I've heard Tariq Ramadan talk three times now, and read two of his books; all these experiences have left me with a curiously slippery and unsatisfying impression. Mark Vernon's piece about him goes a long way to explaining why. It turns out that my complaint against Ramadan is almost exactly the opposite of the one which has been used to keep him out of the USA. His opponents there think he is really a political figure, under the guise of being spiritual leader. I think he is not political enough and talks altogether too much about spirituality.
This comes up very clearly in his treatment of tolerance. He says that there are three ways of understanding tolerance: you can either have an established religion, which makes more or less room for dissident communities: this is the model of classical Islam, and of the British state until, shall we say, the coronation of the present Queen; or you can have a secular state, which is neutral between all religions. This the model of the USA, or France.
Neither of these positions is self-evident or problem-free. Even in the secular model there are still disputes about what constitutes a proper religion or not – scientology is not one in France, but it is in the USA; and I would argue that the reason for the USA's apparent latitude about religious denominations is that it does in fact have an established religion which is a kind of nationalism. An accusation of unAmericanism is in essence an accusation of heresy or worse.
But these are, really, the only two political models for accommodating religious differences that have ever been discovered. Ramadan offers a third approach. But this is not talking about how political problems arising from religious difference should be addressed, or solved, but how we, as individuals, should approach them. I don't disagree with it. Setting out to learn from the people who disagree with us, especially when they do so to the point of apparent lunacy, is an excellent discipline. But it's not a political programme. It doesn't solve the problems which the first two approaches address. It simply assumes that one or the other is in place and tells us how to function under them.
But our problem right now in Western Europe is that we don't know how to make either model work in an entirely satisfactory way. Neither, of course, can eliminate conflict: they are both arrangements for managing it. But this only works when the arrangements themselves have legitimacy and at the moment, as the dean of Dublin almost said, we have just enough secularism to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.