Tariq Ramadan: The Good European
by Robert Bruce (September 2014)
’, have given him pariah status amongst today’s conscience stricken progressives, but in an age where, under the pressure of immigration, western societies are regressing from contract to status in a generation, his hypothetical dilemmas are becoming real ones. As Amartya Sen has indicated, the concrete result of state-backed policies of multiculturalism has been a state of tense plural monoculturalism, and we have made a grave error in assuming that a creed which is today little more than a rationalization of bourgeoisie bohemian sensibilities can have any purchase on cultures which have not yet dissipated into a form of ethnic cuisine. Prominent liberals like Will Kymlika, and Charles Taylor hang on to the ‘not yet’ like, but at a time when the welfare state is freeing up Kaplan’s ‘reprimitivised man’ to withdraw from the modern world, it is difficult to have much faith in their dated visions of cultural mosaics.
In navigating the conflicts that inevitably follow from this balkanisation, much depends on the myriad community leaders called forth by this new medievalism of the group and few have enjoyed a more feted status than Tariq Ramadan, recently included on the Orwellian Foreign Office’s Advisory Group on Freedom of Religion and Belief, and whose profile can only fuel suspicions that it may not be a happy accommodation.
The Prophet Born
Charismatic, clean shaven and avowedly at ease with European culture (he enjoyed a brief career as a professional footballer for top Swiss team Servette Geneva), Ramadan has been recognised in official circles as something close to unofficial spokesman for Euro-Islam, invariably the first port of call for major media outlets when burquas and minarets are headline news, and also, as in 2005 after the 7/7 bombings when he served on an advisory commission to the Blair government, consulted by European governments looking for authentic sound bites on inclusion. He was, in short, a prophet born with great expectation and his theopolitics seemed to offer a way beyond Huntington’s clash of civilisations.
‘’, and even if you don’t take to it, how do you lampoon a vacuum? Still, this is not written for the faithful, and amongst the Ummah his influence is only fractionally related to such overwrought prose. First the obligatory throat clearing. Biography is not destiny but it is difficult to overlook the fact that Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan Al Banna, the famous founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Prophet Offended
’ would take some balls and in any case Muslims make a more promising proletariat. After the Frankfurt School had shifted the Left’s centre of gravity from factory to campus, the white working class had been living on borrowed time and Trotskyite parties were foremost amongst those trimming their ideological sails to batten onto a more promising revolutionary host.
The Prophet Turns Red
If Paris was worth a mass, Tower Hamlets was worth a few queers, and Ramadan, was a prime beneficiary of this degraded species of Popular Front. The Revolutionary Communist League adopted him as their pet Islamist and at umbrella forums like the European Social Forum he was able to shift Orwell’s snob Bolsheviks into some nasty ideological ghettoes. As the political identity of the left became submerged in the nebulous resentments of the anti-globalisation movement, the more its anti-capitalism simply degenerated into a primitive protest against the modern world owing as much to Heidegger as Marx. In a grovelling interview with Ramadan, Ian Buruma remarked with affected curiosity that Ramadan was a ‘Noam Chomsky on foreign affairs and a Jerry Falwell on social matters’ but this is a mainstream position in these intellectual climates, not least in France where, with anti-Americanism as strong on the Right as the Left, the latter, a certain Poujadist primitivism, carries fewer political risks.
It is this decaying moral health of the Left which has given the likes of Ramadan such generous room for manoeuvre, and given the rise of the Fascist Left, Ramadan doubtless thought he had enough cover to retread a few familiar lines about some intellectuals thinking with their blood. The eternal Jew was back, and perhaps if the personal odyssey of Roger Garaudy from dialectical materialism to holocaust denial was anything to go by, there may now have been a bandwagon to jump on. Taking aim at Levy, Glucksmann , and Kouchner, Ramadan tested the waters with a submission to Le Monde airing his solipsisms on the ‘communitarianism of the New Intellectuals’.
‘Intellectuals as different as Bernard Kouchner, Andre Glucksmann or Bernard Levy, who had taken courageous positions on Chechnya, have curiously supported the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq’.
Curious indeed, the names said it all. A faithful barometer of bien pensant Left wing pro-Palestinian sympathies, Le Monde’s editor nevertheless smelled something rotten, refusing five times to publish it, and he was to experience a similar rebuff from Liberation. He had pushed a bit too close to Vichy but given the intellectual and moral torpor of the Left the incident did him no long term damage.
Ramadan’s emergence as a key interlocutor in the Francophone world was co-terminus with the decline in France of secular Republican values on the Left and its ill-advised indulgence of political theology. Faced in the nineties with the seemingly intractable problems of delinquency, and social breakdown amongst the North African underclass, even socialists began to lose their nerve and to talk the language of faith. The immediate beneficiaries of this narrowing of political vision were the Islamists, who under the guises of slum missionary outreach have assumed a de facto social control which now seems virtually impossible to roll back. By some limited measures, this Faustian pact was a partial success – some feral youths may have been given a pious alternative to crime but is the decline in burnt out cars a price worth paying for the stifling control of the Brothers?1 More than a few feminists like those represented by Ni Putes Ni Soumises (literally Neither Submissives nor Whores) are sceptical, and it is not difficult to see why. In the banileu veiled women were once in a small minority but now unveiled women, even non-Muslims2 feel it prudent to wear one lest they fall prey to the gang rapes used as a means of enforcing female piety. The horrors of these tournantes, literally pass-arounds were catalogued in harrowing personal detail by Samira Bellil herself dragged from a train at the age of 14 and raped whilst other passengers managed to distract themselves, and it is depressing to contemplate that but for her book this reign of violent misogyny might have passed almost unnoticed outside these blighted suburbs.
Still, what has this to do with religion? On the face of it not much. One hears it endlessly repeated that the regressive customs associated with Islam are actually prescribed by primitive tribal traditions, rather than the pristine core of the faith, and this is doubtless true in abstract terms. Deuteronomy might even shade the Koran here, but faith and culture are not so easily separated. The appeal of a stripped down Islam thrown back on a 7th century code of honour, to the fragile egos of the male underclass should be obvious. It is the shrill faux piety of the uneducated and it is hardly a surprise that the Islamists should have concentrated so much of their proselytising energies on petty criminals.
The Prophet and the Last Man
–Modern Islam is a brittle creed, caught up in the conspicuous superficiality of dress codes and pious machismo which are simply the flipside of that long melancholy withdrawing roar of faith which, so long as we offer nothing but a fatuous cultural modernity to its refugees, is actually our danger not our opportunity. Still, it is a self-inflicted wound.
A Depressing Postscript
In 2003 Ramadan took part in a televised debate with the then Minister of the Interior Nicholas Sarkozy ostensibly to debate the banning of the burqa, but the conversation soon moved on to less promising areas. Noting that Ramadan’s brother Hani, also a schoolteacher, had recently confirmed his support for stoning women to death for adultery, Sarkozy called on Ramadam to condemn outright the practice which is still widely carried out in Islamic countries in conformity with Sharia law. Even in our temporising non-judgemental times this should not have been a big ask. But it was – all Ramadan could call for was a moratorium
The transcript of succeeding exchanges make astonishing reading.
Ramadan: Wait, let me finish.
Sarkozy: A moratorium, that is to say, we should, for a while, hold back from stoning women?
Ramadan: Let me finish.
Sarkozy: Mr. Ramadan, if it is regressive not to want to stone women, I avow that I am a regressive.
A career ending moment? Curiously no, there are few propositions so stupid that an intellectual will not believe it and the credulity of the French intellectual class clearly knows no bounds. Perhaps pride of place has to go to Olivier Roy for the most imaginative justification. In refusing to condemn stoning against the demands of a government minister, Ramadam had upheld the autonomy of the religious sphere from the control of the state and hence struck a blow for secularism. Sarkozy was the tyrant, Ramadan the progressive. This is impressive stuff by any standard, and explains and coming from France’s prominent authority on Islam explains why Ramadan’s serial misspeaking carries so few consequences in Europe.
[1] As it happens it may not be justified even on these limited terms. Few now seriously deny the involvement of Islamist groups in fomenting the French intifada.
[3] One suspects he would have been happy for Samira Bellil to be stoned to death for adultery, a very real prospect when Sharia law is applied. As he put it on Islam Online “To be absolved from guilt, the raped woman must have shown some sort of good conduct… Islam addresses women to maintain their modesty, as not to open the door for evil… The Koran calls upon Muslim women in general to preserve their dignity and modesty, just to save themselves from any harassment… So for a rape victim to be absolved from guilt, she must not be the one that opens… her dignity for deflowering…” [4] These calculations do not always work out:
_________________________________
The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.
To comment on this article, please click here.
To help New English Review continue to publish interesting articles such as this one, please click here.
If you have enjoyed this article by Robert Bruce and want to read more, please click here.