Berman on Ramadan

There's an excellent - but lengthy - article by Paul Berman in the latest New Republic, which starts out as a look at Tariq Ramadan and his presentation in the media as a model of moderate Islam, and ends up with the extraordinary attacks by supposedly left-liberal writers on the "enlightenment fundamentalism" of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Impossible to extract from it, really:

How did this happen? The equanimity on the part of some well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to acknowledge that women's rights have been at stake in the debates over Islamism; the inability to recall the problems faced by Muslim women in European hospitals; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas; the refusal to discuss with any frankness the role of Ramadan's family over the years; the accidental endorsement in the Guardian [by Timothy Garton Ash] of the great-uncle who finds something admirable in the September 11 attacks--what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?

Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.

Comments

[Richard Dell]

So, Ramadan is an enlightened westerner trying to bring Muslims into line with modernism (whatever that means, but presumably it includes the Golden Rule), or he is a Muslim fifth columnist preparing the way for the desmise of the West. He can, and does pose as both. Would this "double discourse" be, as he would have, necessary to woo the reluctant Muslim, or to decieve the useful idiots of the West? How can we tell? Fourest was most impressed by his tapes, designed for a Muslim audience. Hearing anti-western exhortations, she felt that anyone trying to westernise Muslims would not have said ssuch things. Have Buruma, and more to the point, Garton Ash listened to these tapes?

Ramadan can tell both sides that he is with them. I would apply the dictum: which is harder? If the West were to start to win (by, say provoking a secular revolution in Iran using less than scrupulous means), he could rant about Western duplicity and power with few consequences. If Britain were to get an Islamist government, would he rail against the consequent loss of freedoms without consequence? To stand up for freedom takes courage and clarity. I see neither in him. He may wish for a more moderate Islam, but if he had to take sides, it would not take much coercion for him to betray his latest compatriots. The man is not to be trusted, and his "philosophy" is empty if it does not drive his behaviour.