Taming the Gods

by Ian Buruma

  But it is certainly true that France has been a great promoter and exporter of secularism. In France itself, it has been hotly contested since the revolution. One could say that the imposition of secularism caused a kind of civil war to simmer at least until the end of World War II. The relations between the Catholic Church and the French state went through many stages in the last century, ranging from violence to accommodation to formal separation. Some Catholic conservatives continued to see the revolution as a punishment from God. And yet, for many years after the revolution, the church was still seen as the main normative institution for moral behavior. This enraged the radical proponents of laïcité, of course, who were ever ready to see the black robes of priests flapping behind everything they regarded as backward and obscurantist (an attitude shared, for obvious reasons, by many liberals and leftists in Italy and Spain).

  And not for nothing. The restoration of Catholic authority was always one of the aims of French enemies of the republican state. One of the first acts of Marshall Pétain when he became head of the pro-German Vichy state in 1940 was to challenge laïcité, which he called decadent, by ordering public schools to teach “Duties towards God.” The active persecution of Jews and Freemasons was, among many other things, also an abandonment of laïcité. In 1946, a year after Pétain was sentenced to death (commuted to life by General de Gaulle), laïcité was written in the French constitution: “France is a republic, indivisible, secular, democratic, and social.”

  It is against this background of more than a hundred years of territorial strife between secular and religious authority that the “affair of the veils” in France should be seen. The veil has a long history, which did not begin with Islam. Persian women of a high class wore them long before the Prophet was born. Even in recent times, the image of the veil, and of women wearing them, has not been stable. When France ruled Muslim countries in North Africa, the veil was seen by Frenchmen as a typical example of oppression, which French civilization (laïcité) would rectify.37 Then, in the 1950s, Algerian women wore the veil as a token of resistance against French colonialism and a badge of cultural identity. Frantz Fanon, a fierce opponent of colonialism, wrote in 1958: “In the beginning the veil was a mechanism of resistance, but its value for the social group remained very strong. The veil was worn because tradition demanded a rigid separation of the sexes but also because the occupier was bent on unveiling Algeria.”38

  This is not how many French people saw things in October 1989, the bicentennial year of the French Revolution, when three Muslim girls were expelled from their school in Creil, about thirty miles outside Paris, for refusing to take off their veils. Scarves would be a better word. They did not cover their faces, just part of their heads. As in the Netherlands, when similar controversies break out, images of World War II are immediately invoked. Five well-known philosophers warned about “the Munich of the republican school.” This was countered by other, equally heated, phrases, such as “the Vichy of integration.”

  The “affair” cooled down somewhat when the Council of State, the highest administrative court in France, ruled that wearing signs of religious affiliation was permissible as long as it was discreet and not imposed on others. The affair flared up again in 1994 when the same former principal of the school in Creil, Eugène Chénière, demanded a complete ban on “ostentatious” signs of religious affiliation. François Bayrou, the education minister, decreed that the ban would be imposed. After “Munich” and “Vichy” it was now the turn of the Dreyfus Affair to be recalled. A minority was being persecuted, said the modern Dreyfusards. There should be no tolerance of intolerance, said their opponents. The existence of the republic was deemed to be at stake. The Council of State upheld its earlier decision that discretion should be used and each case judged on its merit.

  But the affair refused to die. In 2004, two girls of Jewish origin who had converted to Islam would not take off their scarves or even replace them with less “ostentatious” headwear. Again opponents and proponents accused one another of racism, oppressing women’s rights, bringing back Nazism, or Maoism, or totalitarianism. In the end, the so-called Stasi Commission issued a report that advised a ban on all ostentatious religious garb in public schools. The law is often called “the headscarf law” but in fact covers such things as the Jewish kippah and the Sikh turban as well.

  What is astonishing is not the debate itself. There are many angles to the headscarf issue: if banning a young woman’s right to wear one is wrong, then so is the condoning of men who force their wives and daughters to do so. Strict neutrality—in theory, at least, the foundation of the secular state—is difficult to maintain in times when religious faith is used to justify serious violence. The disquieting thing about the affair is the tone of hysteria, as though a headscarf, worn by members of a religious minority, represented a similar threat to the secular republic as the full might of the eighteenth-century Catholic Church. This hysteria points to deeper anxieties, which the “natives” have in common with immigrants, or their offspring, anxieties about identity in the modern world.

  The challenge posed by Muslims in Europe, then, is not cultural, civilizational, or even, in the end, religious. It is social and political. The challenge is how to accommodate communities, whether they be Muslims, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, or any other group of believers, who wish to assert their own norms and beliefs in public. Forcing people to conform to norms set by the state, as is the tendency in France, is illiberal, to say the least. Encouraging people to stick to their own ways, as has been the tendency in Britain, does not foster a sense of inclusion. The way forward, then, is not to insist on social, let alone theological, conformity, but on observance of the law and of the basic rules of democratic society. As long as people play by the rules of free speech, free expression, independent judiciaries, and free elections, they are democratic citizens, whatever they choose to wear on their heads.

  If citizens are to play by the rules of democracy, there has to be a common view that those rules are not only just but worth defending. Not all Muslims share this view. Some fundamentalists refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the secular state. This is true of some ultra-orthodox Jews as well, hence their exemption from military service in Israel. There are also Christians who have opted out of mainstream society, especially, but not exclusively, in the United States. Religious communities of this kind live in enclaves, such as Meir Sharim in Jerusalem, or parts of Brooklyn, or rural Pennsylvania. They often consider themselves to be a chosen people who believe, as the Amish do, that, since the world is filled with sinners, “friendship with the world is enmity with God” (James 4:4). But they do not necessarily wish to destroy that world or impose their own beliefs and ways of life on others. In this limited sense, they still play by the rules.

  Revolutionaries who dream of wrecking societies they regard as wicked are in a different category. Religious fundamentalism does not have to lead to this type of revolutionary violence. Orthodoxy of faith and political extremism can be linked, but they are not the same thing. There is little point in trying to argue with the revolutionaries. The use of violence in a democracy, for whatever reason, can only be met with force. Popper was right about that. But containment of revolutionary violence will only be successful if the revolutionaries are isolated and deprived of sympathy from the nonviolent believers. The borders between the faithful, including the fundamentalists, and those who will kill for their faith have to be firmed up.

  A common solution, favored by many well-meaning liberals, is to find the religious “moderates” and deal with them as if they were leaders of a kind, in effect by putting them in a privileged position. Dealing with one organization, as the central representative of a particular religious community, is a French republican tradition. This might just have worked for the Jewish community. It won’t really do for the Muslims, who are much too diverse to be gathered happily under one roof. Milli Görüs, Turkish in origin, is very different from the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FI
S), which is also quite different from, and indeed hostile to, the equally Algerian Mosque of Paris. Aside from the internal differences, any organization that deals directly with the state risks losing street credibility among the believers, who sense, sometimes with good reason, political opportunism in such contacts. This is equally true in countries with a more laissez-faire approach to religious organization, such as Britain and the Netherlands. Even individual Muslims, who stand for political office or rise in the ranks of the civil service, are quickly accused of “selling out” to promote their own interests.

  Trying to find religious “moderates” may not be a good idea anyway. A democratic state has no business being an arbiter in theological affairs. Otherwise, what is the point of separating church from state? All major religions are fundamentalist in the sense of claiming absolute truth. When the current pope was still Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he was adamant that there was only one truth, and that was God’s truth.39 The Catholic Church, not to mention millions of evangelical Protestants in the United States, are against making abortion legal. But most—alas, not all—anti-abortionists still agree to abide by the laws. It is fruitless to enter into theological disputes. Leave that to the religious. Laïcité, as Olivier Roy observes, “does not have to do with the acceptance of shared values, but . . . with the acceptance of the shared rules of the game.”40

  One of the most controversial and hated figures to have emerged from the Muslim debates in Europe is Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born intellectual and activist whose presence has been as polarizing as Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s. Those who regard any degree of skepticism toward the latter as a betrayal of Enlightenment values tend to see any sympathy for the former as a sign of the same thing. In fact, it should be possible to see merit in both Hirsi Ali’s critique of religious bigotry and Tariq Ramadan’s attempt to reconcile Islam with democratic practices. What makes Ramadan such a tricky figure is the apparent discrepancy between his religious orthodoxy and his neo-Marxist politics.

  He calls himself a salafi reformist. A salafi insists on referring to the original holy texts, unencrusted by later commentaries, as an ethical basis for all his actions, whether they be religious, social, or political. Ramadan, in this sense, is a salafi, but he advocates the use of reason in the interpretation of these texts to make them relevant to contemporary life. The aim, he writes, “is to protect the Muslim identity and religious practice, to recognize the Western constitutional structure, to become involved as a citizen at the social level, and to live with true loyalty to the country to which one belongs.”41

  A handsome, charismatic, highly media-friendly figure with personal access to many European politicians, Ramadan has contempt for organizations that promote special interests and minority rights for the Muslims. Islam, in his view, should not be just a personal expression of faith, merely adding one more color to the patchwork of cultural and social pluralism. Nor, of course, should it signify an ethnic minority. Muslims, in the West, should not be treated, or ask to be treated, as a minority at all. Ramadan believes that the universalistic values of Islam, as revealed in the holy texts, should not be relativized but put to full use in Western democracies. Indeed, Islam has a special role to play in restoring spirituality to the rationalistic, materialistic world order, which, in his words, “seems to have forgotten the Creator and to depend on a logic that is almost exclusively economic.”42

  This is not an unusual position for a religious person to take. Pope Benedict XVI shares Ramadan’s belief that the modern world has made false idols of money and possessions. But Ramadan’s fierce criticism of the modern world order, unlike the pope’s, is fueled by rhetoric of the Left: on Third World liberation, on U.S. imperialism, the World Bank and IMF, Zionism, and so on. This has given him a following among the remnants of the New Left in France and among people who may not share his belief in Allah but approve of his politics toward Israel and the United States. One of the factors that gravely weakened the Left in recent decades, apart from the sudden collapse of the Soviet Empire, is the abdication of universalism and internationalism in favor of identity politics, focusing on race, gender, and sexual practices. Ramadan seeks to give leftist causes a universal appeal once again through what he sees as the universalism of his Muslim faith.

  Linking Islam to Marxism is not a new idea. The twentieth-century Iranian thinker Ali Shari’ati saw religion (Shiite Islam in his case) as a way to liberate the Third World masses from Western imperialism and “market fetishism.” Although not an orthodox Marxist, he used Marxist ideology to analyze the ills of modern society and saw Islam as the cure.

  Following a similar path, Tariq Ramadan enraged his opponents and delighted many of his supporters by turning the tables on his most prominent critics. In 2003, he launched a well-publicized attack on “French Jewish intellectuals,” including Bernard-Henri Lévy, Bernard Kouchner, and Pierre-André Taguieff (who is not in fact Jewish), accusing them of “relativizing the defence of universal principles of equality and justice”43 by becoming defenders of Israeli interests at the expense of the suffering Palestinians. In other words, the “Jewish” liberals had become sectarians, while Ramadan’s Islamism was the new model of universal Enlightenment values.

  Exactly why it is a sign of universalism for a European Muslim activist to defend the interests of Palestinians, while it is sectarian for European Jews to defend the interests of Israel, was never made quite clear. And some of the methods used by Ramadan to attack Zionism are dubious. When the Turin Book Fair wished to honor the sixtieth anniversary of the state of Israel in 2008 by inviting Israeli authors such as Amos Oz and David Grossman, Ramadan called for a boycott. In typical fashion, he stated that this was not an Arab or Islamic matter but a universal issue of human rights. Zionism is not the only target of Ramadan’s wrath. In 1994, he protested against the staging in Geneva of Voltaire’s play Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet. The play was dropped.

  Still, however misguided some of his interventions may be, Ramadan has renounced the use of violence. Responding to critics who see him as a dangerous figure, he says: “The danger of my discourse in France is that I’m telling people to be citizens. Muslims are still treated as aliens. I’m telling them to vote.”44 So why do so many people (not just “Jewish intellectuals”) see him as a menace? It is partly a matter of family connections. Ramadan’s standing in the world of Sunni Islam is heightened by the fact that his maternal grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, founder in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Tariq’s father, Said Ramadan, was al-Banna’s disciple, who, after fleeing Egypt, became the Brotherhood’s representative in Europe. Tariq’s brother, Hani Ramadan, who runs the Islamic Center in Geneva, is a controversial preacher who publicly defended the practice of stoning adulterous women.

  Tariq Ramadan is highly respectful of his family, especially his revered grandfather. But this does not mean that he wants to establish—as the Muslim Brothers do—a Muslim state. Indeed, he claims that “there is no such thing as an Islamic order. We have to act to promote justice and inject our ethics into the existing system.”45 But since he aims to influence Muslims, especially educated European Muslims, Ramadan is often accused of saying different things to different audiences. This would fit nicely with the rather Trotskyist methods of many Muslim Brothers, who hope to achieve their goals through participation and infiltration rather than direct confrontation. And yet the accusation may be missing the point.

  In 2003, Ramadan was confronted on French television by Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then interior minister. Sarkozy challenged Ramadan to come clean on the question of stoning as a punishment for adultery. Stoning is stipulated in the section of the Islamic penal code known as huddud. Did or did not Ramadan think this law should be scrapped? Instead of answering with a straight affirmative, Ramadan outraged Sarkozy, and doubtless many television viewers, by calling for a moratorium instead of a ban. “Personally,” he said, “I’m against capital punishment, not only in
Muslim countries, but also in the U.S. But when you want to be heard in Muslim countries, when you are addressing religious issues, you can’t just say it has to stop. I think it has to stop. But you have to discuss it within the religious context. There are texts involved. I am not just talking to Muslims in Europe, but addressing the implementation of huddud everywhere, in Indonesia, Pakistan and the Middle East. And I’m speaking from the inside to Muslims. Speaking as an outsider would be counterproductive.”46

  This can read in different ways. One might interpret it as a candid affirmation of what Ramadan’s critics have thought all along: that he tailors his message to suit his audience. But to expect such candor from such a shrewd activist might be a trifle too naïve. Olivier Roy sees Ramadan’s position on corporal punishment as a de facto acceptance of secularism. What he means is that Ramadan, by wishing to leave a religious law for discussion without actually applying it, is disassociating religious doctrine from political or social practice. As Roy puts it: “An approach of this kind maintains orthodoxy while enabling the believer to live in a society governed by laïcité.”,47 In other words, it allows an orthodox Muslim to play by the rules of democracy without relinquishing his faith.

  Perhaps this is conceding a little too much to the demands of religious orthodoxy. If Ramadan is speaking as a European Muslim, then why compromise on a principle in order to “address” the Middle East? And the number of European Muslims in favor of stoning people to death is probably limited. But Ramadan’s position, however ambiguous, does not make him a terrorist. And he certainly does not argue anywhere for the implementation of the huddud. On the contrary. In this sense, Ramadan draws a clear distinction between his own politics and religious orthodoxy.