David Rieff on Paul Berman, at the National Interest:
For all of Berman’s self-infatuation—his book is shot through with braggadocious formulations such as “I have pondered” this, “disentangled” that and “discovered” the other—he is not quite vulgar enough to accuse these Western writers of what in some right-wing circles in the United States, the UK and France is now routinely called dhimmitude (a neologism of French origin that denotes an attitude of surrender, concession and appeasement to Muslim demands). But his bill of indictment amounts to pretty much the same thing. Following in the line of the French New Philosopher Pascal Bruckner, whom he cites often and praises with a fulsomeness verging on absurdity, Berman insists that, where Islamism is concerned, Western intellectuals like Buruma and Garton Ash can “no longer reliably tell black from white.” Berman tends to quote others when he wants to deliver his harshest judgments—an act of “ventriloquism” that, for a man obsessed with the need for intellectual courage, is, well, not as courageous as it might be. And we see this rhetorical tactic employed again and again, as when he refers to the German writer Ulrike Ackermann’s denunciation of Garton Ash as a “fellow traveler” of Ramadan.
[….] Berman himself concedes that Ramadan has condemned Islamism’s violent strain, but in effect insists that this condemnation is not credible because, in Ramadan’s The Roots of the Muslim Renewal, he exculpates his uncle and shifts the blame onto Sayyid Qutb, who became one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood only after al-Banna’s assassination in 1949 at the hands of the Egyptian secret police, or even onto Qutb’s disciples. Berman also remarks in passing that Ramadan’s project is not just to preserve but also to “adapt” his grandfather’s ideas. What Berman refuses to engage with is the possibility that there is more to these ideas than Jew hatred and Islamist totalitarianism. If that is indeed the case, then Berman is right, but apart from pointing to Ramadan’s whitewashing of his grandfather, Berman offers no real evidence that his subject’s condemnation of terrorism and anti-Semitism, and his embrace of democratic pluralism in Europe, are simply a smoke screen.
And sanitizing the biographies of great leaders (and, for that matter, great philosophers) from the past hardly began with Tariq Ramadan or is restricted to the Muslim world. We speak, and correctly so, of adapting Woodrow Wilson’s ideas about global affairs to the present, without believing them to be invalidated—and thus demanding of rejection—because Woodrow Wilson was one of the most racist figures in all of American history and is also responsible for initiating some of the more sanguinary U.S. imperial ventures in the Caribbean. In any case, Berman does not really even have the courage of his convictions on the matter.
