It's hard not to empathize with Tariq Ramadan after watching several YouTube videos in which he bats away hostile questions. The hostility stems in part from his pedigree: grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. Somehow, many assume, behind this Western looking and acting Muslim theologian there must lurk a double-speaking radical. I also sense a secret fear among commentators that Islam may be perfectly able to articulate itself in non-radical and non-threatening ways. That is Ramadan's specialty. And then where would we find another civilization-threatening Other?
Radical Reform is his recently published study of how Islam should be reformed. He does not think reform should be along a trajectory mirroring that of Christianity, but along its own internally defined one. And yes, he states, Islam must continue to develop; it cannot stay frozen in time. The Quran and the Hadith are universal revelations, but the social context into which the principles of the Quran and Hadith are applied is always changing.. and so Muslims must constantly work to discern how Islam can be realized and lived in a new situation. In the shock and awe of colonialism and the transformations of globalization Muslims have stepped back from that effort to re-apply the faith and too often settled for easy answers.
The easiest answer of all, for Muslims, is the desire to re-create the 7th century world of the prophet and his immediate followers. The duty of every Muslim would then be to dress, act, and think as if living in another time and place. This is the central position of Salafist Islam. Ramadan is especially sharp when arguing against this easy answer:
To confuse eternal principles and historical models is simplistic and, most of all, particularly serious: idealizing something in a moment of history (in this instance, the city of Medina) leads to the thoughtless and guilty denial of that history and reduces the universality of Islam's principles to the dream of an impossible return to the past, to an irresponsible "nostalgia of origins." [19]
This is a direct criticism of a popular strand of conservative Islam. Ramadan reads it out of court in no uncertain terms.
At the same time Ramadan is not interested in jettisoning the Islamic past for a liberal future. A frustration I feel toward conservative versions of Islam is that they are a simplification and abridgement of the historical breadth of Islam. Islamic thought in the past has often gone outside the boundaries of what is today orthodoxy. The way forward for Islam is to re-engage with its past and discover the novel points of view that could once again be live options.. if they only received consideration.
Ramadan signals in Radical Reform that he is a student of this wide Islamic past, and will let this past influence the way he thinks about current issues: "Becoming reconciled to that rich past is the best way of devising new paths toward the future" (27). Ramadan approaches the past not with a hope of finding a perfect world to be mimicked, but instead views study of the past as an opportunity to think through the decision making process that led to particular applications of Islam to particular places. It is the discipline of sound decision making that is ultimately what we can gain from the past. That is to say, the past can furnish us with a decision-making framework by which we can apply Islam to a radically new context.
Needless to say, this embrace of the past, while pushing away any slavish following of it, is deeply harmonious with the philosophy being worked out little by little here at Old Roads. I was thrilled to read a passage like this:
If modernity, progress in any era, means "breaking away from tradition," then such modernity may very well be the euphemistic expression of a state of being that has no landmarks, no history, no principles, no vision. A modernity that rejoices in its situation without really knowing what it is. That is madness, alienation. [27]
As Ramadan critiques status-quo versions of Islam, he at the same time establishes what we might call a prophetic voice for Islam. It is an Islam that will not be accommodated to the present, but that will challenge and reconfigure any social context into which it comes. The vision of modernity as rootless and alienated from itself owes something to Karl Marx and his analysis of the human price of constant social transformation brought by capitalism. "All that is solid melts into the air"—that turns out to be a call for both a radical re-fashioning of Islam and a radical challenge to the modern world.