February 21, 2008
The Alchemist
Brother Tariq can’t turn his Muslim to Western.
by Bruce S. Thornton
Private Papers

A review of Brother Tariq. The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, by Caroline Fourest, trans. by Joana Wieder and John Atherton (Encounter Books, 2008)

The moderate Muslim leader is the theologico-political philosopher’s stone that many in the West believe can reconcile Islam with modernity and thus transmute disaffected Muslims, ripe for jihadist recruitment, into tolerant liberal democrats. Some Europeans believe they have found such an alchemist in Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born charismatic preacher, lecturer, and Oxford professor who has managed to find fans among both anxious Europeans and restless Muslims alike. Yet as Caroline Fourest documents in Brother Tariq, Ramadan is a master of a carefully calibrated doublespeak that reassures Europeans even as he recruits foot soldiers for the long jihad against the West.

A French journalist and writer who has analyzed religious fundamentalism in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, Fourest spent months poring over the numerous tracts, pamphlets, and cassette recordings promulgated by Ramadan yet often unknown to his European champions. The result of her labors is Brother Tariq. First published in French in 2004, this book remains an important and timely exposé of Europe’s most famous and duplicitous Muslim moderate.

Fourest starts by placing Ramadan in the context of his famous grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and the modern reviver of the long tradition of Islamic fundamentalist “reform” preached by Ibn Taymiyya in the 13^th Century and Afghani in the 19^th. The Muslim Brotherhood — one of whose offshoots is the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas — is the primary inspiration for modern jihadists, who share the Brotherhood’s motto: “The Koran is our constitution. Struggle is our path. Death on the road that leads to God is our ultimate desire,” as al-Banna put it. Despite al-Banna’s inspiration for modern jihadists, Ramadan has never repudiated his grandfather’s ideas or his professed desire to see “the Islamic banner . . . wave supreme over the human race.” Indeed, Ramadan proclaims that “there is nothing in this heritage that I reject,” which is why he never criticizes al-Banna or the Muslim Brotherhood.

Fourest’s analysis of Ramadan’s family connections, the activities of his seemingly more extremist brother Hani, and the programs and activities of the Saudi-funded Geneva Islamic Center — founded by Ramadan’s father Said and until recently directed by Hani — establishes the continuity between Ramadan’s allegedly moderate and liberal message and the radical agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Despite supposedly being more temperate and inclusive than his brother Hani, “They have the same guiding principles and the same objectives. It is only the style that can, on occasion, differ — for purely tactical reasons.” The Geneva Islamic Center is supposed to be merely a resource center for European Muslims, yet as Fourest documents, the Center has been linked to terrorist organizations. The now defunct Al-Taqwa bank was started by the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorist groups, and one of its beneficiaries was the Geneva Islamic Center. At the very least, Fourest argues, it “is undeniable that the Geneva Islamic Center and its administrators contribute to the spreading Islamism that incites hatred throughout the heart of Europe.” The distance Ramadan often puts between his own ideas and those of the Brotherhood is nothing other than camouflage.

The heart of Brother Tariq is Fourest’s parsing of Ramadan’s numerous books and speeches in order to expose his duplicity. For example, Ramadan is constantly touted as a “reformer,” as though his intent is to change Islam so that it can coexist with secular liberal democracies and their notions of tolerance and individual rights. This perception led Time magazine in 2000 to name him an important Islamic “innovator.” In fact, Ramadan is a Salafist reformer, Salafism being the 19^th Century fundamentalist movement started by Afghani. As Fourest explains, rather than an innovation, “Salafist reformism . . . is turned towards the past, towards on Islam based on founding principles, more archaic and more political.” On every point advocated by liberal reformism — secularism, separation of church and state, democracy, reason as a guide for adapting Islam to modernity, and the abandonment of proselytizing — “the Salafist reformism of the Muslim brotherhood is totally opposed.” Liberal reform, in the Salafist view, merely colonizes Muslims, while Salafist reform “will re-establish a Muslim world that is strong and triumphant — in short, a colonizing power.”

Rather than repudiating this jihadist program when preaching to fellow Muslims, Ramadan has explicitly endorsed Salafist reformism, as in an interview given on a Muslim radio station in 2003. But a few months later, at a UNESCO symposium, Ramadan denied being a Salafist, a trick he pulled off by fraudulently redefining Salafism as “literalism.” This practice of doublespeak, necessary for one who speaks simultaneously to Europeans and fellow Muslims, explains Ramadan’s call for a “moratorium” on stoning adulteresses rather than for its elimination, or his labeling of Iraqi and Palestinian terrorism as “resistance,” or his suggestion that Muslims had nothing to do with 9/11 at the same time he decried the attack.

On every issue, Fourest unmasks the same techniques and sophistries of Ramadan’s doublespeak. Ramadan claims he wants to empower Muslim women, yet does not repudiate the “puritanical and patriarchal” instruments of their oppression, such as the head scarf, segregation, or other Islamic emblems of women’s second-class status. He counsels European Muslims on how to balance their identities as citizens and Muslims, but the net result of his doctrines is “a hermetically sealed Islam that transforms his disciples into internal exiles within their own countries.” He soothes Europeans with fine talk about peaceful coexistence between Muslims and others, yet he preaches a “confrontation of civilizations” in which a decadent, spiritually corrupt West is doomed to fall beneath the sway of a superior Islam. Here Ramadan finds allies on the anti-globalization left, who do not see that his “criticisms are based not on a refusal of hegemony — which he approves of when it is Islamic hegemony — but on hatred for the rationalist, progressive and modernist project that Western influence represents.” The point is not globalization per se but who controls the process and what goal it serves.

Fourest’ analysis reveals that beneath his soothing rhetoric Ramadan is pursuing the jihadist program of global Islamization through propaganda and recruitment rather than through violence. The West will be won not by a cataclysmic violent takeover but by a more insidious process of “stages” or a “graduated conquest” pursued from within the West itself and exploiting its freedoms. This process includes a renewal of Islam through the dawah or “summons” to Islam, “while at the same time weakening the forces opposed to Islamism thanks to the contacts [Ramadan] has established with other religious leaders, with academia and, above all, with the anti-globalist, secular Left.” Ramadan’s main tool in pursuit of this program is the redefinition of terms that represent ideals critical for Western liberal democracy. When he uses the word “rationalism,” for example, he doesn’t mean the “critical attitude born of the Enlightenment,” but rather “’an intellectual process leading to the recovery of faith,’” as Ramadan himself puts it. “Secularism” doesn’t mean separation of church and state, but denotes “a context in which freedom of religious faith is guaranteed.” “Citizenship” is defined as a “geographical region,” not as a set of obligations and loyalties.

Thus Westerners eager for accommodation with Muslims hear these terms and believe that they mean to Ramadan what Europeans think they mean — the fundamentals of a liberal society. But “insiders” know better: equipped with a “translation manual,” they know that Ramadan is speaking tactically in pursuit of the long-term strategy for bending European laws more “’toward Islam,” rather than changing Islam to coexist with liberal democracy. This delusion on the part of Westerners — one thankfully not shared so far by the U.S. State Department, which has denied Ramadan an entry visa — is dangerous. It provides cover for a creeping Islamism whose goals are utterly opposed to the ideals of the Western civilization it seeks to replace. As Fourest concludes her invaluable, meticulously documented book about Ramadan’s doublespeak, “it is high time we put an end to our naiveté lest we become his accomplices.”