Tariq Ramadan Research Articles

Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation. Tariq Ramadan

Alternatively loathed as a dangerous agent of fundamentalist Islam and lauded as a modern Muslim Martin Luther, Tariq Ramadan has become one of the most prolific and well-known Muslim authors in the west. From the outset, his writings have focused on what it means to be a Muslim living in western democracies, beginning with his first two works, To Be a European Muslim and Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. It was not before his third book, Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity, that Ramadan turned to questions of the practice of Islam in Muslim-majority societies. By his own admission, the approach he used to questions related to Islam and modernity and to the problems facing Western Muslims in the first three books had reached its limit, and while some progress had been made, it was “inadequate” (2). The inadequacy of contemporary Muslim reform, including his earlier books, finds its source, in Ramadan's view, in the casuistic nature of traditional Sunnī moral/legal theory, uṣūl al-fiqh, and the traditional Muslim division of sciences into “Islamic sciences” and “other sciences.” A total rethinking of uṣūl al-fiqh, therefore, is in order, and this work is meant to serve as a call on Muslims, whether living in western democracies or in the Islamic “core,” to develop a radically new approach to understanding scripture and its relationship to Islamic ethics.

Fiqh Al-Aqalliyyât and the Arab Spring

Due to the current shifting regional paradigms in the Middle East brought on by the series of popular uprisings known as the Arab Spring, this article focuses on the issue of minority rights within modern Islamic theorizing. Evaluating the writings of Islamic intellectuals such as Tariq Ramadan, Abdullah Ahmed An-Na’im and Rashid Al-Ghannushi, the article finds that there are indeed constructs available within modern Islamic theorizing that can help resolve current minority problems within Arab societies, albeit with the addition of human rights discourse on citizenship and multiculturalism. Noting that minority–majority relations are a global problem, as seen through case studies of the United States and Europe, human rights discourse, cultural relativism and religion are explored, concluding that Islamic theorizing is a blend of the three. Turning to usul al fiqh, it is concluded that traditional Islamic approaches to minority rights fail to incorporate anything but religious minorities and those religious minorities are second-class citizens under shariah interpretation. The rise of the Ottoman millet system eventually helped shape the collective identity for minority groups, but it still placed sole emphasis on religious minorities and treated all minorities as unequal subjects under the sultanate. Building on the constructs of modern Islamic theorizing and expanding to include the concepts of multiculturalism and territorial citizenship, this article asserts that for minority–majority struggle to be solved, modernist Islamic theorists must transcend the traditional Islamic minority paradigm and instead promulgate citizenship as a basis for equality in society, applying new ijtihad for a fresh, integrative interpretation of minorities within Islam and the civil state.

Promoting Critical Islam: Controversy, Civil Society, Revolution

AbstractCritical Islam is an intellectual orientation that prizes timeliness and broad-mindedness and a political sensibility that tends to honor majority rule, minority rights, and the good of pluralism. This essay considers how an important European Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, promotes critical Islam in his call for a moratorium on stoning, his argument for the reformation offatwacommittees, and his analysis of the Arab Awakening. The essay argues that the art of controversy and the building of civil society—more so than political revolution—can cultivate a critical sensibility among Muslim scholars and publics.

Kantian courage: advancing the Enlightenment in contemporary political theory

How may progressive political theorists advance the Enlightenment after Darwin shifted the conversation about human nature in the 19th century, the Holocaust displayed barbarity at the historical center of the Enlightenment, and 9/11 showed the need to modify the ideals and strategies of the Enlightenment? Kantian Courage considers how several figures in contemporary political theory--including John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan--do just this as they continue Immanuel Kant's legacy. Rather than advocate specific Kantian ideas, the book contends that political progressives should embody Kantian courage--a critical and creative disposition to invent new political theories to address the problems of the age. It illuminates Kant's legacy in contemporary intellectual debates; constructs a dialogue among Anglo-American, Continental, and Islamic political theorists; and shows how progressives may forge alliances across political and religious differences by inventing concepts such as the overlapping consensus, the rhizome, and the space of testimony. The book will interest students of the Enlightenment, contemporary political theorists and philosophers, and a general audience concerned about the future of the relationship between Islam and the West.

Islam and the Arab awakening

One of the most important developments in the modern history of the Middle East, the so-called Arab Spring began in Tunisia in December 2010, bringing down dictators, sparking a civil war in Libya, and igniting a bloody uprising in Syria. Its long-term repercussions in Egypt and elsewhere remain unclear. Now one of the world's leading Islamic thinkers examines and explains it, in this searching, provocative, and necessary book. Time Magazine named Tariq Ramadan one of the most important innovators of the twenty-first century. A Muslim intellectual and prolific author, he has won global renown for his reflections on Islam and the contemporary challenges in both the Muslim majority societies and the West. In Islam and the Arab Awakening, he explores the uprisings, offering rare insight into their origin, significance, and possible futures. As early as 2003, he writes, there had been talk of democratization in the Middle East and North Africa. The U.S. government and private organizations set up networks and provided training for young leaders, especially in the use of the Internet and social media, and the West abandoned its unconditional support of authoritarian governments. But the West did not create the uprisings. Indeed, one lesson Ramadan presents is that these mass movements and their consequences cannot be totally controlled. Something irreversible has taken place: dictators have been overthrown without weapons. But, he writes, democratic processes are only beginning to emerge, and unanswered questions remain. What role will religion play? How should Islamic principles and goals be rethought? Can a sterile, polarizing debate between Islamism and secularism be avoided? Avoiding both naive confidence and conspiratorial paranoia, Ramadan voices a tentative optimism. If a true civil society can be established, he argues, this moment's fragile hope will live.

Book Review: The Arab Awakening: Islam and the New Middle East, Tariq Ramadan, 2012, London: Allen Lane, pages: 273

Book Review: The Arab Awakening: Islam and the New Middle East, Tariq Ramadan, 2012, London: Allen Lane, pages: 273

Interview with Tariq Ramadan

Prof. Tariq Ramadan discusses the meaning of Justice in Islam. He stresses the fact that “justice is a condition of peace because the highest principle is to enter into God's peace, with all your heart and all your being. No justice no peace.” Justice is thus strongly connected with the concepts of khilafa and jihad which should not be reduced to their political dimension. “Jihad is a twofold concept: it involves both resisting the bad and reforming it in view of the good. It is not the way towards war it is the way towards peace because we are trying to reach justice which is peace.”

LOOKING FOR HOME IN THE ISLAMIC DIASPORA OF AYAAN HIRSI ALI, AZAR NAFISI, AND KHALED HOSSEINI

On November 8, 2007, Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma delivered a lecture titled Radicalism in Europe.1 His claim: Muslim thinkers are the key to diffusing a potentially explosive politics of radical religious separatism in Europe. A small but powerful minority of Islamic radicals resides in Europe, according to Buruma, and they remain an unassimilated and thus, dangerous force to be reckoned with. He cites the 2004 slaying of Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, as evidence of this Islamist radicalism. Van Gogh's 2004 film Submission exposed the psychological and physical violence levied against women in Islamic societies, and it was in response to this production that Islamic-Dutch citizen, Mohammed Bouyeri murdered Van Gogh as retribution for his critique of Islam.2Buruma suggests two paths for suturing what he reads as an ever-growing divide between mainstream Europe (and the Western world at large) and its radical Islamic minority. The one lies with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (script-writer for Van Gogh's Submission). A self-proclaimed ex-Muslim, Ali represents for Buruma the radical alternative to radical Islam - renunciation. She is, thus, not the icon he would select for keeping what he calls non- violent Muslim minorities in favor of Western secular democracy3 Rather, he posits so-called thinker Tariq Ramadan as the optimal symbol of Islamic, pro- Western thought. Buruma argues that it is precisely Ramadan's embodiment of moderate Islam that makes him a sound solution to the increasingly dangerous divide between mainstream Europe and its radical Islamic minority. Where Hirsi Ali is, for Buruma, a risky figure because she renounced Islam, Ramadan represents a middle road, a pragmatic alternative that encompasses both Orthodox Islam and a pro- Western politics. Buruma champions him as the salve for an ailing political/religious situation in Europe.Just one month later, on December 7, 2007, Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an editorial in the New York Times under the title, Silent Moderates.4 She defines Islam's Moderates by invoking their opposite, the Radicals. According to Ali, the Radicals constitute proponents of Islamic justice. She cites the case of a twenty-year-old Saudi Arabian woman who was abducted and raped by several men, only to be sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes by bamboo cane. The rape-victim's crime? Mingling, or the association with a male unrelated by blood or marriage.5 Saudi Arabia's enforcement of sharia (Islamic law) marks it, in Hirsi Ali's eyes, a radical Islamist state against which moderate Islamic thinkers should rally. But where are the moderates? asks Ali:Where are the Muslim voices raised over the temble injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say... that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal, and bigoted- and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?6Hirsi Ali is no Boazian or Herskovitzian relativist. She writes, We in the would be wrong. . .to elevate cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.7 According to her, then, the job of a moderate Islamic thinker is to resist the temptation of cultural relativism, to dare to declare Western democratic law morally superior to Saudi Arabian sharia} Ali closes her opinion piece with an invocation of Tariq Ramadan: I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan.9 Ironically, both Buruma (who writes Ali off as an extremist because she renounced Islam) and Ali invoke the moderation of Ramadan in the name of bridging the non-violent/radical, Western/non- Western Islamic divide. There is, then, on the part of both Buruma and Ali, an attempt to negotiate diasporic Islam's relationship to the West as both a geographical region and an ideological influence. …

Ramadan in Liverpool

This article addresses the way in which Muslim children negotiate the Christianity they encounter in an Anglican Primary School in Liverpool. The title picks up the two focal points of the discussion: the writing of Tariq Ramadan and the impact of fasting during the month of Ramadan on the life of the school. With regard to Tariq Ramadan's writing, the article first evaluates his opposition to ‘tolerance’ and ‘integration’. Second, it sets out Ramadan's understanding of the more equalitarian term ‘respect’, and third, his arguments for a ‘new pluralism’ and his proposals for how Muslims should live in a Christian majority context are discussed. The practice of fasting during Ramadan is used to begin a discussion of how observation of Christian and Muslim religious festivals requires negotiation by Muslim pupils at an Anglican Primary School. A scale of resistance and acceptance is used to elucidate the negotiating strategies they employ. The discussion covers three Muslim events (Ramadan and the two Eids) and three Christian (Harvest, Christmas and Easter). The pupils' negotiating strategies and the reactions of school staff are evaluated, and recommendations are made for how Anglican Faith Schools might promote mutual understanding between the Christian and Muslim communities.

French Muslims: New Voices in Contemporary France

In this searching and lively analysis, Sharif Gemie asks what it is like to be a Muslim, and above all a Muslim woman, in contemporary France. This is not a new topic, but one which Gemie tackles with great alacrity through a consideration of struggles around the law of 2004 which in effect banned veil-wearing girls from state schools, and an in-depth study of four high-profile French Muslims who have set the pace in the debate on the place of Muslims in France today. As Gemie points out, there is a tension in the contemporary Republic between the universalist principles of liberty, equality and fraternity available to all citizens and the principle of laïcité which requires that all religious and ethnic groups leave their identities at the door of neutral public spaces such as the town hall and state school. Whereas Jewish and black citizens have had little trouble with this trade-off, argues Gemie, Muslims have generally had more difficulty. This relates for Gemie to the way Muslims are constructed in the media and popular imagination, as living in ghetto-like banlieues, prone to riot, ‘communitarian’, fundamentalist and part of a foreign conspiracy, and to the unhealed scars of the Algerian War. Gemie demonstrates that French Muslims are not a bloc, nor ghettoized, by exploring four case studies of French Muslims who have engaged in the media with the public debate on integration. On the one hand there is Chahdortt Djavann, a Muslim of Iranian origin who has entirely espoused the idea than France is enlightened and countries like Iran backward and oppressive to women. There is also Fadela Amara, a beur of Algerian origin brought up in a banlieue of Clermont-Ferrand, who was one of the founders in 2003 of Ni Putes ni Soumises which criticised sexual violence in immigrant communities themselves, and in 2007 became Sarkozy’s secretary of state for urban policy. On the other side of the debate, Gemie takes the case of Tariq Ramadan, an intellectual whose father was an exiled member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, who argues that Muslim immigrants in the West must fight to preserve their religious identity from globalized mass culture by becoming involved in anti-globalization, anti-capitalist movements. Finally, Gemie takes the case of Houria Boutelja, another beur brought up in Lyon, who co-founded the ‘Indigènes de la République’, who argue that Muslims in France are still suffering the effects of the Algerian War and French colonialism which makes them into second-class citizens.

Constructing the Space of Testimony

How do we conceptualize distinctions between religious–political territories in the contemporary world when old categories—such as Islam and the West, or dar al-Islam and dar al-harb—precipitate misunderstandings and conflicts? In this essay, I consider Tariq Ramadan’s argument that Muslims must enact an intellectual transformation along the lines of Kant’s Copernican revolution and thence create concepts—such as the space of testimony ( dar al-shahada)—to facilitate interreligious dialogue, cooperation, and respectful contestation. The essay aims to illuminate the nature of Ramadan’s political theory and dispel the claim that he is a Muslim Martin Luther; to imagine the contours of a future political-intellectual movement that integrates elements of the European Enlightenment and the Arab Nahda; and to envision how Muslim and non-Muslim political theorists may combat political Manichaeanism without denying the reality and importance of contending ethical visions and political identities.

We Can Work with Hamas

Just as the Arab Spring blossomed, the al‐Qaeda‐led era of terrorism came to an end with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in his Pakistani lair by American special forces. We asked two of the most contentious experts on all things Islamic—Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan—to assess the meaning of these historic moments on the future. Amr Moussa, the leading candidate for Egypt's presidency, and Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, also offer their views. Two top former intelligence agents from MI6 and the CIA look at the next turn of events—the Saudi counter‐revolution.

The Arab Spring After Osama

Just as the Arab Spring blossomed, the al‐Qaeda‐led era of terrorism came to an end with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in his Pakistani lair by American special forces. We asked two of the most contentious experts on all things Islamic—Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan—to assess the meaning of these historic moments on the future. Amr Moussa, the leading candidate for Egypt's presidency, and Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, also offer their views. Two top former intelligence agents from MI6 and the CIA look at the next turn of events—the Saudi counter‐revolution.

The Saudi Counter‐Revolution I

Just as the Arab Spring blossomed, the al‐Qaeda‐led era of terrorism came to an end with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in his Pakistani lair by American special forces. We asked two of the most contentious experts on all things Islamic—Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan—to assess the meaning of these historic moments on the future. Amr Moussa, the leading candidate for Egypt's presidency, and Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, also offer their views. Two top former intelligence agents from MI6 and the CIA look at the next turn of events—the Saudi counter‐revolution.

The Saudi Counter‐Revolution II

Just as the Arab Spring blossomed, the al‐Qaeda‐led era of terrorism came to an end with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in his Pakistani lair by American special forces. We asked two of the most contentious experts on all things Islamic—Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan—to assess the meaning of these historic moments on the future. Amr Moussa, the leading candidate for Egypt's presidency, and Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, also offer their views. Two top former intelligence agents from MI6 and the CIA look at the next turn of events—the Saudi counter‐revolution.

Will the Muslim Brotherhood Succeed Where Osama Failed?

Just as the Arab Spring blossomed, the al‐Qaeda‐led era of terrorism came to an end with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in his Pakistani lair by American special forces. We asked two of the most contentious experts on all things Islamic—Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan—to assess the meaning of these historic moments on the future. Amr Moussa, the leading candidate for Egypt's presidency, and Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, also offer their views. Two top former intelligence agents from MI6 and the CIA look at the next turn of events—the Saudi counter‐revolution.

A Compass of Hope for Egypt

Just as the Arab Spring blossomed, the al‐Qaeda‐led era of terrorism came to an end with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in his Pakistani lair by American special forces. We asked two of the most contentious experts on all things Islamic—Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan—to assess the meaning of these historic moments on the future. Amr Moussa, the leading candidate for Egypt's presidency, and Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, also offer their views. Two top former intelligence agents from MI6 and the CIA look at the next turn of events—the Saudi counter‐revolution.

The Goal in Libya Is Not Regime Change

Just as the Arab Spring blossomed, the al‐Qaeda‐led era of terrorism came to an end with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in his Pakistani lair by American special forces. We asked two of the most contentious experts on all things Islamic—Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan—to assess the meaning of these historic moments on the future. Amr Moussa, the leading candidate for Egypt's presidency, and Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, also offer their views. Two top former intelligence agents from MI6 and the CIA look at the next turn of events—the Saudi counter‐revolution.

A Vibrant Post‐Revolutionary Egypt Needs World Support

Just as the Arab Spring blossomed, the al‐Qaeda‐led era of terrorism came to an end with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in his Pakistani lair by American special forces. We asked two of the most contentious experts on all things Islamic—Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan—to assess the meaning of these historic moments on the future. Amr Moussa, the leading candidate for Egypt's presidency, and Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, also offer their views. Two top former intelligence agents from MI6 and the CIA look at the next turn of events—the Saudi counter‐revolution.

Law as a vanishing mediator in the theological ethics of Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan’s recent book, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation, boldly proclaims the need for Muslims to completely rethink the very meaning of Islamic law, traditionally the preeminent Islamic normative discourse and a primary distinguishing feature of Islam from other religions, replacing it with a more ecumenical applied ethics. He begins the book by rejecting the moderate reformist methods adopted in his previous books as insufficient for the ‘radical reform’ of their epistemologies and mentalities which he believes contemporary Muslims must undertake. It is tempting, therefore, to see this work as a radical break with Law. In this article, I offer a different interpretation. On my reading, throughout his previous works Ramadan systematically advanced and elevated a certain interpretation of Law, based on an appropriation of certain concepts taken from mainstream Islamic legal theory and crucial to the efforts of all reformist thinkers. It is these concepts, which he retains but completely recasts, which mediate his move to a post-legal Islamic ethics. I argue that Ramadan’s long-term project neither merely abandons Islamic law, nor merely reforms it, but dissolves the framework of Law through its own devices.