Finally allowed into the United States to discuss his views, the prominent European Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan found himself fielding questions on Thursday that exposed just how difficult it might be for him to fulfill his stated mission of building bridges between the Islamic world and the liberal, democratic societies of the United States and Western Europe.
The forum was a panel discussion on “Secularism, Islam, and Democracy: Muslims in Europe and the West” held in the Cooper Union’s historic Great Hall. The event was billed as not just a venue for serious debate, but also a celebration marking Mr. Ramadan’s first public appearance in the United States after six years of being denied entry based on allegations that he supported terrorism. Three of the sponsoring organizations—the American Association of University Professors, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the PEN American Center—had been involved in a lawsuit challenging Mr. Ramadan’s exclusion from the United States, and he agreed to make his first return appearance here a way to show those groups his gratitude, which he expressed repeatedly during the night.
But, contrary to the warnings by conservative critics of Mr. Ramadan that the event would be a lovefest in which he would face few tough questions, he found himself being pressed on issues such as the stoning of Muslim women for adultery, the Muslim condemnation of homosexuality, and the close ties that his grandfather, the Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, maintained with a Sunni Muslim leader and Arab nationalist who had helped recruit Arabs to support the Nazis in World War II. Throughout it all, Mr. Ramadan, a Swiss citizen and a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford, urged his fellow panelists to consider the Muslim perspective and argued that it was possible to arrive at positions that show both respect for both Muslim and Western values.
“It is not a problem to be an American by culture and a Muslim by religion,” said Mr. Ramadan, who argued that “we are all of multiple identities.” Muslims in the United States and Western Europe are eager to embrace the languages and laws of the nations in which they live, he said, but their efforts to forge such ties are made much easier when they feel free to hang onto their faith and to express opinions based on their religious views.
“The only way to be loyal as a citizen is to be critically, constructively loyal,” Mr. Ramadan said. Speaking of his own previous exclusion from the country, which he and many of his supporters have blamed not on any ties to terrorism but on his criticism of the U.S. government, he said he was “not going to keep quiet” when he thinks American policies are wrong.
Lifting of a Ban
Mr. Ramadan, who arrived in the United States on Wednesday, was able to travel here as a result by a January decision by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to issue an order clearing the way for him and another previously barred scholar, the South African political commentator Adam Habib, to obtain U.S. visas.
Secretary Clinton’s order pertaining to Mr. Ramadan—who was denied visas in 2004, when he sought to take a tenured position at the University of Notre Dame, and in 2006, when he sought to attend academic conferences—provided few details about his case or her rationale for reversing the Bush administration’s decisions not to let him come here. It strongly hinted at the official reasons for previously barring his entry, however, by saying he would not be excluded for donations he made before 2003 to two charities that the U.S. government subsequently designated as terrorist organizations for their alleged links to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Last year, a federal appeals court held that the federal government had not established that the consular officers handling Mr. Ramadan’s initial visa application had given him sufficient opportunity to establish that he did not know—or could not reasonably have known—that his donations were being used to support terrorism.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Ramadan said his receipt of his U.S. visa was followed by a small flood of invitations to speak here, and he plans to try to come here to talk as much as possible to try to promote understanding between the nation’s Muslims and the rest of American society. He said the Obama administration has done much to build bridges between the United States and the Muslim world, but “we still have to do more.”
In the short term, Mr. Ramadan’s planned engagements include a speech he expects to give on Saturday at the annual banquet of the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a visit to Detroit on Sunday to speak at a local Muslim festival, and an appearance on Monday at Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, where he will give a speech titled “Muslims Today—a Radical Reform.” In late April, he plans to return to the United States to speak on U.S.-Muslim relations at the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington, D.C., and in May he will speak on Islam in the 21st century at an event sponsored by the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California.
Some critics of Mr. Ramadan have argued that, despite his professed eagerness to be involved in debates over his views, his initial appearances in the United States all involve formats and audiences that are unlikely to expose him to serious challenge. When interviewed by telephone on Thursday, he was unapologetic about creating such an impression. “This is the first visit, and the first visit is to explain, not to defend,” he said.
Tough Questions
When Thursday night’s panel discussion rolled around, however, Mr. Ramadan often ended up on the defensive anyway.
George Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, questioned Mr. Ramadan at length about his unwillingness to more strongly criticize the ties Mr. Ramadan’s grandfather had with Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948, who advocated violent opposition to Zionism and supported the Nazis. Mr. Ramadan responded by arguing that his grandfather opposed fascism and should not be held responsible for the strategies employed by Mr. al-Husayni, even though both were united in their opposition to the creation of Israel.
In response to a question from the audience asking him about repression of homosexual people in Muslim society, Mr. Ramadan noted that other religions likewise condemn homosexuality, but he nonetheless made a plea for Muslims to be more tolerant. “I will never say to someone, You are no longer a Muslim because you are a homosexual,” he said. The message that should be sent by Muslims who object to homosexuality based on the Koran, he said, is, “I disagree with what you are doing. but I respect who you are.”
At some points in the discussion, Mr. Ramadan received support for his positions where it was not entirely expected. Such was the case, for example, when the discussion turned to the longstanding controversy over Mr. Ramadan’s refusal to call for an outright ban on the stoning of Muslim women for adultery, and insistence that there should instead by a moratorium on stoning, in general, while Muslims jurists discuss whether it should continue. A fellow panelist, Joan Wallach Scott, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, in New Jersey, who identified herself as a feminist, said, “I actually think that his solution to the problem is not a bad one,” because an end to stoning cannot be imposed on the Muslim world by the West.
Calls to Protest
Some conservative organizations and groups supportive of Israel are unhappy with Mr. Ramadan’s visit and are urging members to protest his appearances and otherwise try to subject him to public scrutiny. One conservative group, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, which characterizes itself as the “leading American Muslim voice taking back Islam from the demagoguery of the Islamo-fascists,” has billed Mr. Ramadan’s visit as his “American Islamist Victory Tour.” It has accused Mr. Ramadan of not taking a hard-enough line against Islamic radicals and failing to offer any significant support for the separation of mosque and state in Muslim-majority nations.
The Middle East Forum, a conservative group that advocates stronger ties between the United States and Israel, has been similarly critical of Mr. Ramadan and called on people to show up at Thursday’s event to “challenge the panelists with questions that they would rather be left unasked.”
David J. Rusin, director of Islamist Watch, a Middle East Forum program, said on Wednesday that the controversy surrounding Mr. Ramadan’s presence in the United States is fundamentally “about support for terrorism in one manner or another,” and he accused the Obama administration of putting outreach to Muslims “ahead of security concerns” in letting Mr. Ramadan into the country. His group, Mr. Rusin says, sees Mr. Ramadan as part of campaign by radical Muslims to subjugate the West by appealing to the courts and the news media, and “chipping away at the foundations of our society from within.”
“He talks a good game to a Western audience,” Mr. Rusin said, “but when you scrape away a lot of the rhetoric and a lot of the doublespeak, you get a sense that this is not the moderate man that is portrayed in the media and that he portrays himself to be.”
Among other conservative critics of Mr. Ramadan, Gretchen Carlson, co-host of Fox News’s Fox & Friends, recently called Mr. Ramadan an “alleged terrorist” and said that he and Mr. Habib are “getting access to not only our country but the minds of our kids on college campuses.”
The Manhattan Institute has scheduled an event next week, featuring several critics of Mr. Ramadam and Islamism, which it is promoting as a response to Thursday’s panel discussion. Among those speaking are Paul Berman, a writer in residence at New York University who is highly critical of Mr. Ramadan in his new book The Flight of the Intellectuals (Melville House); Ibn Warraq, a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry, in New York; and Judith Miller, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute who left a previous position at The New York Times in the midst of controversy surrounding her articles incorrectly reporting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Among the actions that critics of Mr. Ramadan cite as undermining his claims of moderation are his 2008 calls for boycotts of book fairs in Paris and Turin, Italy, because they were honoring Israel.
Duplicitous, or Not?
Echoing a common criticism of Mr. Ramadan, Mr. Berman said in an interview on Wednesday that the Muslim scholar “is really playing a double game,” delivering one message to non-Muslim audiences, another to audiences that are Muslim.
“I don’t pretend to know what is really inside his brain,” said Mr. Berman, who had advocated allowing Mr. Ramadan into the United States. “All I know is that I read a shelf of his books in English and in his own language, which is French, and I can see that he takes multifaceted positions. Thus he can say he is against terrorism, and indeed he has spoken out often about terrorists, but at the same time he advises us to revere the people who promote terrrorism.”
Mr. Packer of The New Yorker argued Thursday that his own review of Mr. Ramadan’s writings and speeches failed to produce any evidence that the Muslim scholar delivers two different messages or has a hidden agenda. “I don’t buy the argument that Mr. Ramadan is two-faced,” he said.
For his part, Mr. Ramadan expressed impatience at the questions he has received based on Mr. Berman’s book, which he dismissed as merely a translation of longstanding criticisms of him in France. In response to assertions that he is a closet radical Muslim, Mr. Ramadan noted that he remains banned from speaking in six majority-Muslim nations: Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Tunisia.
Others scholars interviewed this week cheered Mr. Ramadan’s return to the United States. Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, called Mr. Ramadan’s visit “something to be celebrated” and said “every academic should welcome his presence here.”
“I view Ramadan as a bridge figure,” Mr. Wolfe said, “and I think there is nothing more important in promoting dialogue across sort of hostile terrain than bridge figures.”
Amy W. Newhall, executive director of the Middle East Studies Association, which had protested the Bush administration’s barring of Mr. Ramadan from the country, said “the problem with the initial exclusion was that it was all in a shadow world where no information was ever brought forth. The accusations were always quite unclear.”
Arguing that “there is no basis” for any of the accusations brought against Mr. Ramadan, Ms. Newhall said, “Perhaps it is a good thing he can meet these people face-to-face to ask what they are talking about.”
