George Packer on his participation to a talk given by Tariq Ramadan in New York:
I asked Ramadan two questions. The first was historical: drawing from a chapter in Paul Berman’s forthcoming book “The Flight of the Intellectuals”, I described the relationship between Ramadan’s grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and a Nazi ally who made a series of genocidal broadcasts on an Arabic radio program transmitted from wartime Berlin, urging Arabs to rise up and kill Jews. I cited quotations from al-Banna expressing pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic views; I quoted Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a follower of al-Banna who is a hugely popular TV preacher on Al Jazeera, expressing similar views. And I asked Ramadan why he had never acknowledged, let alone condemned, these things.
(...) Ramadan and I went back and forth a number of times. And he couldn’t give me a direct answer. He hedged, he spoke about context, he suggested that the quotes were mistranslated, that they didn’t actually exist. But he refused to acknowledge that his grandfather and the Muslim Brotherhood in its origins were characterized by anti-Semitic or totalitarian views. It seemed clear that there was a limit to what he would allow himself to say or think, and that I had found it.
Weisberg had asked me at the outset whether I thought Ramadan said different things to different audiences, and whether I thought he evaded hard questions about the conflicts between the open society and fundamentalism. On the first, I said no—he has no hidden agenda, he’s an open book, and it’s essentially moderate. On the second, I said I wasn’t sure and hoped to find out. By the end of the evening, I knew the answer. Ramadan is building a worthy bridge on a rotten foundation.
My impression of Tariq Ramadan is almost the same as the one of Packer. I don't think that Ramadan is a Ben Laden or a Jihadi in sheep clothing. However his vision of society is as troubling as Jerry Farewell or any other religious men who cannot stay away from politics. He fails to make the difference between religion and politics and for that matter, he seems to believe that they are one and the same for religion must invade and dominate every sphere of society. It is this lack of separation between faith, society, and politics that bothers me. I believe that religion beliefs ought to remain private and never allowed to invade the public space and to dominate a society even if the goal is to give it moral foundations or to cleanse it. In short, I don't think that Ramadan's problem is extremism, but rather his politics and his inability to separate his religious faith from it. Those traits in a way make him very 'American' except of course that we are talking here about Islam, which tends to scare people; nevertheless the issue for me is that all politicians who are defined by the faith, guided by it and use religious texts to inform all of their choices always make me uncomfortable and scare me most of the times.
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