How and How Not to Engage Liberalism and Islam
Dissent magazine has just posted a revelatory assessment, by Andrew F. March -- a liberal, non-Muslim scholar of Islam -- of the liberal war hawk Paul Berman's untiring efforts to unmask Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan as an insidious apologist for murderous Islamicism. March also casts a skeptical eye on Berman's efforts to discredit Western intellectuals who've indulged Ramadan as a mediator between liberalism and Islam.
March isn't out to vindicate or celebrate Ramadan, but, because March knows Islam's texts and internal conversations better than almost any other non-Muslim in America, he shows that Ramadan -- an internal critic of Islam who needs to be heard by its most important clerics and scholars -- must at times adopt the tradition's reverential tones and skirt confrontations over specific embarrassments, precisely in order to criticize them.
Ramadan's exhibitions of deference to some infamous Islamicist leaders give Berman some "scare quotes" and other excuses to cast doubt on his intentions. But March shows that Berman -- who is comparatively ignorant of Islamic discourse but is hot with his mission to save the West from Ramadan's supposed perfidy and from left-liberals' naïve delight in it -- is merely "skipping stones" across the surfaces of the deep waters of Ramadan's family ties and of the texts and traditions he references.
Berman's touchy, sneering reply largely proves March's point. You may believe that Islam is too vulnerable to the fascist virus for its differences with liberalism to be bridged, but if it's liberalism you want to save, beware its noisy champions like Berman, who do not often exhibit its deepest strengths.
March is a quieter but firmer champion of liberalism. Again, he isn't promoting Ramadan; he's advancing intelligent liberal discussion of Islam against a breathless rush to closure by Berman and other liberal hawks (like Peter Beinart in The Good Fight in 2006). Although Berman has shifted from leftish to neo-connish in his foreign policy intellection, and Beinart the reverse, neither has outgrown romanticist-moralist inclinations that compromise his arguments.
I haven't proved this, of course. Andrew March's warning -- not just to Berman but to all of us journalists and bloggers -- is that even when our best-informed intuitions are right, we should resist the temptation to announce them by skipping stones across deep waters (as I did in my last post). That won't bring us either the critics or the celebrants we imagine we deserve. They have to be earned, the hard way.
Jim...I started to read March...and then Berman's reply. But I realized that, to comment fairly, I'd also have to read Ramadan. Hard to determine "who's right" unless one's read everyone, if not in full, then at least enough to be able to judge.
Otherwise, it becomes a matter, "Well, you know that Berman WAS a lefty, but he became a neocon when..."
May 26, 2010 1:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree that this subject has a lot more than anyone can digest on casual reading, but I still strongly recommend reading March's comment (it's not very long) and Berman's response and taking note of the kinds of argumentation you are seeing.
It's quite often true that "laymen" like us haven't the expertise to second-guess specific claims, but it's often equally true that people such as you are good judges of what constitutes a sound and fair argument and what really smells like polemics.
I'm not suggesting that recognizing that difference would by itself close the discussion in a scholarly setting, court of law, etc. But you don't see Berman claiming that March doesn't have more knowledge of the matter than Berman himself. What you see is Berman doing in his response precisely what March says he's doing in his book -- sneering, insinuating, and dodging. March's analysis turns on substantive claims. Berman's response turns on attitude and on connecting dots that don't necessarily connect in order to reinforce an assertion that is old and tired. Neither man penetrates Ramadan's soul, but one of them opens your mind and the other tries to close it, and to no useful end.
May 26, 2010 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . Ramadan . . . must at times adopt the tradition's reverential tones and skirt confrontations over specific embarrassments, precisely in order to criticize them.
So, then -- who's to say what Ole Tariq actually believes?
Worse -- given that arguments hidden under an esoteric veil are always subject to the defense that they've been "misinterpreted" by those not privy to the applicable gnostic code, who's to say -- who has the right to say -- what Ole Tariq is actually saying?
May 26, 2010 2:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's a fair question, and for an answer I'd sooner turn to someone who's mastered the subtleties and undercurrents of the conversations we're trying to listen in on and whose past assessments have proved trustworthy; I'd be less inclined to rely on someone who's flushed with a dragon-slaying mission and gives off an air of ungrounded smugness about his bravery and brilliance. That's not a solution to the problem you pose; it's just a guideline to use in sifting people's answers.
May 26, 2010 3:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ouch, I should also have mentioned this review by Andrew March, in the American Prospect, of Berman's book. It has prompted the March/Berman Dissent exchange, but some readers may find the lucid Prospect review easier to grasp even if not easier to endorse:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=whos_afraid_of_tariq_ramadan
May 26, 2010 3:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
"The judgments of the lord are true and righteous altogether." Abraham Lincoln on Psalm 19:9
It's great fun to suss out (deconstruct?) the meanings of the polemics the debaters use in these disputes. For example, here's Paul Berman --
Qaradawi explained to his television audience on another occasion that Hitler was sent by Allah to punish the Jews—a claim that, as I show, likewise echoes the Nazi Arabic-language propaganda of long ago and certainly cannot be attributed to the Koran.
As to the assertion that "Hitler was sent by Allah to punish the Jews," no believer in a just, providential god (Jeremiah, Muhammed, et als.) would dispute the self-evident truth of the statement. The rules of deductive logic would seem to guaranty its truth.
So, what "response" does Paul Berman intend his "readers" to make?
That the assertion is wrong? That the assertion bespeaks the logic inherent in a medievalist if not archaic religion?
Quien sabe.
May 27, 2010 12:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think the response that Paul Berman wants his readers to make is to feel viscerally that the Arabs are coming to get them.
What do you think, Ellen?
May 27, 2010 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=356
I'm not a quarter of the way through the article and this passage struck me as significant...
"Berman gives what seems like a sympathetic spin to all of this. Berman’s Ramadan is a tragic figure. Ramadan is not himself a man of anger, loathing, resentment, and violence; it’s just that he is trapped by biological destiny. By nature, he probably wishes things were different. But by birth, there are limits to his freedom. Yet since his family is precisely the epicenter of all the horror, unless he openly betrays his family we simply have no use for him."
So, am I the only one who thinks this sounds a lot like the dilemma of Quentin Compson?
If not, why not and if yes...
what then...
May 29, 2010 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think its that significant. It comes from the common story of many jihadis attacking from with the west, from Mohammad Atta through the recent NYC bomber--culture clash within one person and conflict with it. To say that Tariq Ramadan has that problem too although he is not driven to the steps of anger, loathing resentment and violence is not particularly profound--I'm sure right now that there are thousands of people from Islamic countries enrolled in universities in the west that have the exact same problem. By taking this problem and comparing it to similar characters in literature you certainly might get into interesting thoughts but you'll also get sidetracked--i.e., yeah, sure take a person from one culture and insert him in another and you have interesting problems, it is the stuff of literature, people like Woody Allen likes to do the meme, too.
May 29, 2010 1:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Second sentence should read: from within the west. And I didn't mean to sound argumentative, should it come across like that. I meant just to say that I don't agree that it's a significant thought on his part, rather, more derivative to me, i.e., the projection of the standard jihadi story onto Ramadan.
May 29, 2010 5:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
you don't sound argumentative..so no worries on that point...
I'm not sure what I think about this...
Speaking provisionally I suspect that while the analysis of Ramadan may be lacking I find the Faulknarian echo interesting and your point about it involving thousands of others interesting in that one finds with Faulkner and others a sense that these dilemmas are universal and take just about forever to work through societies so that Ramadan's dilemma is common and not unique to Islam which would I think undermine the critique of his position as expressed in the article...
I often think that if books weren't so heavily banned in Arab countries and speech was open the "Nakba" meme could be seen as being right out of Absalom! Absalom! where the narration reflects the idea that god will not explain why "we lost" and are condemned to suffer...
In other words...is this universal and if it is how much if any common humanity is being missed...and as a corollary what if these dilemmas can't be solved or take so long to solve that the past ("which aint even hardly past" - W.F.)never leaves people...and keeps repeating...
and just to be clear...I agree with you I think his thought on this aspect of Ramadan is not significant but I'd like to think my using it as a jumping off point has slightly more significance;-)
Cheers
M
May 30, 2010 1:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd like to think my using it as a jumping off point has slightly more significance
it does--interesting comment--it's the victimology thing--the oppression olympics et. al., which is behind some of the biggest problems in the world, mho.
One of my favorite things is to rag on big picture--I think yours, too? With IP the lack of big picture is especially insidious--I came to an epiphany a while back with the brouhaha over New York Times' Israel bureau conflict of interest that they should just remove the bureau and transfer it to cover Haiti or Congo. The more I think on that, the more I genuinely think it's a good idea. It's like feeding trolls over there. They think they're so special, both sides, i.e., most important people in the world and no one has ever suffered like them.
May 30, 2010 6:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
"the oppression Olympics"...that's funny;-)
yeah I am endlessly fascinated by the "big picture" especially as we live in an era seemingly obsessed with minutia at the expense of context...I think there are many intelligent people who have written well about this issue and they could add to the "debate" but the corporate media dominates and creates a terrible echo chamber in which there's just yelling...
you're right about the sense of pirvelaged victim status...it's what I call militant provincialism...you can find it everywhere but there is a propensity towards violence that is far more pervasive in some places...yet I suspect the propensity for violence exists everywhere and just takes a nap in one place before waking up again...the Europeans for example seem to go to sleep for about a century and then decide to see how many of themselves they can kill in the fastest most brutal way possible...
I'll try and illustrate the point but bare with me if this doesn't work:
one day in the Old City I saw this technician from the Israel national phone company (Bezek) trying to install phone wires/cables over the door to a man's shop...needless to say the guy who owned the shop was Palestinian...
within about two seconds they were having an argument...
the phone company guy was saying look you want the phone i have to put the wires somewhere...
the guy said you're blocking my door...
it went back and forth like that...
I eventually walked away and they were still arguing...
now...here's the other nuance...
just about a year ago I was in Paris...
took the metro out to Montparnasse...
at a certain point you notice that 90% of the people on the metro are African...Black and speaking French with African accents...
sure enough this White French guy gets on...says to the Black guy in front of him hey could you please move...the Black guy starts yelling at him saying I'm standing here what do you want me to do fly...
in other words all of a sudden it was Do the Right Thing and the only thing missing were Spike Lee and John Tuturro screaming at each other with weird camera angles...
There seems to be something extraordinarily common about this circle of rage-trigger-violence-rage-trigger-violence in a closed circuit that feeds itself and bloats and repeats...
memory travels and is contained in the smallest gesture and with it comes rage and shame honor and assumptions and slights and so on in a mysterious language often dimly perceived...
one small miscalculation and it's a riot or worse...
like a lynch mob in Faulkner...a vortex of memory and repression and the whole mysterious bag of impulses boiling to the surface...
well...there you go...musing and such...not sure how clear any of this is...
Cheers
M
May 31, 2010 11:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
It comes from the common story of many jihadis attacking from with the west, from Mohammad Atta through the recent NYC bomber--culture clash within one person and conflict with it.
Funny, I've been thinking about this a lot lately (since the CT bomber, I guess), the fact that so many people who perpetrate these attacks are themselves relatively assimilated. I think maybe that's exactly the issue. Long ago, I lived a pretty assimilated life in a place far from home, and I'm still struck by the dissonance I'll sometimes feel in situations where my old life comes back to me in a vivid way. It's rather disturbingly like there's two people in here, the me I'm accustomed to every day, and the one that speaks Japanese.
I guess my point is that cultural assimilation is kind of psychically destabilizing. In this sense, it doesn't surprise me that the people carrying out attacks on the west (whatever the hell that means) are the ones who have been living in Hamburg or Florida or Connecticut. (And of course, most of us foreigners find more interesting and productive ways to cope.) To some extent, if I'm right, I think that recognizing that as a psychological origin of destructive radicalism is an important place to start if you want to really forestall it.
Hmm. I sound kind of like a liberal who wants to give them psychotherapy while Karl Rove girds himself for war.
May 30, 2010 7:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
great points, and I lol on your last line.
Oh something just came to me to throw in. There is also this--the cannon fodder these assimilated guys use, when they work in a cell, not alone, i.e., the suicide bomber followers or whatever, there is a significant thing there going on with the young humiliated men joining gangs thing. (They used to call em juvenile deliquents.) So there is the gang leader and the gang. Zarqawi's whole story is interesting on this, what he learned in prison, etc.
May 30, 2010 7:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
On my last line, come to think of it, I'm happy to tend the home fires like a good milquetoast liberal if Karl actually wants to go off to war.
But I guess he won't for the reason that makes a segue to addressing your point: like many horrible facts of life, this is one that wouldn't be so much as an annoyance if not for the role played by males 18-29 or thereabouts.
May 30, 2010 7:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, Well, I just heard Tariq Ramadan three weeks ago telling 600 Muslims that they should respond to Benjamin Netanyahu's religious scriptural bullshiting about how Jerusalem belong to the Jews on universalist, secular grounds.
So either
1. I must have been fooled by his subtle cunning.
2. Berman doesn't like smart Muslims who don't bend over for Israel.
Take your guess.
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hey Jim
One of the men commenting here said:
"Hard to determine "who's right" unless one's read everyone, if not in full, then at least enough to be able to judge.
Otherwise, it becomes a matter, "Well, you know that Berman WAS a lefty, but he became a neocon when..."
so true. If a person cannot stay objective, and is guided by emotions...judging any issue is a very difficult task.
How to stay objective?
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