It is important to emphasize how much the New York Times remains a haven for neoconservative thinking about the Islamic world and US policy in the Middle East. The reformation/restoration have not occurred.
Last week the New York Times Book Review allowed Harold Bloom to drive a review of Anthony Julius’s book on English anti-Semitism into the ditch of denouncing people who criticize Israel. Bloom thinks they are anti-Semites by and large. The editors surely agree with him (or they would have stomped on this wretched sentence: "Of the nearly 200 recognized nation-states in the world today, something like at least half are more reprehensible than even the worst aspects of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians.").
Well, this week the Book Review turned to Julius himself for a respectful endorsement of Paul Berman’s new 300-page screed against Tariq Ramadan, The Flight of the Intellectuals.
The NYT Book Review is edited by Sam Tanenhaus, who has sought to redeem conservatism from George Bush without blaming the neocons (he says paleo philosophy also got us into Iraq). And the deputy editor is Barry Gewen, an admirer of neoconservatism who is a good friend of Berman’s.
Compare the valentine treatment in the New York Times to a true liberal’s approach: Andrew March’s superb review of the Berman book at the American Prospect, in which he invokes liberal religious principles against Berman’s intolerance, and celebrates Ramadan’s role within Islam. I of course read a lot of March’s respect for Ramadan as an "internal critic" as a model for Jews who are taking on the ideology of permanent war and demonization that Zionism has gifted my religious group with respect to the Arab world.
Ramadan’s entire corpus consists of a steady and unyielding assault on Muslim insularity, self-righteousness, and self-pity. He has been unceasing in his pleas for Muslims to abandon their fearful mistrust of all things infidel and stop clinging to the life raft of the symbols of Islamic religiosity. … Ramadan doesn’t need to reject Islamic criminal law line-by-line and critique Islamist figures by name because he is playing a bigger, longer-term game of moving Muslims beyond Law entirely. This is not lost on conservative Muslims, for whom Ramadan is very touchy subject. If not for his genealogy, they would have hung Ramadan out to dry long ago.
Ramadan, it is true, is neither a Hirsi Ali nor a Salman Rushdie, who are both self-declared apostates. They have left the community and call to those trapped within. In contrast, Ramadan is an internal critic, to use Michael Walzer’s term. Internal critics push their community to change, but they do so from within it, out of love. To follow Berman is to say that Muslims in their mainstream intellectual and religious traditions do not deserve internal critics. They deserve only apostates. As communism in another era had its Arthur Koestlers and Leszek Kolakowskis, so Islamic orthodoxy must have its Rushdies and Hirsi Alis. Islamism is so tainted by shari‘a, the Brotherhood, and violence that we must view it as nothing more than another Stalinism or fascism and draw lines in the sand. According to Berman, we must tell Muslims, “Either you are pro-Enlightenment or you are soft on stoning.”
But that is both blatant nonsense and pernicious groupthink. We also need to recognize the task of internal critics….Internal criticism is not only about facing up to harsh realities; it is also about creative and fruitful forgetting. It is about inventing new stories about your tradition that open up a different future.
Are all good and decent people destined to converge on the same secular, Enlightenment principles? Is every encounter with strangers about sizing them up as friends or enemies once and for all? How should outsiders seek to influence the moral struggles of other communities, especially religious ones? These are not easy questions, and Berman is hardly the first to blink in the face of them and choose comforting pieties over curiosity, complexity, and humility.
March is an assistant professor of Political Science at Yale and author of Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus.
