The Flight of the Intellectuals by Paul Berman Melville House, 299 pages, $26.00
For the past 15 years or so, Tariq Ramadan has been the most influential Muslim intellectual in Europe. Born in Switzerland to Egyptian parents and trained in Western philosophy as well as Islamic law and theology, Ramadan is a prolific author, a professor at Oxford, and a telegenic, multilingual, and charismatic presence in the European media. He is also the subject of an intense controversy among Western intellectuals who cannot agree on whether he is friend or foe.
The dispute about Ramadan arises because of what he says (and doesn't say) and because of who he is. Ramadan calls upon European Muslims both to remain Muslim and to embrace European citizenship enthusiastically -- to stop fretting that European law isn't based on Shariah and to recognize that obeying the social contract is what Shariah demands. Yet he does not explicitly repudiate his father and grandfather, who were key figures in the history of militant Islamism.
Ramadan's grandfather was Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fountainhead of many contemporary Islamist movements. And Ramadan's father, Said Ramadan, was also a major figure in the mid-20th-century "Islamist International" and an associate of Sayyid Qutb, the radical theorist of Islamic revolution and totalitarian governance.
This genealogy accounts not only for Tariq Ramadan's fame but also for the enthusiasm that he elicits from many European liberals and the skepticism that he arouses in others...