Tariq Ramadan is a political activist, Muslim scholar, professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford. Many people see him as a positive reformer for modern Islam, helping to reduce the influence of the hard-core orthodoxy. However, many others see him as a "slippery", "double-faced" religious bigot, "a covert member of the Muslim Brotherhood whose aim is to undermine Western liberalism."There who say that if you are controversial figure then you are probably doing something right. Tariq Ramadan's new book, "The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism," is generating some passionate reviews, so at least his likely to make some money on the deal.
Here are some reviews, all from the British press.
The Quest for Meaning by Tariq Ramadan
John Gray is frustrated by an idealistic treatise that mistakes poetic vagueness for pluralism
By John Gray
The Guardian, Saturday 28 August 2010The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism
by Tariq Ramadan 224pp, Allen Lane, £14.99
"Time is linear or cyclical. The paths are steep, and sometimes there are mountains, plains and vast expanses of desert or water. We go on, in order to make progress or simply to go and then come back, and we learn to be, to live, to think and to love." This short passage captures the flavour of much of Tariq Ramadan's latest book. Before it is anything else, The Quest for Meaning is an exercise in rhetoric – something in which, Ramadan seems to think, clarity should be avoided wherever possible. He tells the reader that time is linear or cyclical, but which is it? Can it be both? Similar questions arise throughout the book, which contains few clear statements of any kind. One can read tens of pages, even whole chapters, and come away without recalling a single straightforward assertion.
Ramadan's equivocating style has made him the target of fierce attack. Neo-conservatives and some liberals have taken the Swiss Islamic scholar to task for failing to denounce human rights violations, while in his wildly hyperbolic The Flight of the Intellectuals the US writer Paul Berman has accused Ramadan of promoting a new kind of totalitarianism. Criticism of this sort is hard to take seriously. Anyone who sees Islamist movements as posing a threat on the scale of Nazism and communism has forgotten what these regimes were really like, and unless one subscribes to absurd theories of clashing civilisations, dialogue with and among Muslims can only be useful. Engaged in a type of intellectual diplomacy that places him at the most sensitive points of conflict between Islam and the west, Ramadan surely has a part to play.
The danger comes when the inevitable hypocrisies of public dialogue are presented as a coherent philosophy. In politics, compromise is unavoidable and often desirable. In the life of the mind, it is a recipe for a dangerous kind of woolliness. Ramadan claims to be developing a philosophy of pluralism, but that means looking for ways in which rival worldviews can coexist – a goal that cannot be achieved by blurring their differences or seeking an imaginary totality in which their conflicts are conjured away. Part of what is needed is old-fashioned tolerance – the willingness to accept that others be free to hold views you believe are mistaken or abhorrent.
Ramadan is having none of this. In a rare display of unambiguous clarity, he writes: "When it comes to relations between free and equal human beings, autonomous and independent nations, or civilisations, religions and cultures, appeals for the tolerance of others are no longer relevant." The idea that tolerance is obsolete because it presupposes a position of power or superiority has become a commonplace. But it is also nonsense, because the need for tolerance comes from something deeper than shifting power relations. It comes from the fact that we will always have to put up with ideas and people we loathe.
Read the whole review.At the end of the day both religious and secular seek the same truth, says controversial Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadam. Michael Pye begs to differThis is an extraordinary book, and that is not a compliment: a wishful incantation dressed up with a clatter of quotes and a touch of mysticism which even the author acknowledges could be thought "ethereal" (or, if you prefer, "fluffy"). You pick it up expecting a remarkable Islamic scholar on how we might stop talking clash of civilisations and try to live a pluralism that insults nobody. You get what the scholar himself calls some kind of "initiation", when he's not likening it, rather too accurately, to crossing a desert.
Maybe that's my fault for having a secular mind, because Tariq Ramadan certainly doesn't and our minds do not meet. He has certainties, and he is certain that if all our attitudes and truths were averaged out we'd find a truth on which we could all agree; and naturally this couldn't contradict his own certainties, so the process is risk-free. To him, everyone is a believer, which suggests he doesn't quite see the difference between believing the sun will rise and accepting a whole system of belief without immediate evidence, like a religion.
You can see the problem: a missionary mindset trying to engage with a secular issue like pluralism. For nobody supposes that everyone will manage a perfect, pluralist mind; we all, to use Ramadan's metaphor, have our windows on the world, and we can only look through one at a time. Pluralism matters somewhere else, in the space (it might be dentistry, it might be bus driving or accountancy) where we are not, first and foremost, religious and where we co-operate with people who believe nothing that we believe. At the moment, that's where we need help. And Ramadan ought to be the man to help: there is nobody quite like him.
The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism, By Tariq Ramadan
Friday, 13 August 2010
In an age in which public intellectuals are often highly divisive figures – think of the storms surrounding Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins or Bernard-Henri Levy - few generate more controversy than Tariq Ramadan. Political activist, Muslim scholar, and professor of Contemporary at Oxford University, he is to some the "Muslim Martin Luther", a courageous reformer who helps bridge the chasm between Islamic orthodoxy and secular democracy.
ALAMY: Seeking plurality: Muslim women shopping in London
To his critics, Ramadan is a "slippery", "double-faced" religious bigot, a covert member of the Muslim Brotherhood whose aim is to undermine Western liberalism. When, in 2004, Ramadan was appointed professor of religion by Notre Dame, America's leading Catholic University, the US State Department revoked his visa for supposedly endorsing terrorist activity. The ban has since been lifted.
The debate about Ramadan was re-ignited earlier this year with the publication of The Flight of the Intellectuals, American writer Paul Berman's savage attack on European thinkers like Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for what he regards as their appeasement of Ramadan. The Quest for Meaning, Ramadan's first book aimed at a wider Western audience, arrives therefore at a timely moment.
It is, he writes, "a journey and an initiation" into the world's faiths to discover the universal truths they hold in common and to set out "the contours of a philosophy of pluralism". Unfortunately it will do little to settle the argument about the nature of Ramadan's beliefs.
There is a willfull shallowness about this work, a refusal to think deeply or to pose difficult questions, that is truly shocking. Insofar as it is provocative, The Quest for Meaning seeks to provoke not through the excess of its rhetoric but the banality of its reasoning.
The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism
By Tariq Ramadan
Reviewed by Ziauddin Sardar - 09 August 2010
Tariq Ramadan is a feted thinker, but his argument for the equal value of all faiths is clothed in platitudes and patronising mysticism.
Philosophy as candyfloss
The noted Muslim preacher, philosopher and Oxford academic Tariq Ramadan invites us to join him on a journey. We are promised an exploration of the bottomless ocean of ancient wisdom, through various religious, mystical, spiritual and secular traditions. We are asked to put our differences aside, to rise above and move beyond our obvious "conflict of perceptions". It will be a quest to help us rediscover our humanity and it will give meaning to our lives.
The journey begins well enough. Ramadan points out that we have a rather restricted view of reality: we see through our own "window", but there are countless other windows, other ways of perceiving and understanding the world. The binary logic of the west confines one to a single window. To get a wider perspective, it is necessary to transcend the limitations of reason and rationality. We need to see not just through our minds but also through our hearts. "The science of the heart," Ramadan writes, "is not the science of reason."
The first truth we must acknowledge, Ramadan asserts, is that of intellectual modesty and humility. Our own perception of truth, scientific or otherwise, is only a single viewpoint over the horizon. Our own religion or way of life is a partial, often distorted, reflection of the Truth. We should not take our partial images as certainties and delude ourselves that we know everything, or have found ourselves. "The dogmatic spirit," he writes, "confuses its exclusive convictions with the oceans of quests and human truths."
True meaning can come only from appreciating the Whole. The ocean has countless shores, all waiting to be explored, all offering distinctly different perspectives on the cosmos. It is the plurality of perceptions that shapes our common humanity. This is the core of Ramadan's "philosophy of pluralism".
But Ramadan's pluralism requires more than simple acknowledgment of diversity. He insists that meaning can emerge only by experiencing plurality. To be fully human, we must share the truth of others. Only "by immersion in the object per se", he writes, will we "be able to meet human beings, or subjects, with their traditions, religions, their philosophies, their aesthetics and/or their psychologies". It is at this juncture that the journey becomes a little confusing. The "ocean" of wisdom seems to yield little beyond trite statements. All explorations of the truth, all varieties of religious exploration, lead to the same destination, he tells us. Stating the obvious with a sense of discovery is neither original nor philosophy. If all paths "lead to the heart", one could ask, why choose one over the other?
Read the whole review.
Tags:
No comments:
Post a Comment