Arguments: The Flight of the Intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan
Arguments: The Flight of the Intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan
Arguments Part 2: Andrew F. March: The Flight of the Intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan
PAUL BERMAN has written an odd book. It is not intellectual history–he rightly does not claim for himself any expertise in Islamic legal, theological and political thought, and he makes no effort to fully explicate Ramadan’s own doctrines in light of those traditions. It is not political biography–he is not telling Ramadan’s personal story except in select snippets. It is not quite political argument–he is not giving an analysis of the social and cultural situation of Muslims in the West and telling us What is to Be Done. It is not even a plea for vigilance–he insists in numerous places that Ramadan is not an Islamist extremist and certainly no threat to anyone.
What is Berman’s book about, in the end? It is an attempt to arrive at a judgment about a very important public intellectual while admonishing educated Westerners about how we treat Muslim dissidents. In doing so, the book discusses Ramadan’s thought and the wider phenomenon of Islamic militancy, but it takes a skipping-stone approach to the subject: glancing off many various surfaces and edges rather than patiently probing the depths. Berman is aiming at a profile-cum-exposé of Ramadan, but he is entangled in an awkward set of questions which he thinks need to be raised about Muslim intellectuals: Should we trust him? Should we like him? Should we praise him? Should we support him? Berman never explicitly discusses what kind of judgment we need to make about a figure like Ramadan, but my feeling (a standard Berman uses often in his own appraisal of Ramadan) is that Berman wishes he could prove to us that we shouldn’t trust him and that we are permitted to condemn him, but since he can’t prove that, he has to settle with showing us that we should not like him.
Berman’s Ramadan
Berman’s Ramadan is part French philosopher-intellectual, part politician. Berman’s Ramadan has ideas, but he is also presumed to have motives and judgments. Berman acknowledges the conceptual distinction between these two activities, but he does not disentangle them. At times, Berman’s call is to pay closer attention to “the nature of [Ramadan’s] philosophy and its meaning for France or Europe or the world” (FI, 20, 130), but he himself has not done this. His probing of Ramadan all pertains to his family origins and his failure to make the right public denunciations at the right time.
Berman’s Ramadan “is nothing if not a son, a brother, a grandson, and even a great-grandson–family relations that appear to shape everything he writes and does.” (32) This sentence permits Berman to spend the next 100 pages telling the often stomach-churning history of Arab and Islamic attitudes towards Israel, Jews, Hitler, and the Holocaust, with a prominent role for Ramadan’s father and grandfather, and Brotherhood thinkers in their wake from Qutb to Qaradawi. Ramadan is not mentioned here, and, in fact, at the end of all this Berman writes that “Ramadan is not his grandfather … and what are we to think of Ramadan and the meaning of his doctrines and historical interpretations for our time?” (130) (Perhaps he should have just begun here?) Berman never once accuses Ramadan of actually sharing in their anti-Semitism or glorification of violence (he actually accuses him of being too anodyne and flavorless). Rather, the point is to portray vividly the family history Ramadan is supposedly not condemning, although this tactic has the surely inadvertent effect of always associating Ramadan in the reader’s mind with fascism and Islamic militancy.
Berman’s Ramadan is a reformer, a genuine liberal, but one with caveats and silences generated by a fundamental tragedy. Ramadan proclaims a belief in universal values, but also thinks Islam has a special message. He wants Muslims to contribute to their societies, but isn’t this the slippery slope to fifth-columnism? He denounces anti-Semitism, but accuses certain French Jewish intellectuals of supporting Israel and the invasion of Iraq against their avowed universalist principles. Ramadan’s early pamphlet on jihad seems “on first inspection to contain a straightforward, frank and commendable discussion of jihad in Islam,” but in the end there is a “dark smudge of ambiguity.” (201) He appears to be constructing an Islamic theology of rights, but only calls for a moratorium on the hudud punishments, such as stoning for adultery. He claims to be trying to reform Islamic law into a more open form of Islamic ethics, but “his commitment to ethical thinking turns out to be worthless.” (243)
Berman’s Ramadan is a good guy, “post-paranoid and post-apocalyptic” (152) whose “career would make no sense at all if ultimately he wanted to mold his followers into some sort of violent force” (186), but is always cloaked by a “veil of euphemism” or covered in that “dark smudge of ambiguity.” He is not insincere in his openness to Westerners, but when push comes to shove he is, in the end, the reverent and obedient servant of the obscurantist jurists back in the Middle East.
Berman gives what seems like a sympathetic spin to all of this. Berman’s Ramadan is a tragic figure. Ramadan is not himself a man of anger, loathing, resentment, and violence; it’s just that he is trapped by biological destiny. By nature, he probably wishes things were different. But by birth, there are limits to his freedom. Yet since his family is precisely the epicenter of all the horror, unless he openly betrays his family we simply have no use for him.
Of course, this is a very convenient form of “sympathy.” It means that we need not loathe Ramadan, but since “he is hardly going to turn against his family” (204) we are permitted to dismiss him and give in to our suspicions and discomfort. We need not fear that maybe he has broken with his family’s legacy in his own way.
Thus, in this way, because Ramadan refuses to define himself negatively in terms of what he has denounced, Berman’s Ramadan becomes a shadow on a cave wall: a figure defined primarily in terms of what he has not denounced. This does an injustice not only to Ramadan, but also to all those more secularized Muslims (up to and including Hirsi Ali) who are now only defined in terms of being non-violent and anti-fundamentalist Muslims.
Berman’s Mistakes
Berman would probably be the first to admit that he is out of his depth on internal Islamic legal and moral reasoning. Thus, we need to untangle some of his themes and claims to get back on dry ground.
As noted, Berman portrays Ramadan as a man with genuinely reformist and liberal instincts, but whose utterances are filled with caveats and silences. This is certainly true, but there are two problems here. First, Berman never gives an account of what Ramadan’s reformist project actually consists of–its concerns and anxieties, its opponents, its modes of argument and persuasion, its doctrines. Given that this is almost the entirety of what Ramadan does, that is troubling for anyone who rejects Berman’s implicit assumption that a Muslim public intellectual is defined negatively in terms of what he or she has or has not denounced. Berman mentions that Ramadan’s reformist ideas exist, and occasionally quotes a favorable statement, but the reader of this book will come away with no idea of what Ramadan actually stands for and why people take an interest in him. Rather, they will think that the reformist statements are scattered and random, and the equivocations on Islamist violence are his main contribution.
Second, Berman’s reading of Ramadan can be arbitrary and random at best, tendentious and perplexing at worst. To give just a few examples:
The provenance of these mistakes is Berman’s obsession with the fact that Ramadan “is nothing if not a son, a brother, a grandson.” (32) In addition to permitting Berman to shift focus to the world of Hitler, Qutb, and Qaradawi, this sentence also seems to prevent Berman from reading Ramadan without the conclusion that these “family relations shape everything he writes and does” already in mind, and without the sense that Ramadan’s thought might change and develop over the years. But not only does Berman then ignore all the places where Ramadan does denounce his grandfather’s and Qaradawi’s legacy (for surely these statements are just the set-up for a subtle backtracking or retraction, right?), but he also completely misses how Ramadan has changed from his earliest positions. This is the fallacy produced by Berman’s form of “esotericism”: it assumes not only a master plan behind the author’s entire corpus, but also that the author was fully in control of how his career would arc from the moment he first put pen to paper.
Berman’s mistakes leave two fatal lacunae: we get no real sense from Berman of what Ramadan’s works are all about, and no real sense of how we should read an author like Ramadan–with what methods and in pursuit of which judgments.
Ramadan’s Project
Ramadan’s views have gradually become less conservative, less indebted to Muslim Brotherhood ideology, over the years. But two features are present from the beginning. The first is an effort to dissolve the psychological antagonism toward non-Muslims and the West on the part of believing Muslims. In fairness, Berman does report and appreciate this, although the extent to which Ramadan has sought to bring about a mental and attitudinal shift amongst Muslims away from Qutbism and Qaradawism cannot be exaggerated. What is ironic about this in the context of Berman’s approach is that Ramadan’s focus has always been on telling Muslims that they should define themselves in terms of their positive values and contributions and not in terms of what they oppose or denounce in Western values and practices. Berman’s insistence on defining Ramadan in terms of what he does or does not denounce is thus particularly misguided and tone-deaf and the perfect mirror image of Ramadan’s Salafi and Brotherhood opponents.
The second theme in his work has been the reformation of Islamic law. But instead of beginning with its details, particularly its most odious features like the criminal punishments, Ramadan has sought to get Muslims to rethink their general attitudes towards the Law and their assumptions about what it is. There are many Muslim scholars who have sought to reform Islamic positive law in its details with the aim of ending up with a new Islamic family law or criminal law (Abdullahi An-Na’im in his early work and Mohammad Hashim Kamali are two authors who write on this in English). But while this is what Berman seems to want from Ramadan, it is actually a more conservative strategy than Ramadan’s own.
Ramadan occupied this conservative space in his early work. His book To Be a European Muslim took the juridical tradition more or less for granted but argued for liberal conclusions. But from the very beginning, a genuinely close and attentive reading of Ramadan revealed a desire to wean Muslims off an emotional and intellectual attachment to the rules of the Law. This did not take the form of “roundhouse” denunciations of the criminal punishments, but rather a more subtle, penetrating language of speaking about the dangers of “formalism.” Even in an early work, still, to be sure, showing much in common with Brotherhood ideology, Ramadan broke with his grandfather’s approach in the following way. Banna’s phrase “Islam is the solution” was denounced as
…a slogan empty of any strategy or planning … a result of thinking that it is enough to cite the sources in order to convey the dimension of their just applicability in an actual context….To apply the text outside its context and orientation is an even more pernicious betrayal [than curtailing the application of the text]….This formalism is one of the worst enemies of the person who wants to respect the Qur’anic and traditional teachings. For it allows that person to apply them as they are cited, without any effort of research or great cost but with great ensuing harm. (Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modernity, 34)
Ramadan goes on: this kind of formalism not only “kills the essence of the message” but leads to “a daily nightmare” and “a totalitarian and police regime.” (45-6)
So here is exactly what Berman claims to want: a Muslim intellectual telling Brotherhood devotees that the dogmatic pursuit of Islamic law is pernicious and leads to totalitarianism.
Ramadan’s critique of the legacy of the Muslim Brotherhood culminates in his latest substantive book (Radical Reform), which completely dissolves “Law” as the lodestar for believing Muslims in favor of an active, open-ended, purposive, anti-formalist, evolving Islamic ethics. Islam for him is now defined as acting in accordance with an awareness of the “Universal” as expressed through “Nature” and the “Purposes” (maqasid) of revealed religion. There is no space here to explain the details of this new meta-ethical doctrine (I have done so in two academic articles*), but suffice it to say that this calls for two momentous reforms: for Muslims to entirely stop thinking that ethics consists of legal rules, and to dethrone the jurists and theologians (mere “text scholars”) from their privileged position of authority and power, even in the realm of religious interpretation. He even provides a clear (“roundhouse”) endorsement of secularism, understood as the separation of authorities and powers. His ideas are not complex, but if you are only looking for denunciations and burned bridges you might miss their boldness and radicalism.
The Moratorium Question
I agree with Berman that it would be great if Ramadan called for a permanent suspension of the hudud punishments and not merely a moratorium. But I want to ask what judgment on our part about Ramadan follows from this, bearing in mind that nowhere (not in Europe, not in the Middle East) is he calling for the application of these punishments. Does it mean he really wants the punishments someday? Does it mean he is not a real reformer? Does it mean he lacks the courage to confront his grandfather’s followers?
Is there a chance that Ramadan got something right? Let me emphasize three dimensions which are absent from Berman’s treatment.
(1) What if we understand Ramadan to be making a factual claim–that he himself does not have the authority to declare Qur’anic texts null and void, but that he believes the Community has the authority to arrive at a consensus which effectively suspends the punishments? We would do well to remember that religious communities are dealt a different hand than secular ones: they may choose a language of speaking about the status of theological commandments which differs from ours. Metaphors, loop-holes, qualifications, redescriptions, silences and creative acts of forgetting are all tried and tested methods for religious communities to change their relationship to sacred text.
(2) Berman ignores Ramadan’s long-term project of Islamic legal and meta-ethical reform. As I argued above, he wants to dissolve the Law by gradually persuading Muslims of a new understanding of its meaning. In this strategy, one does not debate the specific points of legal interpretation, but instead simply ignores that game and speaks in other terms entirely.
(3) What does Berman want Ramadan to achieve by joining Sarkozy in declaring stoning a “monstruosité” on French television? Does he want to make us feel better, to give comfort and solace to Muslims trapped under Islamic laws, or to increase the ranks of people who think stoning is a bad idea? Ramadan’s own argument is that internal criticism within Muslim communities must proceed in a certain way if it is going to be persuasive and efficacious. Is he right? Is his the best way to deal with these questions? I don’t know. I suspect the tolerance for opposing stoning is greater than he sometimes lets on. But let us remember that he is a Swiss intellectual and not the Afghan Minister of Justice. No one has been stoned because Ramadan called for a moratorium on stoning.
The Muslim Public Intellectual and Western Publics
I would like to conclude with some thoughts on how we non-Muslim left-liberals talk about Islam and Muslim public intellectuals. We’re not good at this.
We are not good at posing the right questions to Muslim intellectuals. They are often asked to answer for all Muslims and the entire Muslim world. They must submit to constant inquisition and second-guessing as a precondition for speaking for themselves, and often in place of speaking for themselves. We want perfect clarity, transparency and the erasing of all ambiguity. We assume that Muslim reform must not only lead them towards us, but do so in the shortest path possible and in a very specific language. We insist on choosing figures to support and tout, but then get outraged when others suggest that some Muslims may be more authentic and authoritative for fellow believers than others. Worst of all, Muslim intellectuals are defined and judged not in terms of what they have done or said or thought, but in terms of what and whom they have denounced.
We are not good at posing questions to ourselves. We assume a certain power and prerogative for ourselves. This often results in considerable narcissism when we talk about Islamic debates. “Whom should we support? Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq or Tariq Ramadan?” “What can we do to help the dissidents and the reformers?” We assume that too much curiosity, too much humility, is not a virtue but a weakness in need of an alibi.
Berman’s book is a symptom of this lack of facility. It takes the form of an investigation, with no real crime at the center of it. His avowed aim is to look more closely and deeply at Ramadan than others have, to make a judgment about what he stands for and what he is up to. But the problem is that he never really explains what kind of judgment he is trying to make about Ramadan and for what purpose. Presumably, all judgments about Ramadan will be a mixture of intellectual and moral ones. But he never makes explicit what he thinks we need to be able to say about Ramadan, and thus never considers why his questions are the right ones and his judgments the ones we ought to be searching for.
Andrew F. March is Associate Professor of Political Science, Yale University. He is the author of Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (Oxford), which won the Award for Excellence from the American Academy of Religion, and multiple scholarly articles on Islamic law and liberalism, including three on the thought of Tariq Ramadan.
*“Law as a Vanishing Mediator in the Theological Ethics of Tariq Ramadan,” European Journal of Political Theory (forthcoming, 2011); and “The Post-Legal Ethics of Tariq Ramadan: Persuasion and Performance in Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation (A Review Essay),” Middle East Law and Governance, Vol. 2:2 (2010).
