Yesterday Paul Berman’s latest book was published, The Flight of the Intellectuals. It is a 300-page attack on Tariq Ramadan, with some Ian Buruma thrown in as a palate cleanser. I don’t think I’ll read the book, Berman’s style is oldfashioned and his judgment seems to be missing an engine-mount or two. But my eye did fall on this passage (pps. 240-241) and I found it strange. Does Berman really think he can eviscerate Ramadan’s familial/religious investments as being anti-progressive without opening the door to an examination of the neocons’ Zionism? Is this whole book some kind of projection? Will any of Berman’s interviewers, in weeks to come, ask him about his own Zionism, or his family’s–or about neoconservative dynastic Zionism?
Ramadan obeys and reveres. He especially reveres the people who revere his grandfather. His method of obeying and revering is to call for what he describes as ‘reform.’ In Radical Reform he makes reform sound more radical than ever. And yet, reform, to him, means a continuation of his grandfather’s project from the 1930s and ’40s. It is the call to return to the purity of ancient times. The long-ago, imagined past. The age of the supine. Anyway, it is a call to return, in a slightly softer verson, to the militant, sharp-elbowed atmosphere of his grandfather’s time–the atmosphere in which each new member of the Muslim Brotherhood swore personal allegiance to the Supreme Guide…
He cannot think his way out of this. He is imprisoned in a cage made of his own doctrine about his grandfather and his grandfather’s ideology. all of his intelligence, which is considerable, and his energy, which his vast, and his literary talent, which is modest, goes into devising ever more clever ways, book after book, to paint the iron bars of his ideological cage in cheerful colors that appear to be modern and progressive. He wants to make his cage look anything but a cage. Sometimes he cannot think of new ways to disguise his old ideas. Then he pretends that one or another aspect of his own doctrine does not exist. He mutters about itjihad. And yet he cannot figure out how to unlock the cage. He cannot think for himself. He does not believe in thinking for himself.
