Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan Read online

  PART ONE

  TARIQ RAMADAN:

  HIS RECORD AND BACKGROUND

  Chapter 1

  "Islam's Future"

  or the Future of the Muslim Brotherhood?

  Triq Ramadan was born in 1962, in Geneva, into a family of Egyptian origin that had been exiled to Switzerland on account of their Islamist activities. He makes no secret of it: his parents were the first to have given him a taste for a political Islam. His father, Said Ramadan, was, up to his death, in charge of propagating the Muslim Brotherhood's brand of Islam throughout Europe. His mother, Wafa al-Banna, was none other than the favorite daughter of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, whom all Islamists, including the most extreme, consider a seminal figure. Tariq Ramadan dislikes it when his family origins are held against him, considering it a form of persecution. "I am exasperated to have to reply to these accusations!", Yet he himself boasts of his descent. In the course of the TV program Noms de Dieu [In the Names of God] that was devoted to him, he was proud to exhibit the photograph of his grandfather to illustrate his back- ground.2 In an interview for Journal du Mardi, he objected to those who had the temerity to accuse him of a "genetic offense," while at the same time stating: "I lay claim to this heritage since, if today I am a thinker, it is because this heritage has inspired me."3

  What are we to make of this? Is he a faithful heir to the Muslim Brotherhood or a man who has kept aloof from al-Banna's ideology? `Angel or Demon?" was the title of an article on him that appeared recently in a Moroccan magazine.4 The Boston Globe, the New England daily, preferred not to take sides: "The reformer to his admirers, Tariq Ramadan is Europe's leading advocate of liberal Islam. To his detractors, he's a dangerous theocrat in disguise."5 Where does the truth lie? Until recently, when he became more provocative, the press was inclined to grant him the benefit of the doubt. He was even presented as one of the most promising Muslim leaders of his generation. In December aooo, Time magazine named him as one of the six religious figures that could contribute to the renovation and revival of the Muslim religion in the coming century. Yet, in the mid-r99os, Hassan alTourabi, the high priest of Sudanese Islamism, whose regime had at one point offered Osama bin Laden asylum, thought fit to declare: "Tariq Ramadan? Why, he's Islarris future!" Can one individual simultaneously embody the hopes of an Islamist high priest and the promise of Time magazine? Is the American press better equipped than Hassan al-Tourabi to understand Islam and to situate Tariq Ramadan-to know what sort of Muslims he will be turning out? The only way to get a clear picture is to examine the ways in which Tariq Ramadan has transmitted the philosophy and the methods ofhis grandfather.

  Hassan al-Banna as a model

  Hassan al-Banna is a figure revered by Islamists the world over. In the early years ofthe twentieth century, this Egyptian preacher developed a program for reasserting social and political control that has served as a model for all those engaged in the fight to extend the reign ofa form of political Islam that is both archaic and reactionary. He oversaw the birth of a diabolical machine-the Muslim Brotherhood-that to this day grinds out its fundamentalist message, spreading it to the four corners of the world. Even Al-Qaeda is no competitor in terms of the scope of this negative force. Al-Qaeda militants were often fascinated by al-Banna before they crossed the line into bin Laden-type terrorism. Given the nature of al-Banna's influence, which remains a constant threat, citizens of Muslim origin are often uneasy when they see Tariq Ramadan continue his grandfather's work in the very heart of the West.

  In a collection of interviews with Alain Gresh, editor-in-chief of Le Monde diplomatique, Tariq Ramadan made no secret ofthe fact that he had taken Hassan al-Banna as a model: "I have studied Hassan al-Banna's ideas with great care and there is nothing in this heritage that I reject. His relation to God, his spirituality, his mysticism, his personality, as well as his critical reflections on law, politics, society and pluralism, testify for me to his qualities of heart and mind." And he added: "His commitment also is a continuing reason for my respect and admiration."6 This admission is in itself terrifying. Every word was chosen to play down the fanaticism and totalitarianism advocated by al-Banna, a man for whom "the Islamic banner must wave supreme over the human race." 7 His name still fills any Muslim who is modern and liberal-or simply healthy-minded-with rage over the crimes that have been committed in the name of Islam. Yet his grandson finds nothing wrong in all this. On the contrary, in a book written for a popular audience, he fully accepted his role as one whose mission it was to continue in the footsteps of his grandfather, whom he presented as a model of "spirituality" and of "critical appreciation of society." By extolling his grandfather's "critical reflections on pluralism," essentially he was praising the virtues of al-Banna's totalitarian outlook.

  Well aware of the negative effects that an admission of this kind could have, al-Banna's grandson took the precaution of adding: "I put Hassan alBanna in the context of his period and his society, and I take that context into account in analyzing his objectives and the means he used to achieve them."8 In effect, Tariq Ramadan does not repudiate al-Banna's objectives and methods as such; he only says that he is prepared to adapt them to a changed environment: not Egypt in the early years ofthe twentieth century, but the West at the beginning of the twenty-first. In other words, what is involved is a strategic adaptation, designed to be more efficacious in this new "field"-and not a true rejection. One could, however, be tempted to think otherwise when reading the rest of the interview in L'Islam en questions [Questioning Islam]: "I don't consider anything in al-Banna's way of thinking to be sacred: my approach is to make a selection, keeping what remains interesting and well advised for today, leaving aside what is dictated by the context and the strategy of his time, and leaving aside all sorts of judgments that I don't agree with."9 Even if this does not amount to an outright condemnation of al-Banna's philosophy-one may well wonder what is to be considered "interesting" about itsuch statements have sufficed to convince a good number of people that Tariq Ramadan is capable of taking a critical view of his heritage. At any rate, that's what he claims. However, if one listens carefully to his lectures and reads his writings attentively, it becomes evident that exactly the opposite is true.

  If he had really wanted to adopt a critical perspective in regard to his heritage, and not simply transmit it, Tariq Ramadan would not have been content to simply sift through al-B anna's program, but would have clearly denounced what he found to be negative in it and in that of the Muslim Brotherhood. But he has never done so. When speaking to a Muslim audience, in particular young Muslims under his guidance, Tariq Ramadan never criticizes Hassan al-Banna or the Muslim Brotherhood in any way. He does, of course, emphasize certain aspects, but he remains true to the doctrine of the Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood's leader is clearly identified as a model to be imitated.

  He has converted a whole generation of French-speaking Muslims to Hassan al-Banna's brand of political Islam, thanks to a series of cassettes, of which tens of thousands have been sold by Tawhid, an Islamist publishing house with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In these cassetteswhich are, in effect, taped lectures-Tariq Ramadan begins by introducing the Brotherhood's ideology and its theoreticians. Two of the first three cassettes-which are intended as training material for Tawhid's audience-are entirely devoted to Hassan al-Banna's philosophy, presented as the culmination of "contemporary Muslim thought," and as a turning point in the "Muslim renaissance." Far from expressing any reservations regarding the fanaticism that is an integral part of al-Banna's ideology, he accuses those who would point to the unsavory aspects of his political and family heritage of conspiracy or post-colonial racism. He then invites his audience to disregard such caricatures and witch hunts; on the contrary, they should take inspiration from al-Banna's message-which he describes as "a step-by-step philosophy," "a profound philosophy," "a philosophy without violence," but "a demanding philosophy."I° This unquestioning acceptance sometimes even finds its way in
to articles written for the general public. In a glossary that figures as an annex to the French edition of Etre musulman europeen [To Be a European Muslim]-which was originally intended as part of a special issue of the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur-his grandfather is presented in these terms: "Hassan al-Banna: founder ofthe Muslim Brotherhood, often cited but seldom read. In the West he is known by what his political enemies have to say about him, in particular English colonialists and Zionist militants."" This description merits a closer look.

  The greatest reformer of the century?

  Al-Banna was born in 19o6 in a small Egyptian village and grew up in a family with strong political and religious beliefs. His father, a clockmaker in the town of Mahmudiyya, was a fervent imam of the Hanbalite school, the most rigorous of Islarns four legal schools. At an early age, his eldest son left home to begin his studies in a Koranic school, where the principal activity was learning to recite the Koran by heart. The young al-Banna was a zealous student. At the age of twelve, he became the leader of a Society for Correct Moral Behavior, an association whose aim was to enforce discipline and ensure that within the school strict moral standards were maintained. His zealousness in this respect was to be a permanent feature of his character. A few years later he founded a "group for the prevention of illicit acts," proposing that Egyptians denounce in writing any immoral behavior that they witnessed. The struggle to establish moral order seemed literally to haunt the young boy, influenced as he was by his father's fundamentalist propaganda. Gamal al-Banna, Hassans younger brother, recalls: "He was the oldest of us, which meant he was his parents' favorite. More than any of us, he soaked up the religious atmosphere in which the family lived. My parents used to tell me that, when he played hide-and-seek, he played according to his own rules. He was the leader of the Muslim army combating the enemies of God."12

  This Manichean outlook was to be a lasting trait. As an adolescent, he continued his training as a mystic in a particularly orthodox Sufi fraternity, where he developed a taste for secrecy and for brotherhood in the service of Islam. Unlike other fraternities, his fraternity rejected any kind of innovation in religious matters. Many of their meetings consisted simply of chanting extracts from the Koran and from the Surma for hours on end. But al-Banna would not have stayed for long if the fraternity was simply a separatist mystic movement. He wanted to act; he dreamt of "fighting against evil" by preach ing. And the opportunity was close at hand. He and his comrades preached unendingly against the Christian missions, which they accused of corrupting morals "by charity work, by healthcare initiatives and by their teaching in the schools." His rejection of colonialism was based not on a commitment to independence but on his fundamentalism. In his eyes, the worst feature of colonization was not the occupation itself, but the fact that the occupation went hand in hand with an acceptance of Christianity and, above all, with the liberalization of moral standards. If Egypt had not been a colony, Hassan alBanna would no doubt have had the same sort of career as William Jennings Bryan, the American fundamentalist Protestant who crusaded against Darwinism and the moral decadence of his fellow countrymen in the 1920s. But al-Banna was born into a quite different context, at a time when the war against modernity could easily be taken for a war against colonialism. Thus al-Banna's combat against liberalizing moral standards led him to take part in the popular demonstrations against British occupation in 1919 and 1922.

  He was already more ofa politicalthan a religious figure. Instead ofbecom- ing a theologian at Al-Azhar, the prestigious Islamic university of Cairo, he chose to enrol in the Science House in order to become a schoolteacher. Not that he intended to give up preaching-on the contrary. A teaching job would bring him into close contact with the people and thus provide an opportunity for a far more effective kind of political proselytizing: "I will serve as a counselor and a teacher. Even if I have to spend most of my time instructing children, I will also instruct their fathers about Islam, at times by writing, at other times by giving talks and engaging them in conversation, and by travelling as well."'3 These were the terms in which he was later to explain to his companions his reasons for choosing teaching as a profession. But al-Banna always considered pedagogy as a means of propaganda. His vocation was strengthened after he was assigned to a school close to the Suez Canal, where he could observe with disgust the Westerners' style of life. His revolt intensified when he settled in Cairo, where city life horrified this puritan villager. Everywhere around him he saw decadence, and this he attributed to Western influence. Adopting the style of the Protestant preachers, quick to imagine new methods for "awakening" faith, he took to preaching in the streets and cafes against the "creeping modernism' that was contrary to the spirit of Islam. Tariq Ramadan has provided us with an impassioned description of his grandfather's gift for seducing his listeners and adapting his message to fit the audience in question-a description that tells us as much about Ramadan himself as it does about al-Banna: "His personality, his way of speaking, his charisma and his erudition won over those who heard him speak. Gifted with a prodigious memory, capable of adjusting the level of his discourse so as to reach not only the academics and the city ulemas but the village peasants as well ... he was simple, accessible, and affectionate, as well as intellectually rigorous and demanding. His personal qualities contributed greatly to the spread of his ideas."14

  The Cairo intelligentsia was then in a state of constant upheaval, torn between conflicting political and religious options. In 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk-who ascribed the decline of the Ottoman Empire to a mixing of politics and religion that had paralyzed the Muslim world-abolished the caliphate that was the symbol of this fusion and founded Turkey as a secular state. This was a traumatic event for an ultra-religious person such as alBanna, all the more so since Egypt was itself caught up in the debate. In 1925, Ali Abd al-Raziq published an audacious book, Islam et lesfondements du pouvoir [Islam and the Origins of Power], which argued that Mohammed had never taken steps to provide for a government that would succeed him. On the contrary, the Koran, in a sura known as the "consultation' sura, clearly encouraged men to "conduct their affairs by mutual consultation. "15 The author then encouraged his compatriots to set foot once again on the road to progress via a secular Islam and by instituting a system that would separate religion and politics. The book created a scandal comparable to the reception of Darwins theories that split the Protestants into two camps: one arguing that the Bible should be updated to take account of the new scientific discoveries; the other arguing for a return to fundamentalist Protestantism that rejected the theory of evolution. Abd al-Raziq's book had exactly the same effect: on one side were the Muslims who favored an aggiornamento of Islam; on the other, the purists who wanted to return to Islarns initial precepts. But once again, the Egyptian context and the fact of colonization make interpretation of these debates more complex. In the United States, the fundamentalist movement was immediately identified as a reactionary movement, to which progressive Protestants were firmly opposed. On the other hand, Muslim fundamentalism (which includes literalist Salafism and reformist Salafism)'6 claimed to be an alternative to colonization, which gave it a far more ambiguous status. Afghani (1838-97), the founder of the Salafist school, was also an anti-colonial militant. At one point, he advocated a rationalist secular reform as a way to breathe new life into the Arab world, but he subsequently initiated a brand of reformism that consisted essentially of a return to basic religious principles; in so doing he was following in the footsteps of Ibn Taymiyya (12361328), a medieval Hanbalite jurist who, in opposition to the rationalist Muslims of his era, argued for a purification of Islam. To this day, a number of Arab nationalists and progressive Muslims admire Afghani, even if, in referring to him as a source of inspiration, they find themselves in the company of a religious generation that is more fundamentalist than anti-colonial. The difference between the two is, however, considerable. An anti-colonial militant resists colonization because he believes in the people's right to self-determi
nation and refuses all forms of domination, whereas a fundamentalist opposes colonialism because he believes Islam is superior to the West. Moreover it is in order to re-establish this superiority that he wants to purify Islam and return it to its founding precepts-in order to recover the power that had fuelled Muslim expansion. In other words, he wants to return to a form of colonialism of which he is the beneficiary and not the victim.

  Hassan al-Banna was all the more inclined to agree with the latter outlook, in that he was a student of one of the most rigorous proponents of the Salafist school, Rashid Rida. Unlike Afghani or Mohammed Abduh, who had studied in France and was relatively open to modernizing influences, Rida, motivated by intense anti-Western sentiment, did all in his power to make the reformist impulse more rigid and steer the Salafist school towards an archaic fundamentalism. It is thus not without interest that al-Banna should have attended courses in the reformist Salafist school during this period, nor that he should subsequently have given birth to a movement that was to turn reformism into a version of Islamism violently opposed to any form of ratio nalism that bore the slightest resemblance to Western ways-blocking the aggiornamento of Islam for generations to come.

  For this achievement, Tariq Ramadan considers his grandfather as "the most influential of the reformist Muslims of the century"17-an opinion that he developed at length in his thesis, defended in 1998 at the University of Geneva, "Hassan al-Banna and the reformist tradition since al-Afghani." This was a masterpiece of propaganda in praise of Hassan al-Banna. His argument runs as follows: reformists such as Afghani, Abduh, or Rida were brilliant intellectuals, but they were not effective enough. As intellectuals, they remained on the fringes of a true dynamic and true social and political drive. Providentially, Hassan al-Banna appeared and provided the political movement with the reformism it needed. In other words, Tariq Ramadan considers al-Banna's philosophy and the Muslim Brotherhood as the high point of Salafist reformist thought and of the Salafist reformist initiative. In addition to boasting of his grandfather's success in combating atheism and permissiveness, he situated all the reformist intellectuals in the same tradition, despite the differences that existed between men such as Abduh or Rida. His aim was to make Hassan al-Banna appear as the successor to all of them, the most fundamentalist as well as the most open-minded. Yet there existed significant differences between them, as Ali Merad, a specialist on Muslim reform movements, has reminded us: "Mohammed Abduh is the father of rationalist reform. He tried to open up Muslim thinking to rationalist influences. But one of his disciples, Rashid Rida, was determined to rigidify this aspect of his thought and to rid it of all rationalism. He passed himself off as Abduhs heir, so as to be in a better position to minimize the new perspectives proposed by Abduh."18 But it was Rida's lectures that al-Banna attended, and not those of Abduh, at a time when everyone was free to attend them and to become a supporter, thanks also to the influence of his review, Al-Manar. Ramadan does not deny that this is true, but insists nonetheless on presenting al-Banna as the disciple of Abduh, whereas in reality he was obviously the heir to Rida's uncompromising fundamentalist reformism. It serves his purpose to skip over his apprenticeship to Rida, so as to convince those who are not going to bother to check the facts that his grandfather was commit ted to modern reformism. This does not prevent him, page after page, from disparaging the rationalist reformers who followed in the footsteps of Abd alRaziq. In the course of a footnote, Tariq Ramadan clearly implies that Abd al-Raziq's ideas were the result of Western scheming: the translation of Ali Abd al-Raziq's book was "sponsored by the French mission for research and cooperation in Egypt." "We know how eager the Western governments are to publish and distribute texts that are in harmony with their system of values and their view of the world .... It was no accident."19 This biased view, nakedly propagandist, might have gone unnoticed by novices in the field, but it did not escape the University of Fribourg's thesis jury, to whom he had initially submitted his manuscript. Presided over by Charles Genequand, a specialist on the Arab world, and made up of scholars of Muslim reformism, the jury was simply dumbfounded by the exceedingly partisan nature of the thesis. According to the jury's president, it "was intended as an apologetic" for Hassan al-Banna20-an opinion shared by the other members of the jury. They unanimously refused to accept it as scientific in character. Tariq Ramadan was furious; he threatened to bring the jury and the university to trial, but without success, since a jury has a perfect right to refuse to accept work that it does not consider to be scholarly. Ramadan was obliged to convoke in extremis a second jury, which included Bruno Etienne'21 to have his diploma granted-without honors-by the Faculty ofArts of the University of Geneva. The important thing for him was to have a scientific imprimatur before publishing his thesis in book form. The jury gave him permission, adding that it "authorized the publication of the thesis without expressing any opinion regarding its contents. "22 They could not have been more explicitly critical. In spite of everything, this handbook in praise of Hassan al-Banna was published under the title Aux sources du renouveau musulman [On the Origins of the Muslim Renaissance], by Tawhid, but also by Bayard, a far more mainstream publishing house. The two editions are prefaced by Alain Gresh, editor-in-chief of Le Monde diplomatique. Since then it has not been uncommon to hear non-Islamist militants-even secular militants-tell you, with the most naive candor, that al-Banna was "a great reformer" and that the Muslim Brotherhood was "a liberation movement. .. "