TARIQ Ramadan has been called a Muslim Martin Luther and one of the most dangerous Islamists in the West.
His support for the emergence of a new European form of Islam has raised the hopes of some in the West who yearn for a more engaged Islamic community that adapts to the challenges of modernity.
His critics, however, are deeply suspicious, accusing him of a dual discourse, speaking a conciliatory message to the West while delivering the hard-line, anti-Semitic fundamentalist message of Salafism to Muslims.
Ramadan's newest book is The Messenger, a biography of the prophet Mohammed, described in his publicity as "an intimate portrait of a man who was shy, kind, but determined, as well as a dramatic chronicle of a leader who launched a great religion and inspired a vast empire".
Ramadan will be promoting the book in Australia next week. A senior research fellow at St Antony's College at Oxford University, he has "contributed substantially to the debate on the issues of Muslims in the West and Islamic revival in the Muslim world (and) has also lectured extensively (on) dialogue between civilisations", adds the publicity.
A self-described activist professor, Ramadan is never far from controversy. Last month, the prominent Swiss Muslim scholar called for a boycotting of the Paris and Turin book fairs because they had chosen to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel by inviting some of Israel's greatest living writers, including Amos Oz, David Grossman and Etgar Keret.
Ramadan wrote on his website that when he agreed to participate in the Turin Book Fair, he had no idea that the guest of honour would be in effect Israel, which he described as an "ugly provocation". Ramadan's views on Israel can appear contradictory. On his website, in English, he says he supports Israel's right to exist. At the same time, he says he favours a single Israel and Palestine. Presumably he does not support, in the long term, a two-state solution.
Ramadan is little known in Australia but he has been at the centre of a passionate debate on the relationship between Islam and the West that has raged across continents. He shot to prominence in the US when, in 2004, he was denied an entry visa because he had donated money to a group that passed some of its funds to Hamas. This Palestinian party, which won the last elections, is listed as a terrorist organisation in the US. Its military wing, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, is proscribed as a terrorist group in Australia.
Ramadan says that between 1998 and 2002 he contributed small sums of money to a French charity supporting humanitarian work in the Palestinian territories and that he did not know that the money was passed to Hamas. He also says that even the US did not know of the links between the group and Hamas at that time.
The denial of Ramadan's US visa was the eventual catalyst for fiery debate among liberal intellectuals such as Paul Berman and Ian Buruma. In February 2007, Buruma, a professor and author at Bard College in New York state and an occasional columnist in Inquirer, wrote a profile of Ramadan for The New York Times Magazine in which he canvassed some of Ramadan's key ideas.
Buruma characterised Ramadan in American terms as "a Noam Chomsky on foreign policy and a Jerry Falwell on social affairs". But Ramadan describes himself as a Salafist reformer, which sounds alarming since Salafists believe that Islam was at its best in the time of Mohammed and the next two generations and wish to revive the practices of those times.
Ramadan is irritated when Western critics mention that he is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the radical Muslim Brotherhood. But as Buruma noted, Ramadan is often introduced to Muslim followers with a tone of reverence, as al-Banna's grandson, and Ramadan happily notes that "with older people, it lends authority to what I'm saying".
The Muslim Brotherhood is a fundamentalist organisation that has ostensibly eschewed violence but has been accused of a string of assassinations in Egypt, where it was founded and has been banned. It has also given rise to radical offshoots such as Hamas. The example of one of the Muslim Brotherhood's most famous members, the executed Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, influences Osama bin Laden.
Ramadan says that resistance is a key concept and that he is promoting Islamic socialism. In his book Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, Ramadan says global capitalism and neo-liberal economics must be resisted. He says he will respect Western laws only up to a point. "I will abide by the laws, but only insofar as the laws don't force me to do anything against my religion ... If any given society should take this right away, I will resist and fight that society," he has said in a recorded speech.
Despite these fighting words, Buruma concluded that Ramadan was not part of a holy war against Western democracy. But Berman, a US author, professor of journalism and writer in residence at New York University, found the Buruma article naive and responded with an article titled "Who's afraid of Tariq Ramadan?" in The New Republic that ran to 28,000 words. Berman distils Ramadan's position on violence as "a double message. The first message condemns terrorism. The second message lavishes praise on the theoreticians of terrorism."
Ramadan created a public furore in France in 2003 during a television debate with then French interior minister and now President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy brought up the point of view expressed by Ramadan's older brother, Hani, who supports women who commit adultery being stoned to death. The most Ramadan could do was call for a moratorium. As Berman observed, "Some six million French people watched that exchange. A huge number of Muslim immigrants must have been among them: the very people who might have benefited from hearing someone speak with absolute clarity about violence against women. Ramadan couldn't do it."
Berman laments that so many on the liberal Left thought that Ramadan won the debate. Yet some of Ramadan's fiercest critics come from the Left. French author and journalist Caroline Fourest analysed hundreds of Ramadan's recordings, more than a dozen books, and 1500 pages of interviews that had appeared in the press. Fourest says that in his cassettes "one here discovers Ramadan the warlord, giving orders and spelling out his political objectives: to modify the secular state and help matters evolve towards 'more Islam'. Unfortunately, the Islam in question is not an enlightened and modern Islam but a reactionary and fundamentalist one."
Fourest believes there is no one as effective as Ramadan in furthering fundamentalism in France. "He radicalises the Muslims under his influence by introducing them to the thought of Hassan al-Banna (this constitutes the introduction to his recorded seminars), then he brings them into contact with the present-day ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood: Youssef al-Qaradhawi, one of the few Muslim theologians openly to approve suicide attacks, or Faycal Mawlawi, who is not only a Muslim Brother but also the principal chief of a Lebanese terrorist organisation.
"And that is not all. He weakens secular resistance to fundamentalism by forming alliances with secular anti-racist associations. He has accomplished a sort of tour de force: to make Islamism seductive in the eyes of certain militants of the anti-globalisation Left. His tactic is simple: to send young partisans of his cause to register in anti-racist associations and left-wing parties."
Fourest says she was struck by the extent to which the discourse of Ramadan is often a repetition of the discourse that al-Banna had at the beginning of the 20th century in Egypt. "He never criticises his grandfather. On the contrary, he presents him as a model to be followed, a person beyond reproach, non-violent and unjustly criticised because of the 'Zionist lobby'.
"This sends chills down one's spine when one knows the extent to which al-Banna was a fanatic, that he gave birth to a movement out of which the worst jihadis have emerged and that he wanted to establish a theocracy in every country having a single Muslim.
"Tariq Ramadan claims that he is not a Muslim Brother ... a Muslim Brother is above all someone who adopts the methods and the thought of al-Banna. Ramadan is the man who has done the most to disseminate this method and this thought."
To quote Ramadan's local publicity again, he is "a charismatic and interesting man".