In "Squinting at Extremists," David Thompson exposes the hollowness of Tariq Ramadan's claims to moderation:
“Those willing to trawl through Ramadan’s written and recorded output will find no shortage of material calling into question his supposedly liberal intent. It’s clear that what Ramadan wants isn’t a modernised, secular Islam, but an Islamised modernity.”Over at Sign and Sight, Pascal Bruckner continues his multiculturalism debate with Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash. Bruckner makes a number of important points regarding competing assertions of difference and the loss of common values. He also argues, “It's not enough to condemn terrorism. The religion that engenders it and on which it is based, right or wrong, must also be reformed.” But of particular interest is Brukner’s criticism of those, like Buruma and Garton Ash, who endorse Tariq Ramadan as an “Islamic reformer” and a beacon of moderation. Bruckner reminds us that Ramadan is, in fact, far from liberal in his outlook, most obviously when addressing Muslim audiences rather than Western journalists. Even Buruma’s own generous portrait of Ramadan reveals less than progressive tendencies, of which Bruckner says:
“While propagating the feminine sense of shame and recommending that Muslim women should abstain from shaking men's hands and using mixed swimming pools if they wish, Ramadan states that for his part, he does shake women's hands. Yes, you read it right: in 2007, a self-styled ‘progressive’ Muslim… pushes audaciousness to the point of admitting that he shakes women's hands…It seems to me a blatant error to start talking with conservatives just because they don't openly call for the holy war. This amounts to renouncing reform of Islam, provided Muslims renounce violence. But preferring modern fundamentalism to terrorism runs the risk of having both.”
Perhaps Buruma and Garton Ash have been distracted, even seduced, by Ramadan’s anti-capitalist noises and thus have failed to register the professor’s less reassuring assertions, as outlined in numerous books, pamphlets and recorded lectures. Ramadan has famously equated secularism with dictatorship and, rather crucially, he insists that the Qur’an and Sunnah should govern life today:
“I oppose… our spokespeople who say that one should no longer be faithful to the texts. That is not reasonable.” (L’Islam en Question, p283).Those willing to trawl through Ramadan’s written and recorded output will find no shortage of material calling into question his supposedly liberal intent. It’s clear that what Ramadan wants isn’t a modernised, secular Islam, but an Islamised modernity. In Les Messages Musulmans d’Occident, Ramadan shares his vision of an Islamised Europe:
“The West will begin its new decline and the Arab-Islamic world its renewal… The Qur’an confirms, completes, and corrects the messages that preceded it.”This triumphalist tone is continued in Islam, le Face à Face des Civilisations:
“References to Judaism and Christianity are being diluted, if not disappearing altogether… Only Islam can fill the spiritual void that afflicts the West.”In Pouvoirs (164, 2003), Ramadan goes further:
“The revelation of the Qur’an is explicit: whoever engages in speculation or cultivates financial interests enters into war against the transcendent… Muslims who live in the West must unite themselves to the revolution… from the moment when the neo-liberal capitalist system becomes, for Islam, a theatre of war.”And yet Garton Ash and Buruma maintain that Ramadan represents a moderate version of Islam that is “compatible with the fundamentals of a modern, liberal, and democratic Europe.” Ramadan’s ability to befuddle left-leaning commentators with practised ambiguity and elision has been noted. In her book, Frère Tariq, Caroline Fourest details the incongruities and contradictions of Ramadan’s statements, with particular attention to his 100 or so lectures to Muslim-only audiences, recordings of which are sold through Islamist bookshops.
Read it all.
I read this essay yesterday but didn't follow the link to the debate until today. It's good to see someone articulating the line of thought embodied in this selection from Bruckner. I hope the HTML tags work, but I've been having problems with formatting tags for the last few posts, so they might not.
I know there are those out there from Western denominations who would like to see the West return to non-secular rule, but it is important to realize where that led before and would likely lead again over time. Don't get me wrong, I'll take Christian theocracy over Islamic theocracy any day of the week, but prefer neither, in all honesty.
Begin quote from Brucker:
"The time has come to do for Islam what was done for Christianity as of the 15th century: by bending it to modernity and adapting it to contemporary mentalities. It is too often forgotten that the fight against the Church in Europe was one of outrageous sectarianism, with unheard of violence on both sides. Cathedrals were burned; priests, bishops and nuns were hung or guillotined; the clergy's goods were confiscated. But in the end this fight liberated us from the tutelage of the cassock, radically limiting ambitions on the part of Rome and the various Protestantisms to direct the social order and govern not only people's consciences, but also their bodies. There is no reason why Islam, as soon as it enters the Occidental democratic sphere, should escape secularism and enjoy a favour that is denied to other confessions."
Islam "modernized" means they steal our weaponry to use against us.
Islam is lame.
Spiritually (having to plagiarize someone else's religion, Abrahamic ancestry and God).
Intellectually (forbidding critical/skeptical inquiry).
And emotionally (going on homicidal rampages over cartoons and rumors of flushed Korans that never were).
It is fitting that in an article mainly about Tariq Ramadan David Thompson mentions the absurd propositions of Buruma and Ash. Timothy Garton Ash is at St. Antony's, that graduate college where Ramadan is a temporary lecturer (he calls himself, rather grandly, and allows others to do as well, "a professor at Oxford" as if he were, for all the world, the Regius Professor of Greek, or Laudian Professor of Arabic, and St. Antony's -- the Middle East wing of St. Antony's yet -- practically up there with Balliol. And at St. Antony's Ash has learned all he needs to know about Islam from liquid-brown-eyed, soft-spoken Tariq Ramadan. Like Deborah Ott, like others seduced (but not exactly abandoned, for he needs to keep them on his polemical string), Ash has fallen hard, and so has Buruma. Amazing how the matter of Islam has come to be a kind of ultimate test, separating the sloppy from the sober, those who take the trouble to learn before uttering, and those who do not. It's becoming a litmus test, possibly the best we have.
Islam fill a void? How? It is itself a void.
"If I have not love, I am nothing" - 1 Corinthians 13:2.
For something better than Islam, watch Kieslowski's magnificent film 'Blue', which concludes with an all-stops-out choral setting of large chunks of St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13.
There is no reason why Islam, as soon as it enters the Occidental democratic sphere, should escape secularism and enjoy a favour that is denied to other confessions....
after a similar period of violence and upheaval.
There. Fixed it.
nabi ZK
"It’s clear that what Ramadan wants isn’t a modernised, secular Islam, but an Islamised modernity"
He won't get it. Islam is not compatible with modernity. Europe will decline to the level of practically Stone Age technology with Islam at the helm.