There have been a number of posts in the blogosphere about the long cover article in the New Republic titled “The Islamist, the journalist, and the defense of liberalism. Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?” by Paul Berman. It has been a long time coming, but what Berman writes really needed to be said. The clarity he brings into focus about Tariq Ramadan - but also to what he says about Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash and by extension, those who still cling to the multicultural, relativist “hope” for coexistence with the Islamic “other” now present in Europe - should be required reading for every intellectual in Europe and every leftist who sees in Ramadan a "saviour" from the knife of the Jihadi and the chance that the hated conservative or, female truth teller like Hirsi Ali, might actually be correct.
First Ramadan. What Berman describes is Ramadan’s true nature. He is not an untruthful person or someone who hides his agenda. It is actually quite transparent. He is civil. He speaks the language of multiculturalism, or anti-globalization, of anti-racism, of the persecuted, of the minority. In other words, all the things that the European Mainstream will fall for. But he remains an Islamist, even if he calls himself a Salafi Reformist. It turns out, however, that his version of "reform" does not match the type of reform that most people in the West would recognize as a "reform." In fact, this means that:
Salafi reformism, judging from Qutb and Ramadan, turns out to be a kind of Rousseauianism. There is a pure and authentic way of living, which is the Muslim way. And yet the Muslims, who were born free, are everywhere in chains. The Muslims are oppressed by what Ramadan calls "a Western aggressive cultural invasion"--which is the kind of language that Qutb liked to use half a century ago (and al-Banna before him). A very great danger arises from the Western colonization of minds," in Ramadan's phrase, by which he means the influence of television. This was Qutb's worry exactly, even in the pre-television age, which he described as "the cultural influences which had penetrated my mind." And so the road back to the pure and authentic way of living must be found.
[…]
Ramadan wants a share of the public space, not just a share of the private sphere. Or more than wants: he demands a share of the public space. A properly Muslim life has a physical and communal quality, which must be lived in physical space, and this will require modifications in the existing European secularism. Therefore he wants--he needs--to stick a few sharp elbows into the larger society, demanding his extra space. And does he dream in secret of something larger? Maybe he does, on some theological level, which would not be unusual. All great religions dream great (and dangerous) dreams.
How that squares with the secular European multicultural dream one can only wonder. It is certainly not the vision of reform that I would think liberals like Buruma and Garton Ash would want to see. Why it is that otherwise enlightened people like Buruma and Garton Ash believe that in people like Ramadan, they have found the future, rather than people like Hirsi Ali? Berman notes Buruma’s endorsement:
All in all, Buruma judged that, despite the controversies and accusations, Ramadan the philosopher offers, in Buruma's words, "a reasoned but traditionalist approach to Islam" based on "values that are as universal as those of the European Enlightenment." He judged that Ramadan's values, although "neither secular, nor always liberal," offer "an alternative to violence, which is, in the end, reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without fear." This was not quite a ringing endorsement. Still, it was an endorsement.
I think the answer has to with the bit about "violence." It is that "alternative to violence" that attracts Buruma and Garton Ash. That is, of course, in addition to the overal reasonableness and personablness of Ramadan, his seeming desire for engagement, his charm in person, his "agreeableness." In short, he is the representative of Islam that people like Buruma and Garton Ash are dying to meet with, not the killer of van Gogh or London Tube bombers. They are desperately seeing interlocutors and people like Ramadan, and Hassan -al-Banna's (Muslim Brotherhood Founder) younger brother Gamal al-Banna to show that, "yes, we do have people we can do business with." In fact:
... by February 2007, in his Times magazine profile, face-to-face with Tariq Ramadan and his slightly complicated family relation to Qutb, Buruma could hardly bestir himself to say anything at all about extremist ideas and their consequences.
Ramadan offered his misleading explanation that Qutb and Grandfather al-Banna never knew each other, and Buruma left it at that. Salafi reformism? Buruma failed to notice Qutb's prominence among its intellectual leaders. Anti-Semitism? Ramadan is "one of the few Muslim intellectuals to speak out." And why one of the few? It was as if, without realizing what had happened, Buruma had quietly come to accept Ramadan's overall thesis, and had begun to look upon Ramadan as the voice of the masses, and the masses as a population hopelessly steeped in the vapors of authenticity; and had come also to look upon the liberal intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds as insignificant because, in their liberalism, they are demonstrably inauthentic. Ramadan ended up being "one of the few Muslim intellectuals" because the other Muslim intellectuals, being liberals, did not count. Or worse, the other Muslim intellectuals, being liberals, sometimes stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the non-Muslim liberals, whom Buruma had decided to dismiss as neocons.
This is a pretty big development, if you stop to think about it, and one that might explain the oddly ingenuous press that Ramadan has been receiving. For if people like Ramadan and the other Islamists do speak for the oppressed and the downtrodden, and if Ramadan is a pretty good guy compared with most of his fellow salafi reformists, then shouldn't we make every effort to view Ramadan in the best of lights? He is better than Qutb, after all--so why bring up the troubling parts? Anyway, even if Qutb is a nightmare, wouldn't we be better off not inquiring too closely into the views of someone like van Gogh's murderer? Wouldn't we be better off trying to be, from a sociological point of view, halfway sympathetic? Those millions of anti-war marchers made exactly such a choice, at least on that single day in February 2003: to look on the march's Islamist leaders as the proper representatives of an oppressed community. Shouldn't we ferret out an upbeat definition of salafi reformism? Shouldn't we find a way to conclude, along with Buruma, that "we agreed on most
issues"?
A sincere person could stroke his chin for quite a while over these questions. But then, the questions do express an attitude, which is bound to congeal into a lens, sooner or later, which might not lead to the sharpest of journalistic reportage. And if, in Buruma's journalism, a degree of fuzziness seems to have obscured his view of Ramadan and the Jewish intellectuals, what is likely to have happened in regard to Ramadan and the question of violence, a much bigger issue--this question that Buruma has resolved with the simple and confident remark about Ramadan offering "an alternative to violence"?
In fact, it is worse than that. Violence, in fact, is something Ramadan refuses to dismiss. In regards to the issue of the Muslim punishment of "stoning," Ramadan has refused to condemn it and - amazingly - a great number of intellectuals like Buruma and Garton Ash have in fact praised Ramadan for this stand. If it is anything, this is the Fatal Conceit of Multiculturalism. Berman comments:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan seemed to Buruma rather similar in one respect. "Her mission, too, is to spread universal values. She, too, speaks of reform"--though I have to interrupt these quotations to recall that Buruma's understanding of Ramadan's universal values is based on a philosophical miscomprehension, and his notion of reform in connection to Ramadan reflects a simple factual error. He continued: "But she has renounced her belief in Islam. She says that Islam is backward and perverse. As a result, she has had more success with secular non-Muslims than with the kind of people who shop in Brick Lane." But--this was Buruma's implication--that is not the case with Ramadan. His own credibility has remained intact.
In short, Ramadan made the right decision in refusing to condemn the practice of stoning women to death--not for Roy's reason (a principled blow for secularism) but for political reasons: to maintain his viability on streets like Brick Lane. This ought to be a familiar argument--it was more or less the argument that Sartre invoked in order to explain why he refused to condemn the Soviet Union. Sartre invited his audiences to think of the industrial suburb of Paris called Billancourt, where the ignorant workers believed in communism and the Soviet future--and he did not want to demoralize the downtrodden, to désespérer Billancourt. And so Sartre bit his tongue; if the workers were going to learn the truth about the Soviets, it was not going to be from him. And Ramadan is right not to désespérer Brick Lane by offering a simple straight-out condemnation of violence against women.
Needless to say, yet another positive evaluation ran in the Times Book Review under Giry's byline. Giry argued that Ramadan's refusal to condemn stoning could be sympathetically regarded as, in her words, "an expression of his view that each society must decide for itself how to put into practice the values of Islam." An argument for self-determination. It is almost comic to notice that Roy, Buruma, and Giry disagree entirely about why Ramadan was right to take the position that he did, but everyone agrees that, whatever the rationale, he was right. To go on television and unambiguously condemn the stoning to death of Muslim women--surely everyone can see how wrong that would have been, especially for any progressive person who cares about secular values, oppression, poverty, and colonialism. This is amazing.
The website signandsight.com, run by Perlentaucher, ran a polemic by Pascal Bruckner in January which attacked Ian Buruma and Garton Ash called Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists? This sparked a number of response and counter-responses which siganandsight.com called the Multicultural issue. For reasons not known to me, Signandsight.com gave Buruma and Garton Ash the “last word.” In their “Final Rejoinder,” they make strong points about how Bruckner:
cannot resist the temptation of lashing out at things we never said. Neither of us ever proposed that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a fanatic on human rights issues. We, like others, are concerned about her simplistic, monolithic view of Islam. Not the same thing at all.
This might be semantically correct but it completely misses the point made by Brucker (even if polemical). Bruckner’s point, and Berman’s as well, is that through the picture they paint, through the quotes they use, through the people they meet with, through the images they prevent, Buruma and Garton Ash achieve in their overall prose what they do not technically say in exact words. If anything, that is the problem of their “rejoinder” – they cannot see the point they are making through their words.
...But Murder in Amsterdam is mostly filled, in connection to Hirsi Ali, with one argument or insult after another, accusing her of being a fanatic, of entertaining intellectual arguments that are substantially no different from those of van Gogh's murderer ("two fundamentalisms"), of retaining the zealousness of the Muslim Brotherhood in her own arguments against the principles of the Muslim Brotherhood, of exaggerating the dangers facing her, of being strident and arrogant, of being an aristocratic snob ("It was this wave, this gentle gesture of disdain, this almost aristocratic dismissal of a noisome inferior, that upset her critics more than anything"), and so on: pages written with an unmistakable flash of anger, relative to Buruma's normally phlegmatic manner.
The chapters in Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin--the book with the subtitle about the "Emancipation Proclamation"--carry such titles as "Genital Mutilation Must Not be Tolerated," "How to Deal With Domestic Violence More Effectively," and "Standing Up for Your Rights!" And yet one of the chapters is titled "Let Us Have a Voltaire"--and this was too much for Buruma. He wrote: "Ayaan Hirsi Ali was no Voltaire. For Voltaire had flung his insults at the Catholic Church, one of the two most powerful institutions of eighteenth-century France, while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe." Voltaire was brave--but Hirsi Ali? She is a bully.
Why has Buruma done this, and at such length, too, and repeatedly--three articles condemning Hirsi Ali in The New York Times alone, apart from his book? His main ostensible complaint, as expressed in the Times magazine, seems absurdly tiny. He remarks that, because of her Voltairean insults at Islam, she has frittered away any chance she might have had to make friends and influence people on streets like Brick Lane. Is this true? I wonder if bookish young Muslim women in the immigrant zones of Europe aren't sneaking a few glances at Hirsi Ali's writings and making brave resolutions for themselves. Anne Applebaum contemplated this possibility in The Washington Post, in the course of noting what a large campaign has been gotten up against Hirsi Ali. In Holland, the novelist Margriet de Moor, in her own contribution to the recent debate over Buruma's journalism, has insisted that in fact Hirsi Ali has been tremendously effective in speaking to Muslim women. "And it was claimed that she did not reach her target group?" De Moor thought otherwise: "Secretly, though, all of them swallowed what she said, their ears burning." Ramadan himself has ruefully observed that the overwhelming majority of European Muslims are far from devout--though it should be added that in many places the devout minority have intimidated the majority.
Still, everyone can grant that Hirsi Ali, in taking her Voltairean stand against Islam,has put herself in a less than ideal position for addressing the devout minority, and everyone who has come under their influence. But why this should arouse Buruma's animosity is hard to know. Salman Rushdie has not endeared himself either in some neighborhoods--which is not a count against him, given that, normally speaking, novelists in our modern day have no reason at all to pander to the religious reactionaries. Hirsi Ali is a tractarian and a memoirist, and it is not obvious why the rules for her should be any different. Her entire purpose in fleeing to the Netherlands, as she has explained eloquently and at length, was to escape a life of submitting to other people's reactionary opinions and to go bang the table on behalf of individual freedom, and here she is doing what she has intended to do. Why the attacks, then?
People like Buruma and Garton Ash bring to mind people like Charles Lindbergh and Bernard Shaw and the Webbs and the Duke of Windsor and many sordid others who adhered to Nazism or Communism out of self hate, romanticism of the “other,” and, sadly, the draw to power, unvarnished, which has as a part the masking of fear.
The Rise of Islamism, in the Middle East and in Europe, and the Terrorism and wars that the breakdown of the Middle East has generated, seems to have elicited a similar response in the West: fellow travelers hoping to profit from a rising power and; those who fear the destruction and the abyss of their “weak debased societies” and so wish to join what bin Laden called the “strong horse,” and; most sad of all, those relativists like Garton Ash and Buruma, so insulated form the true tragedy, pain and violence that generally mark human life, that they truly believe in the warped idea of “universal relativism,” that the Western enlightenment is no different and of no greater value than barbarian cultures.
I think the saddest thing about our age is the replacement of tragedy by irony. Berman noted this in his comments on Buruma:
But mostly these passages in Hirsi Ali's books raise the issue of women's rights, and not from an outsider's point of view, regardless of how many times she has been denounced for making herself an outsider to Muslim life. Hers is a story marked by knives--the knife at her own genital mutilation, and at her sister's; the knife at the murder of her friend and colleague, pinning to his chest the sheet of paper threatening her own life. This is not a Swiss professor! Here is the actual insider; the real thing. I suppose that all this unironic indignation can only be annoying in the extreme to a certain kind of refined sensibility. Something about those knives takes away the quality of abstraction that allows a social issue to be shrugged off. It is always good to be subtle and nuanced, but Hirsi Ali's writings have the effect of making a large number of nuanced subtleties look ridiculous.
I think this is part of the denial that we see today: The sense that ‘Geez, haven’t we abolished war and forbidden this kind of brutality through the United Nations? How dare this female present me with an undeniable example of the survival of barbarism! I don’t want your tragedy! We are to go forward, not backward!’
Garton Ash’s and Buruma defense of engagement with the Ramadan’s and al-Banna’s world is the engagement of the deluded. Fear, and attraction to the powerful, are strong motivators of men’s souls and it is not surprising that those who helped win the cold war do not want to lose their position in the next war. It is this generations' “La Trahison des clercs” moment. Berman writes:
About Hirsi Ali we do not have to wonder: where does she stand on the question of stoning women to death? Or on the obligation for husbands to beat their wives? Read one page by her and you will know the answer; and if you read two pages, you might begin to suspect that, on the television screens of France,the man who defended the oppressed of the oppressed in the poorest neighborhoods of Europe was Nicolas Sarkozy. But that has got to be the problem from a perspective like Buruma's. This talk of women's rights--doesn't it point ultimately in directions that ought to be regarded as (here is the mystery of our present moment) conservative? Better the seventh century than Nicolas Sarkozy.
If there is an intellectual establishment, and I suppose there is, the attacks on Hirsi Ali radiate from its center. And this, the campaign against Hirsi Ali--this, like the anti-Semitic mob assault during the Paris peace march of 2003, or like the spectacle of millions of Britons marching under the leadership of an Islamist organization, or like the calm discussions in The New York Times of why it would be wrong to condemn with any vigor the stoning of women to death--this does represent something new. Here is the new development among journalists and intellectuals, the development that Ramadan's career has served to illuminate. Something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. A sustained attack on an authentic liberal dissident crying out against injustices in remote parts of the world and even in the back streets of Western Europe, a sustained attack that appears nearly to have erased the very mention of women's oppression and the struggle for women's rights from discussion--no, this could not have happened yesterday, except on the extreme right. This is a new event. This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world.
Further:
Buruma and Garton Ash, Bruckner concluded, had fallen for the intellectual miasmas of the postmodern sensibility, and the miasmas had led, via the errors of relativism and an indiscriminate multiculturalism, to the simplest of philosophical mistakes. This was the inability to draw even the most elementary of distinctions. In the postmodern idea, the Enlightenment has come to be looked upon as merely one more set of cultural prejudices, no better and very likely rather worse than other sets of cultural prejudices--a zealotry that is unable to control its own excesses. From this point of view, someone like Hirsi Ali, who grew up in an atmosphere of Islamist radicalism and the Muslim Brotherhood in Africa and has taken up a new outlook committed to rationalism and individual freedom, has merely gone from one fundamentalism to another--not much different, seen in this light, from van Gogh's murderer.
But this means only that Hirsi Ali's critics have lost the ability to distinguish between a fanatical murderer and a rational debater. Here is "the racism of the anti-racists," in Bruckner's phrase. It is the racism that, while pretending to stand up for the oppressed, would deny to someone from Africa the right to make use of the same Enlightenment tools of analysis that Europeans are welcome to use. Bruckner took note of the nasty personal tone with which Hirsi Ali had been discussed--the masculine condescension, to mention one aspect, which scarcely anybody could have missed in Garton Ash's New York Review essay, where he suggested that Hirsi Ali's literary success must be owed significantly to her looks.
"It is astonishing," Bruckner wrote, "that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment of Europe's intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy." This was not a gentle criticism. Then again, Bruckner was hardly alone in making these points. It must have been depressing for Buruma to see both the Turkish writer Necla Kelek and Bassam Tibi weigh in with their own ferocious criticisms. Kelek saw in Buruma's writings a new set of stereotypes about Muslims that had prevented him from being able to notice a series of dangers--for instance, the increasing problem in Europe of Muslim men preventing their own women from receiving medical care from male physicians. Tibi, without being much of a fan of Hirsi Ali, was indignant that Buruma could not tell the difference between Islam and Islamism, between the religion and the totalitarian ideology. Tibi was indignant that Buruma had conceded to Tariq Ramadan the right to speak for Islam; and indignant that Buruma could not see the virtue of a genuinely new kind of Europeanized Islam, which can hardly be salafi.
Paul Hollander published a book called Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society in 1981 and it has retained its relevance. I read it in the later 1990s while reading up on the end of communism and was truly astounded and his tales of delusion and self hatred.
Sadly, it is still relevant today, though the enemy has changed:
The attitudes and activities of many present-day Western intellectuals suggest that they believe in the possibility of maintaining their comparatively charmed existence, which enables them to remain at once critical and hostile toward the social system and privileged in their material circumstances, occupational status, and freedom of expression. In short, they seem to believe that “repressive tolerance” will persist and remain quite tolerable. Above all, they persist in taking the freedom of expression for granted. As Nicola Chiaromonte has bserved: “we in the West no longer know and want to know what freedom is and are more or less of the opinion that political freedom… is a sort of commodity. It is one of the many commodities that our highly advanced society lavishes on us, and we use it because it is there, as we might use a car or a washing machine. But even if it were not there, no great harm would be done.” There are many intellectuals who would reject the suggestion that a political system that assures them (and others) the freedom of expression-which is the mainstay of their professional and moral existence-deserves a measure of support. Yet despite their dependence on such freedom, they seem to care surprisingly little about it and have been capable of admiring societies, as was shown earlier, where such freedom does not exist.
The more far-reaching question is whether or not, willingly or inadvertently, Western intellectuals will contribute to the destruction of their relatively free
societies, in part because of their illusions about other societies and their recurrent fantasies of new forms of liberation and collective gratification. If, as a Soviet émigré observer of American attitudes noted, “In the nineteenth century electorates could afford the luxury of not knowing societies different from their own and of electing statesmen who hardly knew anything about them either,” this unfortunately is not longer the case. Ignorance and illusions about other societies (some of which are quite unfriendly) coupled with the refusal of many Western intellectuals to play a part in the legitimation of their own societies or to five them moral support, may yet have tangible consequences. It is hard to say how dramatic, since, obviously, the attitudes of intellectuals are not the only factor which affect the health and survival of these societies. One may note, for example, in the United States, the rise of a generation (or more than one) of educated young people unable to conceive of external political threats to their country and some them ready to revive the old British slogan of “better red than dead,” claiming that “there is nothing worth dying for” and, more specifically, that “the consequences of Soviet aggression would be incomparable to those of nuclear war,” as a few Amherst College students argued recently. The revival of the anti-draft movement certainly suggests that many members of the younger generation, and especiallythe more educated among them, are unwilling to take any steps (even registering for a possible future draft) that may in fact remove the alternatives of surrender to Soviet pressures or nuclear war, that is, the choice between “red” and “dead.” A slogan of the current opponents of draft registration, “no draft, no war,” epitomizes an attitude which puts the blame on the United States for past and future military conflicts and adamantly refuses to acknowledge that there are unfriendly forces out in the world which, Mr. Bernstein’s not withstanding, have shown little inclination to equate military weakness with either moral or political strength.
I think it’s time for a revision…
