There is an important event in NYC tonight at 7, a discussion about Islam and secularism between Tariq Ramadan, Joan Wallach Scott of Princeton, Dalia Mogahed of Gallup, Jacob Weisberg of Slate, and George Packer of the New Yorker. They’re live-streaming here. It is Ramadan’s first visit to the country after being banned for years.
The argument of Packer and the neoliberals is vacuous: secularism, secularism. It is the mantra of the true believer in the enlightenment and has allowed for imperialism and colonialization. Israeli apologists also use this argument. We are secular, and they are not and when they become enlightened, then all will be well (Bernard Lewis). The corollary is that the occupation doesn’t matter. This ideology allowed Iraq to be invaded and the Israelis to continue their brutal occupation.
The central framing question of the debate tonight is, Can Islam be secularized? Does Islam allow for the separation of mosque and state? Meanwhile we have Shia Islamists ruling a partially ethnically-cleansed Iraq and Karzai has just threatened to join the Taliban.
Their liberal internationalist worldview is in shambles but their ideology remains unfettered and devoid of contact with reality.
The other critique is that deep within the liberal internationalists is a tribal ethnocentrism. The late Eqbal Ahmad, a friend of Edward Said, used to speak about this problem.
In promoting the discussion at the New Yorker, Packer offers the typical neoliberal gloss for why Ramadan was not allowed in–the Bushies. But as Ian Buruma pointed out in the NYT Magazine, Ramadan believes that it was because of "his views on Israel and on U.S. policy in Iraq that he was deprived of his visa to teach in the U.S."
Remember, that Ramadan took on Koucher, Sarkozy, and Bernard-Henri Levy, saying that they supported the Iraq war because of Israel. That freaked them out. One isn’t supposed to say these things. only a dreadful anti-semitic Islamist could possibly make these arguments. Wiki:
Ramadan wrote an article entitled, Les (nouveaux) intellectuels communautaires, which French newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro refused to publish. Oumma.com did eventually publish it. In the article he criticizes a number of French Jewish intellectuals and figures such as Alexandre Adler, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann and Bernard Kouchner, for allegedly abandoning universal human rights, and giving special status to the defence of Israel. However, by accusing Jewish and non Jewish philosophers whose name merely sounded Jewish, he opened himself to the charge of anti-Semitism. He also criticized Paul Wolfowitz whom he called a notable Zionist. Ramadan was accused, in return, of anti-semitism and having used inflammatory language.
