[R-G] Tariq Ramadan and Islamic Socialism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Ian Buruma is hardly an ideal writer to introduce Tariq Ramadan's
ideas to the American audience, but this ultimately (if very much
grudgingly) sympathetic portrayal of Ramadan's work, published in the
New York Times Magazine as well as the International Herald Tribune,
may serve to pique some open-minded people's interest. -- Yoshie

<http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/04/europe/web.0204tariq.php>
Tariq Ramadan has an identity issue
By IAN BURUMA
Sunday, February 4, 2007

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Traditionalist principles, for [Tariq] Ramadan, apply to politics as
much as to religion. Muslims, he says, should not try to create a
"parallel system" to Western democracy, let alone aspire to building a
Muslim state. "There is no such thing," he says, "as an Islamic order.
We have to act to promote justice and inject our ethics into the
existing system." According to Ramadan, the global order of neoliberal
capitalism allows the wealthy West to dominate the world. Resisting
this order is part of his task as an activist professor, who derives
his "universal principles" from his Muslim faith. This message not
only provides educated European Muslims with a political cause but is
also pushed with considerable success at such international leftist
jamborees as the World Social Forum, where the world's antiglobalists
meet.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Even though Ramadan's father represented the Muslim Brotherhood in
Europe, promoting the cause of Islamic government, Ramadan went to a
mainstream Swiss school, where he got a solid grounding in French
literature and European philosophy. He graduated a year early and
studied philosophy, literature and social sciences at University of
Geneva. By age 24, he was already dean of a high school and later
lectured in religious studies at a college in Geneva and the
University of Fribourg. I was fascinated to learn that of all European
philosophers, Ramadan chose to study Friedrich Nietzsche, who had
anticipated the death of religious faith. He even wrote his doctoral
thesis on Nietzsche. Had he ever experienced any doubts himself?

"Doubts about God, no," he replied. "But questions, yes. Nietzsche
raised strong and accurate questions about religion, on how religious
identities are built, and how believers use victim status to become
killers themselves. I also read everything by Dostoyevsky, whom I
liked from the very beginning. That was my universal frame of
reference. It was not easy, growing up in a committed Muslim family
while dealing with people outside who were drinking, and all that. But
I was protected on ethical grounds, as a religious person, first of
all by playing sports, every day, for two hours or more — football,
tennis, running. And reading, reading, reading, five hours a day,
sometimes eight hours. My father warned me that life was not in books.
But it meant that even though I stayed away from drinking, I got
respect from the people around me. I was known as 'the professor,' 'le
docteur.' "

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In his book, "Western Muslims and the Future of Islam," published in
2004, Ramadan lists various approaches to Islam, from "political
literalist Salafism" — militant, anti-Western, in favor of the Islamic
state — to "liberal reformism," which sees faith as an entirely
private affair. I asked him at the mosque where he placed himself. "A
Salafi reformist," he said, which might seem a contradiction but is
explained in his book as follows: "The aim is to protect the Muslim
identity and religious practice, to recognize the Western
constitutional structure, to become involved as a citizen at the
social level and to live with true loyalty to the country to which one
belongs."

Ramadan's favorite Muslim philosophers are the late-19th-century
reformists Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who tried to
revive Islam under Western colonial rule by rational interpretation of
the holy texts. They were skeptical of religious tradition,
accumulated over time, and looked for core principles in the Koran
that spoke to reason. For them there was no contradiction between
scientific reasoning and their Muslim faith. And female emancipation
or democratic government could be reconciled with the original
principles of Islam. Both had lived in Europe. Both were harsh critics
of colonialism and Western materialism. In Ramadan's words, "They saw
the need to resist the West, through Islam, while taking what was
useful from it."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

But what exactly are his politics? Ramadan explained to me what shaped
his political understanding: "In my family, resistance was a key
concept, resistance against dictatorship and colonialism. When I was
18, I started to travel to southern countries, in Latin America, India
and Africa. The people I met were often leftists. The liberation
theologists in Brazil were very important, resisting in the name of
religious principles. I was at home with this discourse. I was also
close to the Tibetans and spent one month with the Dalai Lama. It was
the same philosophy, spiritual commitment and resistance, in their
case against Chinese colonialism. Perhaps because of these personal
experiences, I started to read the work of my own grandfather, who
used the Scriptures, the story of Moses, against British colonialism.
He was saying in the 1940s what the liberation theologists were saying
in the 1960s."

Some of Ramadan's critics, most notably the French journalist Caroline
Fourest, who wrote a sharp attack on him titled "Frère Tariq" (Brother
Tariq), draw a direct line from Hassan al-Banna, through Said Ramadan
and Tariq Ramadan himself, to the militant Islamism threatening the
West today. Such was the disquiet in France about Islamist violence
that Ramadan was barred from that country in 1995. The ban was
eventually lifted. Ramadan prefers to see the family legacy in terms
of "Islamic socialism, which is neither socialist, nor capitalist, but
a third way." In this reading, his father's friendship with Malcolm X
is much more significant than any Saudi Arabian connection. This is
why Ramadan was a popular speaker with African-American Muslims before
his visa was revoked.

"Western Muslims and the Future of Islam" throws some light on
Ramadan's idea of "Islamic socialism," an ideology, combining
religious principles with anticapitalist, anti-imperialist politics,
that goes back to the time of the Russian Revolution. (Libya's
strongman, Muammar el-Qaddafi, is one who claims to rule according to
these principles.) The murderous tyranny to be resisted, in Ramadan's
book, is "the northern model of development," which means that "a
billion and a half human beings live in comfort because almost four
billion do not have the means to survive." For Ramadan, global
capitalism, promoted by such institutions as the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is the "abode of war" (alam
al-harb), for "when faced with neoliberal economics, the message of
Islam offers no way out but resistance."
-- 
Yoshie
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