BONN (May 29, 2009) – When, in the Internet portal qantara, a “modern understanding of religious belief on the basis of a separation of state and church”1 is attributed to Tariq Ramadan, the Egyptian-born Swiss scholar of Islam, then one should pay attention to the exact meaning of the individual key concepts and catchwords used by him in order better to place Ramadan’s understanding of Islam in his overall concept, so the assessment by the scholar of Islam Dr. Christine Schirrmacher from the Institute of Islamic Studies of the German Evangelical Alliance. For example, integration for Ramadan does not mean the integration of Muslims into European societies, but rather first and foremost the adaptation on the part of Europe to Islamic values, explained Schirrmacher on the occasion of an interview that Ramadan had given to the Internet portal qantara on May 20, 2009. In an article on his personal website in April, 2008, Ramadan declared: “Integration is a concept from the past. Taking an active role is the concept of the future.”2 In the framework of his argument for Islamic values in Europe, Ramadan for this reason no longer uses the classical designation of Europe as a “realm of unbelief” or “realm of war”, but rather chooses instead the term of “realm of the [Islamic] confession of faith”.3
Sharia as an “Ethical Vision”: Secularization of Islam is out of the Question
In his interview with qantara, Ramadan makes clear that he does not wish to outline his own European Islamic theology. “I have nothing to do with Euro-Islam,” Ramadan declared, and in the process distanced himself from Bassam Tibi’s calls for a separation from the political legacy of Islam. The separation of the Catholic Church from the state was an important step, so Ramadan told qantara. In the Islamic world, so Ramadan further, the concept of secularization, however, is too closely “bound up with colonization and dictatorship” to have a positive meaning. In his book Der Islam und der Westen (Islam and the West), he writes in regard to Western development: “The process of secularization not only liberated society from the rule of religion, but also led to a questioning of the fundamentals of morality.”4 Thereby, secularization stands inevitably in contrast to Islamic law (Sharia). In his interview with qantara, Ramadan described Sharia as an “ethical vision” and “Islamic ethics”, which means that one wishes “to implement certain values”. Their claim, so Ramadan, is comparable with that of European constitutions and laws. At the same time, Ramadan in his interview with qantara is at pains to project a moderate impression, and emphasizes that many of the ethical achievements in Islam and in the West are similar. One, however, may not compare them with each other, so he says. Yet, Ramadan does exactly that in another context with extreme stridency.
The Western Culture of Doubt Appears as Godless, Decadent, and Materialistic
In Der Islam und der Westen, Ramadan places Western and Islamic culture in sharp contrast to each other. Thus, the Western way of life rests upon “the enticement to arouse the most natural and most primitive instincts of the human being: social success, the will to power, the urge for freedom, the love of possessions, sexual needs”. While, in his portrayal, a godless culture of doubt gained the upper hand in the West and led to secularization, perfect harmony between Creator and His creation rules in Islam, according to Ramadan’s view of the world. In this view, the human being was created as an Islamic believer and, by rights, must recognize the signs of God through the means of his understanding and must confirm His revelation.
In a 2006 study on “Tariq Ramadan and the Islamization of Europe”, the Berlin scholar of Islam Ralph Ghadban explains in detail that Ramadan strictly rejects the free use of reason. Critically progressive Islamic thinkers such as the Arabic-Spanish philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) from the twelfth century, or representatives of the “nahda” of the nineteenth century, who aimed at a revival of reason and Islamic theology, simply are ignored in Ramadan’s outline of the history of Islamic theology, according to Ghadban. Instead, Ramadan takes an eternally valid “Islamic universe of references” as his starting point. This means in practice, first of all, that Ramadan can declare all new (Western) achievements to be Islamic as long as they do not contradict Islamic principles. On the other hand, all that is non-Islamic is, for him, thereby to be rejected fundamentally. According to Ghadban, Ramadan accepts Western human rights declarations and constitutions only on the basis of Islamic law. They appear to be contracts for him, which in the end means that they develop only a temporary validity and can be replaced step by step by the “Islamic vision” of the Sharia, wherever they contradict it.
Updating the Sharia: A Moratorium on Stoning for Adultresses
On November 20, 2003, in a discussion on French television with the, at that time, interior minister and, today, President of France Nicolas Sarkozy on the subject of “Dieu et la République”, Ramadan called for a moratorium on stoning for women caught in adultery, instead of fundamentally condemning the corresponding provision of the Sharia.
On the one hand, in his interview with qantara, he called for the financial compensation of, and financial support for, single mothers. On the other hand, he defended the provision of the Koran according to which women inherit at the level of only half of the masculine share by referring to the Islamic ideal of the family that is geared towards stability and justice. This can be judged as an implicit criticism of the regulation of inheritance in Western countries based on equal rights, but in any case as a declaration of the indispensability of this Sharia standard. From this perspective, the regulation of inheritance is just for the simple reason that the Koran has laid it down just in this way.
According to Ghadban, Ramadan’s concern is an “updating of the eternally valid Sharia” and its “adaptation to the respective contextual circumstances”, not its annulment through progressive or liberal ideas. As Ramadan declared to qantara, he desires “to bring the learned of the text [meant are the Koran and the Islamic tradition] together with the learned of the context” in order to outline a “methodology for the world of today”. The strategy of contextualization combined with his own interculturality also becomes clear in the apologetically motivated reinterpretation of Islamic concepts. Jihad appears here as “liberation struggle”, the headscarf as “expression of emancipation”, and the “critique of the decadence of the West” as “anti-imperialist”, so Ghadban. Thereby, Ramadan encounters understanding and approval among totally different social groups who often take notice of his, in part, ambiguous and contradictory statements detached from his own views on Sharia and Islam. At the same time, he is understood quite well by those who advocate adoption of Sharia in Europe, too, as someone who does not favor a secularized Euro-Islam.
In the Tradition of the Muslim Brothers: Step-by-Step Social Conversion from Within
Thus, Ramadan is quite at home in the intellectual world of the Muslim Brotherhood, which his grandfather, Hassan al-Banni, founded in Egypt in 1928. Characteristic for the today worldwide active and networked Muslim Brothers is the notion that all social and economic problems are to be attributed to a faulty implementation of Islam. For this reason, they work for an Islamic awakening in all social areas and groups, and combine religious instruction and training with social work, welfare, and the economic support of their members. In Jordan, they even provide an influential faction in parliament. While the majority of the members of the movement prefers the step-by-step conversion of their respective societies from within and below to the violent overthrow of those societies, they nevertheless have prepared the ideological ground for radical and militant groups such as al-Qaeda.
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