the heart of Europe explains here. (Granted she's talking about France, so one might have to concede partial credit.)
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