Tariq Ramadan: The Muslim Martin Luther?

The author of "To Be a European Muslim" discusses terrorism, the problem of Saudi Arabia and whether Islam can peacefully coexist with the West.

By Paul Donnelly

Feb. 15, 2002 | Tariq Ramadan is not a household name in the United States, but the Swiss professor could be one of the most important intellectuals in the world. Ramadan's thinking, his methods and his personal history are all connected to the same question: Islam's encounter with the modern world. Can the youngest of the world's three great monotheisms co-exist harmoniously with the Western world and its Enlightenment legacy? Or is it fated to be reactionary, closed off from the world, an excuse for terrorism and failure?

Ramadan's books, mostly in French, focus on the growth of Muslim populations in Western Europe -- that area once called Christendom. For America, founded on the separation of church and state, the presence of religious minorities is simply a fact of life. Centuries of Americanizing newcomers (and expanding American identity to include them) tends to obscure how revolutionary -- and rare -- that is for the rest of the world. The questions in Ramadan's English-language book "To Be a European Muslim" identify just how profound a shift being Muslim in a non-Muslim country is for Islam itself: "Early in Islamic history ... [jurists ruled that] it was not possible for Muslims to live [outside of Muslim-ruled states] except under some mitigating circumstances. What bearing does this have on those Muslims who came to work and are now living in the West with their families? What about their children and their nationality? Can they ... be true, genuine and complete citizens, giving allegiance -- through the national constitution -- to a non-Islamic country?"

At the start of the 21st century, there can be few more important questions.

Ramadan's theological inquiries cut to the heart of the motivations of the Sept. 11 terrorists, of the apocalyptic claims of Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iranian mullahs. Above all, however, they are concerned with that disputed terrain where Islamic tradition collides with modernity.

Ramadan has the credentials and credibility to confront Islam's modern identity on its own terms. Muslim scholars recognize that no one is more orthodox in his methods and sources, or more innovative in his conclusions. He is genuinely radical, rather than reactionary. Quiet, thoughtful and deeply religious, he closes an e-mail: "May the Light protect you and go with you and all the people you love."

Ramadan's personal history is inextricably tied to his thinking. Born in Switzerland in 1962, Ramadan received a classical Islamic education (he wrote his dissertation on Nietzsche) and went on to become a high school principal and later a professor at prestigious European universities (College of Geneva and Fribourg University). Ramadan's grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schooteacher and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the journalist Milton Viorst called "the flagship of fundamentalism in the Arab world." It was al-Banna who most effectively connected Islamic fundamentalism with the struggle against colonialism. That struggle still reverberates in countless ways today -- many of them deeply alarming to his grandson, interviewed by phone from Geneva.

If Islam is beginning what in a Christian context would be called a Reformation, you might be cast for the Martin Luther role. Do you have a list that you would nail to a church door?

I don't have a list. I know what might be the priorities when we think about reform and revival within the Islamic landscape. And the first thing for me is the way Muslims today are reading our text. There are a lot of misconceptions within the Islamic communities. We have to come back to a very thorough understanding of what it does mean to have a text coming from God. This is an Islamic credo, and at the same time we have to know that some principles are universal and eternal, and some prescriptions should be understood in a specific context.

It is also important to understand the way that scholars, from the very beginning, tried to present some normative tools to read the Quran. For example, when someone says there is no difference in Islam between politics and religion, we have to say that the sources are the same, for example the Quran and the Sunna [lessons from the life of the Prophet], but the methodologies are different. This is the problem we have today in the Muslim world : we repeat slogans, but we don't know exactly what they mean.

When I am speaking about worship and social affairs, there is a crucial difference. In worship we have to do what is written and in social affairs everything is open, except what is strictly forbidden. And these differences are extremely important.

Islam is now the excuse for the world's premier us vs. them ideology.

Yes.

You wrote in "To Be a European Muslim" that Muslims need to get past the us vs. them worldview, the old concept of Dar al-Islam, the Islamic world, opposed to the non-Muslim world (the Dar al-Harb, the House of War), and propose the new concept of a House of Testimony, a Space of Witness, available to Muslims anywhere.

That is exactly what I was saying about the way we are reading the text. Some Muslims are saying, "We are more Muslim when we are against the West or the Western values" -- as if our parameter to assess our behavior is our distance from or opposition to the West. They are promoting this kind of binary vision of the world that comes from a very long time back in the Muslim psyche. We have to get rid of this kind of understanding and evaluate if an act or a situation is Islamic or not, on the scale of the Islamic ethics and values per se, not against any other civilization

Our values are not based on "otherness." Our values are universal. We have to come to the understanding that it's not "us against them," it's us on the scale of our own values. This defines the place I live in. That is to say, my role in this world is to understand that I am a witness to the Islamic message before mankind.

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