DAR AL HARB - U.K.: A GLOWING ARTICLE ABOUT TARIQ RAMADAN, TAKE IT WITH A TUB FULL OF SALT

Tariq Ramadan : Do you trust this man?

Tariq Ramadan is banned from the US and accused of plotting Islamic revolution in Europe. He may also be the one man to save us all from the Clash of Civilisations. Deborah Orr meets a twinkly eyed academic on a thankless mission

It's pretty weird, to find oneself enscon- ced in one's Soho drinking club, picking at a sea bass and waving away the wine list (regretfully), while chatting reasonably about what might be the best way of tackling the stoning-of-women problem. It's pretty weird, actually, to have decided that one's Soho drinking club is just the place to hang out for a couple of hours with a devout Muslim at all.

Professor Tariq Ramadan styles himself as a "Salifi Reformist" (the Saudis are Salafis too, though literalists). He counts Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, as his granddad. He is banned from the US under the Patriot Act. All this conspires to suggest he won't be terribly comfortable in the Groucho Club. But that's life, isn't it? You've got to stand up for western liberal values in whatever way you can.

Anyway, Ramadan's alluring pitch is precisely that he has few problems with western liberal values. He has spent most of his life as an academic, writer and activist, engrossed in the task of squaring the most liberal interpretations that Islamic texts have to offer with the most Islam-friendly of the values that the West cherishes, and thereby trying to persuade the world there are only a few small matters on which the supposedly clashing civilisations don't snugly converge. He presently lives in London, and pops down to Oxford for a couple of days a week to take tutorials in his role as a senior research fellow at St Antony's College.

For his efforts in splicing western and Islamic values, he's been lauded by Time as one of the 100 most important innovators of the century, and condemned by many Europeans as a secret exponent of the Islamification of Europe. His most trenchant critics, though, come from Muslim countries, which is a difficulty that seems to convince Ramadan he's on the right track. He and "some of the petro-monarchies", for example, appear to despise each other more than anything else on the planet. Conversely, his most ardent fans are among the young and educated European Muslims who flock to his charismatic lectures, buy his books and exchange tapes of his speeches.

Born in Switzerland in 1962, he was brought up there as his father, Said Ramadan, and all of the Muslim Brotherhood, had been banned from Egypt in 1954, after an alleged assassination attempt by one of the group on President Nasser. Ramadan confesses that he idealised Egypt in his youth, and assumed that he'd find life there more convivial to him than Europe. But moving there with his young family in 1991, after he had received a doctorate in Islamic studies and Arabic from the University of Geneva, he came to realise that living in a Muslim culture wasn't all he'd cracked it up to be.

...


Pertinent Links:

1) Tariq Ramadan : Do you trust this man?