Paul Berman’s piece in TNR on Tariq Ramadan is important, and deserves attention for a few reasons. One is Berman’s point that western liberals have rationalized the stoning of adulterers and other primitive practices in the Muslim world. I’m not sure how widespread that practice is, but I’m in complete agreement. As I’ve said many times, I think the Muslim world is behind the west on freedom of speech and women’s rights. Berman is right to talk proudly about the 150-year struggle to establish women’s rights in the west, including modern landmarks like Madame Bovary, speaking of adultery.
That said, Berman is essentially a neoconservative as I would define that term now–wanting to impose democracy on the Arab world by force, dismissing the Israeli occupation as meaningless–so I want to critique him. Let’s look at one point. Berman’s rationalization of the French law barring Muslim women from wearing headscarves in schools.
As I understand Berman, he says the reason that was a good law is that the Muslim girls wanted to participate in the freedoms accorded women in a democracy, and their families were keeping them from so participating by making them wear headscarves. The girls were "under pressure."
The pressure sometimes came from their families at home, and other times from the larger Muslim community, in opposition to their families. The pressure demanded conformity with Islamic precepts.. The purpose [of the law] was to transform the schools into a zone beyond Islamist control, not out of some ideological whim but in order to preserve and to enforce one of the major achievements of modern sociey still not entirely realized, which is full rights and benefits for women.
I find this nutty. Berman’s chief problem as a thinker is black-and-white-ism, and this is a good example of his failure to make subtle distinctions. If a family wants to stone a girl for adultery, or cut her genitals, I am all for the state interfering on behalf of the girl. Berman has no evidence that these women are being compelled to wear the headscarf, and even if they were, it’s a very difficult area. The realm of the family as a cultural entity is somewhat sacrosanct in the west, and while we may object to strong familial cultures–I am upset when I see evangelical kids proselytizing on street corners with their parents; they have no ability to resist–society must tolerate those cultures. According to Berman’s principle of interference, we could be going into Orthodox Jewish families too, because they deny their girls certain rights. How could the state ever sort out these psychological/familial questions. It can’t. And so I say, Back off.
No, I wish they wouldn’t wear a headscarf. But I’m not going to get them to stop wearing them by interfering in these personal decisions. I’ll get much further by demonstrating pluralist principles of respect. Besides, anyone who has hung out at an American campus understands that it is not such a big deal that some girls are wearing a headscarf. (A burqa is a different matter; that crosses the line).
It is precisely these failures to understand, What is our business and what isn’t, what we are capable of achieving and what we aren’t, what we can tolerate and what we must smash, what threatens our freedom and what doesn’t–these intellectual failures that mark the Iraq War that Berman pushed for. Nowhere in this very long article does he come to terms with his massive and horrifying failure of judgment…
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As it happens, I've lived in France for the better part of a decade and have taught at a public high school in the predominantly poor and immigrant suburbs of Paris. I'm also familiar with Ramadan the scholar and the television personality.
First of all the headscarf (or hijab): some of my Muslim students wore it, some didn't. While there may well have been pressure from home for some girls to wear it, I never once saw any pressure coming from fellow students one way or the other. It was never a problem and frankly never even an issue until it was turned into an issue by Sarkozy et al. Many of my students wore it not out of any religious piety (most of my Muslim students were unable to list the five pillars of Islam), but rather as a cultural distinction. Racism is rampant in France, and despite having a French passport, having a Muslim name is often reason for discrimination. For example, a friend of mine who is half Algerian and half French has both Arab and French first names, although she goes by the Arab one. But when she's looking for work, she always puts the French one on her CV and even changes her answering machine message to match it. So many of these young Muslims have found themselves between two stools, so to speak. They're not considered French by "les français de souche," but they're not really Algerian or Moroccon either, as their summer trips to the "bled" (or ancestral village) show them. So many of my students claimed their "beur" (Maghrebin-French) culture by donning the hijab.
As for lapidation, Berman doesn't even spell out Olivier Roy's argument for backing Ramadam, instead just wishing it away with a "oh, never mind the reasoning." This isn't even a straw man, which leads me to believe that Berman didn't even read Roy's reasoning, which is laid out quite succinctly in his interesting little book, "La Laïcité face à l'Islam."
For Roy, in a secular (read: laïque) system, the state has no place making theological claims. Ramadan used the word moratorium in a very specific sense: a legal, and thus secular, decision to stop something. To condemn stoning in Islamic terms is not the place of a secular state; that theological task is left to religious scholars. A laïque state's responsibility is not to pass moral judgment, not to condemn, but rather to pass juridical judgment. In this case, a moratorium is an unambiguous cease and desist order for stoning based on legal and not theological reasoning: it is illegal in the French civil code.
The guys down at TNR act like they've unearthed some hidden jewel with this exchange between Sarkozy and Ramadan, but it's a really famous dialogue. And anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the debate on secularism and Islam in France in general, and Ramadan's place in that debate in particular, would have known about it. It is, after all, common knowledge. Berman makes a lot of beans saying that Buruma, Giry and Ash haven't read much of Ramadan's work. I may be going out on a limb here, but I get the feeling that Berman himself is proficient in neither French nor Arabic and has only read the smattering of Ramadan's work that's been translated into English.
I have read the Paul Berman article and many others on Tariq Ramadan.
The Muslims of this world deserve a meaningful advice. While complimenting the honesty and good nature of peaceful Muslims, we must send a message to the people of Islam that secular Islam is on the rise. It is the only escape from the prisons of some Muslim countries. The choice between freedom and oppression.
http://www.secularislam.org
It is problematic that not all secular Muslims are having Abraham Lincoln type integrity.
Or a Ferenc Deak, mentioning another great exaple.
I have read the Paul Berman article and many others on Tariq Ramadan.
The Muslims of this world deserve a meaningful advice. While complimenting the honesty and good nature of peaceful Muslims, we must send a message to the people of Islam that secular Islam is on the rise. It is the only escape from the prisons of some Muslim countries. The choice between freedom and oppression.
http://www.secularislam.org
It is problematic that not all secular Muslims are having Abraham Lincoln type integrity.
Or a Ferenc Deak, mentioning another great exaple.
Steve,
Are you kidding me with the Secular Islam being on the rise? It is because of the destruction of Arab Nationalism by Israel and US that caused Political Islam to rise out of its ashes. Now we are back again supporting the despots in trying to clamp down on Political Islam with cases like Egypt.
They only way to resolve it is to not meddle in other peoples affairs and don't support henchmen like the Shah or regional guard dogs like Israel.
Berman does espouse a typical neocon view of the subject. It is a non-issue made into one by French pols looking for their own wedge issue just as our good Republican friends have done in the past.
Wearing the hijab should be a free choice made by a woman. The state has absolutely no right to impose itself in this matter.
Christian noblewomen in the Crusader States wore the Muslim veil when they went outdoors. This had nothing to do with modesty or cultural sensitivity, but with the aging effects of sunlight upon a woman's skin. Yet one can read all sorts of sinister portents into the practice.
I know alot of muslim women who wear the headscarf and it's entirely of their own choice. Many of them are converts or people who discovered their spirituality a little later in life as many people do. the schools shouldn't be beyond islamist control. it's god and country, not the other way around. the headscarf liberates women
All humans teach their young how to dress.
Some teach their children proper outerwear and some teach their children to go naked.
Muslims teach their women to protect themselves against sexual crime.
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