Islamism Goes MainstreamMy evening with Tariq Ramadan.
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2007, at 1:29 PM ET
MANTUA, Italy—A literary festival in the ancient capital city of Lombardy is as good a place as any other to survey the question of whether there is such a thing as "Western civilization" and whether it is worth defending. Here the poet Virgil was born, and here you can see the frescoes of Andrea Mantegna, painted for his feudal patrons the Gonzagas. But the great sacking of the city, which left Mantegna's work as almost the only surviving treasure, was undertaken by a Christian emperor. And it was here, in 1459, that Pope Pius II held a "diet" to proclaim yet another crusade—this time against the Turks.
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StumbleUponI had come here to defend atheism and secularism in general but also to have a debate with Tariq Ramadan, an Islamist academic domiciled in Geneva, who has emerged as the most sinuous and dexterous of the "interpreters" of Muslim fundamentalism to the West. He eventually declined our original debate, but there was nothing to stop me from attending his event and trying to re-stage our canceled confrontation from the floor.
French author Caroline Fourest has made an intensive study of Ramadan's discrepant appearances in Europe and in the Muslim world, and has concluded that he speaks with a forked tongue and deliberately gives different impressions to different audiences. Having listened to him, I would say that the problem is not quite that. He possesses a command of postmodern and sociological jargon (of the sort that you may easily recognize by its repetitive use of the terms space and discourse to delineate the arena of thinkable debate), and he has a smooth way with euphemism.
Thus, he tells Egyptian television that the destruction of the Israeli state is for the moment "impossible" and in Mantua described the idea of stoning adulterous women as "unimplementable." This is something less than a full condemnation, but he is quick to say that simple condemnation of such things would reduce his own "credibility" in the eyes of a Muslim audience that, or so he claims, he wants to modernize by stealth.
His day-to-day politics have the same surreptitious air to them. The donations he made to Hamas (donations that led to difficulties receiving a visa to teach at the University of Notre Dame, a position he eventually resigned) were small gifts directed to Hamas' "humanitarian" and "relief" wing. He did not actually say that there was no proof of Osama Bin Laden's involvement in the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001; he only warned against a rush to judgment. He often criticizes the existing sharia regimes, such as that of Saudi Arabia, especially for their corruption, but such criticism is as often the symptom of a more decided Islamist alignment as it is a counterindication of it.
In Mantua, he was trying to deal with the question of dual loyalty, as between allegiance to Islam and allegiance to the democratic secular European governments under which Muslim immigrants now choose to live. He redirected the question to South Africa, where, he said, under the apartheid system there was a moral duty not to obey the law. After sitting through this and much else, I rose to ask him a few questions. Wasn't it true that the Muslim leadership in South Africa had actually endorsed the apartheid regime? Wasn't it evasive of him to discuss the headscarf in France rather than the more pressing question of the veil or niqab in Britain? Wasn't it true that imams in Denmark had solicited the intervention of foreign embassies to call for censorship of cartoons in Copenhagen? And was it not the case that he owed his position as an informal cultural negotiator to the fact that his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, had been the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist organization of which his father had also been a leader in Egypt?
He described my last question as too "offensive" to deserve an answer. He gave quite a good reply on the Danish point, saying that the imams in question had been a minority and should not have received support from foreign governments. He completely dodged the question of the veil in Britain, ignored my request that he give any reason to believe that women were wearing it voluntarily, and he admitted that the Deobandi Muslim leadership in South Africa had indeed been a pillar of the old regime. On the other hand, he added, some Muslims had been anti-apartheid, and these were the "real" ones. Indeed, on everything from stoning to suicide-murder to anti-Semitism, he argues that the problem is not with the "text" itself, or with Islam, but with misinterpretation of it. How convenient. Ramadan often relies on the ignorance of his Western audiences. He maintained that there was no textual authority for the killing of those who abandon their fealty to Islam, whereas the Muslim hadith, which have canonical authority, prescribe death as the punishment for apostasy in so many words.
When I went to Ramadan's event in the Palazzo d'Arco, I had just finished reading Osama Bin Laden's latest anniversary prose-poem. Here, too, are signs of an act being cleaned up. He brags of the murders of Sept. 11, of course (thus inconveniencing all those who attribute them to Mossad or some mysterious other agency), but he does not forget to cite Noam Chomsky, CIA maverick Michael Scheuer, and the Oliver Stone theory of the JFK assassination. He also exhibits concern for the global-warming crisis, the fate of American Indians, and even the recent collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Everything he says about the war in Iraq, right up to the affected concern for the civilian and military casualties, is presented as if he had hired one of Michael Moore's screenwriters as a consultant. Most unctuous of all, he reminds his audience that the Quran has a whole section in praise of the Virgin Mary, an ecumenical point that I had noticed before. (It is typical of monotheisms to plagiarize each other's worst features, from Abraham onward.) I think that this pitch is probably too crude and crass to work, but it's exactly the crudeness and crassness of Bin Laden that require the emergence of more "credible" middlemen to allay anxiety and offer reassurance. Only six years on, and already the soft mainstreaming of Islamic imperialism is under way.
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Remarks from the Fray:
Hitchens the Atheist Scourge of Believers and Unrepentant Contrarian only appears in the pages of Vanity Fair, or his books, occasionally here on Slate. The other Hitchens, Waugh manqué, Blimp-ish caricature of various Ford Maddox Ford characters, semi-official Stately Pundit for neo-conservatism & advocate of neo-liberal imperialism, appears in The Weekly Standard, takes up the rest of his Slate space and does mediocre, petty ad hominem "literary criticism" in Atlantic Monthly (no to wanton, sloppy, self-absorbed Jew sex (Roth); yes to squeamish, puerile, self-abnegating Brit sex (McEwan)) or The New York Times.
Does that mean Hitchens is two-faced, forked of tongue, a hypocritical or schizophrenic operator? Well, maybe; but not really necessarily, so to speak. No one more than a writer who likes to publish a lot, in a wide array of publishing outlets, to say nothing of a real media whore like our hero, knows and understands the degree to which one tends to tailor the message to the audience. Editors often demand it, in fact.
Now imagine you're trying to straddle two diametrically opposed worlds. One claims that only authentic cultural identity and divine sanction can convey authority; the other rejects the moral relevance of such categories out of hand, subtly but unmistakably seeks to impose a counter-anathema on anyone who broaches such ideas in polite, civilized debate. Each party condemns the other, wishes the other's utter demise by the most violent means if necessary.
So Tariq Ramadan is getting bashed again by a neocon-lib know-it-all. Hitchens is much less thorough than Paul Berman, but no less perfunctory and arbitrary. Ramadan has written books addressing huge themes. He says he would like to forge a new path into utterly virgin territory, toward an accommodation between the most hidebound radical fundamentalism and a modernism that eschews any link to the theological past of our culture. He declares himself a tribune of tolerant, democratic Islam, an Islam that can make a home for itself within a multicultural society without violence or the subjugation of women. But you wouldn't know it, from all the reductive quote-mangling and mongering, the paranoid context-mashing in which his frothing detractors indulge themselves.
It may be that he's trying to square a circle, to harmonize spheres which are irredeemably dissonant; but you would think those who rush to bash him with gotcha take-downs and the most illiberal sort of witch-hunt logic (guilt by lineage - how civilized!) would at least stop for an instant to express an iota of sympathy for his stated aims. No, you are not going to eliminate Islam and its more recalcitrant, atavistic hypostases by sheer bluster, by military invasion or moral denunciation. Someone, somewhere, is going to have to do for today's Islam what Herder did for the more nativist, mystical strands of German religiosity, to make them consonant with a modern, secular society without depriving them of their cultural authority -- to retro-"classicize" them. And without the benefit of a latter day Kant to fight with, to play off of, to set rigorous intellectual boundaries defining the parameters of enlightened political morality.
So no, it's not silly to stop and think about the "space" and "discourse" where the theological might intersect with the political. Even if you dislike some specific aspect of whatever Ramadan's proposing as an accommodation between Islam and the West you should begin by acknowledging that some such rapprochement is the best that could possibly be hoped for in the current situation, if not the best of all possible worlds. Ramadan may contradict the haditha in his definition of what constitutes truth for Muslims -- all the better, one would think! Rather than accusing him of insincerity, why doesn't Hitchens welcome the possibility of a challenge to a particular dogma from within that community? It's as if he can't think, can't breathe, except in the presence of a stick-figure anti-caricature of his own Atheist Absolutism, or as if he were almost physically addicted to the emotional rush of pure, unadulterated imprecation.
--MarkEHaag
(To reply, click here.)
Hitch remains an enigma to me. He is able to see the horror that religion has unleashed on this planet-from the crusade to jihad (same thing really), but he still insists that the way to handle it is to bomb the crap out of the Islamic world (in other words-support a modern crusade). As Shakespeare said, a rose by any other name is still a rose, and so a crusade by any other name remains a crusade-to the Muslims anyway.
Islam has modern practitioners who are not the rabid crazies portrayed in movies and by conservative media but Hitch and others like him would prefer we not recognize this fact. It is so much easier to kill people you don't see as people. To think that the thousands of innocent Iraqis killed by allied shock and awe bombings as not being victims of terror from above was strange considering the English know as much as anyone about horror coming from a technically advanced enemy in the sky-but Hitch seems to think that such destruction is OK when you think the cause is right-but then the Germans and the English were on near equal footing-this is not the case in Iraq.
So here is Hitch, claiming to be an atheist yet leading a charge which is entirely based on religious persecution. No doubt the US Christian community with it's bloodlusting revenge supporters going to church every Sunday to proclaim a commitment to the prince of peace think Hitch is pretty OK for an atheist.
--RML
(To reply, click here.)
(9/14)