Christopher Hitchens writes his Slate about his evening with Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Swiss Muslim who many argue is no better than a closeted Islamist. Ramadan, of course, couldn’t charm Hitchens and the fact that he tried shows that he is very conscious of his image and of the fact that being open is important for a politician, which is what Ramadan is first of all, to convey the fact that he is a moderate. Sugary excerpt:
He often criticizes the existing sharia regimes, such as that of Saudi Arabia, especially for their corruption, but such criticism is as often the symptom of a more decided Islamist alignment as it is a counterindication of it.
In Mantua, he was trying to deal with the question of dual loyalty, as between allegiance to Islam and allegiance to the democratic secular European governments under which Muslim immigrants now choose to live. He redirected the question to South Africa, where, he said, under the apartheid system there was a moral duty not to obey the law. After sitting through this and much else, I rose to ask him a few questions. Wasn't it true that the Muslim leadership in South Africa had actually endorsed the apartheid regime? Wasn't it evasive of him to discuss the headscarf in France rather than the more pressing question of the veil or niqab in Britain? Wasn't it true that imams in Denmark had solicited the intervention of foreign embassies to call for censorship of cartoons in Copenhagen? [...] He completely dodged the question of the veil in Britain, ignored my request that he give any reason to believe that women were wearing it voluntarily, and he admitted that the Deobandi Muslim leadership in South Africa had indeed been a pillar of the old regime. On the other hand, he added, some Muslims had been anti-apartheid, and these were the "real" ones. Indeed, on everything from stoning to suicide-murder to anti-Semitism, he argues that the problem is not with the "text" itself, or with Islam, but with misinterpretation of it. How convenient. Ramadan often relies on the ignorance of his Western audiences. He maintained that there was no textual authority for the killing of those who abandon their fealty to Islam, whereas the Muslim hadith, which have canonical authority, prescribe death as the punishment for apostasy in so many words.
I share Hitchens’ skepticism about Ramadan because in my opinion, he is too slick and too smooth to be true. Tariq Ramadan reminds me of Mitt Romney. He is obviously a man with great ambition who will constantly adapt with his time by avoiding important questions about his faith (I am not making an hazardous comparison between Mormonism and Islam, but simply between secularism and those who believe that faith cannot be separate from the public domain even though they are unclear about how far they want it to go) and by switching from moderate to conservative depending on his audience and on his present political objectives. So is Ramadan dangerous? I don’t know, but is he insincere and hypocritical? Yes.
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