Ibn Tufayl, our correspondent at Harvard, responds below to the conversation between Tariq Ramadan and several Americans at Cooper Union last night. Ramadan’s antagonist in the conversation was George Packer, of the New Yorker, who assailed Ramadan for too weakly criticizing his own grandfather, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for his long-ago praise for the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was a Nazi ally. Ramadan condemned the Nazis, but said that his grandfather’s praise stemmed from his opposition to the "silent colonization" of Palestine and need for allies in that cause "at that time."
It is breathtaking to see how little Packer knows of Islam and Islamic political and Islamic legal thought. He reads Paul Berman and then assumes that narrative is correct. Packer reused all of Paul Berman’s arguments. Here’s a trip down memory lane (God I feel old) where Noam Chomsky is accused of being a Nazi sympathizer. Berman on Chomsky:
Poor Chomsky, innocent victim of a quasi-Pavlovian automatism. Someone mentions "rights," he signs. Someone says "freedom of speech," he signs. He goes even further with the famous preface (which is not really a preface, though it strangely resembles one) to Faurisson’s Memoire en defense. The press seized on the event, and I leave to others the delicate pleasure of pinpointing the ambiguities and contradictions that run through Chomsky’s comments about the preface. But it is important to emphasize that the Faurisson affair is not an issue of legal rights. (Nadine Fresco, Dissent, Fall 1981) Regrettably, Faurisson’s new book has an unconscionable preface by Noam Chomsky that is being used to legitimate Faurisson at a bona-fide scholar of the Holocaust. As an unqualified civil libertarian Chomsky claims — disingenuously — that he has not read the book he is prefacing! (Arno J. Mayer, Democracy, April 1981)
It is absurd that Tariq Ramadan has to denounce events and personalities that existed before his time. It’s like if I ask Packer, does he denounce the American tendency to recruit Nazi scientists at the end of the war. Does he denounce it or did he support Nazi scientists in the country?
As well, from my defensive vantage point, the mufti gets trotted out to show that the Nazis and the Arab Palestinians were seemlessly in lock step. This has been used to successfully deny Palestinians their rights. There were Indian Nazi sympathizers and, I suspect, sympathizers in much of the then colonized world.
P.S. To be honest, I don’t find Tariq Ramadan to be really intellectually challenging, like say UCLA’s Khaled Abou El Fadl who is brilliant in the way that a medieval Talmudic scholar might be (but also understands the Western and Islamic traditions). What’s interesting is that some Muslim intellectuals mine Islamic philosophers such as an al-Farabi or Ibn Rushd (Salman Rushdie’s father changed their family name to Rushd in his honor). The link between the old and the new is the renewed emphasis upon Islamic rationalist philosphical traditions such as Mu’tazili.
