NUS opposes religious obscurantist speaking at ESF - or does it?

Submitted by on 12 October, 2004 - 1:21

On Wednesday October 6th, the National Union of Students National Executive Committee overwhelmingly passed a motion proposed by AWL member Alan Clarke, stating that since Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan is an Islamist reactionary, NUS should oppose his invitation to speak at the European Social Forum.

However, following a campaign by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, NUS President Kat Fletcher and National Secretary James Lloyd are refusing to carry out the resolutions involved. They cite the fact that 13 out of 26 NEC members have written in asking for the carrying out of the motion to be delayed - as if this has not happened under pressure from the leadership (no doubt afraid of losing FOSIS votes at the next NUS conference), and as if it justifies refusing to carry out the decision of a properly constituted executive meeting.

So far, those who support the invitation to Tariq Ramadan have failed to actually debate the issues involved, preferring to ridiculously equate any criticism of Islamism with Islamophobia. Below is a briefing which makes it clear that Ramadan is, as we have said, a reactionary who has no place speaking the ESF.

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NOTES ON NUS, TARIQ RAMADAN AND THE ESF

Alan Clarke, NUS National Executive (October 10th 2004)

On October 6th 2004, NUS NEC passed my motion arguing that, since Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan is an Islamist reactionary (albeit of a soft, reformist type) we should oppose his invitation to speak at the European Social Forum. Not only has this decision aroused major controversy, but the National Secretary has so far refused to carry out the mandates included in my motion. What follows is a brief attempt to clarify the issues involved.

1. Islamophobia

(See also appendix)

A key argument for those who wish to reverse the NEC’s decision seems to be that criticising the politics of any Muslim public figure is Islamophobic. Thus to criticise Tariq Ramadan is apparently a blow against all Muslims and even people of Muslim background. The Black Student Officer and National Secretary’s responses to my NEC motion do not include any specific, point-by-point rebuttal of its content; rather they rely on the unjustified idea that criticising Tariq Ramadan is necessarily Islamophobic. The implication of this view is that political disagreement and debate should be reserved for non-religious white people, since they are not appropriate for anyone else, least of all Muslims.

In fact, Muslims and people of Muslim background are as divided by class position, political ideology, worldview etc as anyone else. Tariq Ramadan’s defenders are trying to essentialise “Muslims” as single, homogenous constituency of which Islamists of various shades are necessarily the spokespeople. In fact, Islamists are still thankfully a small minority among Muslims; but even if they possessed majority support, that would not demand that progressive organisations endorsed or allied with them, any more than majority support for reactionary parties in any population makes those parties progressive.

Let us be extremely clear: what is being argued over here is NOT the fact that a Muslim has been invited to speak at the ESF. In 2002, the No Sweat campaign took Indonesian trade union leader Dita Sari on a speaker tour of the UK. Sari is a religious Muslim, but she is also a workers’ leader, a feminist and a socialist. She and Ramadan share the same religion, but they are not at all the same politically. The point is that promoting Tariq Ramadan as a spokesperson for “Muslims” as a bloc is a betrayal of people like Dita Sari, ie Muslim democrats, socialists and feminists, as well as secular and non-religious people in mainly-Muslim countries and communities.

2. Who should speak at the ESF?

My basic contention is that it is wrong for the ESF - a forum devoted to the theme that another and better world is possible, and which obviously chooses its main plenary speakers as a tight selection from a vast range of people who would like to get to the top tables there - to invite Tariq Ramadan as a top-billed speaker representing “the Muslim point of view”. It is wrong because the ESF should not be put together with speakers representing religious constituencies, and because Tariq Ramadan represents a very particular strand in Muslim thought, one that seeks to promote the reactionary ideology of Islamism in Europe by constructing a version of it tailored to blur all clashes with democratic values. To object to Tariq Ramadan being a top-billed speaker at the ESF is not saying that he is a “demon”, or a fascist, or anything like that; I also object, for example, to Ken Livingstone being top-billed at the ESF. The amendment did not say that Tariq Ramadan could not speak anywhere, or that NUS should oppose the campaign against the US government's refusal to allow him entry to the US, or that NUS should demand he be sacked from his academic job in Switzerland. It did not suggest that it would be wrong for organisations or universities to invite Tariq Ramadan to take part in debates.

3. Is NUS “in opposition” to the trade union and global justice movements?

The Black Students Officer argues that the NEC’s judgement of Tariq Ramadan is “in clear opposition to the judgement of the rest of the trade union movement, NGO sector and civil society groups” and that opposing Ramadan’s invitation to the ESF will therefore expose us to “ridicule among the trade union movement for having presumed that they would wittingly compromise their political integrity and commitments to equality”. There is a general point to be made that, in a democratic, rational society, being in a minority does not require you to shut up, turn off your brain and mouth agreement with the majority; but beyond this, I think the Black Students Officer’s equation of the leading ESF organisers with the majority of the labour and global justice movements is questionable to say the least.

It is not the whole or even the leaders of the trade union movement that made the decisions about which speakers to invite to the ESF, but committees dominated by precisely the forces which on NUS NEC have protested against my stance (eg the SWP and Socialist Action/Student Broad Left in the form of Livingstone’s full-time advisers). As the National Secretary has noted, many NEC members had never heard of Tariq Ramadan before last week’s meeting; is it not then reasonable to suppose that many ESF-supporters in the broad movement had not heard of him either and simply assumed – wrongly, as it turns out – that anyone invited to speak at the ESF must be a left-winger?

4. Tariq Ramadan’s politics

So what is the reality of Tariq Ramadan’s politics? He is a writer who tries to construct an ideology loyal to the basic traditions of movements like the Muslim Brotherhood – but rebranded so that he can rope back European Muslims into a world-view centred on centuries-old texts without directly affronting basic values of democracy and equal rights in a way that would marginalise him among those Muslims in the same way as Hizb-ut Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun are marginalised. He wants to make contact with a wide range of readers and listeners - but in order to pull them backwards, not to take them forwards.

This is the full extent of my claim. Nowhere have I used words like “demonic”: the Black Students Officer has simply invented the phrase “demonic Muslim caricature” in order to misrepresent my argument.

a) Because ambiguity is essential to his project, Ramadan is not clear and straightforward as a writer and speaker. He evades and elides fundamental issues; and he significantly changes the emphasis of what he says depending on who his audience is. His is a soft-sell version of Islamism, but that does not make it fundamentally anything other than reactionary.

b) Ramadan claims allegiance to democratic and progressive values, saying that they can be derived from the Islamic holy texts just as well as from other sources. At the same time he does not disavow the political tradition of his grandfather Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Defining himself repeatedly as a “Muslim reformist”,(1) he describes al-Banna as the “most influential of the Muslim reformists of the century”.(2) To give a more specific example: when asked if he thought there was any contradiction between his proclaimed opposition to anti-semitism and the Muslim Brotherhood’s persecution of Jewish people in 1940s Egypt, Ramadan replied that “it is necessary to present each of the positions, my grandfather’s and my own, in their political context. Al-Banna lived a time when the state of Israel was being formed and he, like others, defined its establishment as an act of colonisation which in his opinion justified resistance. . .clearly there is a difference between what he said in his day and what I am saying. . .There are some things of my grandfather’s with which I agree and others with which I don’t agree. I have taken from my grandfather what in my opinion is Muslim reformism.”(3) A long reply to a simple yes/no question (I have only quoted part of it), but at no point does Ramadan say that there is a contradiction. He reaffirms that he and al-Banna are part of the same broad tradition.

Now let us be quite clear what exactly it is Ramadan is expressing this general sympathy with. In 1946, while he still lived in Palestine, socialist writer Tony Cliff (founder of the SWP) wrote a survey of the Muslim Brotherhood’s politics and in particular its attitude to Jewish people.(4) Describing the Brotherhood as “clerical-fascist”, Cliff noted that its leaders had expressed a wish for cooperation with the British empire against Palestine’s Jewish population, arguing that Arabs should “not fight Britain. . .but fight against Jewish settlement”.(5) On November 2nd, the anniversary of the Balfour declaration promising a Jewish national home in Palestine, the Brotherhood attempted to incite Muslim Arab workers in Cairo and Alexandria to attack those cities’ Jewish and other minority populations, only to be frustrated by the united, anti-racist action of the Egyptian trade union movement.

The question of anti-semitism is typical of how Ramadan waxes progressive but fails to disassociate himself from the ultra-reactionary tradition of the likes of Hasan al-Banna.

c) Ramadan does indeed claim to oppose state persecution of gay people and be in favour of women’s rights. But on this as other questions, those general claims are not at all the end of the story. For instance, he recently argued in a lecture to young Muslims that one cannot be both Muslim and gay, since “God wanted things in order. And that order is ‘man for woman’ and ‘woman for man’”.(6) Instead of clearly opposing physical punishments and demanding their abolition, he instead proposes a “total and absolute moratorium, to give us the time to go back to our fundamental texts. . .and to determine precisely the necessary conditions.” In his letter to FOSIS concerning the NEC’s decision, he pointed out that his 1995 book Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modernity he wrote opposing conjugal violence; but in 2002 he put it a bit differently: the Koran envisages such violence as a “last resort”.(7) In similar vein, he has explained his conception of sexual “equality” as follows: “the man is responsible for management of the family space, while the role of the mother is central there”.(8) That “central” role “should take priority over financial considerations and personal professional success”.(9)

Gay sex and relationships are unnatural; we should stop stoning people for adultery and cutting off their hands for theft until we’ve had a chance to discuss it properly; men should rule over their families while women devote themselves to the domestic sphere. We would not accept or excuse such reactionary nonsense from a Christian or Hindu fundamentalist, so why should we accept them from Ramadan?

d) Similarly, in his letter to FOSIS and elsewhere, Ramadan claims to be in favour of democratic values and institutions. He says that, for him, shari’a is not a “set of law to be implemented without taking the context into account”; the National Secretary cites this as evidence in his favour. But in his interview on the Open Democracy website, Ramadan explains in more detail exactly what he means by adding: “We must think about the law when trying to be faithful to a specific goal. . .I reject the notion of al-fiqh (the body of law) coming first. It is not first for me.” More specifically, he says that he thinks a “literal understanding” of the Koranic prescription to cut off the hands of thieves is wrong.(10) In other words, he does want a legal system based on the shari’a; he is in favour of laws based on Islamic scripture and its interpretation, but thinks that this should be implemented flexibly (“taking into account the context”; not “first”, but after considering them more general requirements of Islamic jurisprudence), not rigidly as a more radical Islamist might advocate.

It should be understood that this flexibility does not distance Tariq Ramadan from the Muslim Brotherhood tradition. Although politically the Muslim Brotherhood has been what Middle Eastern socialists saw as “clerical fascism” (see above), theologically the Brotherhood's “attitudes have generally been in line with the reformist approach of Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida. . .to create an up-to-date Islam suited to modern conditions. . .Theologically, Banna's views were fairly close to those of Abduh and. . .Rashid Rida... Some of his followers [argued] that the thief should have his hand amputated only when the perfectly just Islamic society, in which there was no want, had been realised. . .[For them] Islam was an ideal to be worked for... within its framework, development was not only possible, but also desirable and necessary. The Sharia, however, must reign supreme. . .”(11)

In his response to NUS, Tariq Ramadan lists four democratic principles to which he subscribes. Then in his Open Democracy interview (Rosemary Bechler, 14 July 2004) he declares that even if those principles can be found in what he calls “the western model of democracy”, they “can also be extracted from Islam”, and that for him “justice and equality come from my Islamic teaching”. “I want to sustain these four principles, but to elaborate specific models in the Islamic world that respect them. Every society should respect its culture, its memory and its collective psychology. A specific model that embodies established, respected principles is the aim”.

So, Tariq Ramadan wants democracy, but an Islamic democracy. All this is very vague, so let us look at what he means in practice. He claims that in the mainly-Muslim world “‘secular’ means ‘dictatorship’, when you look at the historical balance sheet of political regimes like Turkey, Syria, Tunisia and others”.(12) One might reply that ‘Islamist’ has also meant ‘dictatorship’, for instance in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan and Saudi Arabia. In any case, what’s Ramadan’s alternative? “The country which has advanced most towards democratic institutionalisation is Iran. . .In twenty years, Iran has transformed itself more – not only on the political level, but also on that of ideas and modes of relating to scriptural references – than any other apparently progressive Muslim country”.(13) As far as we know, Tariq Ramadan does not defend Iran as a perfect, ideal Islamic state - it would be very much not his style to do that - but he plainly gives it great credit. Iran does have universal suffrage and a parliament; it is also indisputably a theocratic and extremely repressive state. NUS activists, who have a proud tradition of supporting their Iranian brothers and sisters against the fascistic regime ruling their country, will have a better idea than most about what Iran’s sort of “democracy” means for ordinary people – state violence, destruction of the labour movement, super-exploitation, the suppression of women, anti-semitism and war.

In interpreting all these statements by Tariq Ramadan, we must bear in mind who is speaking, and to whom. If a speaker in a village where religious traditions weigh with the unshaken weight of centuries, where people have very little possibility of considering alternative world-views, and where it is hard for young people even to conceive the possibility of not regarding the Koran as superseding all human wisdom - if such a person were to advocate having a moratorium on chopping off thieves’ hands, or stoning women guilty of adultery, then that might be a tremendous step forward. Tariq Ramadan was born and brought up, and lives, in Switzerland. He writes mostly in French. His chosen audience are young, educated, socially-integrated European Muslims, most of whom would find the idea of chopping off thieves’ hands as far-fetched as the villagers might find the idea that the Koran was written by a human being. For him to tell them that the idea of chopping off thieves’ hands should be put on hold while Islamic scholars further examine the sacred texts has exactly the opposite significance to the imagined village speaker saying the same thing.

In conclusion, Tariq Ramadan is very much at the soft, reformist end of the Islamist spectrum, but he is still part of it. Such a thinker has no place speaking at the ESF.

Appendix: The unhelpfulness of demagogy

Among the requirements of rational discussion are an avoidance of insult, insinuation and demagogy. These standards have not been consistently maintained in the debate over Tariq Ramadan. It is perfectly reasonable (though in my view wrong) to argue either that I have mischaracterised Tariq Ramadan’s politics (i.e. that he is not a reactionary) or that I draw the wrong conclusions from my characterisation (i.e. that NUS’s adherence to progressive, egalitarian values, particularly with regards to the ESF, is misguided). It is emphatically not reasonable to suggest that those who share my views on this issue do not oppose Islamophobia – or worse, as the Black Students Officer implies in one email, that we are unconcerned about racist violence against Muslim asylum-seekers in Britain.

If I was going to respond to cheap demagogy with slightly less cheap demagogy, I might – to take just one example – point out that Alliance for Workers’ Liberty campaigned for the rights of the mainly-Muslim peoples of Bosnia and Kosova when many of those now shouting about Islamophobia were implicitly supporting their suppression. But I would rather deal with the issues actually in dispute.

Footnotes

1. For instance in one of the interviews that the National Secretary cites, at www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-5-57-2006.jsp
2. Etre musulman européen, étude des sources islamiques à la lumière du contexte européen, p460
3. See interview at www.labournet.net/world/0205/ispa255.html
4. Written on in Jerusalem on July 8th 1946 and published in the British Trotskyist press
5. Proclamation issued on September 4th 1936, quoted in Cliff
6. La conception islamiques de la sexualité. Innocence, responsibilité et maitrise, audio cassette
7. Both quotes concerning violent punishments come from Le Courrier, Geneva, 13 November 2002
8. L’Islam en question, co-written with Alain Gresh, p280
9. Islam, le face-à-face des civilizations, p51
10. See note 1
11. Malise Ruthven, Islam in the World, p 318, 307-8
12. L’Islam en question, p181
13. Ibid, p119, 129


More on Tariq Ramadan.

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 12/10/2004 - 21:01

Tariq Ramadan does not approve sex before marriage, homosexuality and divorce. He thinks that women should be submitted to their husbands. He is against feminism and sexual liberation. He contributed in Switzerland to ban a play of Voltaire against religious fanaticism. What a strange friend for the Left !

1) In september 1993 Tariq Ramadan waged a successful campaign to impede the town of Geneva to finance and show a play of Voltaire "Mahomet ou le fanatisme" (1741) for the 300th birthday of the French philosopher, a play which attacks religion and fanaticism and was directed much more against christianism than against islam.

2) In 1996, he spent one year in Leicester (UK) to write his book "Etre un musulman européen" (How to be a European Muslim). During his stay, he was in close contact with the Leicester foundation. Khurshid Ahmad, rector of this foundation, is also president of the main islamist Party in Pakistan the Jamaat e islami.

3) In 1997 he presented a doctorate about his grand father, the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers. His thesis was then published by the catholic publisher Bayard with a preface of Alain Gresh, editor of "Le Monde diplomatique" and member of ATTAC, who wrote at that time that Tariq honoured perfectly the tradition of Hassan al Banna, presented as one of the major muslim reformers of the 19th century - a total lie.

4) In 1998 Ramadan wrote a foreword to a collection of fatwas ("Recueil de fatwas" by Yusuf al Qardawi) published by the European council of the fatwa.
According to this book, a husband "has the right to forbid his wife to visit another woman, if he thinks this visit may cause a prejudice to his wife, his children or his marital life" and a "woman should not take the initiative to talk to men she does not know". A woman " should not play with children who are dancing". And the book goes on with themes like "Should a Muslim woman use a credit card ?" or "Should she cut her hair without her husband's authorization ?"

5) In a audiotape called "Pour une culture islamique alternative" (For an alternative islamic culture") Ramadan declared that to forbid music, drawing, photo, television or a movie is "une opinion comme une autre" ("an opinion among others" !).

6) In an audiotape called "Islam et laïcité" (Islam and secularism) Ramadan declared that one should not say that "islam makes no difference between religion and politics" but that islam makes no difference "between the realm of faith and the realm of action" ("entre le domaine de la foi et le domaine de l'action"). Which means exactly the same !
7) In an audiotape called "La femme musulmane, réalités et espoir" (The Muslim woman, realities and hope") Ramadan takes position against mixed swimming pools : "According to islam, I can't see how you can go to places like that."

8) In the same audiotape he declared his hostility to feminism and women's liberation : "We are not going to enter in the logic which unfolded itself in the European countries where women have struggled and became feminists. Against who ? against men."

9) In the same audiotape he took position against flirt and sex before marriage. A young Muslim woman asked him : "I have a boyfriend. Until where can we go without going too far ?" TR answered her "You already gone too far."

10) In a book called "Peut-on vivre avec l'islam ? Le choc de la religion musulmane et des sociétés laiques et chrétiennes" (Can we live with islam ? The shock between Muslim religion and secular and christian societies") he wrote that "a Muslim man can marry a Christian or Jewish woman" but "the reverse is not possible because a Muslim woman can't marry a man from another religion".

11) In the same book Ramadan opposed homosexuality : "Homosexuality is not allowed in Islam and its public legislation, like it is practiced in Europe ; it can not been admitted in Islam neither on the social level, neither in marriage, neither under any form. There is here a limit about the expression of the norm which applies to the social and public space."

12) In the same book he opposed divorce : "Divorce is, among the permitted things, the one God hates most".

13) In 2002 he wrote a preface to "Musulmane tout simplement" (Simply Muslim) a book from Asma Lamrabet in which she says that the Western world can't criticize polygamy because "many men have one, two or three mistresses in western societies". In the same book Asma Lamrabet writes that husbands should give their wifes a "light slap" ("une tape légère") because " many women become hysterical when they quarrel with their husband".

Y.C.
All the quotations are taken from "Tariq Ramadan dévoilé", by Lionel Favrot, livre-supplément à Lyon Mag, september 2004

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 24/10/2004 - 16:47

Why call for a no-platform on Tariq Ramadan, who may well be more reactionary than he appears on the surface but who has little or no influence over British political affairs? You made no such efforts over Ken Livingstone, who part-organised the event, yet who is a politician of national profile and power who has said as recently as this past summer that he would cross picket lines organised by unionised workers on the London Underground?

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