Who can speak for or against Islam?

The New Yorker of 6 June 2010 carries an article by Pankaj Mishra, an Indian essayist and novelist, in which he critically assesses the influence of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Paul Berman, and Tariq Ramadan -- three individuals featuring prominently in recent debates of the place of Islam in Western societies and the role of religion in Muslim societies.

Here are some excerpts:

Muslims today, Hirsi Ali believes, must be forced to choose between the darkness of Islam and the light of the modern secular West. In her new book, which bears the additional subtitle “A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations,” she takes an uncompromising line with her own relatives, who remain faithful to their benighted religion. [...]

If Hirsi Ali’s rhetoric has earned her critics among Western liberals, she has a fierce defender in Paul Berman, whose new polemic, “The Flight of the Intellectuals” (Melville House; $26), hails her as a “classic example of a persecuted dissident intellectual.” He upbraids such writers as the Anglo-Dutch journalist Ian Buruma and the British academic Timothy Garton Ash, who, he says, “sneered at Ayaan Hirsi Ali for having taken up the ideas of Western liberalism.” Berman also condemns Buruma and Garton Ash for “grovelling” to Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born Muslim professor at Oxford University, whose work seeks to integrate observant Muslims into secular Western societies, and whom Berman sees as an apologist for extremism. For Berman, the spectacle of writers attacking Hirsi Ali while embracing Ramadan points to a dangerous “ reactionary turn in the intellectual world” of Europe and America.

 Ramadan, a prolific author who has preached a “European” Islam in the heart of secular France, has certainly attracted the attention of journalists and academics, along with those uncompromising secularists who use him as a foil [...] Sooner or later, just about every writer of non-Western background finds himself taken to be a representative of, or spokesperson for, his community, nation, race, or religion. Ramadan, who has solemnly, even pompously, embraced this role, seems no more than one of the many academics struggling to fulfill the West’s post-9/11 demand for “moderate” Islam.

Read the whole article here

US ban on Tariq Ramadan lifted

Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-Egyptian Muslim publicist and academic who was banned from entering the United States for six years has made his first visit to the United States since 2004. In that year Ramadan had accepted a job to become a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame, but nine days before he was set to arrive, the Bush administration revoked his visa,invoking a provision of the PATRIOT Act. Now the Obama administration has reversed this as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lifted the travel ban earlier this year. This week, Ramadan arrived in New York for a visit and media appearances.

Initially the media did not give it very much coverage. According to The New Yorker's George Packer who hosted Ramadan during a discussion in Greenwich Village the only other print medium to pay attention to the event was the Jewish periodical Tablet. In his own blog, Packer showed himself a critical observer, as noted how Ramadan struggled to establish a rapport with the audience:

Ramadan seemed wrong-footed in those opening remarks. He didn’t have a sense of where he was, of his American audience. It was as if he were speaking to disaffected young second-generation immigrants in a working-class mosque in Lille or Leicester, which is how he spends much of his time. Multiple identities, the value of diversity—not exactly news in this city, in this country. Many of his sentences amounted to buzz words strung together, without reaching a point. It seemed a missed opportunity: his first address in America since becoming an international figure, and he hadn’t prepared, hadn’t thought it through.


Even more significant is his assessment that Ramadan is 'not a philosopher, or an original thinker', but that he has only been cast in that role 'by recent historical crises and his own ambition'. In Packer's view, Ramadan's positions on most issues are those of 'garden-variety European leftism', while he tries to act as a 'reconciler' when it comes to the place of Islam in the West. Although admitting that here Ramadan is at his best, Packer maintains that: 'I don’t think this calling leaves him with very much to say to audiences here. An American Tariq Ramadan would likelier be talking to groups of young blacks or Hispanics.'

Contrary to many critics who have accused Ramadan of being double-tongued or two-faced, Packer thinks he 'has no hidden agenda, he’s an open book, and it’s essentially moderate'. However, he found Ramadan much less forthcoming about the tensions between an open society and Islamic revivalism, conjecturing that in this respect Ramadan is hampered by his pedigree, accusing his maternal grandfather, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, of holding totalitarian and anti-Semitic views. On these grounds he concluded that Ramadan was 'building a worthy bridge on a rotten foundation'.

For an extensive TV interview on the Democracy Now! programme, click here