Martin Amis on the Kulturkampf in Islam

Martin Amis

Glancing askance

at something amiss?

(Image from Wikipedia)

In light of yesterday's post, this remark by Martin Amis in an article, "The age of horrorism," published the year before last in The Observer (Sunday September 10 2006), is apropos:

Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.

I have at times over the past seven years felt much as does Amis, usually when I feel something amiss as I read the statements of even moderate Muslims. At least, I'm told that they're 'moderate' . . . until I read something that they actually say. London mayor and secular leftist Ken Livingstone has assured us that Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a moderate . . . but I then find myself reading some of the 'moderate' Qaradawi's 'moderate' words:

Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do.

This defense of suicide bombing, quoted in a BBC News article, "Controversial preacher with 'star status'" (July 7, 2004), was uttered by our 'moderate' Muslim, a scholar even, the eminent Yusuf al-Qaradawi, but if he's a 'moderate,' then who's an Islamist?

Yet, I also read of widespread, profound disenchantment with Al Qaeda in places that experienced their brand of Islam, such as the Anbar province of Iraq, or of large numbers within the Muslim world growing disillusioned with Islamist suicide bombings after having seen so many Muslims die in such blasts throughout the Muslim world.

And I then think that it is Amis who is amiss in his remark...

Paul Berman on Tariq Ramadan: Part 10

Jesus of Nazareth

Carl Heinrich Bloch, Sermon on the Mount, 19th c.

Calling for a Moratorium on Stoning?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Consider, if you will -- as Paul Berman does -- Tariq Ramadan's tragic position:

The problem lies in the terrible fact that Ramadan's personal milieu -- his grandfather, his family history, his family contacts, his intellectual tradition -- is precisely the milieu that bears the principal responsibility for generating the modern theoretical justification for religious suicide-terrorism. Yet what can Ramadan do about this horrific reality -- turn against his family? He is his family's prince. He has timidly offered jurisprudential proposals contrary to Qaradawi's; but Ramadan, unlike Qaradawi, is a university philosopher, a secular figure (in spite of everything), and not an authoritative theologian. Ramadan's opinions are opinions; Qaradawi's opinions are law. What is Ramadan to do, then? To challenge Qaradawi's authority would mean challenging the system of authority as a whole, which is something well beyond the salafi reformist idea. So Ramadan writes op-eds, which are not fatwas. And he devotes his life to burnishing the prestige of his father and grandfather and their works, and to promoting the cause of salafi reformism, which means promoting the authority of true and authentic Islamic scholars such as Qaradawi. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," page 45)

Such is the contradiction that is Ramadan, the contradiction between an intelligent, even intellectual man of perhaps humane, independent views and a pious Muslim man subjected to a fate over which he has no control, the fate of being Mr. Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Hassan al-Banna, son of Said Ramadan, brother of Hani Ramadan.

All three of these close relatives have favored, for example, stoning women to death for adultery. Tariq's brother Hani has explicitly supported stoning. What is Tariq Ramadan's position? We already know. He has called for a moratorium. Or perhaps "called for" is a bit too strong. In a debate with Sarkozy, he found himself forced into the uncomfortable distinguishing his views from his brother Hani and felt constrained to offer words in favor of that already mentioned moratorium.

Berman takes Aziz Zemouri's book, Should Tariq Ramadan Be Silenced?, and draws upon its transcript of that exchange in this famous debate at the very moment that Ramadan has just suggested a moratorium on the stoning of women:

SARKOZY: A moratorium.... Mr. Ramadan, are you serious?

RAMADAN: Wait, let me finish.

SARKOZY: A moratorium, that is to say, we should, for a while, hold back from stoning women?

RAMADAN: No, no, wait.... What does a moratorium mean? A moratorium would mean that we absolutely end the application of all of those penalties, in order to have a true debate. And my position is that if we arrive at a consensus among Muslims, it will necessarily end. But you cannot, you know, when you are in a community.... Today on television, I can please the French people who are watching by saying, "Me, my own position." But my own position doesn't count. What matters is to bring about an evolution in Muslim mentalities, Mr. Sarkozy. It's necessary that you understand....

SARKOZY: But, Mr. Ramadan....

RAMADAN: Let me finish.

SARKOZY: Just one point. I understand you, but Muslims are human beings who live in 2003 in France, since we are speaking about the French community, and you have just said something particularly incredible, which is that the stoning of women, yes, the stoning is a bit shocking, but we should simply declare a moratorium, and then we are going to think about it in order to decide if it is good.... But that's monstrous -- to stone a woman because she is an adulterer! It's necessary to condemn it!

RAMADAN: Mr. Sarkozy, listen well to what I am saying. What I say, my own position, is that the law is not applicable -- that's clear. But today, I speak to Muslims around the world and I take part, even in the United States, in the Muslim world.... You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things. You can decide all by yourself to be a progressive in the communities. That's too easy. Today my position is, that is to say, "We should stop."

SARKOZY: Mr. Ramadan, if it is regressive not to want to stone women, I avow that I am a regressive. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," pages 50-51)

Of this exchange, Berman observes:

Some six million French people watched that exchange. A huge number of Muslim immigrants must have been among them -- the very people who might have benefited from hearing someone speak with absolute clarity about violence against women. Ramadan couldn't do it. Here was his Qutbian moment, the moment of frisson. The seventh century had suddenly appeared, poking out from beneath the modern rhetoric of feminism and rights. A moment of barbarism. A thrill. The whole panorama of Muslim women suddenly deployed across the television screens of France -- the panorama of violence that is condoned, sanctified, and even mandated by the highest authorities. And here was Sarkozy, recoiling in horror: the bourgeoisie, shocked at last. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," page 51)

Such is Berman's view, but let us here recall that Ramadan is a tragic figure, which is to say, he is a man constrained by fate, his fate of being Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Hassan al-Banna, son of Said Ramadan, and, yes, brother of Hani Ramadan. What more could he do than suggest a moratorium? He could not simply state outright that stoning is wrong. That would contradict his salafi principles. The Qur'an itself may say nothing about stoning, but the hadith assuredly do and shariah mandates it. About stoning, Sarkozy may insist, "It's necessary to condemn it!" but Ramadan has no such luxury.

The Christian world, which perhaps includes 'post-Christian' Europe, can easily speak out against stoning by citing the words of Jesus in John 8:1-11:

[1] Jesus went unto the mount of Olives. [2] And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. [3] And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, [4] They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. [5] Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? [6] This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. [7] So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. [8] And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. [9] And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. [10] When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? [11] She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. (King James Version)

That seems simple enough. Stoning is wrong, for Jesus said so. But things are not so simple. Aside from the somewhat troubling point that this passage in John 8 does not always appear in the ancient manuscripts of John 8 but sometimes elsewhere in John and in some Johannine texts not at all, Jesus himself does not in this passage speak out explicitly against stoning. Confronted by the Pharisees, who insist upon a religious opinion concerning the Mosaic law's penalty of stoning for adultery, Jesus evades answering directly. Rather than confirm or reject the Mosaic law upon this point, Jesus turns the issue upon those confronting him with the question by confronting them with a question, in effect asking them, "Which of you is worthy to judge?"

One might say that Jesus was calling for a moratorium while we determine the answer to that question, somewhat as Ramadan could be doing, namely, calling for a moratorium while Muslims determine whether the Ummah is pure enough to enact the laws of Allah. And what of Sarkozy himself? He considers himself Catholic. The Church is, of course, against stoning ... but why? Is it wrong? Well, it didn't use to be wrong, back when Moses revealed the divine will, but it's 'wrong' now, though only because God instituted a new covenant. Well, thank God for that!

Unfortunately for Muslims, Allah returned them to an older covenant, an even harsher one with its strict, punitive laws of huddud. Ramadan, despite his moderation, cannot simply condemn these laws outright. At best, he can only ask for their suspension. Such is my tentative, generous view of Ramadan, but what does this bode for a European Islam if its outspoken spokesman cannot offer more than a moratorium?

What it bodes is not good.

Suppose such a moratorium were declared. How might pious Muslims see this? A moratorium could be either temporary or permanent. If the former, then we would soon be returned to the current, unbearable circumstances in which Muslims cannot openly oppose stoning. If the latter, then the entire apparatus of shariah would be called into question, for why shouldn't all of Muslim law be under a permanent moratorium, and in that case, with no Muslim submitting to Allah's laws, what could "Islam" -- the religion of submission to Allah -- possibly mean?

The best that the tragic Ramadan can offer would mean either nothing at all . . . or the death of Islam.

Paul Berman on Tariq Ramadan: Part 9

Yusuf al-Qaradawi

A Voice of Moderation?

(Image from BBC News)

Let's return from our detour to the main road, Paul Berman's investigation of Tariq Ramadan, where we'll discover that Yusuf al-Qaradawi has hitched a ride.

Berman begins a new section -- numbered 7 -- of his long essay by praising Ramadan's apparently sincere disavowal of violence:

It is true and it is wonderful that Ramadan has, on quite a few occasions, condemned any sort of terrorist violence. Better still, these condemnations seem consistent with Ramadan's larger program for the Muslim community in Europe, which ought to require many things, but nothing even remotely resembling a violent campaign. Anyway, the entire shape of Ramadan's career so far -- the energy he has expended on projecting his own ideas and personality onto the public stage in Western Europe and beyond, instead of conserving his time and strength for strictly Muslim audiences -- would make no sense at all, if the ultimate purpose was to mold his followers into some sort of force, capable of opening a violent breach in society. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," page 41)

If Ramadan is an Islamist intellectual, then he is not of the sort that we find in Abu Musab al-Suri or Abu Bakr Naji, both of whom are theoreticians of terror.

But given Ramadan's genealogy, both familial and intellectual, perhaps we'd do well to inquire a bit more closely into what Ramadan thinks about violence in the cause of Islam. Here, again, Berman leads the way:

Still, sometimes it is useful to inquire a little more closely into what anyone means by violence or terrorism. Bomb attacks on random crowds in the mass-transit systems of Madrid or London obviously count as terrorist acts. But what about bomb attacks on random bus-riders in Israel? ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," page 42)

Berman notes that in the introduction to Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity, Tariq Ramadan writes of his father Said Ramadan's rejection of violence, a principle consistent with Hassan al-Banna's rejection of violence. However, as Tariq Ramadan himself writes:

The only exception was Palestine. On this, the message of al-Banna was clear. Armed resistance was incumbent so that the plans of the terrorists of Irgun and of all Zionist colonizers would be faced up to. He had learnt from Hassan al-Banna, as he said it one day: "to put one's forehead on the ground." The real meaning of prayer being giving strength, in humility, to the meaning of an entire life. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," page 42)

On this point, Berman draws an apt observation:

So there is an exception. It is violence against Zionists -- against the plans of all Zionists and not just the Zionist extreme right wing, the Irgun (who were in fact terrorists, just as al-Banna says). But the peculiar note in that passage emanates from a single word, "incumbent" -- a word suggesting that anti-Zionist violence is obligatory. A duty, not just a tactic. Moreover, a duty linked with prayer, forehead on the ground. A duty that gives meaning to an entire life. A religious duty. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," pages 42-43)

As Berman explains, this sort of "ideological dogma that has led so many Palestinians to look on violence as a principle" (page 43) has prevented them from seeing violence as a mere tactic and thereby rendered them incapable of compromise.

On this point, our hitchhiking passenger Yusuf al-Qaradawi has an opinion. Berman explains:

There is something else in that word "incumbent," together with the forehead bowed in prayer. Tactics speak to a given circumstance, but religious duties address the universe. The notion of a religiously mandated violence, an obligatory violence, therefore opens a door, and it is hard to see what could prevent ever wilder yet equally pious obligations from ultimately pushing their way through the open space. Qutb's contribution to the notion of religious violence consisted largely of determining that Muslim "hypocrites," quite as much as Zionists or any other outright enemy of Islam, merited a violent resistance. This notion opened the door to mass killings of Muslims, in the name of Islam. And there is the example of Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, by all accounts one of the great scholars of Sunni Islam, a man with a long and illustrious history in the Muslim Brotherhood who went on, after his emigration to Europe, to help found the European Council for Fatwa and Research -- all this, even apart from his other career, thanks to Al-Jazeera television, as the world's most visible expert on Islamic jurisprudence. It was Sheik al-Qaradawi who directed the funeral prayer at Said Ramadan's funeral in Cairo in 1995 -- as Tariq Ramadan proudly reports in The Roots of the Muslim Revival.

And yet Qaradawi is also the person who, in 2003, issued the most famous of the fatwas authorizing suicide terrorism by Palestinians. He issued the gruesome fatwa permitting women to commit suicide terrorism while, at the same time, giving women terrorists a dispensation from the normal obligation to conceal their hair under a hijab -- a bizarre touch on Qaradawi's part, underlining the ritualistic nature of these acts, and yet entirely in keeping with the sort of erudite matter that Qaradawi normally concerns himself with: say, whether women must keep to themselves when they are menstruating (a point that he rejects, on authority) or whether they may have intercourse with their husbands during that time (they may not, though other kinds of physical pleasure are permitted).

Among the religious authorities who stand behind the vogue for ritualized suicide terrorism in the Arab and Muslim world in the last few years, Qaradawi, drawing on his jurisprudential learning, does appear to be in the first rank -- which is not an argument for downplaying the historic role of Hassan al-Banna long ago. On the contrary, the elderly Qaradawi himself has invoked, in one of his sermons, the memory of al-Banna orating on the agreeable nature of death in the cause of God. As for Tariq Ramadan, he reveres Qaradawi above all other present-day Islamic scholars, and in one book after another he has left no room for doubt about his fealty. If anyone in the world offers a model of modern enlightened Islam, Ramadan plainly judges Qaradawi to be that person. Ramadan has contributed prefaces to two collections of Qaradawi's fatwas in their French editions, not to mention other books written by people with one or another sort of connection to the terrorist vogue -- these editions published by the Tawhid house in Lyon, which is Ramadan's publisher as well. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," pages 43-44)

This is the same Qaradawi who "favours female genital mutilation, wife-beating, the execution of homosexuals in Islamic states, the destruction of the Jewish people, the use of suicide bombs against innocent civilians and the blaming of rape victims who do not dress with sufficient modesty," as Peter Tatchell has noted in "An embrace that shames London" (New Statesman, January 24, 2005). But perhaps he has expressed these views in a soft-spoken, moderate, nonviolent manner.

One might also wish to ask Tariq Ramadan -- along with the far weightier Qaradawi -- why Israel constitutes an exception. Let me hazard a guess. The exception derives from the fact that Israel occupies Muslim land, territory that once was part of the domain of Islam, ruled by shariah, solidly Islamic.

But that is also true of Spain, as the Spanish have of late been reminded by Islamist manifestos that no longer mention the Spanish troops in Iraq, for these have been withdrawn, but which recall the lost glory of Islamic Spain and vow to fight the Spanish 'colonizers' by all means necessary, including terror.

Exceptions have such a dreadful way of becoming the norm.

Paul Berman on Tariq Ramadan: Part 8

Kenneth Robert Livingstone

Leftist Detour?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Let me take a detour today from Tariq Ramadan and provide a bit from Paul Berman's point about an effective alliance between leftists and Islamists:

Britain's Stop the War Coalition, which organized the February 2003 march and a good many additional demonstrations during the next years, was visibly dominated by the [UK's] tiny Socialist Workers Party, in alliance with Britain's version of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Association of Britain. Trotskyists and Islamists: "an odd marriage," as the Economist put it [in "Muslims and socialists: With friends like these" (February 8, 2007)]....

Yet the marital oddity did not prevent millions of non-Trotskyists and non-Islamists from tramping through the streets under the leadership of this alliance, quite as if the millions felt confident that, no matter what might come of the march, the Socialist Workers could reasonably be ignored (a safe assumption) or even regarded with irritable fondness, and quite as if the Islamists, whom nobody could ignore, authentically represented the oppressed and the downtrodden, and therefore lent majesty to the march. Such was the implication, anyway. Nothing like a Trotskyist-Islamist alliance could possibly have mobilized millions of Britons in the past. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," page 39-40)

Moreover, when one hears longtime leftists such as George Galloway or London's leftist mayor Ken Livingstone praising known Islamists, then something strange is in the air. Galloway might be dismissed as a kook, but Livingstone is a popular figure on the left 'despite' his arguably antisemitic remarks (see Chris Tryhorn, "Livingstone attacks 'scumbag' Standard," Guardian Unlimited, February 10, 2005) and his support for Muslim religious leaders like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who "favours female genital mutilation, wife-beating, the execution of homosexuals in Islamic states, the destruction of the Jewish people, the use of suicide bombs against innocent civilians and the blaming of rape victims who do not dress with sufficient modesty," as former Livingstone supporter Peter Tatchell noted in "An embrace that shames London" (New Statesman, January 24, 2005), an article in which he criticized Livingstone for inviting al-Qaradawi to London.

These bits may seem like so much chaff, but they may be straws in the wind from a storm that's coming.