The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism Part II

V.
Salafi reformism, judging from Qutb and Ramadan, turns out to be a kind of Rousseauianism. There is a pure and authentic way of living, which is the Muslim way. And yet the Muslims, who were born free, are everywhere in chains. The Muslims are oppressed by what Ramadan calls "a Western aggressive cultural invasion"--which is the kind of language that Qutb liked to use half a century ago (and al-Banna before him). A very great danger arises from the Western "colonization of minds," in Ramadan's phrase, by which he means the influence of television. This was Qutb's worry exactly, even in the pre-television age, which he described as "the cultural influences which had penetrated my mind." And so the road back to the pure and authentic way of living must be found.

The road is textual, and it leads back to the foundational documents of seventh-century Islam, which record the pure and the authentic before the days of Western cultural aggression and the colonization of minds. And yet neither of these men wants to reconstruct the seventh century brick by brick. Both of them are convinced that, in its comprehensiveness, the Qur'anic revelation is larger than the modern world and can swallow it whole--convinced that, instead of reconstructing the seventh century, they can reconstruct the modern age, and do so along salafist lines. They can fill each element of modern life with a proper Islamic meaning. Therefore they need to read the ancient texts with an eye to the modern world and come up with new interpretations: Islamic responses, point by point, to the challenge from the West, which conventional Islam has failed to do. That is why they are "reformists"--unlike the scholastic traditionalists (to use Ramadan's term), who merely go on rehearsing the ancient Islamic jurisprudence; and unlike the starker fundamentalists, who do want to rebuild the seventh century.

It has to be said that, in regard to reading the ancient texts with an eye to the modern world, Qutb is vastly more interested in the ancient texts, whereas Ramadan appears to be mostly absorbed in the modern world. Still, the principle remains intact. And then, since both men are seeking a practical result--the reconstruction of a proper Muslim community--they have no alternative but to give their project a political aspect, which is the doctrine of al-Banna.

And the ancient-and-modern orientation leads to another common trait, which is the tendency on the part of both men to grab hold of modern political vocabularies and convert them to their own purposes--quite as if a political vocabulary could be regarded as one more empty modern reality waiting to be infused with Qur'anic meaning. Do modern political thinkers speak about such-and-such? Qutb and Ramadan will rush to do the same, only in versions that seem to them faithful to the Qur'an. Qutb, following this instinct, sometimes sounds like an early twentieth-century revolutionary anarchist. Then again, sometimes he sounds (in one of his earlier books) like a New Dealer. "Social security" figures among his ideals. Those are vocabularies from his own time.

Ramadan, being a man of the post-modern era, prefers to sound like a liberation theologian from Latin America. Or he sounds like one of his anti-globalist allies, railing against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He cites the Greco-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, the philosopher of left-wing "autonomy," which is Ramadan's way of indulging in his own anarchist-like flights of fancy. Or Ramadan sounds like a moderate reformer in the conventional civic and not the salafi sense--like someone who has a few practical and well-intentioned proposals to make on behalf of marginalized populations.

Yet the modern rhetorics always turn out to be translations, in one fashion or another, of Qur'anic concepts. They are worldly exteriors with Islamic interiors. Qutb, in launching his anarchistic odes to freedom, means to say that, under his proposed resurrected Islamic caliphate, human beings will no longer be tyrannously ruled by other human beings but only by God, as interpreted by God's representatives. The libertarian rhetoric turns out to be a theocratic argument against democracy. By "social security," Qutb means the traditional Islamic obligation to pay a charity tax. Ramadan invokes civil libertarian arguments in order to defend the autonomy of his reconstructed Muslim community. He invokes the anti-globalist rhetoric of his left-wing allies in order to defend the mainstream Islamist movements in the Muslim world. And so forth, throughout the entire modern terminology.

None of this is meant to deceive anyone. These people are trying to conduct a thorough "reform" not of the world, but of Islam--a campaign to ensure that Islamic thinking will expand to match each new innovation of modern life without losing the connection to the original revelation. So they look for modern concepts, and for Qur'anic equivalents, and they fill the modern with the Qur'anic. And with all of this in hand, they set about posing their challenges to the unreformed Muslims, and to the modern, non-Muslim world.

The challenges they pose turn out to be different, however. Qutb wrote his principal works in the decades between the 1940s and 1966; and, like the fascists on the extreme right in those years, or the Marxists and the anarchists on the extreme left, he pictured the entire world hurtling toward a catastrophic crisis, which he interpreted along paranoid and apocalyptic lines. His vision of the impending collapse of both the West and the communist East Bloc, his vision of an Islamic revolutionary vanguard establishing somewhere an Islamic state and using it to export the Islamic revolution to the Muslim world and then to everywhere else, his vision of the Qur'anic utopia to come--all this was fairly wild: a grandiose version of al-Banna's already pop-eyed and Mussolinian idea about resurrecting the Islamic Empire. Perhaps Qutb's vision enjoyed one great advantage over the other mid-twentieth-century revolutionary projects, and this was Islam, an exceptionally sturdy base on which to rest his many novel ideas. Even so, his was a vision in the mid-twentieth-century mode.

Ramadan bears no relation to any of this. He is post-paranoid and post-apocalyptic. He thinks that Western-dominated globalization produces the poverty of the underdeveloped "south," the Muslim world included, and ought to be resisted. He is furious about Western assaults on the Muslim world, which in his eyes seem to be taking place no matter what the West happens to be doing or not doing--failing for such a long time to intervene in Bosnia, or choosing to intervene in Afghanistan (which strikes him as an American "retaliation against the people of Afghanistan"). In the 1990s he swelled with indignation at the sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and these days he swells with still more indignation at the invasion that overthrew Saddam. Everything the United States does strikes him as something of a plot; but this is not unusual. He does not seem obsessed by the coming catastrophe. He has no intention of launching revolutionary wars. He adheres to the preaching, or dawa, school of salafi reformism, and he wants to achieve his successes through persuasion and legal methods. His dreams do not point to a utopian climax. Mostly he wants to construct an Islamic counterculture within the West--his reconstructed Muslim community, which instead of withdrawing behind ghetto walls will take its place within the larger non-Muslim society.

Ramadan wants a share of the public space, not just a share of the private sphere. Or more than wants: he demands a share of the public space. A properly Muslim life has a physical and communal quality, which must be lived in physical space, and this will require modifications in the existing European secularism. Therefore he wants--he needs--to stick a few sharp elbows into the larger society, demanding his extra space. And does he dream in secret of something larger? Maybe he does, on some theological level, which would not be unusual. All great religions dream great (and dangerous) dreams. Still, Fourest and Landau and some of Ramadan's other panicky critics suspect something much more worldly. They suspect that clandestinely Ramadan, too, entertains the larger pop-eyed more-than-theological project: a world dominated by Islam, with his Muslim counterculture serving as the future empire's fifth column within Europe, under the ultimate control of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Exactly why the panicky critics harbor these suspicions ought to be easily understood. The Muslim emigration has turned out to be one of history's largest events, and in scattered regions across the whole of Western Europe, old-stock populations nowadays wake up to discover that people from the Muslim world have suddenly come to dominate this or that neighborhood or town, and Arabic or Turkish has begun to outpace some of the smaller European languages, and here and there Islamist groups are demanding censorship of one thing or another, or are demanding gender-segregated beaches, or the curricular demise of Voltaire or Darwin, or an end to history instruction on the crimes of Nazism. And there are always sermons by one or another exotically costumed Islamic scholar fantasizing about a Muslim conquest of Europe and the world, which therefore can be cited as evidence of a giant conspiracy. And it is true that, in Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups are prospering among the immigrant populations, not to mention Qutb's radical fringe groups, which are thoroughly terrifying; and true that Ramadan is theorizing the Muslim advance; and true that Ramadan wants his Muslim counter-culture to promote the mainstream Islamists elsewhere in the world.

Only none of this needs to be interpreted as a fifth column acting on the Brotherhood's secret plan. Mostly Ramadan's worldwide ambition appears to be something else entirely: the dream of a Western Islam, in his own salafi reformist version, taking the lead among Muslim currents everywhere; the dream of Western Islam, in his version of it, becoming the center, instead of a faraway outpost, of the larger Muslim world. But that is not a millenarian eschatology.

Judged on strictly literary grounds, there is no comparison between these men. Qutb, even in translation, commands a prose style of his own, which is typically serene and discursive, and nonetheless capable of sulfurous outpourings. He has the advantage of a background in literary criticism, which allows him to comment easily on the Qur'an and its style and mood. Most of all he has the advantage of the Qur'an, which occupies his attention. Qutb shows no embarrassment at all in noting the seventh-century barbarities whenever they seem apropos--the cruel amputations and other punishments ordained by huddud, the penal code, which he carefully discusses ("In case of a third or fourth theft, scholars have different views as to what is cut off," and so forth). The barbarous passages add a peculiar thrill to his writings, a frisson of the weird and the forbidden that seems all the more powerful because his tone of voice never changes: the tone of a man speaking with tranquility and confidence about things that are cosmically true.

And Qutb is, not least, a writer capable of summoning up the passions of hatred. He rains mighty blows upon the Jews of ancient Arabia. He scrupulously acknowledges that, here and there, the Qur'an contains passages that show compassion or kindliness to this or that individual Jew, but he prefers the other, more numerous passages: the descriptions of Jewish treachery and enmity during Muhammad's years in Medina, which in Qutb's estimation represent the eternal Jewish trait. In Qutb's commentaries (just as in Said Ramadan's Al-Muslimun, according to Hamel), you stumble here and there on references to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in a simple display of the continuing influence of Nazi and Nazi-like influences from Europe, even in the period after Nazism had been defeated; and in a simple display, likewise, of Qutb's reformism, to use the right word--his willingness to interpret the ancient texts on the basis of modern ideas. Not every modern idea is a good one, after all; nor every reform, a forward step.

The Swiss professor, by contrast, who never languished in an Egyptian jail, has never managed to work up a reliable prose style. Sometimes Ramadan writes in a heated and emotional tone, personal, slightly archaic, grim, tight-lipped; and this is startling to see. The very first sentences of Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity offer a breathless description of an unnamed person who turns out to be the author's father: "I still have the intimate memory of his presence and of his silences. Sometimes, long silences sunk in memory and thoughts and, often, in bitterness. He had a keen eye and a penetrating look that now carried his warmth, kindness and tears, and now armed his determination, commitment and anger." At other times he lapses into a faux esoteric and ecumenical guru tone, suitable for all denominations. The first sentence of Ramadan's new book, In the Footsteps of the Prophet: "In the hours of dawn when this book was written, there was silence, meditative solitude, and the experience of a journey, beyond time and space, toward the heart, the essence of spiritual quest, and initiation into meaning."

More often, Ramadan produces a solid professorial expository prose, unremarkable and clear, except for some obvious infelicities of translation. He never even toys with the idea that pulses so insistently within Qutb's Qur'anic commentaries--the idea that merely by turning his pages you are performing a religious act, or are engaging, soldier-like, in a bold and dangerous mission. Then again, if Ramadan makes very few efforts to inspire a sense of spiritual elevation, neither does he strain himself to incite his readers. Ramadan is not a hater--not by Qutb's standards, certainly. Sulfurous odors do not seep upward from the page.

But his books can seem a little bowdlerized. His own recounting of Muhammad's life and teachings in In the Footsteps of the Prophet is relentlessly bland, as if he has gone out of his way to avoid the Qur'anic tones of florid exaltation. "Life went on in Medina." "The situation had become difficult for the Muslim community in Medina." "The Muslims had returned to Medina and daily life had resumed its course, in a far less tense atmosphere than before." The Prophet himself is a very nice person. Muhammad adores his first wife: "He loved her so much." Also his other wives. Muhammad is reasonable. The little contradictions that pop up in the Qur'an, which Qutb patiently disentangles, pretty much disappear in Ramadan's account. On the topic of the Jews--to stick with the controversies in Medina--Ramadan presents Muhammad as thoughtful and just. Even when Muhammad orders the massacre of all the males of a Jewish tribe, Ramadan makes it clear that Muhammad has issued the order not because the hostile Jewish tribe embodies an eternal quality of Zionist evil, but because Muhammad needs to teach his numerous enemies, Jewish and otherwise, a stern lesson. And because the massacre succeeds at doing this, no further massacres of that sort need to be committed, thus demonstrating Muhammad's wisdom and even his restraint.

The Jews themselves arouse nothing venomous in Ramadan's account of Muhammad's life and experience of revelation. On the contrary, Ramadan emphasizes the common God worshiped by Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike. Naturally Ramadan acknowledges that, in Medina, Muhammad's relations with the Jewish tribes take an unfortunate turn. And yet, in Ramadan's version, "those developments by no means affected the principles underlying the relationship between Muslims and Jews: mutual recognition and respect, as well as justice before the law or in the settlement of disputes between individuals and/or groups." From a present-day political standpoint, Ramadan's presentation is more than superior, it is altogether commendable.

Passages in Ramadan's account could lead you to believe that if Qur'anic scholars ever wanted to spell out a scriptural basis for Muslim recognition of a Jewish state, the prophetic revelations might well prove to be, upon examination, more elastically flexible than previously imagined. Anyway, a good story, like an inveterate thief, can always be usefully amputated, in order to eliminate the disagreeable antisocial aspects. But then the surgical amputations, and Ramadan's spirit of uplift and multicultural piety, might prompt a skeptical reader to wonder if, as in Ramadan's several remarks to the credulous Buruma, something crucial may have been craftily withheld. Something about the Jews, maybe? Violence? Women? I do not bring up these three issues to be provocative. Ramadan's life during the last few years, his history of polemics and controversies, has already broached these particular matters--which drags me back one last time to the double question of his Genevan opinions and their shimmery Lake Léman reflections in the press.

VI.
In the Times magazine, Buruma did inquire into these three controversies--over Jews, violence, and women--and, in regard to the Jews, he did this by wondering about twenty-first-century France instead of seventh-century Arabia. This was appropriate. Four years ago, Ramadan launched a polemic against six well-known French intellectuals--Pierre-André Taguieff, Alexandre Adler, André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, and Bernard Kouchner--whom he grouped together as Jews. And he launched some accusations. In Buruma's summary of the affair, Ramadan complained that the various intellectuals had abandoned universal principles by becoming, in Buruma's phrase, "knee-jerk defenders of Israel." Buruma considered this complaint to be, in his word, "unfair," and that was because the several intellectuals in question, as he described them, "had all championed many causes other than Israel, including putting a stop to the mass murder of Muslims in Bosnia."

But then, in his even-handed spirit, Buruma went on to compare the intellectuals to "many early neoconservatives" in the United States, which is a description that five or six readers of the Times magazine may have regarded as neutral and objective, but was bound to be viewed by everyone else as pejorative, if not a withering condemnation. And Buruma observed that at least some of those French intellectuals struck back at Ramadan in ways that were, in Buruma's words, "shrill" and "vastly overblown," namely, by accusing Ramadan of anti-Semitism--which, in Buruma's view, they should not have done because these kinds of attacks, in Buruma's words, "have a way of sticking to their target." But did Ramadan deserve these attacks in a non-shrill and underblown way? Buruma went out on a limb. Ramadan, he flatly declared, "is in fact one of the few Muslim intellectuals to speak out against anti-Semitism."

Such was the account in the Times magazine. It was not accurate. In his polemic of four years ago, Ramadan's chief complaint about the people he grouped together as Jewish intellectuals did not boil down to calling them "knee-jerk defenders of Israel." Ramadan complained that his group of intellectuals had abandoned what he called universal values in order to advance their narrow community interests as Jews. A retreat to Jewish tribalism: that was the accusation, and the communal loyalties had to do, above all else, with French domestic politics. Ramadan accused the intellectuals of making a false issue out of anti-Semitism in present-day France, a false complaint that bigotry against Jews has lately begun to revive in a novel form, different from the Christian religious hatreds of the Middle Ages, and different from the hatreds of the fascist era, though perhaps not entirely different.

The writer who has chiefly advanced this idea is Taguieff, the author of a book called La Nouvelle Judéophobie (which has been somewhat oddly translated as Rising From the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe); and Taguieff's was the first name to come under Ramadan's attack. Taguieff is the principal historian of racism in France today, and, as it happens, he is not Jewish--a mistake on Ramadan's part, which Buruma duly noted. Still, the question remains: regardless of Taguieff's ancestors or religious affiliation, does his notion about the rise of a new kind of French anti-Semitism, a "new Judeophobia," reflect some kind of communal loyalty to the Jews on his part, perhaps a loyalty that he has freely chosen for one reason or another? The obnoxiousness of this question ought to be obvious. The only proper question ought to be, is Taguieff a good historian?

This, at least, is answerable. A new kind of hostility to Jews does seem to have cropped up in France, and the evidence for this proposition, I would think, has the misfortune of being overwhelming. It is confirmed by the flight of some French Jews from the immigrant working-class suburbs; by the much-discussed difficulty or inability of even non-Jewish schoolteachers in those same suburbs to teach students about the Holocaust, out of fear of arousing Islamist anger; and by some well-reported violent crimes. It is true that, for a couple of years, the government in France, and the mainstream press as well, stuck to the view that most of this was greatly exaggerated. And yet after a while, when the problem failed to go away, the French government organized its own advisory commission, and the commission arrived at the conclusion--reported in The New York Times in March 2005--that 62 percent of the hate crimes committed in France during the previous year were directed at Jews. This is the kind of pseudo-precise statistic that can seem a little dubious, but it does suggest a trend, especially when you consider that France's Jewish population amounts to less than 1 percent of the total French population.

As to how sinister and dangerous the "new Judeophobia" may be: that is a separate issue. Jumpiness is the modern French condition, and some of the jumpier commentators have left an impression that France's Jews are undergoing a horrific wave of hatred and ought to flee for their lives to Israel. Ariel Sharon, not long before his health collapsed, advised the French Jews to do just that--only to be rebuked by André Glucksmann, as could have never have been predicted by anyone relying on Ramadan's essay, or for that matter on Buruma's. The point of Ramadan's essay, in any case, was not to argue about social realities or the accuracy of Taguieff's scholarship, but to challenge the Jewish communal loyalties that Ramadan imagined to be at work--which is still another aspect, in the zone of intellectual debate, of what Taguieff has done so much to identify.

Ramadan's second big indictment had to do with the Iraq war and its accompanying disputes, which Ramadan saw once again as proof that the Jewish intellectuals had acted on their tribal loyalties. He wrote that "intellectuals as different as Bernard Kouchner, André Glucksmann or Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had taken courageous positions on Bosnia, Rwanda or Chechnya, have curiously supported the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq." Another error turned up in this sentence. Lévy, back in 20022003, when the Iraq war was being debated, declined to endorse the intervention, though his endorsement would have counted for a lot. (This error was compounded by Stéphanie Giry's account of the same affair in the Times Book Review, which erroneously enlisted Alain Finkielkraut as still another Jewish supporter of the war.) Still, Kouchner and Glucksmann lent their endorsements--Kouchner, in a highly modulated version. But nothing was, in Ramadan's word, "curious" about this--at least, nothing suggesting a retreat from positions held in the past.

Kouchner, in his capacity as humanitarian activist, not to mention as a veteran campaigner for the Kurds, has advocated humanitarian interventions in any number of instances over the years, which makes it hardly surprising that, in 2003, he would have seen a virtue in overthrowing Saddam. The same logic applies to Glucksmann. Nor has either of those men, Kouchner or Glucksmann, kept the public uninformed about his reasoning. These are voluble men, at book length. They have even acknowledged, both of them, an influence from their Jewish backgrounds on their recent thinking, though the influence has zero to do with Israel. They were influenced by their experiences as toddlers during the years when Nazis ruled France--experiences that led both men to conclude that powerful countries have a duty to protect populations victimized by dictatorships.

Ramadan argued that, by intervening in Iraq, the United States "certainly acted in the name of its own interests, but we know that Israel supported the intervention and that its military advisers were engaged among the troops." More: "We also know that the architect of this operation in the heart of the Bush administration is Paul Wolfowitz, a notorious Zionist, who has never concealed that the fall of Saddam Hussein would guarantee a better security for Israel with its economic advantages assured." It ought not to require an exceptionally fine mind to detect the conspiracy theory at work in these remarks. I cringe at having to add that Wolfowitz, whatever his other sins, has never been known for his Zionism (though I realize that, given the confluence of z's, hardly anyone will believe me). Ramadan's description of the Jewish intellectuals in France pretty much harmonizes, by the way, with his description in Western Muslims and the Future of Islam of the American Jews as well--the American Jews who, en bloc, are said by Ramadan to form a "lobby" (the word has been internationalized) that advocates Jewish interests and the promoting of Israel in lieu of standing for "right, justice, and ethics," which is what he thinks that Muslims should do.

So, yes, Glucksmann and Lévy responded in print. Glucksmann began his response by writing, "Mr. Ramadan says, in short: Glucksmann doesn't think with his head, he thinks with his race" (though Buruma, in the Times magazine, skipped over this line, which contains the nub of the argument, in order merely to quote Glucksmann's insult: "What is surprising is not that Mr. Ramadan is anti-Semitic, but that he dares to proclaim it openly"). Lévy, as Buruma reports, adverted to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But were these responses especially shrill and overblown, as Buruma claims? Ramadan's polemic did have the sound, in some people's estimation, of an ultra-right-wing rally, with a demagogic leader calling out the names of Jewish journalists to the jeers of a crowd--but perhaps this echo is not widely appreciated outside of France. The anti-globalists in France posted Ramadan's polemic on their European Social Forum website; but once the anti-globalists had listened to the responses, they took it down again, abashed, and not because they had been intimidated.

But never mind the Jews. The most striking comment in Buruma's Times magazine account of this affair is something else entirely--his plea, in Ramadan's defense, that "Ramadan is in fact one of the few Muslim intellectuals to speak out against anti-Semitism." It is as if, in picturing the modern Muslim world, Buruma can imagine only a landscape of bearded fanatics--the kind of people who, like Qutb in his Qur'anic commentaries or Hamas in its charter, do natter on about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And, to be sure, there are many such types, which is Taguieff's point. And Ramadan has indeed issued some excellent condemnations of anti-Semitism (which Hamel quotes at length), even apart from his genuinely commendable interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews of ancient Arabia.

But good grief! What can Buruma have been thinking of? You have only to glance at your own bookshelves to see how absurd is Buruma's comment about Ramadan as a lonely Muslim intellectual opposed to anti-Semitism--your shelves full of books by this or that novelist or literary critic or well-known political analyst, one book after another demonstrating that liberal culture in our modern age has come to be animated by no small number of distinguished and celebrated intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds. Or was Buruma thinking only of the Francophone world? Francophones are not so different. But I suspect that, in speaking about Muslim intellectuals, Buruma was picturing something other than ordinary intellectuals. I suspect that he was picturing the kind of person who can claim deeper social roots than book-writing intellectuals would normally care to have. He was picturing leaders with mass followings in poor neighborhoods, intellectuals whose audiences, in their folk authenticity, might enter the lecture halls through separate doors for men and women. From this point of view, Buruma might well be right. The number of demagogic rabble-rousing Islamist preachers who denounce anti-Semitism is not very large.

But let us not be too quick to assume that one person is authentic and another is not. Nor should we assume too quickly that Muslim immigrant neighborhoods are inherently deaf to liberal voices, even if Buruma's description of Ramadan as a lonely Muslim voice against anti-Semitism does seem to imply something of that sort. The "new Judeophobia" that Taguieff has identified is unquestionably a large phenomenon, but it is also, as Taguieff's coinage suggests, new. And yet the immigrant neighborhoods are relatively old. Something has happened, then; and Ramadan may even have played a role in bringing the something about. He began to build his social base in the Arab districts of Lyon in 1992. But those neighborhoods do have a history, and this history does not begin with Islamism. In 1983, a tiny group of young Arabs in Lyon organized something called a "March for Equality" to protest their own social conditions and those of people like themselves. And the tiny group set out for Paris. The march turned out to be a big event. The young people from Lyon captured the popular imagination. By the time they arrived in Paris, their numbers had swollen to 100,000, and the protest had become known as the "March of the Beurs"--a slang word, friendly and not at all racist, for young Arabs.

Here was a genuinely mass movement. It gave rise, the next year, to an organization called SOS Racism. And SOS Racism likewise proved to be a popular success, for a while. SOS Racism called a rally in the Place de la Concorde in Paris in 1985. I happened to be there myself. Hundreds of thousands of young people attended, Arabs and everybody else, glorying in their multi-hued splendor--which SOS Racism made a point of rendering fashionable. These were the avatars of 1980s anti-racism and social equality, young people who were determined to shout down the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotries of the French extreme right, and were determined to protest the disparities of wealth, and had good reason to make these protests. But SOS Racism defined its principles broadly, and was therefore the enemy of anti-Semitism as well. Explicitly, no less. SOS Racism's slogan was "Touches pas à mon pote!"--"Don't touch my buddy!"--and this was an affecting and popular slogan for a trendy movement of the anti-racist young. People wore a cheerful-looking button bearing that slogan, and in some neighborhoods the button itself came into fashion, pinned to every lapel.

A number of media-savvy writers stood behind the movement, and orchestrated the press and offered a bit of intellectual leadership. And these people, who were they? Marek Halter, the popular novelist, was one of them. The best-known was Bernard-Henri Lévy, the same person whom the readers of Ramadan's polemic from 2003 could only view as an agent of the notorious Zionist within the Bush administration, and whom the readers of Buruma's piece in the Times magazine could only regard as an incipient neocon. But SOS Racism was not a neocon development. It was something new on the left, a wing of the larger popular left that, in the 1980s, worked up an excitement for Amnesty International, and for East Bloc dissidents, and for famine relief--quite as if anti-racism, human rights, Arab rights, women's rights, anti-totalitarianism, humanitarian awareness, the rebelliousness of the young, a fashion for boldly colored clothes and for certain kinds of music, and the cult of motorcycles could be viewed, in a tizzy of trendiness, as one and the same.

Only what happened to that movement in the years that followed--the movement that got its start among the "Beurs" of Lyon? It was defeated. That is the big story lurking underneath all these current debates about Tariq Ramadan and salafi reformism. SOS Racism was defeated by its own errors and missteps, none of which were especially dreadful but did give the impression that politicians in the Socialist Party were pulling the strings, and SOS Racism had ended up a feel-good exercise for softheads. But mostly the new movement was defeated by a newer movement, which competed for support in the immigrant streets. The newer movement (as I learn from the various biographies of Ramadan) likewise got started in the immigrant zones of Lyon.

The newer movement was the Union of Young Muslims, founded in 1987, four years after the March of the Beurs, precisely in order to fight against everything that had come out of the March of the Beurs. The Union of Young Muslims was, exactly like SOS Racism, a movement for social justice--only, instead of being animated by the trendy mishmash of 1980s left-liberalism, the new movement invoked seventh-century Islam, in the style descended from al-Banna. And the two movements, the brand-new Islamists and the left-wing liberals, went head-to-head in a competition for support. SOS Racism campaigned to prevent nightclubs from discriminating against young Arabs and blacks. The Islamists campaigned to prevent young Muslims from going to nightclubs.

By the time Ramadan arrived in Lyon, the Union of Young Muslims was five years old, and the Tawhid bookstore and publishing house were reasonably well-established, and yet those were immigrant institutions, a little rough around the edges, the bookstore filled (according to Paul Landau in The Saber and the Qur'an) with anti-Semitic tracts, the tape cassettes with rants. Ramadan added polish and eloquence to those endeavors, even if, being a bourgeois from Geneva, he could never quite make himself at home in the proletarian streets. And in the immigrant districts of Lyon, the fiery refurbished hard-headed Islamists outcompeted the politician-ridden soft-headed liberal left. Then again, this was more than a local story. Islamists defeated leftists all over the world.

There is another half to this story, though, which is what happened on the left in the wake of these defeats. The rise of Islamism in the 1980s and 1990s created a tremendous crisis on the European and even the American left--even if, for most left-wingers at the time, the crisis went unnamed and undiscussed. The crisis was unavoidable, though. What does it mean to be on the left, after all? I mean the larger left, the left that includes everybody marked by even the faintest and most attenuated of left-wing traces--the progressives, and the people who, with still more sophistication, shudder with savvy distaste at any ideological label at all. To be on the left: doesn't this mean a solidarity with the poor and the downtrodden?

The March of the Beurs excited support and acclaim in France in 1983 precisely because, for the first time on a national scale, the sincere young anti-racists of old-stock France were offered a way to manifest their solidarity with the oppressed immigrants. But once SOS Racism had lost its sheen, everybody who identified even faintly with the left had to pause and consider what new attitude to adopt. Here were the Islamists, shouldering aside the liberal left, and shouldering aside the dowdy mainline Muslim organizations, too--the Islamists, claiming to be, at last, the true and authentic representatives of the poor and the downtrodden. The Islamists, in spite of a thousand principles that were otherwise unthinkable to the left. This required a left-wing response.

In France--and in Britain and other countries, too--the first people on the left to recognize that something big was going on proved to be the tiny and ridiculous-looking Trotskyist sects. The Trotskyists saw an opening. From a Marxist perspective, Islamism was strange, and it was true that Trotskyism, back in the 1940s, used to have its own literature (there was a famous essay by Tony Cliff) about the fascist nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. But that was long ago, and Trotskyists pride themselves on not being finicky. So the Trotskyists reached out. Nor were they the only ones. Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamist revolution in Iran came to power in 1979 by allying with the Marxists of Iran, meaning the groups that were pro-Soviet, and this development led communist parties all over the world, during the early 1980s, to look on Iran's Islamists as a progressive movement: a force for anti-imperialism and social justice. In its May Day parade, the French Communist Party marched through Paris with an Iranian delegation called Hezbollah, as Ladan Boroumand has pointed out--something that could never have happened in the past.

These developments on the old-school Marxist left might appear of no significance whatsoever, given that, by the 1980s, old-school Marxism was beginning to fade ever more quickly into the past. In France the communists were undergoing the first stages of their collapse. As for Trotskyism, it was, almost by definition, a microscopic cause. Still, no one should be counted out. In the first round of the presidential elections in France in 2002, a lot of high-minded progressives wanted to register a protest vote, and Trotskyist candidates were on the ballot, and 10 percent of the electorate ended up voting Trotskyist (which is how, back in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen edged past the Socialist candidate in the first round of elections and ended up in second place). Something similar cropped up at the big anti-war marches in February 2003: the giant demonstrations in Paris and London, not to mention in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and many other places. The tiny Marxist groupuscules played an outsize role in organizing those demonstrations, either behind the scenes, as in the United States (where the groupuscules were exceptionally tiny), or front and center, as in Europe. And the Marxist organizers with their new alliances added a new and peculiar note to those gigantic events.

The march in Paris offered the most scandalous example, not just because a contingent of Baathists marched by with their placards in favor of Saddam Hussein, but also because a group of peace demonstrators broke away from the march and beat up some Jews--a minor event, universally condemned, but hinting of something new in the air. Nothing even faintly resembling an attack on random Jews could possibly have taken place at any previous left-wing demonstration in France during the last many decades. The march in London proceeded without anything shameful taking place, but this only made the situation in London easier to identify, since everybody was well behaved. Britain's Stop the War Coalition, which organized the February 2003 march and a good many additional demonstrations during the next years, was visibly dominated by the tiny Socialist Workers Party, in alliance with Britain's version of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Association of Britain. Trotskyists and Islamists: "an odd marriage," as the Economist put it. Tony Cliff must have turned over in his grave.

Yet the marital oddity did not prevent millions of non-Trotskyists and non-Islamists from tramping through the streets under the leadership of this alliance, quite as if the millions felt confident that, no matter what might come of the march, the Socialist Workers could reasonably be ignored (a safe assumption) or even regarded with irritable fondness, and quite as if the Islamists, whom nobody could ignore, authentically represented the oppressed and the downtrodden, and therefore lent majesty to the march. Such was the implication, anyway. Nothing like a Trotskyist-Islamist alliance could possibly have mobilized millions of Britons in the past.

And among the progressive intellectuals, the people who sound off in the magazines and write their books? Here, too, a shift got under way, and Buruma--not to beat a dead horse--has offered the clearest instance of it, stage by stage. In Occidentalism, in 2004, he and his co-author Avishai Margalit made a big point of demonstrating the influence of fascist and Nazi ideas on various radical thinkers around the world, the Islamists included. But this kind of sophisticated ideological analysis pretty much disappeared in Buruma's next book, Murder in Amsterdam, which was published in 2006. Murder in Amsterdam described the murder of Theo van Gogh by the Islamist fanatic Muhammad Bouyeri, but Buruma no longer seemed interested in extremist doctrines and their origins and trajectory--even though, to judge from his spotty descriptions, the murderer Bouyeri appears to be a reasonably consistent ideologue, clinging to Islamist doctrines descending from Qutb himself. And by February 2007, in his Times magazine profile, face-to-face with Tariq Ramadan and his slightly complicated family relation to Qutb, Buruma could hardly bestir himself to say anything at all about extremist ideas and their consequences.

Ramadan offered his misleading explanation that Qutb and Grandfather al-Banna never knew each other, and Buruma left it at that. Salafi reformism? Buruma failed to notice Qutb's prominence among its intellectual leaders. Anti-Semitism? Ramadan is "one of the few Muslim intellectuals to speak out." And why one of the few? It was as if, without realizing what had happened, Buruma had quietly come to accept Ramadan's overall thesis, and had begun to look upon Ramadan as the voice of the masses, and the masses as a population hopelessly steeped in the vapors of authenticity; and had come also to look upon the liberal intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds as insignificant because, in their liberalism, they are demonstrably inauthentic. Ramadan ended up being "one of the few Muslim intellectuals" because the other Muslim intellectuals, being liberals, did not count. Or worse, the other Muslim intellectuals, being liberals, sometimes stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the non-Muslim liberals, whom Buruma had decided to dismiss as neocons.

This is a pretty big development, if you stop to think about it, and one that might explain the oddly ingenuous press that Ramadan has been receiving. For if people like Ramadan and the other Islamists do speak for the oppressed and the downtrodden, and if Ramadan is a pretty good guy compared with most of his fellow salafi reformists, then shouldn't we make every effort to view Ramadan in the best of lights? He is better than Qutb, after all--so why bring up the troubling parts? Anyway, even if Qutb is a nightmare, wouldn't we be better off not inquiring too closely into the views of someone like van Gogh's murderer? Wouldn't we be better off trying to be, from a sociological point of view, halfway sympathetic? Those millions of anti-war marchers made exactly such a choice, at least on that single day in February 2003: to look on the march's Islamist leaders as the proper representatives of an oppressed community. Shouldn't we ferret out an upbeat definition of salafi reformism? Shouldn't we find a way to conclude, along with Buruma, that "we agreed on most issues"?

A sincere person could stroke his chin for quite a while over these questions. But then, the questions do express an attitude, which is bound to congeal into a lens, sooner or later, which might not lead to the sharpest of journalistic reportage. And if, in Buruma's journalism, a degree of fuzziness seems to have obscured his view of Ramadan and the Jewish intellectuals, what is likely to have happened in regard to Ramadan and the question of violence, a much bigger issue--this question that Buruma has resolved with the simple and confident remark about Ramadan offering "an alternative to violence"?

VII.
It is true and it is wonderful that Ramadan has, on quite a few occasions, condemned any sort of terrorist violence. Better still, these condemnations seem consistent with Ramadan's larger program for the Muslim community in Europe, which ought to require many things, but nothing even remotely resembling a violent campaign. Anyway, the entire shape of Ramadan's career so far--the energy he has expended on projecting his own ideas and personality onto the public stage in Western Europe and beyond, instead of conserving his time and strength for strictly Muslim audiences--would make no sense at all, if the ultimate purpose was to mold his followers into some sort of force, capable of opening a violent breach in society. Ramadan is said to have been influenced by the example of Malcolm X in the United States, or at least by Spike Lee's Malcolm X--Malcolm, whose last letter in real life, left unsent at his death, is said to have been addressed to Said Ramadan at the Geneva Islamic Center. But Tariq Ramadan, who has something of Malcolm's air of touchy dignity, has nothing of Malcolm's demeanor of unstated threats.

Still, sometimes it is useful to inquire a little more closely into what anyone means by violence or terrorism. Bomb attacks on random crowds in the mass-transit systems of Madrid or London obviously count as terrorist acts. But what about bomb attacks on random bus-riders in Israel? Ramadan has expressed himself on this topic, too. He is keenly anti-Zionist. He applauds the Palestinian resistance. And yet he has sometimes raised an objection to some of the methods of the Palestinian resistance: a careful distinction, well drawn. But then again, Ramadan has offered more than one commentary on anti-Zionist themes, and, to my eyes, one of those commentaries, in the introduction to Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity, nearly leaps from the page. It comes in the course of an emotional tribute to his father, and to his father's devotion to the principles of Grandfather al-Banna.

About his father, Tariq Ramadan writes, in a passage that has been translated less than gracefully: "Often, he spoke of the determination in his commitment, at all moments, against colonialism and injustice and for the sake of Islam. This determination was though never a sanction for violence, for he rejected violence just as he rejected the idea of an 'Islamic revolution.'" The rejection of an "Islamic revolution" in this context means the rejection of armed uprisings or coups in favor of the slower, more cautious, yet still militant proceedings of the Muslim Brotherhood. Violence does not offer the road to success, from this point of view. But the passage continues. The time frame is evidently the late 1940s:

The only exception was Palestine. On this, the message of al-Banna was clear. Armed resistance was incumbent so that the plans of the terrorists of Irgun and of all Zionist colonizers would be faced up to. He had learnt from Hassan al-Banna, as he said it one day: "to put one's forehead on the ground." The real meaning of prayer being giving strength, in humility, to the meaning of an entire life.

So there is an exception. It is violence against Zionists--against the plans of all Zionists and not just the Zionist extreme right wing, the Irgun (who were in fact terrorists, just as al-Banna says). But the peculiar note in that passage emanates from a single word, "incumbent"--a word suggesting that anti-Zionist violence is obligatory. A duty, not just a tactic. Moreover, a duty linked with prayer, forehead on the ground. A duty that gives meaning to an entire life. A religious duty.

That is a heartbreaking passage. The entire tragedy of the Palestinian people can be found in statements such as this one--the ideological dogma that has led so many Palestinians to look on violence as a principle, therefore as something that can never be abandoned. If only the Palestinian national movement had been able to look on violence as merely a tactic, the movement's leaders, and not just a handful of freethinkers and pragmatists, might have noticed after a while that, realistically speaking, violent tactics were proving to be counterproductive and ought to be exchanged for better tactics--perhaps something that might actually succeed in building a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel, as could very likely have happened years ago. But if violence is obligatory, if it is "incumbent" on the partisans of al-Banna's Islamic renewal, if violence is an obligation that (as al-Banna observes) distinguishes anti-Zionist struggles from all other struggles against colonialism and injustice, well, there can be no question of surrendering a principle, regardless of the practical cost. And so it has been, in the history of the Palestinian movement; and the cost has been terrible, to the Palestinians above all.

There is something else in that word "incumbent," together with the forehead bowed in prayer. Tactics speak to a given circumstance, but religious duties address the universe. The notion of a religiously mandated violence, an obligatory violence, therefore opens a door, and it is hard to see what could prevent ever wilder yet equally pious obligations from ultimately pushing their way through the open space. Qutb's contribution to the notion of religious violence consisted largely of determining that Muslim "hypocrites," quite as much as Zionists or any other outright enemy of Islam, merited a violent resistance. This notion opened the door to mass killings of Muslims, in the name of Islam. And there is the example of Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, by all accounts one of the great scholars of Sunni Islam, a man with a long and illustrious history in the Muslim Brotherhood who went on, after his emigration to Europe, to help found the European Council for Fatwa and Research--all this, even apart from his other career, thanks to Al-Jazeera television, as the world's most visible expert on Islamic jurisprudence. It was Sheik al-Qaradawi who directed the funeral prayer at Said Ramadan's funeral in Cairo in 1995--as Tariq Ramadan proudly reports in The Roots of the Muslim Revival.

And yet Qaradawi is also the person who, in 2003, issued the most famous of the fatwas authorizing suicide terrorism by Palestinians. He issued the gruesome fatwa permitting women to commit suicide terrorism while, at the same time, giving women terrorists a dispensation from the normal obligation to conceal their hair under a hijab--a bizarre touch on Qaradawi's part, underlining the ritualistic nature of these acts, and yet entirely in keeping with the sort of erudite matter that Qaradawi normally concerns himself with: say, whether women must keep to themselves when they are menstruating (a point that he rejects, on authority) or whether they may have intercourse with their husbands during that time (they may not, though other kinds of physical pleasure are permitted).

Among the religious authorities who stand behind the vogue for ritualized suicide terrorism in the Arab and Muslim world in the last few years, Qaradawi, drawing on his jurisprudential learning, does appear to be in the first rank--which is not an argument for downplaying the historic role of Hassan al-Banna long ago. On the contrary, the elderly Qaradawi himself has invoked, in one of his sermons, the memory of al-Banna orating on the agreeable nature of death in the cause of God. As for Tariq Ramadan, he reveres Qaradawi above all other present-day Islamic scholars, and in one book after another he has left no room for doubt about his fealty. If anyone in the world offers a model of modern enlightened Islam, Ramadan plainly judges Qaradawi to be that person. Ramadan has contributed prefaces to two collections of Qaradawi's fatwas in their French editions, not to mention other books written by people with one or another sort of connection to the terrorist vogue--these editions published by the Tawhid house in Lyon, which is Ramadan's publisher as well.

None of this alters the fact that Tariq Ramadan himself disapproves of terrorism. But there is a cost in having it both ways, in noisily affirming his place within the salafi reformist tradition while pretending that terrorist components of the movement belong only to a distant offshoot; or in affirming his own disapproval of violent action while exalting his grandfather's memory; or in condemning the terrorist aspects of the Palestinian resistance while still revering Qaradawi and even, with his prefaces, bedecking himself with Qaradawi's prestige, and bedecking Qaradawi with his own prestige. The cost is a little smudge of ambiguity in Ramadan's own position. It is the little smudge that makes the various allegations regarding the Ramadan family (in connection with the al-Taqwa Islamic bank in Switzerland, accused and later cleared of financing Al Qaeda, though the lawyers for some families of September 11 victims have lodged a lawsuit; in connection with a Qaeda financier who has been jailed in Spain since 2002, under the authority of the great Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who ordered the arrest of Augusto Pinochet; in connection with a Qaeda militant who came from the Lyon region; and so forth) look not more convincing than before, but also not outlandish.

The problem lies in the terrible fact that Ramadan's personal milieu--his grandfather, his family history, his family contacts, his intellectual tradition--is precisely the milieu that bears the principal responsibility for generating the modern theoretical justification for religious suicide-terrorism. Yet what can Ramadan do about this horrific reality--turn against his family? He is his family's prince. He has timidly offered jurisprudential proposals contrary to Qaradawi's; but Ramadan, unlike Qaradawi, is a university philosopher, a secular figure (in spite of everything), and not an authoritative theologian. Ramadan's opinions are opinions; Qaradawi's opinions are law. What is Ramadan to do, then? To challenge Qaradawi's authority would mean challenging the system of authority as a whole, which is something well beyond the salafi reformist idea. So Ramadan writes op-eds, which are not fatwas. And he devotes his life to burnishing the prestige of his father and grandfather and their works, and to promoting the cause of salafi reformism, which means promoting the authority of true and authentic Islamic scholars such as Qaradawi.

And his final message, therefore, ends up calling for--but what is his final message with regard to violence? It is a double message. The first message condemns terrorism. The second message lavishes praise on the theoreticians of terrorism. I suppose he expresses a third message, too, to the effect that around here nobody knows nothing about nobody, and around here nobody would dream of ratting on family, and what are you, a racist?

Caroline Fourest, in Brother Tariq, makes the argument that, in the end, the ambiguity in Ramadan's outlook can only serve to confer legitimacy on the revolutionary Islamist idea, which is willy-nilly bound, in turn, to elevate ever so slightly terrorism's prestige. Fourest pictures a young man from North Africa in France, attending a lecture by Ramadan, and she wonders what ideas somebody like that might take away. Hamel, in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan, scoffs at Fourest's argument and observes that, for all the accusations against Ramadan, nothing has ever been proved, and out of the many thousands of people who have in fact attended his lectures, only a single person, a man from the Lyon district, is known to have ended up in Al Qaeda's Afghan training camps. Who is right in this dispute?

Hamel, the scoffer, would carry the day in a court of law. Still, it is easy to imagine that, in a small way, Fourest may be on to something. And what is Buruma's position on the Fourest-Hamel debate? The author of Murder in Amsterdam seems to have missed this particular controversy, which is odd. Theo van Gogh's murderer is precisely the kind of bewildered young man that Fourest has asked us to picture: a second-generation North African immigrant who has had to sort through the doctrines coming his way, looking for the signs of prestige and glamour, trying to estimate which of those many ideas might be deemed to be exceptionally honorable, legitimate, dignified. Even obligatory. Fourest published Brother Tariq in 2004. Muhammad Bouyeri murdered van Gogh later that year. Buruma published his book in 2006.