IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE PROPHET ...Lessons From the Life of Muhammad. ...Tariq Ramadan

For some years now, the Swiss philosopher and Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan has been saying he wants to reconcile Islamic tradition with Western democracy, conservative religious values with liberal political ones. But not everyone finds him credible. And being the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, doesn’t help. Skeptics say he is a radical in disguise — a Janus-faced rhetorician who presents a moderate’s face to Western audiences and a reactionary’s to Muslim ones.

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Graham Morrison for The New York Times (2004)

Tariq Ramadan

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE PROPHET

Lessons From the Life of Muhammad.

By Tariq Ramadan.

242 pp. Oxford University Press. $23.

By STÉPHANIE GIRY

The government is taking no chances: it has twice denied him a visa to teach in the United States, ostensibly for giving about $800 to a charity later blacklisted by the government because of suspected ties with Hamas. (Ramadan is now a fellow at Oxford.) Ian Buruma concluded a recent profile of him in The New York Times Magazine with this uncertain endorsement: “From what I understand of Ramadan’s enterprise,” the values he espouses “are neither secular, nor always liberal, but they are not part of a holy war against Western democracy either. His politics offer an alternative to violence, which, in the end, is reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without fear.”

Ramadan, meanwhile, continues to defend himself and his project. In his new book, “In the Footsteps of the Prophet,” a biography of Muhammad, he seeks to illustrate that Islam and Western democracy are inherently compatible by extracting lessons from the prophet’s life. Returning to the roots of Islam, he believes, makes the parallels clear. Ramadan’s Muhammad is a kind man and a wise leader. He is fair to his wives, openly affectionate with his daughters, generally good to women — he lets them into the mosques. (“Gentleness” is one of Ramadan’s favorite words.) Muhammad knows when to encourage patience and faith in his followers and when to indulge their craving for rest and sex. He consults before making decisions, and wages war only when necessary. He is tolerant of non-Muslims and fair to his enemies. His faith is unflappable, but he is also a critical thinker: he uses reason to translate the word of God into a practicable ethics. If Muhammad is the embodiment of Islam, Islam is a religion of moderation, common sense, resilience and love.

Some will challenge Ramadan’s understated, if not euphemistic, treatment of the Muslims’ conquest of the Arabian Peninsula and his claim that armed jihad is justified only in self-defense. But judging this avowedly interpretive biography by its historical accuracy or the quality of its Koranic interpretation is to miss the more relevant question: What does the book reveal about Ramadan’s political philosophy?

Ramadan’s vision of Islam comes down to just a few universal principles. Everything else — the cultures of Muslim countries, the politics often pursued in Islam’s name — is historically contingent, and so up for negotiation. (Elsewhere, Ramadan has said, “Arabic is the language of Islam, but Arabic culture is not the culture of Islam.”) For just this reason, Islam can be a complement to modern democracies. “Islam does not establish a closed universe of reference,” Ramadan argues, “but rather relies on a set of universal principles that can coincide with the fundamentals and values of other beliefs and religious traditions.”

In other words, “In the Footsteps of the Prophet” is a brief. But it is also an apologia for some of Ramadan’s most controversial positions. In 2003, he was criticized for calling for a moratorium on the stoning of adulterers rather than condemning the practice outright. He replied that while he personally opposed the sentence — and the death penalty in general — advocating a sweeping ban might have alienated hard-liners in majority-Muslim countries and delayed reform there. This claim seemed feeble to his detractors, but it was probably less sinister than it sounded. As this book suggests, Ramadan’s response wasn’t a tacit endorsement of stoning so much as an expression of his view that each society must decide for itself how to put into practice the values of Islam.

Likewise, his portrayal of those values as universal may shed a different light on his alleged bigotry. He was called an anti-Semite after he wrote an article in 2003 chiding French-Jewish intellectuals like Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Bernard Kouchner for reflexively backing the war in Iraq and Israel’s foreign policy. He didn’t help his case by including on his list the sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff, who isn’t Jewish. Yet even prejudice, if that’s what accounted for the slip, needn’t have undermined his warning about the danger of sectarian politics. Ramadan was making the point about these writers as a prelude to discouraging Muslims from resorting to ethnic politics themselves — even though, as Ramadan told me when I interviewed him in 2005, their greater numbers in France suggest it’s a strategy that might serve them well. By invoking universalism — a mantra of French republicanism — as a higher good, Ramadan has tried to show that even as a practicing Muslim he can be a better citoyen than his critics.

So why the controversy? To those who say his discourse is double talk, Ramadan responds that they practice “double hearing” (and sometimes it does seem as though they have a stake in his not being what he claims). More important, Ramadan’s intentions — whatever they are — ultimately matter less than the arguments themselves. Taking him literally could be one way to get beyond his critics’ accusations, as well as the paranoid legalism of the State Department. In fact, it could yield just the kind of accommodation that the secular establishment in France and the multiculturalists in the Netherlands are struggling to reach with their growing Muslim populations. Ramadan’s universalist, apolitical view of Islam could actually facilitate the pragmatic resolution of social frictions.

Ramadan, who encourages modesty among Muslim women, opposed the 2004 French law banning head scarves in public schools, for instance. But he did so on classic libertarian grounds — the right of Muslim girls to choose for themselves whether to cover up — and has been advising girls forced to choose between attending class and wearing the veil to “go to school and learn.” He has said of last year’s controversy over cartoons lampooning Muhammad both that “Muslims have to understand that there is an old tradition in secular Western society to make fun of everything” and that “we should not forget wisdom and decency.” Sensible arguments all, whatever plans are lurking in the recesses of the mind that produced them.

Muhammad may not have been as sober and sensible as Ramadan writes, but why take issue with this portrayal if it can help reconcile Islam with Western liberalism today? The project that Ramadan states is his own is worth pursuing even if, for some, Ramadan himself cannot be entrusted with it.

Stéphanie Giry is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs.

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