Reinventing Islam in Europe: a profile of Tariq Ramadan Rosemary Bechler 6 - 7 - 2004 The sophisticated exponent of a European Islam, Tariq Ramadan, articulates a project that speaks to a continent, and a faith, in transition. openDemocracy’s Rosemary Bechler encounters a complex mind on a restless journey.
Who is Tariq Ramadan? The question that French intellectuals and media outlets have been asking with accumulating force in the past two years is getting serious. In December 2003, Le Monde offered part of the answer: even as a Swiss national, he is the central figure of Islam in France today. A month later, Serge Raffy in Le Nouvel Observateur posed the matter in provocative terms: is he a brilliant, young philosophy lecturer who cites the Koran and Nietzsche’s or Heidegger’s critiques of western rationalism with equal mastery, while drawing crowds of young immigrants in Paris and New York; or the undercover heir to the Muslim Brotherhood, the “Trojan horse of jihad in Europe”, an arch dissimulator whose suave exterior hides an anti–Semitic core?
It’s not just the French and European press that can’t make up their minds about Ramadan. Mohamed Sid–Ahmed in Egypt’s Al–Ahram asks why this young intellectual is granted so much importance. His answer is that the controversy around Ramadan – from accusations of anti–Semitism by French intellectuals to the parallel critique from within Islam that he is soft on Israel – stem from the essential duality of his Swiss–Egyptian point of origin and intellectual project: “the issue goes beyond Ramadan as an individual. It has its origins in the undeniable duality between the Islam to which Ramadan assigns himself and the western, Judeo–Christian environment in which he was brought up”.
So who is Tariq Ramadan? ...
and
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-5-57-2006.jsp
A bridge across fear: an interview with Tariq Ramadan Rosemary Bechler 14 - 7 - 2004 “I want to go beyond the perception that I am only different from you, or that difference is the beginning and the end.” In an interview of remarkable range and frankness, the influential Swiss–Egyptian philosopher, teacher and writer Tariq Ramadan talks to Rosemary Bechler of openDemocracy about his life’s project: bringing Muslims and Europe home to each other. ...
Copyright © Rosemary Bechler <http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-5-57-2006.jsp#> , 2004.