<http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/04/europe/web.0204tariq.php> Tariq Ramadan has an identity issue By IAN BURUMA Sunday, February 4, 2007
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Traditionalist principles, for [Tariq] Ramadan, apply to politics as much as to religion. Muslims, he says, should not try to create a "parallel system" to Western democracy, let alone aspire to building a Muslim state. "There is no such thing," he says, "as an Islamic order. We have to act to promote justice and inject our ethics into the existing system." According to Ramadan, the global order of neoliberal capitalism allows the wealthy West to dominate the world. Resisting this order is part of his task as an activist professor, who derives his "universal principles" from his Muslim faith. This message not only provides educated European Muslims with a political cause but is also pushed with considerable success at such international leftist jamborees as the World Social Forum, where the world's antiglobalists meet.
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Even though Ramadan's father represented the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, promoting the cause of Islamic government, Ramadan went to a mainstream Swiss school, where he got a solid grounding in French literature and European philosophy. He graduated a year early and studied philosophy, literature and social sciences at University of Geneva. By age 24, he was already dean of a high school and later lectured in religious studies at a college in Geneva and the University of Fribourg. I was fascinated to learn that of all European philosophers, Ramadan chose to study Friedrich Nietzsche, who had anticipated the death of religious faith. He even wrote his doctoral thesis on Nietzsche. Had he ever experienced any doubts himself?
"Doubts about God, no," he replied. "But questions, yes. Nietzsche raised strong and accurate questions about religion, on how religious identities are built, and how believers use victim status to become killers themselves. I also read everything by Dostoyevsky, whom I liked from the very beginning. That was my universal frame of reference. It was not easy, growing up in a committed Muslim family while dealing with people outside who were drinking, and all that. But I was protected on ethical grounds, as a religious person, first of all by playing sports, every day, for two hours or more — football, tennis, running. And reading, reading, reading, five hours a day, sometimes eight hours. My father warned me that life was not in books. But it meant that even though I stayed away from drinking, I got respect from the people around me. I was known as 'the professor,' 'le docteur.' "
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In his book, "Western Muslims and the Future of Islam," published in 2004, Ramadan lists various approaches to Islam, from "political literalist Salafism" — militant, anti-Western, in favor of the Islamic state — to "liberal reformism," which sees faith as an entirely private affair. I asked him at the mosque where he placed himself. "A Salafi reformist," he said, which might seem a contradiction but is explained in his book as follows: "The aim is to protect the Muslim identity and religious practice, to recognize the Western constitutional structure, to become involved as a citizen at the social level and to live with true loyalty to the country to which one belongs."
Ramadan's favorite Muslim philosophers are the late-19th-century reformists Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who tried to revive Islam under Western colonial rule by rational interpretation of the holy texts. They were skeptical of religious tradition, accumulated over time, and looked for core principles in the Koran that spoke to reason. For them there was no contradiction between scientific reasoning and their Muslim faith. And female emancipation or democratic government could be reconciled with the original principles of Islam. Both had lived in Europe. Both were harsh critics of colonialism and Western materialism. In Ramadan's words, "They saw the need to resist the West, through Islam, while taking what was useful from it."
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Some of Ramadan's critics, most notably the French journalist Caroline Fourest, who wrote a sharp attack on him titled "Frère Tariq" (Brother Tariq), draw a direct line from Hassan al-Banna, through Said Ramadan and Tariq Ramadan himself, to the militant Islamism threatening the West today. Such was the disquiet in France about Islamist violence that Ramadan was barred from that country in 1995. The ban was eventually lifted. Ramadan prefers to see the family legacy in terms of "Islamic socialism, which is neither socialist, nor capitalist, but a third way." In this reading, his father's friendship with Malcolm X is much more significant than any Saudi Arabian connection. This is why Ramadan was a popular speaker with African-American Muslims before his visa was revoked.
"Western Muslims and the Future of Islam" throws some light on Ramadan's idea of "Islamic socialism," an ideology, combining religious principles with anticapitalist, anti-imperialist politics, that goes back to the time of the Russian Revolution. (Libya's strongman, Muammar el-Qaddafi, is one who claims to rule according to these principles.) The murderous tyranny to be resisted, in Ramadan's book, is "the northern model of development," which means that "a billion and a half human beings live in comfort because almost four billion do not have the means to survive." For Ramadan, global capitalism, promoted by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is the "abode of war" (alam al-harb), for "when faced with neoliberal economics, the message of Islam offers no way out but resistance."
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