Who’s afraid of Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan is a charismatic and energetic Islamic philosopher in Europe who has become popular and influential among various circles of European Muslims during the past fifteen years--originally in Geneva, where his father founded the Islamic Center in 1961; then in Lyon, the French city closest to Switzerland, where Ramadan attracted a following of young people from North African backgrounds; then among French Muslims beyond Lyon; at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, in Britain, where he spent a year on a fellowship; among still more scattered Muslim audiences in Western Europe, who listened to his audio recordings and packed his lecture halls, normally with the men and the women sitting demurely in their separate sections; among Muslims in various Francophone countries in Africa--and outward to the wider world.

Tariq Ramadan by Lara Tomlin for The New RepublicRamadan possesses a special genius for shaping cultural questions according to his own lights and presenting those questions to the general public, and he has demonstrated this ability from the start. As early as 1993, at the age of thirty-two, he campaigned in Geneva to cancel an impending production of Voltaire's play Muhammad, or Fanaticism. The production was canceled, and a star was born--though Ramadan has argued that, on the contrary, he had nothing to do with canceling the play, and to say otherwise is a "pure lie." Not every battle has gone his way. He taught at the college of Saussure, where his colleagues were disturbed by his arguments in favor of Islamic biology over Darwin. This time, too, Ramadan shaped the debate to his own specifications by insisting that he never wanted to suppress the existing biology curriculum--merely to complement it with an additional point of view. A helpful creationist proposal. But the Darwinians, unlike the Voltaireans, were in no rush to yield.

That was in 1995, and by then Ramadan had already established his social base in Lyon, at the Union of Young Muslims and the Tawhid bookstore and publishing house. These were slightly raffish immigrant endeavors, somewhat outside the old and official mainline Muslim organizations in France. Even so, the mainline organizations seem to have welcomed the arrival of a brilliant young philosopher. He built alliances. He attended conferences. His op-eds ran in the newspapers. He engaged in debates. Eventually his face appeared on French television and on the covers of glossy magazines, which introduced him to the general public in France, a huge success. And yet--this is the oddity about Tariq Ramadan--as his triumphs became ever greater, and his thinking came to be more widely known, no consensus whatsoever emerged regarding the nature of his philosophy or its meaning for France, or Europe, or the world.

Some mainstream journalists in France were drawn to him from the start. The Islam-and-secularism correspondent at Le Monde, full of admiration, plugged him fairly regularly and sometimes adopted his arguments. At Le Monde Diplomatique, he became a cause, not just a story; the editor lionized him. Politis magazine promoted him. On the activist far left, some of the anti-globalist radicals and the die-hard enemies of McDonald's looked on Ramadan--because of his denunciations of American imperialism and Zionism and his plebeian agitations in Lyon--as a tribune of progressive Islam, even if his religious severities grated on left-wing sensibilities. The Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Communist League formed something of an alliance with him. A number of Christian activists regarded him with particular fondness: a worthy partner for inter-religious dialogues. A dike against the flood tides of secular materialism. A religiously motivated social conscience similar to their own, laboring on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. Ramadan might even have seemed, in some people's eyes, stylishly trendy at one moment or another--a champion of Islam who, because Islam has been so badly demonized, held out a last dim hope for shocking the bourgeoisie. Then again, some of the French experts on Islam, such as the distinguished scholar Olivier Roy, who had no interest in shocking anyone, likewise found something admirable in him: a thoughtful effort to modernize Islam for a liberal age.

Still, in France other people recoiled, and did so without much hesitation, and recoiled also at the people who had failed to recoil. The critics were thoroughly convinced that Ramadan's friends and admirers and supporters in the press were deluding themselves, and that alliances with him were bound to backfire, and that, beneath the urbane surface, he represented the worst in Islam, not the best. These critics were drawn not only from the Christian conservatives and the political right. The most prominent of his left-wing Christian allies turned against him in a fury, as if betrayed. Some mainline Muslim leaders in France grew reserved. Even the French anti-globalists were of two minds about him. He had his fans, but there were many who watched with dismay as Ramadan's pious followers filled the seats at anti-globalist meetings and veiled women thronged the podium. In France his loudest enemies were left-wing feminists, who took one look and shuddered in alarm. Feminists from Muslim backgrounds denounced him in Libération, the left-wing newspaper. The Socialist Party politicians in France, who had every reason to seek out Arab and Muslim voters, showed no interest in him at all.

Dark rumors spread. The Spanish police inquired into his Lyon networks. In 1995 the French minister of the interior denied him permission to re-enter France--which sparked a mobilization of petition-signers until the order was rescinded. His detractors in the press--initially at Lyon Mag, the city magazine in Lyon--speculated grimly about his personal connections. He responded with a double lawsuit, against Lyon Mag and against one of his critics, the Lebanese historian Antoine Sfeir. The verdict ended up split: against the magazine but in favor of Sfeir. The magazine kept on hammering nonetheless.

Books about Ramadan tumbled into the bookstores at a remarkable pace. Caroline Fourest's Frère Tariq, or Brother Tariq, which appeared in 2004, has been the most influential--an angry book, alarmed, energetic in tabulating the naïve tropes and clichés of the French press, indignant at the journalists who keep falling for the same manipulations, indignant at the progressives who view Ramadan as progressive. But hers was only the first, followed by six more books in the last three or four years--among them Paul Landau's Le Sabre et le Coran, or The Saber and the Qur'an, in 2005 (no less hostile and accusatory than Fourest's); Aziz Zemouri's Faut-il Faire Taire Tariq Ramadan?, or Should Tariq Ramadan Be Silenced?, the same year (which affords Ramadan the chance to have his own say); and Ian Hamel's La vérité sur Tariq Ramadan, or The Truth About Tariq Ramadan, this year (mildly sympathetic to Ramadan, sometimes skeptical, indignant at the hostility expressed by Fourest and Landau). And the books, too, having contributed to the controversy, contributed to his popularity.

Ramadan seems to have known instinctively how to respond to accusations and innuendos, and his rejoinders succeeded in turning every new setback into an advance. He suggested a bigotry against Islam on his critics' part, amounting to a kind of racism. He argued that criticisms of him represented a holdover from the colonialist mentality of the past. He was angry, dignified, self-controlled, and unmovable. The combination of his replies and his demeanor proved effective in the conscience-stricken atmosphere of modern postimperial France. A good many people, listening to his rejoinders, grew pensive. His supporters waved their fists. And his critics became ever more fretful--not just at Ramadan, but at the people who, in applauding or merely in growing pensive, seemed to have accepted his categories of analysis, as if in a stupor.


His entrance into the Anglophone world began quietly. The Islamic Foundation in Leicester, where Ramadan studied and wrote in 1996-1997, enjoys the distinction of having been the first and most vigorous Muslim institution in Britain to rally against Salman Rushdie back in 1988, even before Ayatollah Khomeini issued his religious decree authorizing Rushdie's assassination. The foundation published Ramadan's book To Be a European Muslim in 1999, and it enjoyed a modest success. To Be a European Muslim was regarded as a thoughtful argument for healthy new relations between old-stock non-Muslim Europe and the new-stock immigrant Muslim population. Daniel Pipes in the United States was among the expert observers who offered applause--though, if you visit Pipes's website, you will see that, ever since his initial review, Pipes has been posting additional remorseful observations about how wrong he was, and what could possibly have gotten into him? (You will also see that Ramadan, for his part, together with a sympathetic journalist or two, has promoted Pipes into the center of an anti-Ramadan conspiracy on behalf of the Jews.)

In 2001, the Islamic Foundation published Ramadan's Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity, a philosophical text that attracted less attention. Even so, controversy went on working its wonders, and in faraway Indiana the University of Notre Dame offered him a professorship beginning in 2004--partly funded, as it happens, by the Kroc family, which means the McDonald's fortune. Ramadan accepted. He obtained a visa. He arranged for his family to move. Then, at the last minute, Homeland Security balked, and the State Department revoked his visa. The ACLU, PEN, and a couple of academic organizations rallied to his defense, as was their duty. But the man was barred, which generated still more publicity, some of it hostile, of course, but much of it sympathetic, as was only natural--a feeling of outrage on his behalf, an exasperation at American provincialism, a fearful recollection of the obtuse McCarthyite xenophobia of yore. Anyway, America's nay triggered a British yea. St. Antony's College at Oxford stepped in with its own offer of a fellowship for 2005. Ramadan accepted.

The London terrorist attack took place in July of that year. The Blair government organized an advisory commission afterward to make suitable recommendations. Ramadan was invited to participate. He accepted. And with one incident piling atop the next--the defeats, the victories--he was lifted, at last, to the pinnacle of American journalistic recognition: the sort of full-length profile and full-page photograph in The New York Times Magazine that half the writers and intellectuals of Europe dream of receiving one day, in the hope of realizing the impossible, which is to break into the American bookstores and the American conversation.

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