Tariq Ramadan

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Tariq Said Ramadan (born 26 August 1962 in Geneva, Switzerland) is a Francophone Swiss Muslim academic and scholar.

1 Biography
2 Views
3 Influence
4 Criticism
5 Books
6 References
7 External links

Biography

His maternal grandfather Hassan al Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. His father, Said Ramadan, fled Egypt due to the persecution of that organization, and settled in Switzerland. Tariq Ramadan studied philosophy and French literature, having two doctorates, one in Philosophy, and the other in Islamic studies. He also studied Arabic and Islam in Al Azhar Islamic university in Cairo, Egypt. He held the position of lecturer of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Fribourg and the College de Saussure, Geneva, Switzerland. In February 2004, he accepted a tenured position of Luce professor of religion at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, USA. However, in late July 2004, his visa was revoked by the State Department, and he was forced to resign the position. [1]. Though the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declined to provide a specific reason for denying the visa, they explained that Patriot Act allows the government to ban of foreigners who “espouse terrorist activity.” But it never asserted that Ramadan did so.

In October 2005 he began teaching at St Antony's College at the University of Oxford on a Visiting Fellowship [2].

In March 2006, the ACLU requested an injunction in federal court that would bar DHS from denying Ramadan entry into the U.S., where he hopes to speak at several U.S. academic and literary conferences.

Tariq Ramadan is married and has 4 children. His wife is French and converted to Islam after their marriage. His brother Hani Ramadan is also a Muslim activist and resides in Geneva, where he is a French teacher and director of the Islamic Centre of Geneva.

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Views

Tariq Ramadan advocates that Muslims living in the West should not view themselves as foreigners or temporary residents of their countries, but rather as full citizens with full rights and responsibilities. In some respects, he argues for integration and not alienation from the surrounding society. Indeed, the main theme of his book, To Be a European Muslim attempts to bridge the gap between being a Muslim and being European.

He also advocates that immigrant parents not confuse culture with religion. So, Muslims born in Western countries should adopt the tastes and cultural norms of their country, and not those of their parents' homeland.

Ramadan argues that there need be no conflict between being a Muslim and being a full citizen in Western countries, active in the community and caring about it. He criticizes the 'us vs. them' mentality that some Muslims advocate against the West. Ramadan also advocates having Muslim scholars in the West who are versed in Western mores, and not relying on religious studies that come only from the Islamic world.

However, his detractors question how sincerely he holds these beliefs. In 2004, during a television debate (100 Minutes pour convaincre) with the then French minister of interior affairs, Nicolas Sarkozy, he refused to condemn the application of hudud laws - which are controversial due to punishments, such as amputations for theft, the stoning of adulterers and the persecution of those with dissident views on Islam (see Prof. Nasr Abu Zayd). He only wanted to propose a 'moratorium'. In doing so, he distanced himself from many mainstream islamic scholars (as grand mufti Soheib Bencheikh, Prof. Zaki Badawi, prof Azizah Al-Hibri) who massively reject stoning.

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Influence

His books and are widely read by the mainly francophone young Muslims in Europe. His lectures are also distributed widely on cassette tapes.

In September 2005 he was invited to join a task force by the Blair Government in the UK after having been stopped from taking up a post at Notre Dame University (USA) by the Ideological Exclusion Provision of the Patriot Act.

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Criticism

Many French intellectuals accuse Ramadan of being "The Master of Doubletalk," of saying one thing to the non-Muslim public and the opposite to his Muslim audience. Caroline Fourest analysed Tariq Ramadan's books and recordings. Extracts of the book here

Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French Minister of the Interior, publicly accused him of this in a televised debate. His beliefs that Muslim youth should remain within their own religious community (especially for personal and marital relations) has been criticized as segregationist, and at odds with the integrationist beliefs he has stated elsewhere, and also to his marriage to a woman who was originally non-Muslim. His refusal, until April 2005, to condemn stoning for sharia crimes was also an issue.

Other charges levelled against him in the French media are that he is sexist and a reactionary Islamist. More fundamentally, his attitude toward European legal and democratic institutions is dubious at best because of his insistence that Muslims should literally respect the Qur'an and sharia, and that there would be no incompatibility between those and the secular democratic society. This conflict is nevertheless quite explicitly recognised by the European Court of Human Rights, which said that "The Court concurs...that sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy" (13/02/2003).

This was at a time of tension between French secularists and officials and Muslims over the hijab ban issue, and increasing anti-Jewish and anti-Christian activities by Muslim youth.

Other French intellectuals and politicians accused Tariq Ramadan of being anti-Semitic, after he wrote an essay in October 2003 ("Les nouveaux intellectuels communautaires"), published in the internet discussion site of the European social forum. Ramadan stressed the Jewish origins of several prominent French intellectuals (Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, André Gluscksmann) and of the socialist politician Bernard Kouchner (former Health minister and founder of the "French doctors" group Médecins sans frontières) and accused them of supporting the war in Iraq because this war, invented by the "well-known zionist Paul Wolfowitz", had been staged to secure the interests of the state of Israel. The essay ignited a fierce controversy and resulted in Ramadan being castigated by several politicians (Socialist mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë, rightist interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy) among them some outspoken supporters of the Palestinian cause (socialist MP Manuel Valls).

The charge of anti-Semitism and some of the double talk accusations are vehemently denied by Ramadan, who also has many supporters both in the Muslim and western worlds. ^[3]

From 2000 to 2002, Tariq Ramadan was frequently lauded in Western media as a Muslim reformer, and even dubbed the Muslim "Martin Luther" by Paul Donnelly of the Washington Post.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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Books

In English:

Western Muslims and the future of Islam ISBN 019517111X
To Be a European Muslim ISBN 0860373002
Islam, the West, and the Challenge of Modernity ISBN 0860373118

In french :

Faut-il faire taire Tariq Ramadan ?, Aziz Zemouri; ISBN 2841876470
Frère Tariq : Discours, stratégie et méthode de Tariq Ramadan, Caroline Fourest; ISBN 2246667917
Le sabre et le coran, Tariq Ramadan et les frères musulmans à la conquéte de l'Europe, Paul Landau, 2005, ISBN 2-268-05317-2
Lionel Favrot : Tariq Ramadan dévoilé - hors série de Lyon Mag'.
Jack-Alain Léger, Tartuffe fait Ramadan, Denoël, 2003,
À contre CORAN, livre de Jack-Alain Léger, mars 2004, collection « Hors de moi », éditions HC