Tariq Ramadan has a prezzy for us
Ah the indispensable wisdom of Tariq Ramadan. He’s full of it.
We are equal citizens, but with different cultural and religious backgrounds. So, how can we, instead of being obsessed with potential “conflicts of identity” within communities, change that viewpoint to define and promote a common ethical framework, nurtured by the richness of diverse religious and cultural backgrounds?
I have no idea. I don’t in fact think we can do that – for the boringly simple reason that it combines two incompatible items: the (welcome) claim that we are equal citizens, and the claim that ‘diverse religious and cultural backgrounds’ are (in and of themselves, with no qualification) rich and nurturing. The drearily obvious problem there is that many ‘religious and cultural backgrounds’ are strongly and coercively anti-egalitarian. Many cultural and religious backgrounds consider women inherently and profoundly inferior. Many consider gays abhorrent; many group people into clean and unclean, touchable and untouchable; many consider slavery acceptable. Just saying ‘hoo-ray diversity’ ignores all that, or, worse, hides it. I suspect Ramadan of doing the latter – because he’s nowhere near stupid enough or sheltered enough to be unaware of it.
[A]n ethics of citizenship should itself reflect the diversity of the citizenship. For while we agree that no one has the right to impose their beliefs on another, we also understand that our common life should be defined in such a way that it includes the contributions of all the religious and philosophical traditions within it. Further, the way to bring about such inclusion is through critical debate.
Who’s we? I understand no such thing. And the claim that such ‘inclusion’ relies on critical debate introduces another incompatibility. Religious traditions are not about genuine critical debate. Traditions as such are not about genuine critical debate – the two are fundamentally opposed. Once genuine critical debate gets going, traditions become vulnerable. That’s not to say that no traditions can survive critical scrutiny, since plenty of them are harmless or beneficial, but it is to say that they’re not automatically partners or allies of critical debate, because they’re not rooted in it in the first place.
Islam is perceived as a “problem”, never as a gift in our quest for a rich and stimulating diversity. And that’s a mistake. Islam has much to offer…Islamic literature is full of injunctions about the centrality of an education based on ethics and proper ends. Individual responsibility, when it comes to communicating, learning and teaching is central to the Islamic message.
And so on and so on. That’s nice, but what about it is specific to Islam and cannot be found in other, secular systems of thought? Nothing. So what does Islam have to offer that no other sets of ideas have to offer? Nothing. Ramadan just bangs on about various ok ideas that can be found in Islam as well as other places (though he omits the last five words) and lets it go at that.
More broadly, the Muslim presence should be perceived as positive, too. It is not undermining the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ethical and cultural roots of Europe. Neither is it introducing dogmatism into the debate, as if spiritual and religious traditions automatically draw on authoritarian sources. They can operate within both the limits of the law and in the open public sphere. On the contrary, the Muslim presence can play a critical role in thinking about our future and shaping a new common narrative. It can help recall and revive some of the fundamental principles upon which the cultures of Europe are based.
Here he’s shifted his ground, in a shifty way – he started out talking about what Islam has to offer, not ‘the Muslim presence.’ But translating ‘the Muslim presence’ back into Islam, what he says is pure assertion, and some of it is pretty damn bald, too. Yes Islam is inserting (though not introducing) dogmatism into the debate – as witness this very piece, for a start. ‘Spiritual and religious traditions’ do draw on authoritarian sources – not automatically, perhaps, but historically and as a matter of fact, yes. Tariq Ramadan is an interesting example of that very thing, dressed up in convincing modernish academicky garb.
(I was careful not to look at any of the comments before writing this because I knew if I looked at them I would decide ‘no need to bother’ and I wanted to say what I thought even if a couple of hundred people had already said it. I’ve looked at some now, and sure enough. The Graun is weird – insisting on this endless relentless Islamophilia while something like 90% of its readership tries to remind it of the secular heritage of the left and the not altogether progressive quality of life under sharia.)
In response to Ramadans doublespeak
Islam should be seen as a gift
the Guardian commenter rejoinder:
I hope someone kept the receipt.
Priceless.
Indeed; I nearly used that for the post title.
To pick out only one point: I wonder how he gets from “witnesses to their message before people” to “respecting the environment”. Looks like he found what he wanted to find….
Thank you for this. It is so clear and unanswerable. Ramadan is like the pope, only more so. The surface of his writing gleams with reason, yet you can’t avoid getting caught on the thorns.
I would add, though, that religious traditions are intrinsically authoritarian and uncritical. They must be. There’s no critical basis for religious belief. Ramadan carefully buries this fact in his claim about “the contributions of all the religious and philosophical traditions within [Islam].”
This is philosophy harnessed to the cart of religion, and has nothing to do with critical reason. The Muslim presence plays a ‘critical role’ “in thinking about our future and shaping a new common narrative.” If you wondered where the Muslim Brotherhood was in all this, there it is. Make no mistake: the new common narrative will include Islam. That’s not a gift; that’s a threat.
It’s so weird, Al-Guardian. These sorts of posts get a coldly hostile and derisive response, but they keep on doing them. & as someone said on the thread, you only get posts of the uplifting nature of one religion and one religion only. Buddhists, Sikhs not to mention Christians must be getting very ticked off.
Yes, and Islam has got to be the religion with the least uplift. The Bible is bad enough, but the Qu’ran is really bad. The Bible talks about Amalekites, which is hard to put into contemporary language (though some very conservative Jews try). But the Qu’ran talks about unbelievers, and names them – Jews, Christians, polytheists.
Couldn’t a charitable reading of “our common life should be defined in such a way that it includes the contributions of all the religious and philosophical traditions within it . . . through critical debate,” interpret this to mean that critical debate is the filter to apply to various traditions to make them acceptable to modern standards? People cling to their traditional identity, no matter how self-defeating, so perhaps filtering through critical debate is the only reasonable option.
However, this brings up the point that many religionists and apologists don’t look kindly on critical debate at all. In fact, criticising Islam often brings the charge of “Islamophobia,” requests to “hush leave the poor beleaguered migrants alone,” or even accusations of racism. So I’m not exactly sure what Ramadan is up to here. If he is welcoming critical debate, shouldn’t he be lauding people like you, OB? What exactly does he mean by critical debate, and by whom?
“The surface of his writing gleams with reason, yet you can’t avoid getting caught on the thorns.”
And like the pope, both engage in polishing turds. But it’s shit all the way to the centre.
Emily, well, I’m not very good at charitable reading when it comes to Tariq Ramadan and other apologists for theism. I think what he means by critical debate is a veneer of respectability with no substance at all.
Why? Why should any contribution be religious at all? Surely anything brought to the debate that can be justifiably identified as a specifically Islamic/Christian/Jewish contribution, is by definition _not_ universal.
Ah, but for Ramadan and his ilk in Muslim Brotherhood, what is specifically Islamic is universal. This is Eric’s point in his first post about how Ramadan smuggles Islam (or at least the MB’s interpretation, which too many in academia and politics assume is the only interpretation) into “our” “new” narrative. It’s a nice unmentioned intellectual two-step.
And Ramadan wonders why people call him disingenuous?
I would also note how Ramadan automatically assumes the “Muslim presence” has something to do with (his brand of) Islam. Which is, of course, part of what he’s trying to do – convince people that there is something inherently and primordially “Muslim” about people of Muslim background living in Europe, when there’s absolutely no reason to assume so.
Again, it’s a neat trick, but he really shouldn’t wonder why people think he’s deceptive.
I couldn’t help thinking that this must be what Toyota salesmen sound like nowadays.
Rob-B, virtual high five!
Re: the Graun’s islamophilia. Orwell had similar problems with the old left whenever he found fault with Stalin. It’s in the cultural DNA of rather dim leftists (i.e. the ones who are nothing like me) to find any militant ideology that’s anti-Western and cleave to it, regardless of how brutal it is. Shirley MacLaine’s little visit to Mao’s China springs to mind.
Valdemar – right. And the fellow travellers of Stalinism were made to look knaves and/or fools by gross historical events. I hate to think what gross historical events it would take to make the fellow travellers of Islamism look knaves and/or fools.
I guess I was trying to say that even with a charitable reading, TR shoots himself in the foot. I think he is trying to please everybody, thereby pleasing nobody.
Btw. . . has anyone seen the entire pamphlet of which TR’s piece is about? “Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis.” Looks kind of puke-inducing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/20/citizen-ethics-time-of-crisis
I actually think that the persistent publication of such stuff is part of a deliberate strategy to maintain reader involvement in Guardian Unlimited. By consistently giving a platform to controversial views in high-investment debates (religion, crime, climate change etc) they provoke comment and keep things churning – and by keeping readers involved in this way they keep the place looking like “part of the internet” and not just “an old-fashioned newspaper published online”. It’s essentially institutionalized trolling.
Yes, Outeast, it is a kind of ‘concern trolling’, and no more laudable than that perpetrated on atheist blogs by religious fundies.
Yes, the parallel with Stalinism and the Popular Front has occurred to me often – and I suppose the non-Islamist left (what its enemies are pleased to call, sneeringly, ‘decents’) is parallel to the Trotskyist or semi-Trotskyist left in the 30s. The Partisan Review crowd. I’ve always had a soft spot for them.
There is a certain weird overlap in the bogus populism of both – the Popular Front and the Islamophilic Front. They both go in for a lot of patronizing unconvincing evasive bullshit – doubtless because both have to ignore or conceal a lot of nasty realities.
Truth be told, Ramadan’s article sums up much of why I find an awful lot of religious “moderates” and “liberals” to be annoying, even though another part of me wishes that the moderates and liberals would “win out” over the traditionalists and conservatives. But I’m not going to refrain from criticism of positions I find intellectually lacking just because I happen to agree with many of their end positions.
With the traditionalists and conservatives and/or fundamentalists, you know EXACTLY what they’re proposing. You know that when a Saudi scholar talks about “enjoining good and forbidding evil” this includes things like forcing women to wear certain “modest” clothing and to submit to the traditional Islamic rules concerning women’s place; you know they’ll consider homosexual acts to be an abomination probably deserving death, you know they will have no truck with any questioning of Islamic doctrines or scripture. Similarly for traditional Catholics and other conservative Christians — you KNOW what they’re specifically for and against.
By contrast, a lot of the moderates and liberals come up with a lot of stuff that superficially sounds good, but trying to find out what they specifically think about X, Y and Z, that’s much more difficult. Islam is more prone to this, I think, because so much of the religion DOES consist of specific laws, though of course it’s not the only religion that does so. Thus, when somebody like Ramadan talks about “justice” or “diversity” or whatever, you have no idea whether this includes the traditional Islamic attitudes towards women, gays, etc., and Ramadan tends to be very slippery about mentioning his own opinions, at least with Western audiences. As another example, Catholic liberals will sometimes go on about “social justice” and “human dignity,” which sound good but turn out to include banning abortion and euthanasia, in addition to more congenial to liberals support for universal health care and the like.
Another point — attempts by liberals to bring on religious believers with traditional views often lead to a subtle, or not so subtle, shift in emphasis. The adoption of groups like the MCB by certain parts of the British left means that feminist and gay concerns are not infrequently thrown under the bus in order to appease these new “partners.” If 40% of the support for health care reform comes from devout Catholics, the matter of abortion access will probably be played down and silently cut back or eliminated, or else carving out exemptions for Catholic hospitals as a quid pro quo for their support. The very act of legitimizing religious views by accepting moderate or liberal religious rationales can have this effect, because once you have them on board, it’s far more difficult to say no to the concerns of their co-religionists who aren’t quite so liberal.
I don’t know if I explained that well, but I haven’t really seen it examined. Sure, it’s politics, but that can have a destructive impact on real people who have to accommodate themselves to their religious partners’ “concerns.”
Hell yes you explained it well. Exactly, about Ramadan being very slippery about his own views. I’ve criticized him for that in the past, so kind of took it for granted here – but that’s what the whole piece is about: claiming that Islam is Good and liberal and so on, without ever spelling out what he means.
And absolutely, about the shift in emphasis. I hope I’ve examined that here! It’s the point of the Gita Sahgal issue, for instance. It’s also why I loathe the Blairs and their absurd pretense that Catholicism can be liberal.
Actually, B&W is one of the best sites when it comes to pointing out that sort of thing, which makes the lack of it in some other groups and sites so obvious!
This is one reason why it can be so irritating when religious liberals complain about how awful it is that atheists criticize their religion as irrational and ridiculous when they share similar views on certain issues. Well, the problem is that the entire notion that people should live their lives and order their societies in accordance with the divine will revealed in some text or tradition, whether that’s conceived as “liberal” or “conservative,” is exactly what the atheists have a problem with, and simply having the “right” position on certain issues is not the be-all and end-all. The problem is that once you start taking on board the nice, “progressive” views of liberal Catholics, for instance, that’s very hard to separate from the hierarchy and institution, and soon you’ve got the whole Vatican in the tent with you, not least because people don’t want to offend their co-activists, who get upset when the Vatican as a whole is torn apart by atheists. Or liberal Christians, Jews or Muslims who get upset when their holy books are disparaged — “you must understand the good and progressive ideas in them!” “Respect creep” sets in and you know where that leads.
Lisa, I second OB. You explained it very well indeed. It’s exactly this ability to open the door for an indeterminate multiplicity of views, some of which are brutal and extreme, that makes apparently liberal religion dangerous.
There is, however, a difference. Some people are genuinely liberal, and do their best to hold liberal positions and distinguish their own positions from conservative members of their own religion, but others, like Ramadan, are not liberal at all, and the slippage between the apparent reasonableness at the surface, and the real conservatism that underlies it, makes it particularly insidious.
What is really insidious about it is that an enormous number of people are prepared to defend Islam – in fact, I suspect that far more Western liberals are ready to accept Islam than are prepared to defend Christianity – even fairly extreme varieties; so the apparent liberalism of a Tariq Ramadan – with its barbs and thorns quilted beneath newspeak liberalism – is that much more difficult to oppose.
The lessons of Troy are still relevant. For Troy it was the Greeks, for the West it is Islam. We should beware it when it comes bearing gifts. Lest there should be any mistake about it, it is more dangerous than Christianity. We know the ways of the church. Of Islam we are largely ignorant. Christianity sounds irrational to many on the left. It’s almost beyond belief, but Islam does not so readily seem so. It should. Just read the news. But it’s easier to excuse, because it hasn’t yet done that much harm to the West. Just wait. It’s just begun.
Well, it IS a bit disquieting to see well-meaning, liberal people defend attitudes and practices in Islam and Islamic societies that they would never tolerate coming from Christian clerics. There are probably several reasons for this, though:
1. It doesn’t affect their lives personally in the West, and is frankly unlikely to do so, so it’s pretty risk-free, whereas Christian groups are perceived as a direct, immediate threat. Thus, what might seem to be a horrific threat to one’s lifestyle coming from some Christian group like Focus on the Family becomes a quaint cultural practice coming from an Islamic cleric, nothing to get too worried about. (Most are unlikely to personally KNOW any Muslims affected by it, in any case.)
2. There’s the “don’t pick on the oppressed” sentiment, along with “don’t judge other cultures so harshly” attitude, which can devolve into “what else can you expect of those poor oppressed people?” paternalism when it comes to defending the indefensible. Were Muslims by and large white Europeans, of course, attitudes would be much harsher towards things like religiously-based misogyny, homophobia, and wanting to impose religion on the society at large.
3. There is the “we don’t know enough about Islam to criticize it” attitude, which can be a laudable sentiment…unless taken too far, of course!
4. A desire to be seen as tolerant, respectful, and understanding to certain communities. Which is all well and good…until you start regularly knuckling under to threats of violence, or even the fear of threats of violence.
There are no doubt plenty of other reasons; these are the most immediate ones I can think of. Of course, I hasten to add, it’s not all liberals or leftists, most of whom would never think of daft notions like defending Iran’s mullahs on the grounds that they’re “anti-imperialist” or sucking up to domestic-violence-condoning clerics, but there are always some who seem to have lost their minds.