Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan

by Caroline Fourest

  It is evident, then, that bringing up Qutb's name today is a delicate matter, even for the Muslim Brothers, among whom the more moderate consider that "he went too far"-without, however, questioning their own views. At first sight, Ramadan would appear to belong to this group. In On the Origins of the Muslim Renaissance, he explained that Qutb initiated "a perceptible shift, but one that was particularly important in relation to Hassan alBanna," without coming out clearly against this "shift." 7' He is content to preserve intact his grandfather's philosophy by describing Qutb's interpretation as "perceptibly" different. A shift that he accounts for by pointing to the fact that Qutb had lived in the West and had developed a form of thought that was "reactive" and "strained," and motivated by hatred of the West. As if alBanna himself had never developed a "reactive" and rigid view of the West! It is typical of Ramadan s approach that he refuses to admit that the intent to return to an Islam "purified" of all outside influences is itself "reactive," preferring to think of it as an attempt to recover the purely positive aspects of the past. This can only be a form of blindness or else simply propaganda.

  He also attributes the "shift" initiated by Qutb to the influence ofthinkers such as Mawdudi, the famous theoretician of the Islamic state and founder of the Jama'at-i-Islami, a Pakistani movement similar to the Muslim Brotherhood. As if Qutb could not have found in al-Banna's philosophy reason enough to found an Islamic state. It is clear that he borrowed from Mawdudi the contemporary use of the term jahiliyya, but the idea of a defensive jihad that could be revived in case of adversity was already foreseen by al-Banna and was there, ready to be reactivated.

  The other factor that, according to Tariq Ramadan, explains the shift initiated by Qutb has to do with Nasser's repression. Here, he is in agreement with the view expressed by many historians. It is certain that Qutb would not have called for the assassination of Nasser if the latter had agreed to establish the type of Islamist regime demanded by the Brotherhood. But does this make of Qutb a Brother different from the others? Would not al-Banna himself, in the same circumstances, have written a book similar to Trail Markers? Al-Banna died before it became clear that his plans for the future would be brutally cut short by Nasser. If he had been faced with such an insurmountable obstacle, thrown into prison and tortured, he, too, would most probably have called for a holy war. Did he not assert that the resort to armed combat was the highest degree of jihad and that the resort to force was justified if other means failed?

  Tariq Ramadan prefers not to indulge in such conjectures, obsessed as he is by the rehabilitation of al-Banna's model-which does not mean that he rejects Sayyid Qutb. On occasion he refers to him by name in his lectures, as if he were a thinker of no particular importance, but for the most part references to him remain allusive, as if Ramadan wanted to avoid revealing his true thoughts. But Ramadan is a fervent admirer of one of Qutb's female disciples, who was imprisoned and tortured during the same period: Zaynab al-Ghazali, for whose memoirs Ramadan wrote a preface in 1996. Entitled Des jours de ma vie [Some Days from My Life], the book is a raging firestorm that recounts in detail the tortures and humiliations suffered at the hands of Nasser's jailers. One would expect that reading this book would be a moving experience. But one finds instead a woman who was an ultra-fundamentalist before the first arrests even took place. At a time when Nasser was making numerous conciliatory gestures to this woman, whose association advocated the Islamization ofwomen and who served as one of the Brotherhood's agents, she refused, for example, to join a public meeting organized by the Socialist Union in support of Nasser-not in order to maintain her independence, but out of respect for "decency": "I have made it clear: members of the governing board of the Muslim Women and members ofthe General Assembly live in conformity with the Muslim rites and cannot, consequently, take part in the sort of activities where many people congregate and where members of both sexes commingle freely with no respect for decency."72 That's the sort of person who, Tariq Ramadan tells us in his preface, should be "a model for all Muslim women."73 The rest of the book is even more enlightening. After having refused to negotiate in any way, al-Ghazali took part in the Brotherhood's speculations on how to overthrow Nasser. When the latter threatened to dissolve her organization for disturbing the public peace, she declared: "Thanks be to God for having filled Nasser with hatred and fear of me. I, too, hate him for the love of God. His cruelty and his tyranny will only reinforce our resolve as combatants to listen solely to the dictates of our conscience and to live for our cause, for our unique way and for monotheism, and by the grace of God we will triumph."74

  Al-Ghazali was thrown into prison and left without food and water for six days. On arrival, she was locked in a room with dogs that snapped at her. At any rate, she was terrified by what she thought was happening to her, but when they released her, she realized that she had not bled at all. The dogs must have been toothless, or had perhaps been trained to simulate biting. She interpreted this as a miracle. Despite torture, she refused to admit that the Brotherhood was intent on overthrowing Nasser. But she did this in her own particular way:

  The Muslim Brotherhood has no intention of assassinating Nasser or anyone else. Neither do they intend to lay waste the country or stir up trouble. If anyone has ruined the country, it's Nasser himself. Our objective is far more important and far more noble. Our objective is to reveal the pure truth, the supreme truth, the presence of a sole God on earth, monotheism, the veneration of the unique God, respect for the commandments of the Koran and the Surma and their application. Our cause is to govern in the name of God and in accord with his commandments. The day when this comes about, their institutions will vanish and their legends disappear. Our objective is to reform, to make better, to seek perfection and not to destroy, devastate or stir up trouble.75

  One can well imagine that the police officer who was interrogating her did not find her reply all that reassuring. Al-Ghazali herself saw no rea son for him to be skeptical.76 She denied taking part in a conspiracy, but at the same time indicated that she agreed with Qutb when he called for the murder of representatives of apostate governments. In the same book she recounts how the author of Trail Markers had given her the manuscript of his book before she was taken to prison, where she spent part of her time in the company of Qutb's two sisters. Even several decades later, when she was writing her memoirs, she never expressed the slightest criticism of the man who had served as theoretician for the Islamists that killed in the name of Islam. On the contrary, throughout the book she expresses her admiration for his courage and his perspicacity. The fact that Tariq Ramadan wrote the preface for this book is thus not without significance, all the more so since he endorsed the book in the following terms: "Zaynab alGhazali never went too far ... "77

  Trained by the Islamic Foundation

  Because Ramadan has taken pains to protect al-Banna from the criticism to which Sayyid Qutb was subjected does not mean that he disapproves of Qutb. In 1998, the very year in which he defended his doctoral thesis on reformist thinking and the "perceptible" shift initiated by Qutb, he left for a year of study at the Leicester Islamic Foundation, an Islamist institute whose mission was to use England as a base for spreading the doctrines of Mawdudi and Qutb!

  Founded in 1973, the institute accommodates an Islamic training center known as the Markfield Institute of Higher Education, a most pompous title for what is neither more nor less than a university of propaganda. Conceived at first as a means of ensuring that Muslim students in England had a refuge that would protect them from contamination and keep them from forgetting Islam, the foundation, little by little, became a base camp for promoting "an Islamic social order in Great Britain." 78 The British environment seemed congenial to the most radical of Islamists. Adopting a strategy that many find incomprehensible, Britain gladly welcomed jihadists intent on organizing their projects far from the oppressive surveillance of Arab Muslim dictatorships. Prince Charles himself even provided the Leicester Institute with a certain degree of legit
imacy by granting it a prize in recognition of its service in the spread of a religious culture. Apparently searching for any means to demonstrate his morality, the future sovereign-who is also the head of the Anglican Church-decided to support any religious movement, however marginal or extreme, that enabled him to present himself as the defender of religious liberty-even if it meant lending an aura of legitimacy to the most controversial Islamic training center in Europe. Thanks to this official recognition, Tariq Ramadan no longer had reason to conceal the fact that he had been trained there. At the age of 36, he lived with all his family on the Leicester campus, where the alleyways are named after Qutb and Mawdudi. In the introduction to his book To Be a European Muslim, he thanked the institute for the instruction received there: "If this book has been possible, I owe it first of all to the excellent working conditions offered by the Islamic Foundation. I owe particular thanks to the president, Professor Khurshid Ahmad, for the trust he placed in me, and the institute's director, Dr Manazir Ahsan, for his warm welcome."79 He had every reason to express his thanks. For the entire year that he passed at the institute, he received a scholarship of Li,ooo a month, in addition to free lodgings.

  The Pakistani Islamists who offered him this opportunity have, for a long time, worked hand in hand with the Muslim Brotherhood network, in particular with Tawhid, the bookshop in Lyon that serves as Tariq Ramadan's headquarters. Until recently, the Islamic Foundation supplied the bookshop with books by Qutb or Mawdudi. But now it is a two-way exchange. The most radical Islamic foundation in Europe so appreciated Tariq Ramadan s works that they have undertaken to translate them and distribute them in England. Mohammed Seddiqi, one of the leaders, confirmed that Ramadan's writings fitted perfectly into the institute's tradition, as represented by Mawdudi and Qutb: "In the beginning, the foundation was inspired by the Islamic movement to translate Mawdudi s works and also those of Qutb. Today we publish more contemporary authors, such as Tariq Ramadan." $° The Swiss preacher's books are popular with British Islamists; 20,000 copies have been sold and they are to be found on the shelves of the foundation's library. One book will never have a place there, except as an object of abhorrence: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. The Islamic Foundation spearheaded the campaign against him. It is the foundation that served as the intermediary in the campaign launched by the Mawdudi network in Pakistan with which the institute is linked. In obedience to orders sent out by the Islamic Foundation of Madras, the Leicester foundation distributed to all the Muslim organizations a condemnation of the "blasphemous" book. According to Gilles Kepel, this campaign gave Mawdudi's followers a dominant influence within the English Islamic circles that have a reputation for extremism (often known as Londonistan)-a world in which the name of Tariq Ramadan strikes a harmonious note.

  Chapter 2

  The Heir

  Triq Ramadan admits that he is descended from a dynasty that is both religious and political: "Even before I had been formed intellectually, my education had given me the idea that we were entrusted with the inheritance of certain values."' He not only teaches about Hassan al-Banna, but he also imitates him down to the last detail-starting with the firm intention of employing his pedagogical talents in the service of Islamism. Many newspaper articles refer to him as a theologian, others as an imam. In fact, he has no degree from Al-Azhar University. His religious learning comes from his family, an education in an exceptionally political Islam, completed by a rapid-fire apprenticeship in Cairo and, above all, by a year's study at the Leicester Islamic Foundation. His thesis, granted without honors by the Faculty of Arts of Geneva, is nothing more than an opus in praise of Hassan al-Banna. He wrote a Master's thesis on "The concept of suffering in Nietzsche's philosophy," but his knowledge of philosophy has served principally to assail Voltaire's and Dostoevsky's permissiveness in conferences often organized by the Muslim Brotherhood. In lectures to students, he takes a more prudent stand. Ramadan has often been introduced as a university professor, but in truth, up to the time when an American Catholic university decided to appoint him to a chair in the autumn of 2004, he was simply a modest schoolteacher in Saussure (Switzerland). Before being invited, in 2006, to be Senior Research Fellow at the European Studies and Middle East Center of St. Antony's College, Oxford, he did teach once a week at Fribourg University, but as an outside collaborator and only for courses on the Islamic religion.

  Tariq Ramadan owes his fame and his reputation as an intellectual to his status as a Muslim leader. But what can legitimize this status, since he is in no way a theological scholar? First and foremost, he is a preacher-whose aura for Muslims had long been due to his direct descent from the mentor of modern Islamism. That is, up to the day when he made a name for himself not as a scholar but as a political leader with a considerable following thanks to the tapes of his lectures, as edited and distributed by the Muslim Brotherhood network. He was first presented as a religious leader, but was subsequently conceded the status of an "intellectual" on the basis of his many books on Muslims and the West-books that go over and over the same ground, but that have been published and republished with additions and rewordings first by Islamist publishing houses, and then by mainstream publishing houses impressed by the sales posted by his first publishers. His charisma, his undeniable pedagogical talent, and his perfect mastery in adapting the level of his discourse to the audience in question, Muslim or otherwise, have taken care ofthe rest. Always on the go, he sets off heated arguments in whatever country he visits, monopolizing public debate and defending his grandfather's Islam in veiled terms. Despite this subversive reputation, or perhaps on account of it, he has become a media idol in many European and North African countries. One imagines him to be somebody exceptional. In fact, the heir apparent has done nothing but follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and his father, along a path determined from the moment of his birth.

  The influence of his father, Said Ramadan

  Not only is Tariq Ramadan the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, but he is also the son of Said Ramadan, the Guide's favorite disciple, who spread the Muslim Brotherhood's Islam beyond Egypt's frontiers. Tariq was brought up in the cult that his father devoted to Hassan. "He [Said] had learned all that he knew from this man that had given him so much and provided him with so much, and who had, from his earliest age, formed and protected him," wrote Tariq Ramadan in the preface to his book Le face-a face des civilisations [The Confrontation of Civilizations]. "He never stopped talking about him .... For hours on end he recounted from memory the events and the occasions that had left their mark on him, his spiritual son, whom they called Hassan al-Banna junior."2

  "Banna junior" was born on April 12, 1926 in Shibin el-Kom, seventy kilometres north of Cairo. He was only fourteen years old when he first heard the name ofthe great al-B anna mentioned in a lecture given in Tanta. He was still at secondary school when he joined the Brotherhood. After obtaining a law degree from Cairo University in 1946, he was chosen by the Guide as his personal secretary, as well as editor of his review, Al-Shihab. Of all his faithful disciples, Said Ramadan was undoubtedly the one he preferred, to the extent that he gave him his cherished daughter, Wafa al-Banna, in marriage. A woman of whom Tariq Ramadan tells us: "My mother was fully imbued with this heritage: she was the eldest of Hassan al-Banna's children, but in addition, until the age of fifteen and a half, she was very close to him and greatly influenced by his spiritual appeal. Through her I have come to know my grandfather's unique qualities, as a man and as a father."3

  Tariq Ramadans parents grew up in the cult devoted to al-Banna, and they transmitted this cult to their children. Tariq Ramadan remembers how hard his father fought to rehabilitate Hassan al-Banna's reputation. "Hassan al-Banna, through his total devotion to God and God's teachings, had let light into his [Said's] heart and laid out the path of his commitment. To those who criticized him, who spoke of him without even having met him or listened to him, or had only read him, he would recall how he had learned spirituality, love, fraternity, and humili
ty at his side. "4 This is a tradition taken up today by Tariq Ramadan, brought up in the same atmosphere of idolatry. The heir apparent admires his grandfather as much as he does his own father. He speaks unendingly about Said Ramadan's military prowess when, at the age of twenty-one, he set off for Palestine to fight the Zionists. Tariq Ramadan claims that he "took part in the defense of Jerusalem." It was in 1947 and the state of Israel did not yet exist; the territory was divided between Egypt and Jordan under British mandate. It was not thus a question ofhelping the Palestinians recover the occupied territories, but of training anti-Jewish resistance units. The contact in the field, the person who helped the movement conduct its operations, was no novice as regards fighting the Jews: he was none other than Haj al-Husseini, the man who had asked the Muslims to fight alongside Nazi Germany in the Second World War. He had even trained two Bos nian army divisions-both of them in SS uniforms-assigned to massacre the Serbian population. He counted on Adolf Hitler to rid the world of the Jews. Hitler's downfall left him an orphan in a particularly awkward predicament. Providentially, Hassan al-Banna-another friend whom he had known since 1935-arranged for his political exile. Thanks to him, he rapidly found employment, becoming the mufti of Jerusalem, a position that meant organizing the arrival of fighters drawn from the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood's Special Organization, come to combat the Jewish immigrants, some of whom had only just been released from concentration camps. The latter saw in Israel a place of refuge where they would no longer have to suffer from anti-Semitism. And they landed up face to face with al-Husseini, busy raising new legions of combatants. The head of these legions was named Said Ramadan.