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2 The faith that dare not speak its
name By Spengler
Amid
the apologetics and invective over Islam, Paul
Berman's portrait of the Muslim academic Tariq
Ramadan in the June 4 New Republic stands out as a
thoughtful critique. Professor Ramadan personifies
the West's bafflement before Islam; widely
regarded as the thinking man's Islamist and a
bridge-builder between cultures, he was barred by
the Homeland Security Department in 2004 from
entering the United States to take up a
professorship at Notre Dame University in Indiana.
In a rebuke to the US, St Anthony's
College, Oxford, offered him
a fellowship, which he now occupies.
Berman untangles the spaghetti-strands
that tie Professor Ramadan to the terrorist
ambience. He has trouble, though, making sense of
what it is that Ramadan actually believes. Is he a
7th-century throwback (Salafi reformist), or an
Islamic adaptation of Western totalitarian
movements, or something quite different? We find
an intriguing solution to Berman's puzzle in the
work of the great German-Jewish theologian Franz
Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who argued that pagan
society everywhere always is "totalitarian" in
character, and that Islam is a form of paganism
masquerading as revealed religion. I put
"totalitarian" in quotation marks because
Rosenzweig's sociology of paganism predates this
neologism. I summarized Rosenzweig's still highly
controversial view of Islam in a 2003 review of a
German-language volume on the subject. [1]
Following Rosenzweig, then, we may say
that what ties Ramadan and his celebrated family
to 20th-century totalitarianism is not association
or influence, but rather commonality of spirit.
Professor Ramadan, in a word, is a pagan, just as
the Nazis (for example) were pagans. That does not
prove by any means that Ramadan bears the taint of
Nazi influence, for the normative Islam of
Mohammed al-Ghazali (1058-1111), which Ramadan
embraces, represents a much earlier form of
paganism. I will explain, but some background is
helpful first.
Ramadan famously is the
grandson of the founder of the banned Muslim
Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, the ideological
inspirer of radical Islam. Ramadan's critics
accuse him of offering a reasoned dialogue to
Westerners while promoting terrorism among Arabs,
and the division of views among academics and
journalists is as wide as the differences between
the US and UK governments over his immigration
status. His efforts to "Europeanize" Islam do not
extend to such customs as wife-beating, which he
recommends so long as it does not produce wounds.
In a televised debate with now French President
Nicolas Sarkozy, Ramadan refused to condemn the
stoning of women for adultery as prescribed by
Islamic law, offering only to institute a
temporary moratorium on the practice.
Without spoiling Berman's story in The New
Republic, a subscription site, I can report that
he has placed Ramadan in the midst of a web of
terrorist associations. He does not advocate
terrorism, by any means, but he defends many who
do. Berman's 30,000-word essay, really a condensed
book, targets not only Ramadan, but the European
and American journalists who admire him, for
example Timothy Ash in The Guardian. What Berman
dubs "the intellectual establishment" has decided,
"Better the 7th century than Nicolas Sarkozy," and
attacks Muslim dissidents such as former Dutch
Member of Parliament Hirsan Ali while cozying up
to presentable Islamists like Ramadan.
An
especially revolting example is found in Ash's
laudatory profile of Ramadan's great-uncle, the
cleric Sheikh Gamal al-Banna. Ash contrasted the
aged Egyptian mullah favorably with the hapless
Hirsan Ali, as it happened on the same day that
Banna's public endorsement of the World Trade
Center attacks appeared on the MEMRI (Middle East
Media Research Institute) website. Comparing Banna
to Hirsin Ali, the collaborator of murdered
filmmaker Theo van Gogh, Ash wrote, "Which do you
think reveals a deeper historical knowledge of
Islam? Which is more likely to encourage
thoughtful Muslims in the view that they can be
both good Muslims and good citizens of free
societies?" It happens that Banna had praised the
"extremely courageous" action of the September 11,
2001, hijackers, which was "dreadful and
splendid", in opposition to the "barbaric
capitalism" of the United States.
Willful
blindness in the face of undisguised intentions to
do violence to the West, Berman writes, requires
explanation. The physical threats that follow
journalists who attack Ramadan and his homicidal
family, he concludes, have turned some of the more
timid members of the fourth estate. A simpler
explanation is that left-wing journalists hate the
United States and Israel so much that they relish
the idea of terrorist attacks on civilians, the
way that left-wing intellectuals in the West
defend Josef Stalin's terror. But that is another
matter. On these matters, read Berman's booklet
for yourself.
Regarding the connection
between Ramadan's family and fascism, Berman
observes:
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."
In fact, there is a vast
literature evaluating the links between political
Islam (Islamism) and fascism, including Marc
Erikson's 2002 series on this subject on this
site. [2] The Rousseauvian paradise of paganism
depicted in the anthropological writings of
Margaret Mead or such films as Dances With
Wolves do not square with the all-embracing,
total control of the individual we encounter in
paganism. In fact, Rosenzweig wrote, pagan society
dissolves the individual into a mere instrument of
race or state:
People, State, and whatever else the
societies of antiquity may have been are lion's
caves before which one sees the tracks of the
Individual entering, but not leaving. In fact,
the individual human stands before society as a
whole: he knows that he is only a part. These
wholes, with respect to which he is only a part,
these species, of which he is only a
representative example, have absolute power over
his ethical life, although they as such are
hardly absolute, but are in fact themselves only
examples of the species "State" or "People". For
the isolated individual, his society is the
society ...
In the thoroughly organized
State, the State and the individual do not stand
in the relation of a whole to a part. Instead,
the state is the All, from which the power flows
through the limbs of the individual. Everyone
has his determined place, and, to the extent
that he fulfills it, belongs to the All of the
State ...
The individual of antiquity
does not lose himself in society in order to
find himself, but rather in order to construct
it; he himself disappears. The well-known
difference between the ancient and all modern
concepts of democracy rightly arise from this.
It is clear from this why antiquity never
developed the concept of representative
democracy. Only a body can have organs; a
building has only parts. [3]
That is
precisely what Rosenzweig meant when he
described
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