{"id":781,"date":"2005-07-25T01:36:52","date_gmt":"2005-07-25T01:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/?p=781"},"modified":"2013-09-19T11:16:06","modified_gmt":"2013-09-19T10:16:06","slug":"tariq-ramadan-we-muslims-need-to-get-out-of-our-intellectual-and-social-ghettos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/?p=781","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Tariq Ramadan: ‘We Muslims need to get out of our intellectual and social ghettos’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Can this erudite Swiss lecturer really be the man branded by The Sun as the ‘acceptable face of terror’? Paul Vallely meets Tariq Ramadan<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The day the first bombs went off in London a Swiss academic issued a press release. What the civilised world must do, it said, was work out how the bombers wanted us to react \u2013 and then do the opposite.<\/p>\n

Its condemnation of the outrage was absolute. \u201cThe authors of such acts are criminals and we cannot accept or listen to their probable justifications in the name of an ideology, a religion or a political cause,\u201d it said. Even though it was signed by a Muslim, Professor Tariq Ramadan, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Geneva and president of the Swiss Muslim Organisation, it received little coverage.<\/p>\n

Four days later Tariq Ramadan was brought to the attention of the British public a little more dramatically. The front page of the Sun shrieked:<\/p>\n

BANNED in the US for links to terrorists.<\/p>\n

BANNED in France for links to terrorists.<\/p>\n

WELCOMED to Britain days after the al-Qaeda attacks.<\/p>\n

The paper\u2019s leader column claimed that Ramadan was \u201cmore dangerous\u201d than extremist clerics like Abu Hamza or Omar Bakri because \u201che is a soft-spoken professor whose moderate tones present an acceptable, \u2018reasonable\u2019 face of terror to impressionable young Muslims\u201d.<\/p>\n

The coverage was shot through with errors and inaccuracies. Other papers repeated the story without checking the facts. The London Evening Standard managed in the space of just 10 short lines to include no less than four mistakes.<\/p>\n

The most pernicious of the untruths was a quote in which the professor was traduced into appearing to give his backing to suicide bombers. \u201cIn Palestine, Chechnya there is oppression. It is\u00a0legitimate for Muslims to resist fascism that kills innocent people,\u201d the reports said. None of them included the next line from the quote as it had appeared in an Italian magazine: \u201cBut the assassination and the kidnapping of civilians are illegitimate. . . \u201d<\/p>\n

To compound the mystery Tariq Ramadan had been invited to London to speak at a conference, sponsored by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Metropolitan Police. He was last year named by Time magazine as one of the world\u2019s 100 most important innovators of the 21st century. And in academic circles he is widely known as an erudite and provocative scholar who has dedicated himself to working towards the creation of a new European Islam which is faithful to its religious principles but accepting of post-Enlightenment Western intellectual culture.<\/p>\n

Contrary to the image portrayed in much of the press he is a Muslim who has prominently spoken out against Islamic punishments such as the cutting off of hands for theft, stoning for adultery and the use of the religion to oppress women. Though he is critical of much Western foreign policy in Muslim lands he has repeatedly condemned suicide bombers as guilty of \u201codious acts.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact Tariq Ramadan is one of the brightest hopes for reconciliation between the Muslim community and Western cultural values. \u201cWhen I first heard about the 7\/7 bombs,\u201d he said this weekend, \u201cmy immediate reaction was that we must do exactly the opposite of what they want. They want to spread fear. We have to spread trust, mutual knowledge, and a way of living together\u00a0based on common values. That means being united not just in a struggle against terror and violence but in a commitment to a struggle for universal values, for diversity, for democracy, for freedom, for justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The implicit message of the terrorists to Muslims is: this is not an Islamic society; it is not your society. \u201cWe have to say it is your society. Now more than ever it is imperative for Muslims to be active citizens and to be proactive.\u201d<\/p>\n

In part that means supporting new laws to tighten security and ban clerics who incite to violence. \u201cI have never been very happy with [the leeway given to] some of these people \u2013 Abu Hamza, Omar Bakri. Yes, of course, we need freedom of speech, but there should be limits. People who say it is Islamic to kill and not respect the law and to spread hatred are outside those limits. But we must tackle security in a way that undermines human rights and makes every Muslim feel discriminated against. To blindly follow the US example on that is not wise.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it is imperative now, he says, not to restrict ourselves to that security agenda. \u201cWe must understand that British Muslims are part of the solution not part of the problem. We need to build partnerships at the local level. Muslims should collaborate with the local authorities and police. And the local community should try to trust Muslims. Focusing exclusively on security is not the way to build mutual trust.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Muslim community now must face up to wider responsibilities. \u201cMuslims now need, more than ever, to be self-critical,\u201d he says. That means educating young Muslims in more than religious formalism. They must be taught that \u201cthe capacity to promote social justice and the protection the integrity of every individual, woman or man, rich or poor\u201d is what determines authentic Islam.<\/p>\n

What turned four young Muslims born and brought up in Leeds into suicide bombers was a radical and literalist Islamic discourse which the mainstream Muslim community did not do enough to pre-empt, Prof Ramadan says. Disdain was not enough. \u201cThey needed to assert that this kind of talk is not just unIslamic. It is anti-Islamic.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there is something more subtle. Too much of the internal conversation within the Muslim community at present nurtures a sense of guilt, inadequacy and alienation. \u201cYoung people are told: everything you do is wrong \u2013 you don\u2019t pray, you drink, you aren\u2019t modest, you don\u2019t behave. They are told that the only way to be a good Muslim is to live in an Islamic society. Since they can\u2019t do that, this magnifies their sense of inadequacy and creates an identity crisis. Such young people are easy prey for someone who comes along and says: \u2018there is a way to purify yourself\u2019. Some of these figures even keep the young people drinking to increase their sense of guilt and make them easier to manipulate.\u201d<\/p>\n

The alternative is to teach them to develop a critical mind. \u201cOn the arts, literature, the way we eat, our sense of humour, the second generation feel close to the non-Muslims they went to school with. That\u2019s right. That\u2019s the Islamic way. The universality of Islam is shown by the way you can integrate into the local culture. They need to be told: you can dress in European clothes \u2013 so long as you respect the principle of modesty. Democracy and pluralism aren\u2019t against your Islamic principles. Anything in Western culture that does not contradict the message of Islam can be accepted and integrated.\u201d<\/p>\n

To promote this it is essential to break what Tariq Ramadan calls \u201cthis binary vision of reality \u2013 the Us versus Them, the idea that everything Western is decadent and unIslamic.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is also necessary for the young generation to jettison the approach of their parents, which was to try to make themselves invisible to the rest of society. \u201cNow it\u2019s time to speak out \u2013 both against those who are doing these things in the name of our religion and against those who say that being a loyal British citizen means blindly accepting all the decisions of the British government. Ours must be a constructive and critically participative loyalty.\u201d<\/p>\n

The third change required is far greater inter-religious dialogue. \u201cIf you go back to the source of our religions you find common values. It\u2019s important to read the scriptures of the other faiths and see how the others interpret these common values. It\u2019s high time for Muslims to say that anti-semitism is not acceptable. We have to ask questions of our own tradition and be self-critical about what is sectarian and racist. \u201d Only then can our society build a common future.<\/p>\n

If all of this sounds uncontroversial to most Western secularists it has got Tariq Ramadan into hot water with fellow Muslims \u2013 most particularly his call for a moratorium on corporal punishment, stoning and the death penalty in Muslim countries.<\/p>\n

His arguments for this are all Islamic. These penalties are Koranic but, he argues \u2013 in a way designed to persuade Muslims who fear they will appear to betray the Islamic scriptural sources \u2013 the original social conditions under which they were set are nearly impossible to re-establish. The penalties, therefore, are \u201calmost never applicable\u201d. He cites historical Islamic precedents for the suspension of such punishments. And he argues that it is a \u201cgrave injustice\u201d that these penalties are applied almost exclusively to women and the poor, \u201cthe doubly victimized,\u201d who rarely have access to defence counsel, and never to the wealthy, the powerful, or the oppressors.<\/p>\n

\u201cIslam is being used to degrade and subjugate women and men in certain Muslim societies,\u201d he says and the collusion of Muslims around the world in this \u201cliteral and non-contextualized application\u201d of sharia law is a betrayal of the teachings of Islam.<\/p>\n

Muslim critics have attacked Prof Ramadan for this, accusing him of being a sell-out, or of promoting Islam-lite. The Swiss academic is sanguine about this. \u201cThe more literal will say I am westernising. But I am not losing the universal principles. I\u2019m just not confusing them with the culture of the countries that Muslims have traditionally come from. There\u2019s no consensus among scholars that the conditions are in place for these penalties to be enforced. And if there\u2019s a doubt it should be in favour of the poor. Islam is centrally about justice. This is not just.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that this lessens the attacks that come from the opposite direction, most particularly from neo-con Americans who dislike his criticism of the government of Israel and the support given it by the West. The London bombs may not be directly attributable to Britain\u2019s role in the war in Iraq, he says, \u201cbut there is definitely a connection between the international scene, Palestine and so on, and domestic policy. It\u2019s easy to see why many Muslims think that the policies of Western governments are killing people there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who object to such views have plastered the internet with spurious allegations about Tariq Ramadan. The claims are always the same. That his grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of the current Islamist movement, in 1927 (as if he is responsible for that). That his father once met Osama bin Laden\u2019s brother. That he is barred from entering France (he was once in a case of mistaken identity, but he now lives there). That he has nefarious connections, according to always anonymous security sources, with the kind of people he has spent the past 25 years condemning.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe accusations are never based on facts, only on the frequency of their repetition on the internet.\u201d But they were enough to have a work permit granted for him to take up a post at a US university revoked last year. \u201cI\u2019m condemned from the Western point of view because I stand up for Muslim values. The West feels that the good Muslim is the less observant Muslim; that the practising Muslim is a potential terrorist. We have to be aware that there is an ideological struggle here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lecture he gave yesterday in London was entitled The Middle Path. It is a path he is treading with some difficulty.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a path between text and context, which insists that in a changing world our interpretation of faith must also evolve, that there is no faithfulness without change. We need a deep faith, but a critical mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing British by culture and Muslim by religion is no contradiction. Muslims need to know the culture and history of Britain if they are to build a British Muslim personality. We need to get out of our intellectual and social ghettoes, and be freed from our narrow understanding. To do that is not easy. The easy way is to become an extremist.\u201d.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can this erudite Swiss lecturer really be the man branded by The Sun as the ‘acceptable face of terror’? Paul Vallely meets Tariq Ramadan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,40,27,37,38],"tags":[715,719,97],"class_list":["post-781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-ethics","category-islam","category-politics","category-society","tag-politics","tag-religion","tag-tariq-ramadan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=781"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7948,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781\/revisions\/7948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}