Who’s Afraid of Paul Berman?

Stephen Schwartz unloads on Paul Berman in an essay titled Who’s Afraid of Paul Berman? His response to Paul Berman’s article in the New Republic titled Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramadan is mostly one long ad hominem attack on Berman.

Schwartz, Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, DC, has a beef with Berman. In short, it is that Berman misses the point that in the current struggle within Islam, it is the “reformists” who are the threat and the traditionalists who represent moderation, tolerance, and peace. Berman is attacked because he only half understands this. It seems that Schwartz attacks Berman because he does not understand well enough what he is writing about:

The Brotherhood and Ramadan are alike in that while they call themselves reformers, they are really radical reformationists, calling for a fundamentalist reformism that would supposedly return Islam to what they imagine it to have been at the time of the Prophet Muhammad. They are reformers in the manner of the Central European religious extremists of the Protestant Reformation—they justify bloodshed for what they consider the purification of the faith. Three countries spawned the ideologies that most support jihadist Islam today—the Saudi Arabia of Wahhabism, the Egypt of the Brotherhood, and the India-Pakistan of Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi—whom Ramadan explicitly defends and Berman claims to understand. In all three cases, the traditional Islam of the past 1,400 years—embodied in a pluralistic view of Islamic law, support for Sufi spirituality, and an emphasis on prayer rather than politics—is the target. Ramadan himself jeers at the Islam that has evolved over 14 centuries as “scholastic traditionalism,” which Berman notes. But neither he nor Berman mentions that “scholastic traditionalists” are under attack today in many Muslim countries precisely because they represent the moderate Islamic religious heritage.

The “modernizers” and “reformers” who Tariq Ramadan defends represent something apart from that patrimony—a perverse vision of ur-Islam “Protestantized” into what I have called “cracked modernity.” Much as evangelical Christian sects preach a rejection of the contemporary world through the medium of stadium rock concerts, so do Islamic fundamentalist reformers make use of contemporary conduits, like satellite television, for disseminating their retrograde worldview. This gap between moderate, traditional religion and radical reform is easy for Muslims, who participate in this history, to grasp. But it is very difficult for non-Muslims to understand. To the Western liberal, tradition is bad and reform is good, a dichotomy that has befuddled the author of Terror and Liberalism into speaking of Straussian “double discourses” to account for Ramadan’s contradictory positions before Western and Islamic audiences.

Why Schwartz is so “mad” at Berman, I don’t quite understand. Berman provides a valuable service by getting us closer to an understanding of that which Schwartz wants us to realize. It seems Berman is attacked for acts of omission rather than commission. But isn’t it better that the facts that Berman brings to light be brought to light? The strange blaming of Berman by Schwartz for “not understanding Islam enough” seems to be more attached to some kind of frustration on Schwartz’s part with the Islamists.

The last point I will make is hard to do because some will say it is unfair. But, Schwartz is a Muslim convert and a follower of Sufis. He is an enemy of the Wahhabis and the Brotherhood. So why is he attacking Berman who is also an enemy of both? Because Berman has published a number of articles on Islam and these have not measured up to Schwartz’s standards by seeming to not have gone far enough.

Schwartz makes some very points but they recede to the background, drowned out by his anger and ad hominem attacks. If only Schwartz could focus on the real enemy as most of us non-Muslims would agree with him on most of his (non ad hominem) points.