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

Mapping of Britain's Islamic 'Blogosphere' draws criticism

A study of the extent and allegely also the content of Islamic blogs in the UK, commissioned by the country's Home Office to its Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) has been criticized by observers for its lack of profundity and rigour.

Executed within the framework of the UK government's overall Counter-Terrorism Strategy (CONTEST)*, the resulting report, entitled Estimating network size and tracking information dissemination among Islamic Blogs was released in March 2010, although the data collection was completed in April 2008.

In a commentary on a headline article appearing in The Guardian of 23 March 2010, Brian Whittaker questions the value of the exercise and less than exciting conclusions of the report's author, Dr. David Stevens of the University of Nottingham.

Even more incisive is the critique by blogger Jillian York, who is associated with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. York's criticism zeroes in on Stevens' reliance on link analysis and keywords, with no apparent attention for content. Based on her experience at the Berkman Center, York argues that this kind of research cannot be carried out without a 'human touch'. There a study of the Arabic-language blogosphere covering more than 35,000 blogs, led to a mapping of 6,000 sites, '4,000 of which were hand-coded by Arabic-speaking researchers'. Compared to that approach, the Home Office project seems indeed rather shallow. York also rightly questions the credentials of author David Stevens. Apparently a specialist in Anglo-American normative political philosophy, one wonders indeed why he was selected to conduct this research, and not a more recognized figure from the field of Islamic Studies who actually specialises in 'cyber Islam', such as Gary Bunt from the University of Wales at Lampeter, who has a track record of publications on the subject, and whose website Virtually Islamic already contains a wealth of information.

* The full policy document can be found here



For a recent study of the role of media in today's Muslim societies and communities, which also adds a useful comparative perspective, see the special issue of the academic journal Contemporary Islam of April 2010.

Smooth Operator: Anwar Ibrahim on Religion and Pluralism in a Divided World

On Thursday, 18 March, the London School of Economics (LSE) hosted former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Pakatan Rakyat opposition coalition Anwar Ibrahim for a brief lecture and Q&A session.

That this was a last-minute event became clear from a somewhat rambling introductory talk in which quotes from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets on humankind's limited capacity for coping with reality featured alongside excerpts from Rumi's Masnavi ('The lamps are different, but the light is the same') and references to religious scholars such as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350CE). All for the purposal of showing Ibrahim's support for an inclusivist Islam as found in Indonesia. Presenting Indonesia as an example worthy of emulation is in itself an interesting position for a Malay-Muslim politician who rode to power on a much less tolerant Islamist ticket in the 1970s and 1980s.

This point was also raised during the discussion, when one interlocutor asked if his own first-hand experience with imprisonment under the draconian ISA (Internal Security Act) had something to do with this transformation from his firebrand Muslim activist rhetoric as leader of the Muslim student organization ABIM to the mellower tone of today. In a rare moment of straightforwardness, although he hoped he would still be considered a firebrand, Ibrahim attributed his erstwhile militancy to youthful idealism.

For the rest he excelled in evading any direct answers to the questions that were posed to him. Instead he generally sufficed with repeating the mantra that Southeast Asian Islam has historically been characterized by inclusivism in regards to the various strands of thought and practice found among Muslims, and the embrace of pluralism in its attitude towards non-Muslims. In the Datuk's view this was also true of Malaysian Islam and he deplored the recent hardening of positions, such as the controversial claim that the name 'Allah' may only be used by Muslims, not by adherents of the other Abrahamic religions; Judaism and Christianity.*

Although he supported the application of Islamic law in Malaysia for its Muslim citizens, he opined that Shari'a courts had no business in interfering in the affairs of other religious traditions. In response to a question what his position is on apostasy, Anwar Ibrahim suggested that the guidelines should be provided by the Maqasid al-Shari'a or Core Objectives of Islamic Law. Explicitly defined by such scholars as al-Ghazali (d. 1111CE) and al-Shatibi (d. 1388), these principles safeguard freedom of conscience, the sanctity of life and property, the dignity of men and women, and the freedom of expression. Although as a Muslim he would never encourage a fellow Muslim to leave the faith, he agreed with Taha Jabir Alalwani, who in a lecture at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) had said it was ultimately up to the individual. Adding that forcing someone to lie and hide his or her true conviction would only turn them into hypocrites he also referred to the Quranic injunction that there can be 'no compulsion in religion' (2: 256). However, he avoided making any clear statement on what he expected religious courts in Malaysia to do when cases of apostasy were brought before them.

In evidence of his own disagreement with religion-inspired intolerance he frequently referred to his book The Asian Renaissance, which he insisted was grounded in the Quranic injunction that God had created humankind's ethnic and religious multitudes so 'that ye may know each others' (Sura al-Hujarat 49.13).

For the rest he used every opportunity to criticize the incumbent government of Malaysia and the failure of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to instill democratic governance and values among its member states, in particular Myanmar. Ever the jocular and smooth political operator, he said that, instead of pursuing a 'constructive engagement' with the Burmese junta, most countries in the region seemed more interested in engaging in construction projects. In the same context, however, Indonesia was again presented as a rare positive exception, where general elections had been restored after decades of 'elections of generals'.


Indicative of his ability to circumvent taking any firm positions and keeping all his future options open was also his response to whether he regarded Malaysia as secular or Islamic state. While he said Malaysia was not strictly an Islamic state in the sense as implied by an overall application of Islamic law, it was certainly Islamic in the sense of the Maqasid al-Shari'a. Besides that, both the notions 'Islamic' and 'secular' were open to a wide range of interpretations. As for the concrete implementation of Islamic law, Anwar Ibrahim concluded that Shari'a courts should only have jurisdiction in family law and moral injunctions pertaining to Muslims, and confine themselves only to cases in which all parties were Muslim.

* see the coverage in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Malaysian Newspaper The Star, Indonesia's Jakarta Globe, and on Juan Cole's Informed Comment

Muslims in the Netherlands: What is the effect of the 'Geert Wilders' Factor?

In his programme 'Islam and Life' on PressTV, Tariq Ramadan discusses the present situation of Muslims in The Netherlands in light of the rise of Geert Wilders and his PVV (Party for Freedom) on the country's political scene:

Who is Geert Wilders (Tariq Ramadan & Carool Kersten) from Carool Kersten on Vimeo.

A Brief Note on Critical Muslims in Malaysia

In contrast to neighbouring Indonesia the Islamic intellectual scene in Malaysia seems much more subdued if not barren. That is not to say there are no critical, innovative or controversial thinkers to be found. Aside from intellectuals with outspoken views on political issues such as Chandra Muzaffar and a younger generation of maverick scholars with a high profile internet presence like Farish Noor, a prospective PhD research student drew my attention to the writings of Kassim Ahmad, a literary scholar, erstwhile lecturer in Malay studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, and a former leader of Parti Rakyat Malaysia (1965-1980), who spent five years in jail under Malaysia's very stringent Internal Security Act (ISA).

Born in 1933, in the state of Kedah, Kassim Ahmad first caused controversy in 1950s with his radical re-reading of a Malay literary classic Hikayat Hang Tuah, about the legendary seafarer Hang Tuah, a prominent laksmana or admiral from the Sultanate of Malacca.

His notoriety only increased with the publication of Hadith: A Re-evaluation. First appearing in Malay in 1986, an English translation was released in 1996. In this book he joins the ongoing debate among scholars and intellectuals on the reliability of the existing Hadith collections. As a scriptural source containing the so-called 'Traditions of the Prophet', it is only secondary to the Qur'an, and questioning its authenticity has grave implications for most branches of traditional Islamic learning.

Like so many other Muslim scholars willing to venture into critical engagement with the Islamic heritage it put him at odds with more traditionalist-minded Muslims who were especially suspicious of his socialist past. However, as the subtitle of his autobiography Mencari Jalan Pulang: Daripada Sosialisme kepada Islam (Finding the Way Home: From Socialism to Islam) indicates he has drifted back towards his Muslim roots and was able to rehabilitate himself with the establishment to the extent that former Prime Minister Mahathir penned an introduction to the book.