The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism Part I
Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?
by Paul Berman
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ah6sxjndq9qq_315dwk7qn

I.
Tariq Ramadan is a charismatic and energetic Islamic philosopher in Europe who has become popular and influential among various circles of European Muslims during the past fifteen years--originally in Geneva, where his father founded the Islamic Center in 1961; then in Lyon, the French city closest to Switzerland, where Ramadan attracted a following of young people from North African backgrounds; then among French Muslims beyond Lyon; at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, in Britain, where he spent a year on a fellowship; among still more scattered Muslim audiences in Western Europe, who listened to his audio recordings and packed his lecture halls, normally with the men and the women sitting demurely in their separate sections; among Muslims in various Francophone countries in Africa--and outward to the wider world.

Ramadan possesses a special genius for shaping cultural questions according to his own lights and presenting those questions to the general public, and he has demonstrated this ability from the start. As early as 1993, at the age of thirty-two, he campaigned in Geneva to cancel an impending production of Voltaire's play Muhammad, or Fanaticism. The production was canceled, and a star was born--though Ramadan has argued that, on the contrary, he had nothing to do with canceling the play, and to say otherwise is a "pure lie." Not every battle has gone his way. He taught at the college of Saussure, where his colleagues were disturbed by his arguments in favor of Islamic biology over Darwin. This time, too, Ramadan shaped the debate to his own specifications by insisting that he never wanted to suppress the existing biology curriculum--merely to complement it with an additional point of view. A helpful creationist proposal. But the Darwinians, unlike the Voltaireans, were in no rush to yield.

That was in 1995, and by then Ramadan had already established his social base in Lyon, at the Union of Young Muslims and the Tawhid bookstore and publishing house. These were slightly raffish immigrant endeavors, somewhat outside the old and official mainline Muslim organizations in France. Even so, the mainline organizations seem to have welcomed the arrival of a brilliant young philosopher. He built alliances. He attended conferences. His op-eds ran in the newspapers. He engaged in debates. Eventually his face appeared on French television and on the covers of glossy magazines, which introduced him to the general public in France, a huge success. And yet--this is the oddity about Tariq Ramadan--as his triumphs became ever greater, and his thinking came to be more widely known, no consensus whatsoever emerged regarding the nature of his philosophy or its meaning for France, or Europe, or the world.

Some mainstream journalists in France were drawn to him from the start. The Islam-and-secularism correspondent at Le Monde, full of admiration, plugged him fairly regularly and sometimes adopted his arguments. At Le Monde Diplomatique, he became a cause, not just a story; the editor lionized him. Politis magazine promoted him. On the activist far left, some of the anti-globalist radicals and the die-hard enemies of McDonald's looked on Ramadan--because of his denunciations of American imperialism and Zionism and his plebeian agitations in Lyon--as a tribune of progressive Islam, even if his religious severities grated on left-wing sensibilities. The Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Communist League formed something of an alliance with him. A number of Christian activists regarded him with particular fondness: a worthy partner for inter-religious dialogues. A dike against the flood tides of secular materialism. A religiously motivated social conscience similar to their own, laboring on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. Ramadan might even have seemed, in some people's eyes, stylishly trendy at one moment or another--a champion of Islam who, because Islam has been so badly demonized, held out a last dim hope for shocking the bourgeoisie. Then again, some of the French experts on Islam, such as the distinguished scholar Olivier Roy, who had no interest in shocking anyone, likewise found something admirable in him: a thoughtful effort to modernize Islam for a liberal age.

Still, in France other people recoiled, and did so without much hesitation, and recoiled also at the people who had failed to recoil. The critics were thoroughly convinced that Ramadan's friends and admirers and supporters in the press were deluding themselves, and that alliances with him were bound to backfire, and that, beneath the urbane surface, he represented the worst in Islam, not the best. These critics were drawn not only from the Christian conservatives and the political right. The most prominent of his left-wing Christian allies turned against him in a fury, as if betrayed. Some mainline Muslim leaders in France grew reserved. Even the French anti-globalists were of two minds about him. He had his fans, but there were many who watched with dismay as Ramadan's pious followers filled the seats at anti-globalist meetings and veiled women thronged the podium. In France his loudest enemies were left-wing feminists, who took one look and shuddered in alarm. Feminists from Muslim backgrounds denounced him in Libération, the left-wing newspaper. The Socialist Party politicians in France, who had every reason to seek out Arab and Muslim voters, showed no interest in him at all.

Dark rumors spread. The Spanish police inquired into his Lyon networks. In 1995 the French minister of the interior denied him permission to re-enter France--which sparked a mobilization of petition-signers until the order was rescinded. His detractors in the press--initially at Lyon Mag, the city magazine in Lyon--speculated grimly about his personal connections. He responded with a double lawsuit, against Lyon Mag and against one of his critics, the Lebanese historian Antoine Sfeir. The verdict ended up split: against the magazine but in favor of Sfeir. The magazine kept on hammering nonetheless.

Books about Ramadan tumbled into the bookstores at a remarkable pace. Caroline Fourest's Frère Tariq, or Brother Tariq, which appeared in 2004, has been the most influential--an angry book, alarmed, energetic in tabulating the naïve tropes and clichés of the French press, indignant at the journalists who keep falling for the same manipulations, indignant at the progressives who view Ramadan as progressive. But hers was only the first, followed by six more books in the last three or four years--among them Paul Landau's Le Sabre et le Coran, or The Saber and the Qur'an, in 2005 (no less hostile and accusatory than Fourest's); Aziz Zemouri's Faut-il Faire Taire Tariq Ramadan?, or Should Tariq Ramadan Be Silenced?, the same year (which affords Ramadan the chance to have his own say); and Ian Hamel's La vérité sur Tariq Ramadan, or The Truth About Tariq Ramadan, this year (mildly sympathetic to Ramadan, sometimes skeptical, indignant at the hostility expressed by Fourest and Landau). And the books, too, having contributed to the controversy, contributed to his popularity.

Ramadan seems to have known instinctively how to respond to accusations and innuendos, and his rejoinders succeeded in turning every new setback into an advance. He suggested a bigotry against Islam on his critics' part, amounting to a kind of racism. He argued that criticisms of him represented a holdover from the colonialist mentality of the past. He was angry, dignified, self-controlled, and unmovable. The combination of his replies and his demeanor proved effective in the conscience-stricken atmosphere of modern postimperial France. A good many people, listening to his rejoinders, grew pensive. His supporters waved their fists. And his critics became ever more fretful--not just at Ramadan, but at the people who, in applauding or merely in growing pensive, seemed to have accepted his categories of analysis, as if in a stupor.

His entrance into the Anglophone world began quietly. The Islamic Foundation in Leicester, where Ramadan studied and wrote in 19961997, enjoys the distinction of having been the first and most vigorous Muslim institution in Britain to rally against Salman Rushdie back in 1988, even before Ayatollah Khomeini issued his religious decree authorizing Rushdie's assassination. The foundation published Ramadan's book To Be a European Muslim in 1999, and it enjoyed a modest success. To Be a European Muslim was regarded as a thoughtful argument for healthy new relations between old-stock non-Muslim Europe and the new-stock immigrant Muslim population. Daniel Pipes in the United States was among the expert observers who offered applause--though, if you visit Pipes's website, you will see that, ever since his initial review, Pipes has been posting additional remorseful observations about how wrong he was, and what could possibly have gotten into him? (You will also see that Ramadan, for his part, together with a sympathetic journalist or two, has promoted Pipes into the center of an anti-Ramadan conspiracy on behalf of the Jews.)

In 2001, the Islamic Foundation published Ramadan's Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity, a philosophical text that attracted less attention. Even so, controversy went on working its wonders, and in faraway Indiana the University of Notre Dame offered him a professorship beginning in 2004--partly funded, as it happens, by the Kroc family, which means the McDonald's fortune. Ramadan accepted. He obtained a visa. He arranged for his family to move. Then, at the last minute, Homeland Security balked, and the State Department revoked his visa. The ACLU, PEN, and a couple of academic organizations rallied to his defense, as was their duty. But the man was barred, which generated still more publicity, some of it hostile, of course, but much of it sympathetic, as was only natural--a feeling of outrage on his behalf, an exasperation at American provincialism, a fearful recollection of the obtuse McCarthyite xenophobia of yore. Anyway, America's nay triggered a British yea. St. Antony's College at Oxford stepped in with its own offer of a fellowship for 2005. Ramadan accepted.

The London terrorist attack took place in July of that year. The Blair government organized an advisory commission afterward to make suitable recommendations. Ramadan was invited to participate. He accepted. And with one incident piling atop the next--the defeats, the victories--he was lifted, at last, to the pinnacle of American journalistic recognition: the sort of full-length profile and full-page photograph in The New York Times Magazine that half the writers and intellectuals of Europe dream of receiving one day, in the hope of realizing the impossible, which is to break into the American bookstores and the American conversation.

No popular magazine in the United States has done more in the last few years to illuminate the intellectual life of the Muslim world than The New York Times Magazine--always in a serious manner, never flippantly, always with major sources behind the journalism, always at full length. In this instance, the Times magazine assigned its profile to the well-known journalist Ian Buruma, and this was an impeccable choice. Buruma published a book last year called Murder in Amsterdam, on the assassination of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh by an Islamist fanatic--and the book testified to Buruma's expertise on Islamist dangers in Europe. Three years ago, Buruma and the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit joined forces to write a book called Occidentalism, on the historical appeal of European fascist and other anti-liberal doctrines to people outside Europe, and this book testified to Buruma's expertise on wayward and totalitarian ideologies as well: a pertinent credential. Buruma produced his profile. The Times magazine published it in February--though, because of the European controversy that has broken out during the last few months over Buruma's journalism, the profile has lingered in the public eye, and not just in Europe. The profile bore the amusing title "Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue." You can find it on the New York Times website.

The profile affected a quizzical tone. Buruma seemed bemused by his difficulties in pinning his subject down--his difficulties even in arranging for an interview, though he did finally get one. Buruma dutifully rehearsed some of the political accusations that have been leveled at Ramadan in France, in their more generalized versions at least--dark rumors, feminist shudders, instinctive suspicions. In Buruma's judgment, one accusation after another turned out to be groundless; or exaggerated and unjust; or distorted because the context had been omitted. Or Buruma expressed no opinion of his own and, out of courtesy, permitted Ramadan to rebut his critics; and the rebuttals seemed firm, or at least plausible, even if Buruma now and then raised a skeptical eyebrow.

He marveled over Ramadan's mix of anti-globalist fervor and ultra-conservative cultural views. "In American terms," Buruma remarked, "he is a Noam Chomsky on foreign policy and a Jerry Falwell on social affairs." Yet Buruma seemed to look on Ramadan much more warmly than any comparisons to Chomsky and Falwell might suggest. He explained that last year the French magazine Le Point invited him to debate Ramadan and, in the hope of seeing sparks fly, urged him to be aggressive. The debate took place. Ramadan was unflappable. The discussion failed to stumble across any serious differences at all. "We agreed on most issues," Buruma wrote, "and even when we didn't (he was more friendly toward the pope than I was), our debate' refused to catch fire"--which is a debate summary that, in its affability, is hard to imagine if Buruma had come face-to-face with Chomsky or Falwell on a public platform. "We agreed on most issues"--no, this would have been an unlikely result of any encounter with the anti-imperialist from MIT or the late evangelist of the Christian right.

All in all, Buruma judged that, despite the controversies and accusations, Ramadan the philosopher offers, in Buruma's words, "a reasoned but traditionalist approach to Islam" based on "values that are as universal as those of the European Enlightenment." He judged that Ramadan's values, although "neither secular, nor always liberal," offer "an alternative to violence, which is, in the end, reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without fear." This was not quite a ringing endorsement. Still, it was an endorsement. It conveyed the unmistakable implication that Ramadan, the worthy interlocutor, stands for more than himself, which is why engaging him might be useful--in order to discover the human and philosophical principles that Western and Muslim hearts and minds might share in common, and to bridge the divisions, and at last to achieve, between the West and Islam, a cultural peace: the goals that every reasonable person yearns to see achieved, even if not everybody would assent too quickly to a vision of the world that consigns the West to one corner and Islam to another.

Such were the conclusions in the Times magazine. They were tempered. But they were confident. And here, in a single full-length magazine profile, the entire well-established heap of European journalistic platitudes about Ramadan that Caroline Fourest had catalogued and deplored three years ago in France smoothly glided into American print, as if landing at the airport. Nor was Buruma left standing alone with his luggage of views and evaluations. The New York Review of Books had already published an essay by Timothy Garton Ash, who is Ramadan's colleague at St. Antony's College. Garton Ash lavished praise on Buruma and, in passing, applauded Ramadan, too, precisely along Buruma's lines, except without the cautionary notes. This spring, Oxford University Press published Ramadan's latest book in English, a biography of the Prophet Muhammad called In the Footsteps of the Prophet. The New York Times Book Review assigned the book to Stéphanie Giry, an editor of Foreign Affairs--a journalist who, like Buruma, has contributed to The New Republic. Giry in her review went so far as to invoke the authority of Buruma's profile in the Times magazine, and she followed his argument almost to the letter.

It is not entirely obvious to me that Buruma has read very much by Ramadan, nor that Stéphanie Giry has read more than a single book, though she has met the man. As for Garton Ash, he confesses in his New York Review essay that he bases his judgment on having heard Ramadan speak, which may suggest that he has read nothing by Ramadan at all. But no matter: a conventional wisdom has plainly convened. And in this fashion Tariq Ramadan, by acquiring a brilliant fame and refracting its rays in one country after another, has succeeded in brightly illuminating two very different, murky, and related developments during the last few years: a large new development among select circles of pious Muslims in Europe, and not just in Europe; and an equally new and still more remarkable development among the normally impious journalists and intellectuals of Europe and America.

II.
Tariq Ramadan is nothing if not a son and a brother and, especially, a grandson, not to mention a great-grandson--family relations that shape everything he writes and does, or at least the perception of what he writes and does, which is an unusual fate for a writer on philosophical themes. His grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, born in Egypt in 1906 and assassinated by the Egyptian political police in 1949--a man who has cast a big shadow over modern events. At a very young age, Hassan al-Banna conceived a genuinely original project for the Muslim world, or at least a partly original one, as is always the case with new ideas. He gazed back on some late nineteenth-century thinkers--on Muhammad Abduh (under whom al-Banna's father, Ramadan's great-grandfather, studied at Al-Azhar University) and on Abduh's mentor and colleague Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. These were people who had wanted to overthrow the European colonizers--and at the same time to modernize the Islamic world. They wanted to join reason to faith, tradition to modernity, the Islamic achievements of the ancient past to the European breakthroughs of their own age. They called for an Islamic rejuvenation that was going to return to the pristine seventh-century, or "salafi," roots of Islam, while retaining a spirit of innovation--which made sense on the ground that, back in the seventh century, Islam itself was forcefully innovative.

Maybe there was something ambiguous in those nineteenth-century ideas. It has even been suggested that al-Afghani was never entirely sincere about his religious convictions, and used Islam for rhetorical purposes. Then again, the nineteenth-century ambitions and ambiguities ought to seem recognizable enough. In several places around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--in Latin America, in India, in China--nationalist-minded intellectuals labored earnestly to bring their own autochthonous traditions together with European and North American innovations, in the hope of overthrowing the imperialists. That was an irresistible idea in those days. It is still an irresistible idea. But how to accomplish any of this was never really obvious. Hassan al-Banna's suggestion in the 1920s and 1930s was to convert the proposed seventh-century-and-modern Islamic revival into a forward-looking political force of a particular sort. He glanced at a few of the European breakthroughs of his own time, which meant the extreme-right political movements of the 1920s1940s, whose doctrines he was happy to borrow so long as he could adapt them to his own purposes. And in 1928, with these several wispy inspirations beginning to solidify in his imagination, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood.

The organization was minuscule. It grew. It became a political force--though the Muslim Brotherhood was always many other things as well: rigorously pious and observant, intellectually vigorous, educationally and culturally active, earnestly welfare-oriented, athletics-oriented (the Boy Scouts were a direct influence), secretly paramilitary (although cautious and legal-minded in appearance), and not above staging the occasional assassination. Ultimately, al-Banna's Muslim Brotherhood was revolutionary in the name of a Qur'anic utopia--the Brotherhood's politicized vision of returning to the salafi seventh century, as adjusted for the modern age. And yet the Brotherhood was patient and even eager to endure the greatest of sufferings, given that utopia was eternal and did not have to arrive tomorrow. Al-Banna's Brotherhood was, in short, the original model for what has come to be known as "Islamism"--with the "-ism" trailing after Islam in order to distinguish Islam itself, the ancient religion, from the modern political, and more than political, tendency that al-Banna brought into the world.

The Muslim Brotherhood spread from Egypt to Syria, Palestine, Sudan, and other places, and its inspiration spread even to Iran (via the Shiite variation of al-Banna's idea elaborated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Shariati) and India and Pakistan (via a sister movement founded independently by Abul Ala Mawdudi, al-Banna's South Asian counterpart) and beyond. In a small way, the Brotherhood even spread to Europe, under the leadership of al-Banna's secretary and son-in-law, Said Ramadan, who became Tariq Ramadan's father. Said Ramadan was a loyal lieutenant--he was "the little Hassan al-Banna"--and as a very young man he took on some big responsibilities. Said Ramadan was in charge of spreading the Muslim Brotherhood's message to Palestine (where he fought in 1948 in the war against Israel) and to Pakistan (where he coordinated affairs with Mawdudi's sister movement). And Said Ramadan published a monthly magazine, Al-Muslimun, which introduced Mawdudi's ideas to the Arabic public. In 1954, the Egyptian government under Nasser suppressed the Brotherhood and threw its leaders and a great many other people in jail, but Said Ramadan, having already done a month in prison, happened to be in Jerusalem at the crucial moment, and he escaped the crackdown. Then he fled from pillar to post in the Arab world, to Germany, and finally to faraway Geneva, where he founded his Islamic Center and settled his family. He started up Al-Muslimun again. Until his death, in 1995, Said Ramadan persisted in his proselytizing labors among the Muslims of Western Europe.

The number of people all over the world who have come to look on the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist legacies with ardent veneration has by now become immeasurably vast, and this is true nowadays even in Western Europe. The Muslim population in Western Europe numbered less than one million in the 1950s, but it has lately swelled to something like twenty million, though no one seems to have exact figures--and this means that, in the eyes of huge numbers of European Muslims, a more glorious ancestry than Tariq Ramadan's does not exist. Ramadan himself, Swiss-born and Swiss-educated, has always exulted in his family legacy, sometimes humbly, sometimes arrogantly; sometimes presuming the right to speak for his long-gone revered grandfather; sometimes carrying himself with the wounded air of a man who, through his father, knows in the flesh the meaning of persecution and suffering.

And yet Tariq Ramadan's august background generates, all by itself, still more controversy, and has done so from the very start. At the University of Geneva, Ramadan wrote his thesis on his grandfather's ideas--and his committee judged the work to be a partisan apologia, unworthy of commendation. Ramadan protested. A Swiss Socialist rose to his defense, and a second committee was convened, a rare occurrence. Even then, the thesis was accepted without honors. This was an academic dispute, but also more than academic. And it has never gone away. It is a dispute over the meaning of Hassan al-Banna's Islamic revival and its political and cultural legacies for today and not just the past--a dispute over whether al-Banna's movement ought to be regarded as a progressive force, in spite of every complaint or reservation that could be lodged. Or is there something in al-Banna's legacy that ought to worry us unto panic?

Everyone knows by now that Al Qaeda can trace its roots to a splinter tendency within the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the 1960s and even earlier, and this history raises an awkward question, which Ramadan has had to answer more than once in the years since September 11. He answered the question one more time in Buruma's Times magazine profile in February. He acknowledged that, yes, Al Qaeda emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood. But not from Grandfather al-Banna's legacy. Al Qaeda drew its inspiration, instead, from Sayyid Qutb (19061966), who enlisted in the Muslim Brotherhood only after al-Banna's assassination. About al-Banna and Qutb, Ramadan said, "They didn't even know each other"--which is true, narrowly speaking. Buruma quoted the remark and had every reason to do so (though it was odd of him not to mention how misleading was Ramadan's observation, seen from a broader angle--a point to which I will return). Still, Buruma did go on to quote Ramadan's account of his grandfather's un-Qutb-like political goals. Al-Banna, in Ramadan's phrase, "was in favor of a British-style parliamentary system, which was not against Islam."

This second observation, though--is it equally correct, from a narrowly factual angle? In the Times magazine, Buruma elected to be wryly noncommittal. "This may or may not be an accurate representation of Hassan al-Banna," he observed--which is the mark of Buruma's charm as a writer, his gift for understatement and indirection. Even so, understated indirection is not always the best way to inform the public. He might have pointed out that Ramadan, in his book Aux Sources du Renouveau Musulman, or The Roots of the Muslim Revival, in 1998, devotes some two hundred pages to al-Banna and his visionary ideas. Ramadan concedes that al-Banna did want to replace the multi-party system in Egypt with a single national council, which might appear to be a one-party state--but Ramadan explains that, because of the fundamentally democratic nature of Islam, al-Banna's proposal was tantamount to a multi-party system. Such is the interpretation in The Roots of the Muslim Revival. And Buruma might have pointed out one of the principal alternative interpretations of al-Banna and his ideas, if only to offer a little perspective on Ramadan and his way of thinking. According to this second interpretation, al-Banna is best described as a fascist.

This used to be a fairly common judgment on the Arab left, not to mention among European Marxists--maybe in some cases because "fascist" is every left-winger's favorite insult, and for no larger reason. Still, something called "clerico-fascism" (to use the traditional term) is an old concept on the left, dating back to the 1920s in Italy, where it used to refer to the militant wing of the Catholic extreme right. And the applicability of that sort of label to al-Banna's new movement in Egypt did seem, at least to some people in the past, hard to miss--an obvious applicability based on the populism and demagogic emotionalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, together with its authoritarianism, intolerance, violence, invasiveness, and a certain kind of giddy twentieth-century-style utopianism, not to mention some of the direct influences that wended across the Mediterranean Sea from fascism's original home in Europe. Then, too, in the eyes of a fair number of scholarly and journalistic observers today, a fascist label, or some reasonably similar term, seems faintly applicable--or more than faintly--even now.

You can see a sophisticated political-theory presentation of this analysis in the writings of Bassam Tibi, the Syrian-German scholar, though in regard to al-Banna and his legacies, Tibi, in his precision, prefers the loftier Arendtian word "totalitarian" (which, anyway, was coined by Mussolini) to the label "fascist" (likewise coined by Mussolini). A discussion of al-Banna's fascism turns up repeatedly in the current literature on Tariq Ramadan. Paul Landau, in The Saber and the Qur'an, describes al-Banna, in his position as chief guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, as a figure comparable to Il Duce and the Führer. Landau attributes a lot of importance to al-Banna's friendship with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem--who, as Hitler's ally, helped organize a Muslim division of the Waffen-SS and then, after the war, when he was wanted for war crimes (owing to his SS division), succeeded in escaping to Egypt, thanks to help from al-Banna himself. Ian Hamel reprises Landau's point about al-Banna and the mufti of Jerusalem in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan--though Hamel's purpose is normally to knock down everything said by Landau, if he can. Even Hamel describes al-Banna as a man with a "totalitarian organization and an extremist program."

Caroline Fourest offers a more striking observation in Brother Tariq by pointing to al-Banna's Epistle to the Young. The epistle lays out, under the six clauses of his slogan ("God is our goal; the Prophet is our guide; the Qur'an is our constitution; struggle is our way; death on the path of God is our ultimate desire; God is great, God is great"), the five stages of his program. To wit: the creation of a properly Muslim individual person, in thought and belief; of a properly Muslim family; of a properly Muslim people or community; of an Islamic state; and, finally, the resurrection of the ancient Islamic Empire--which al-Banna describes by referring admiringly to what he calls the "German Reich" and to Mussolini's dream of a resurrected Roman Empire, though naturally al-Banna regards his own resurrected Islamic Empire as vastly preferable and theologically more legitimate than anything Mussolini could have contemplated.

Back in the early 1940s, the British authorities in Egypt took this sort of sentiment seriously enough and, in the hope of avoiding anything resembling the pro-Axis coup d'état that took place in Iraq in 1941, presided over al-Banna's arrest more than once. But the pointed aspect of Fourest's discussion of al-Banna and his Epistle lies in her observation that Ramadan, in presenting the Epistle in one of his own popular audio recordings, has omitted the fascist references--which raises anew the question about forthrightness.

Among the present-day commentaries on al-Banna and fascism that I have lately stumbled on, the most eye-opening turns up in an essay by the Iranian scholars Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand, which appears in an anthology called Islam and Democracy in the Middle East, edited by Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Daniel Brumberg. The Boroumands (who are sisters) arrive at a grim evaluation: "The man who did more than any other to lend an Islamic cast to totalitarian ideology was an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna." By "totalitarian ideology," the Boroumand sisters have in mind the doctrines of the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis, whose influence on al-Banna they underline. And they point out the disastrous consequences: "From the Fascists--and behind them, from the European tradition of putatively transformative' or purifying' revolutionary violence that began with the Jacobins--Banna also borrowed the idea of heroic death as a political art form."

There is nothing especially novel or bizarre in noticing that al-Banna displayed an eager interest in the aesthetic cult of death. The classic history of the Muslim Brotherhood, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, by Richard P. Mitchell, which appeared in 1969, was quite lucid on this topic even then. Al-Banna came up with a double phrase about the importance of death as a goal of jihad--"the art of death" (fann al-mawt) and "death is art" (al-mawt fann). This phrase became, in Mitchell's description, a famous part of al-Banna's legacy. Stringing together his own paraphrases with al-Banna's words, Mitchell wrote: "The Qur'an has commanded people to love death more than life" (which, I might add, is a phrase that we have heard more than once in terrorist statements during the last few years, for instance in the videotape that was made by the Islamist group that attacked Madrid in 2004). And al-Banna continued, in Mitchell's presentation: "Unless the philosophy of the Qur'an on death replaces the love of life which has consumed Muslims, they will reach naught. Victory can only come with the mastery of the art of death."

But what might strike some people as novel or controversial is the Boroumand sisters' observation that al-Banna borrowed these grisly ideas from Europe, instead of deriving them, as al-Banna himself claimed to have done, from Qur'anic tradition. Hassan al-Banna, seen in this light, did something dreadful to Islam. He founded the modern vogue for suicide terror--the cult of death as political art form par excellence--and he attached this cult to Islam. This interpretation of al-Banna corresponds to Bassam Tibi's view, though Tibi emphasizes that al-Banna served mostly to clear the way for Sayyid Qutb, and it was Qutb who played the crucial role.

Ian Buruma, as a co-author of Occidentalism, is a student of fascism's influence outside of Europe, which means that he does know something about these several arguments and points, and the knowledge at his fingertips must surely have contributed to his skeptical response in the Times magazine to Ramadan's description of his grandfather--though Buruma tactfully refrained from sharing any of this information with his readers. Buruma did remark that Ramadan's description of al-Banna tells us "a lot about the way Ramadan presents himself." But what does it tell us? In the Times magazine, Buruma confined himself to observing that Ramadan is a builder of bridges, someone who sets about "reconciling what seems hard to reconcile," and he confirmed the point by quoting a professor at Notre Dame who praises Ramadan for "trying to bridge a divide and bring together people of diverse backgrounds and worldviews"--all of which does sound wonderful, though only so long as everyone agrees not to mention or describe some of the worldviews being bridged.

III.
But these are questions from a couple of generations ago, and Ramadan is not his grandfather, nor does he appear to be an agent of his grandfather's organization (though both Fourest and Landau do take him to be an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood). "What is past is past," as the Qur'an says more than once. And the past cannot tell us what Ramadan has been trying to achieve in the present. His own ideas and intentions--where do they point, finally? That is what everyone has wanted to know during the last dozen years or so. In the Times magazine, Buruma put it directly: "What does he stand for?" And, having asked, he stood aside to allow Ramadan to respond, and Ramadan used the opportunity to speak about philosophical principles.

He stands, he explained, for "universal values" that are in line with the European Enlightenment. He stands for a rationalism seeded by doubt, though Ramadan prefers to invoke these concepts and beliefs by citing the wisdom of Islamic philosophers instead of their European counterparts. "Doubt did not begin with Descartes," Ramadan instructed Buruma. "We have this construction today that the West and Islam are entirely separate worlds. This is wrong. Everything I am doing now, speaking of connections, intersections, universal values we have in common, this was already there in history." So he stands for the commonalities linking the West and Islam--for the values that everyone ought to share, except that, in his version, he prefers to give these values an Islamic inflection.

His response is philosophically reasonable and historically defensible, given the medieval sages and the influences of Aristotle this way and that. On the other hand, it is worth asking why anyone should care about what was "already there in history," in Ramadan's phrase. Why bother with historical chronologies or with the matter of whether Descartes came first? These are not trick questions. There might be some obvious answers: to remind the hubristic and anti-Muslim Western publics of Muslim contributions to world civilization. Or to hearten the many publics of the Muslim world, who may feel a little discouraged and beset. Or simply to draw an accurate timeline of the history of ideas, which would be valuable in itself.

Then again, if Ramadan means to suggest, by pointing to Islamic thinkers of the Middle Ages, that ancient roots are everything; or that science and rationality come in different versions depending on one's origins, a version for Muslims and a different version for everyone else; or that universalism itself comes in different versions, and my universalism may not be the same as yours, and truth varies from culture to culture--then, of course, further questions arise. The notion that science and rationality come in different versions is an old idea: it is the notion that, taken to a logical conclusion, led the Nazis to suppose that physics came in an Aryan version and in a Jewish version, which were not identical, even if Jewish physics and Aryan physics appeared to be identical; and led the Stalinists to suppose that proletarian science was one thing and bourgeois science another, in spite of every superficial resemblance; and so on. This kind of argument is not hard to stumble across in Islamist literature: the notion that science comes in a Western version and also in an Islamic version, which are not the same. The same idea re-appears today in a sweet-tempered postmodern variation, as a kind of multiculturalism taken to the nth degree, in which every culture is pictured as equivalent and unique, and each culture's claims to universal principles ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as an agreeable rhetoric that probably does not mean very much.

So, then, where does Ramadan stand on these philosophical matters? Buruma did not inquire any further, but Ian Hamel does pose the question in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan. Hamel provides a number of isolated quotations suggesting that Ramadan draws a careful line between religious outlooks and scientific ones; and that he does know that medicine is medicine, regardless of its origins; and that his notion of universality is genuinely universal. But it is hard to judge the significance of those quotations when they are removed from their original context. In The Roots of the Muslim Revival Ramadan presents a quotation that makes al-Banna himself appear to have entertained a lucid and un-fascist view of natural science. But then again, in Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity Ramadan finally makes plain that, in his own view, Muslim universalism is not, in fact, the same as Western universalism, and Muslim reasoning, with its acknowledgment of doubt, is not the same as Western reasoning, with its own acknowledgment of doubt. This might explain why Ramadan regards biology education as merely an education in Western biology, which ought to be supplemented by a bit of Islamic biology (though I might add that in the Islamist literature there is a deeper argument against Darwin, which Qutb presents, drawing on Alexis Carrel, the French Vichy intellectual). In any case, Ramadan does believe that Islam and the West are separate--even cosmically separate. At least he appears to believe this in Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity. "We are indeed dealing with two different universes of reference," he writes, "two civilizations and two cultures."

On the topic of rational doubt and Descartes, he invokes the medieval philosopher al-Ghazali, who, in Ramadan's interpretation, proposed arguments that anticipated Descartes by several hundred years. This must be what Ramadan had in mind in pointing out to Buruma that "doubt did not begin with Descartes." But in Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity he goes into more detail, and the details suggest that al-Ghazali's notion of doubt points in one direction and Descartes' in another--an observation that accords with al-Ghazali's reputation as the medieval philosopher who issued the most formidable challenge to high Islamic rationalism. About al-Ghazali, Ramadan writes, "At first, we can find innumerable correspondences between his thought and that of Descartes. Such correspondences certainly exist, but the frame of reference which gives the solution to going beyond doubt is fundamentally different."

In Ramadan's view, ancient Greek influences on Islam have never allowed for the kind of tension or difference between the sacred and the non-sacred that exists in Western thought. The ancient Greek influences on Islam have never allowed for a Promethean spirit of rebellion, and have never allowed for a sense of the tragic. That is because in Islam, as per Ramadan (and here he invokes the medieval philosopher Ibn Taymiyya), the zone of the sacred contains only a single concept, which is tawhid, or the oneness of God. Tawhid leaves no room for tensions, rebellions, or doubts. A deep and tragic sense of doubt is not even a conceptual possibility. Buruma in the Times magazine pursued this philosophical matter sufficiently at least to ask Ramadan if he has "ever experienced any doubts himself." Ramadan replied: "Doubts about God, no." And Buruma seems not to have realized that, in responding with this easy certainty, Ramadan was surely offering more than a self-confident autobiographical observation. Doubt, in Ramadan's interpretation, can exist only within the limits allowed by tawhid--meaning that, for a proper Muslim, doubts about God are literally inconceivable. A Muslim, in Ramadan's formulation, may forget, but a Muslim cannot doubt.

Ramadan's harsher critics would argue that in speaking to Buruma the way he did on these abstract and historical questions, not to mention on his grandfather's ideals, he was cagily deploying a "double discourse"--a language intended to deceive Western liberals about the grain of his own thought. An accusation of "double discourse" has dogged Ramadan for many years in France. It is a chief complaint against him, and a big source of anxiety among his critics. Fourest, in Brother Tariq, documents what appears to be rather a lot of "double discourse," instances in which Ramadan appears to have said one thing to the general public and something else to his Muslim audiences. Landau, in The Saber and the Qur'an, offers his own documentation. On the other hand, Hamel, in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan, will have none of this. Hamel is a Swiss journalist from a Moroccan background, and he does seem to have listened to a great many speeches and audio recordings by Ramadan, and to have conducted many interviews, and generally to be more at ease in Ramadan's European Muslim environment than Fourest and Landau appear to be; and he earnestly believes that Fourest and Landau, in their animosity, have wrongly allowed themselves to think the worst.

And yet what are we to do, in that event, with the expansive puddle of footnoted documentation that lies at the bottom of Fourest's pages, and the additional puddle at the bottom of Landau's? I have no way to resolve this quandary, except to hazard a guess that all these writers, friend and foe alike, may have arrived at a truth. Islam, in Ramadan's view of it, is a comprehensive system that takes in the universe, and the comprehensive quality allows him--requires him--to view each new thing in an Islamic light, as if from on high. I think that, from his lofty Islamic heights, he ends up speaking in a naturally dialectical language, secular (in a style descending from both Descartes and al-Ghazali) and at the same time Islamic (in a style descending from al-Ghazali alone). Ramadan's outlook allows him to speak on a level that is true and on a level that is truer; and sometimes the two levels are the same. Is there something deliberately deceptive in this way of going about things? Some people are bound to think so. And yet someone else, more willing to grant the presuppositions, might conclude that Ramadan has stayed reasonably consistent all the while, and, if some people cannot make sense of him, that is the fault of his un-dialectical listeners.

I would suppose that, in the case of Buruma and The New York Times Magazine, Ramadan might have figured that if the journalist required on-the-spot instruction into the deeper meanings of words such as "doubt" in their al-Ghazalian and Cartesian contexts, this was not up to Tariq Ramadan. Nor was it Ramadan's obligation to explain how Grandfather al-Banna's intention to abolish the multi-party system was perfectly compatible with British-style parliamentarism, given the democratic nature of Islam. I would imagine that from Ramadan's perspective, with his notion of "two different universes of reference, two civilizations and two cultures," there was not much point in spelling out every last nuance to the cordial journalist, especially since, in his books, Ramadan has already done so. Some things may be ambiguous, but nothing is secret. Besides, Ramadan is generally not in the business of making enemies. If the correspondent from The New York Times Magazine was intent on coming away from their debates and discussions with a feeling that, in Buruma's phrase, "we agreed on most issues"--hey, how wonderful! Why pick a fight?

IV.
Ramadan's various opinions and interpretations ought not to be conflated with Islam itself--and this point, as I have learned from experience, requires emphasis, and even double emphasis. When I wrote about Ramadan some years ago, I noticed that all too many non-Muslim readers are quick to seize on any disagreeable or troubling statement by a Muslim thinker and pin it on Islam as a whole--even if these readers are warned not to do anything of the sort. So I stress the point. Nor does Ramadan himself claim to be speaking for every last Muslim on the planet. He identifies several modern currents of Islamic thought or Muslim self-identification, even apart from the ancient denominations that have transfixed everybody's attention right now, and he knows that all these currents do not accord with one another. In the Times magazine, Buruma very properly asked Ramadan to specify which of the currents is his own, and Ramadan answered with a simple phrase. His own current of Islamic thought is the one that goes under the paradoxical-sounding label of "salafi reformist."

Which means? Buruma came up with a definition by plucking a sentence out of Ramadan's Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. A "salafi reformist," Buruma explained, quoting Ramadan's book, is someone who aims at the following goals: "to protect the Muslim identity and religious practice, to recognize the Western constitutional structure, to become involved as a citizen at the social level, and to live with true loyalty to the country to which one belongs." This quotation is accurate, in a fashion--I have located it on page 27 of Ramadan's book, as well as in a slightly different setting in To Be a European Muslim--but, then again, less than accurate because of the way that Buruma has severed the quoted words from some other remarks on the same page and the previous one. Taken by themselves, the quoted words make salafi reformism sound like an earnest and slightly dowdy do-good effort to adapt Islam to the modern liberal world. But that is a mistake. It is an old mistake, too, that journalists persist in making, as both Fourest and Landau point out with a lot of exasperation in their respective books. In a footnote on the topic of "reformism" in his book The Roots of the Muslim Revival, back in 1998, Ramadan himself halfway acknowledges the potential for misunderstanding, though he thinks he is justified in using the term anyway.

Salafi reformism, in his usage, signifies something precise, which has nothing to do with liberal reformism in the conventional sense. Buruma asked Ramadan to list his two favorite Muslim philosophers. Ramadan duly named Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh--the late nineteenth-century figures whom Ramadan regards as the progenitors of Hassan al-Banna's Islamic revival and the Muslim Brotherhood (though other people would insist rather sharply that al-Banna's Islamism, in its radicalism and rigidity, departed fundamentally from those nineteenth-century thinkers). Anyway, not many readers of the Times magazine are likely to have recognized these nineteenth-century names. And yet if Buruma had thought to ask Ramadan about some more recent thinkers in the salafi reformist mode, Ramadan could have gone on listing names, and some of those additional names would, in fact, be recognizable to a good many readers. Ramadan has already listed the names in Western Muslims and the Future of Islam--has done this, as it happens, in the paragraph directly preceding the one from which Buruma has plucked his misleading definition.

Here, on page 26, is Hassan al-Banna; and Abul Ala Mawdudi from the South Asian subcontinent, whose activities Tariq's father, Said Ramadan, coordinated with the Muslim Brotherhood; and Ali Shariati, Ayatollah Khomeini's fellow thinker in Iran. And here is Sayyid Qutb, one more influential reformist among the others, listed without comment--even if Qutb's legacy, in one of its offshoots, did lead to Al Qaeda. In Ramadan's usage, salafi reformism turns out to be the philosophical underpinning for modern Islamism in the sundry versions that descend from al-Banna's (and Mawdudi's) original idea. Naturally, these sundry versions do not always chime with one another, and this, too, Ramadan carefully spells out. In Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, he divides the descendants of the original reformist idea into subcurrents or tendencies--though in order to distinguish among these tendencies, you have to inspect his account rather closely, unto the fine print, meaning the footnotes. And this kind of close inspection is worth undertaking, not just to shed a little light on Ramadan's philosophy but also to cast an extra glance at the related but different theme of Ramadan's image in the press.

So, then, the subcurrents of salafi reformism, as per Tariq Ramadan. One of these subcurrents turns out to be his own: the outspokenly Western variant, the version whose particularities Ramadan defines with the attractive language that Buruma has mistakenly applied to the entire movement--a language of preserving Muslim identity and becoming loyal citizens of democratic countries. Ramadan's subcurrent is not the principal one, however. The principal subcurrent flourishes only in the Muslim world (and, in Ramadan's book, only in the footnotes)--though "flourishes" may give the wrong impression, since, as he observes with a touch of bitterness, the organizations and movements within this subcurrent "are almost everywhere, though in different degrees, subjected to imprisonment, torture, and persecution." Plainly, Ramadan is writing here about the Muslim Brotherhood, together with (I suppose) its several national and sectarian variations and offshoots--the Muslim Brotherhood in the Muslim countries themselves, where martyrdom has come to figure as part of the movement's identity. The intention of this, the most prominent current of the salafi reformists, is fully revolutionary: it is to establish an Islamic society.

And then, in his honesty, Ramadan somewhat ruefully cites still another sub-current that flows from the salafi reformist source--though, in his view, this final tendency has emptied salafi reformism of almost all of its original content. This final tendency, he tells us, has gone over to "strictly political activism," joined to "a literalist reading" of the sacred texts, leading to "radical revolutionary action." Ramadan describes this tendency as "political literalist Salafism"--which Buruma in the Times magazine mentions by name, though without identifying it as an offshoot of the salafi reformist idea. Ramadan explains that political literalist salafism has attracted "a lot of public attention"--though it is represented in the Western countries only "by structures and factional networks." This last phrase is incomprehensible to me, but it communicates an impression that, in spite of the public attention, political literalist salafism does not count for much. Ramadan disapproves of this tendency, owing to its textual literalism and its unspecified departures from salafi reformist principles--though he also rushes to ascribe the tendency's errors not to any elements intrinsic to its salafi reformist roots but to the ghastly way that Muslim governments have suppressed the mainstream salafi reformists.

As to why the political literalist salafists should have attracted "a lot of public attention," Ramadan says nothing at all in his main text. Only in a footnote does he mention "violent and spectacular actions," and not even there does he remark on any sort of radical departure from basic morality. Nor does he define any relation that might exist between this sort of thing and the legacies of Qutb. A veil of timidity and euphemism hangs over the entire discussion, which could lead a sleepy reader to miss his meaning altogether.

And yet it is obvious what Ramadan is talking about in this particular passage. Political literalist salafism is the doctrine underlying the terrorism that has emerged from salafi reformism--the vast wave of random murder, the vogue for "violent and spectacular actions," that has swept across so many regions of the Muslim world and beyond. That is what he means by "radical revolutionary action." He does refer somewhat cautiously in a footnote to "a section" of the Islamic Salvation Front of Algeria, by which he must have in mind the people who went about slaughtering whole villages in Algeria during the 1990s and who are evidently not finished yet. But mostly he is the sphinx. At least Ramadan does not deny the estranged sibling relation between his own wing of salafi reformism and the champions of "radical revolutionary action"--these different currents that descend from the same source. Ramadan is, on this particular theme, more straightforward than his Times profiler.

Still, Ramadan has left out a few details, and these do add up to something. On the topic of al-Banna and Qutb, for instance, it is true, yes, that in spite of being exact contemporaries, the two men never did meet in person. Al-Banna was a salafi reformist from the start, but Qutb, in his younger years, was a secular intellectual, a poet, and a literary critic--which meant that al-Banna and Qutb disapproved of each other. Still, they did not live on opposite sides of the earth. Qutb, as I learn from a biography by Adnan A. Musallam called From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism, adhered to a school of Romantic poetry in Egypt, influenced by Coleridge among others, and his ideas about poetry led him to seek truth in his own heart (as opposed to following the traditions of established schools) and at the same time to yearn romantically for death. Qutb's poetry took an apocalyptic turn as well--which, though his biographer does not make the point, could be compared stanza for stanza with some of the apocalyptic poetry of the fin-de-siècle European Symbolist poets. And all of this, the Romantic and Symbolist literary impulses, mirrored al-Banna's Islamic thinking pretty closely.

What was salafi reformism, after all, if not a belief that truth could be obtained directly from the Qur'an and the seventh century (as opposed to following the traditions of the established schools of Islamic jurisprudence)? And what was al-Banna's phrase about "the art of death" and "death is art" if not an Islamic variation on Qutb's Romantic-poetry yearning for the eternity of the tomb? As for Qutb's Symbolist-poetry apocalyptic fantasies--well! This was Islamism itself, in its Mussolinian, Third Reichstyle yearning for the final showdown. Seen from this angle, Qutb's Romantic secularism and al-Banna's Romantic Islamism were variations on a theme. And then, in the mid-1940s, Qutb began to drift in Islamist directions himself, and al-Banna was anything but hostile. Sayyid Qutb and Naguib Mahfouz made up a mutual admiration society in those days (Qutb, in his capacity as literary critic, played an important role in bringing public recognition to Mahfouz's talent), and in 1948 Qutb and Mahfouz and a few other people launched a magazine, with Qutb as editor.

Al-Banna tried to woo the magazine for the Muslim Brotherhood. The next year, al-Banna was assassinated. Qutb happened to be in the United States at the time, and, in one of the stranger passages of his report on his American experience, he recounted that Americans were jubilant over al-Banna's death--which has got to be a fantasy, given that in 1949 hardly anyone in the United States had heard of Hassan al-Banna. The fantasy nonetheless suggests that al-Banna's late-life appreciation for Qutb had begun to be balanced by Qutb's appreciation for al-Banna as a world-historical figure, even if they never met. Then Qutb returned to Egypt and enlisted in the Muslim Brotherhood, and found his way to al-Banna's son-in-law, "the little Hassan al-Banna," Said Ramadan, the editor of Al-Muslimun. Said Ramadan's magazine presented the ideas of Abu Ala Mawdudi to the Arabic-speaking world, and Qutb adopted some of these ideas for what now became his own ultra-revolutionary doctrine.

Qutb began to contribute his own monthly articles to Al-Muslimun. Some of those monthly articles were eventually gathered together in a book called Toward an Islamic Society. But Qutb's most important contributions to Al-Muslimun consisted of commentaries on the Qur'an, which were strikingly original--commentaries written not in the spirit of traditional jurisprudential analysis but, instead, in the spirit of Romantic literary criticism, drawn from the heart instead of from the scholarly texts. These were the articles that, in book form, eventually blossomed into Qutb's gigantic masterwork, In the Shade of the Qur'an, which is widely regarded as the single greatest literary product of the worldwide Islamist movement.

And so, yes--a third time, yes--Qutb and Tariq Ramadan's grandfather never met, if only because of al-Banna's assassination. But Ramadan's father, Said Ramadan, the editor of Al-Muslimun, not only knew Qutb; he was, at the crucial moment, Qutb's most important supporter in the world of the Egyptian intellectuals. Said Ramadan was the editor who got Qutb started on what became his most important work. And at the worst moment of Qutb's life--in 1965, when, having already languished in prison during most of the time since the crackdown of 1954, he was accused one last time of plotting a revolution, for which he would be hanged a year later--his alleged conspiracy was said to include, of course, Said Ramadan, the man who avoided a similar fate only because, back in 1954, he happened to have been out of the country.

Ian Hamel in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan insists that, in his last years, Said Ramadan put some distance between himself and Qutb's legacy. But that is a late-life detail. The biographies of Said Ramadan and Sayyid Qutb are otherwise intertwined. And in this case what is past is not, in fact, past, and Tariq Ramadan's career has likewise twined itself around the Qutb legacy. Said Ramadan worked long ago with Mawdudi in Pakistan, and Mawdudi's British followers established their Islamic Foundation, and Tariq Ramadan published his first two English-language books at the Islamic Foundation and spent his year of study at its campus for reasons that were entirely natural and familial. The Islamic Foundation has been slowly bringing out a handsome edition of Mawdudi's own multi-volume Qur'anic commentary, Toward Understanding the Qur'an, translated from Urdu into English. And the foundation has also been bringing out Qutb's In the Shade of the Qur'an, likewise in a handsome edition--some ten volumes of which, out of what is promised ultimately to be eighteen, now sit on my own bookshelves. All of this makes perfect sense, given that salafi reformism does constitute a movement broad enough to stretch from al-Banna to his son-in-law to Mawdudi and Qutb and, ultimately, to Tariq Ramadan. The Islamic Foundation, from its British campus with its Al-Banna Hall, has done nothing at all peculiar in publishing Mawdudi, Qutb, and Ramadan, these several intellectual stars in a single constellation.

Only why did none of this, not even a trace, appear in the portrait of Ramadan in the Times magazine? It's not as if Buruma skipped over the issue of Ramadan's relation, via his grandfather, to Qutb. Buruma did pose the question, even if he satisfied himself by publishing Ramadan's remark about Grandfather al-Banna and Qutb not having known each other. Nor did Buruma lack for information of his own. In Occidentalism he discusses Qutb. He points out the Nazi influence on Qutb's thinking. The editors of The New York Times Magazine (who some years ago published my own essay on Qutb) had every reason to expect that on this topic, as on many topics, Buruma knew what he was doing. He must have arrived at the conclusion for some reason that in the Times magazine it was good to ask the question about the relation to Sayyid Qutb, but bad to answer the question.

In any event, the family ties between Tariq Ramadan and Sayyid Qutb offer an analytic opportunity. Ramadan's reputation for less-than-frankness raises a bit of a problem for anyone who cares to figure him out. If you wanted to know the beliefs and opinions of any number of public figures, you could go ask them, and you could publish their replies with a reasonable certainty that you were getting the real poop. Not so Ramadan. He poses a difficulty--the constant possibility of an esoteric meaning. Still, there is a way to put his doctrines into some kind of historical and intellectual perspective, and this is to stand Ramadan next to Qutb--the father's son next to the father's author, the Islamic Foundation's book-writer next to the Islamic Foundation's book-writer, salafi reformist next to salafi reformist. Ramadan himself devotes a chapter of The Roots of the Muslim Revival to Qutb, just to show that nothing is illegitimate in proposing such a comparison. And, with Ramadan standing next to Qutb, it ought to be possible one more time to ask the question, which still has not been answered: what does he stand for, in the end? Salafi reformism--what does it amount to, finally?