The flight of the intellectuals

[Valin]

Jerusalem Post:

Tony Badran
5/20/10

Paul Berman is someone who takes ideas - especially pernicious and toxic ones - very seriously. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Berman wrote a penetrating work, Terror and Liberalism, which delved into the dark ideologies of the Arab world. His latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, further explores these ideas, their history and some of their proponents. He also unsparingly criticizes Western liberals for their inability to properly stand up to them.

Berman is a writer in residence at New York University who excels at intellectual history, and is a dogged critic of totalitarian and fascist ideologies of both the Left and the Right. He has a knack for precise and thorough research, with a sharp eye for detail. And despite his profound knowledge, Berman is a down-to-earth, affable guy, which makes talking to him an exceptional treat.

The main subject of his new book is Tariq Ramadan, the self-described "Salafi reformist" grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the intellectuals and journalists who have reacted to his ideas. Admirers view Ramadan as the embodiment of a reformed Islam; a bridge between Islam and modernity whose approach offers an "alternative to violence." Critics see in him a deceptive obscurantist who engages in double discourse on issues such as violence, women's rights and so on.

In his book, Berman diligently chronicles this debate, and identifies the central problem with Ramadan: He can't and won't break with his grandfather's dark and violent legacy. Instead, he stands by it (when he's not evasive and ambiguous about it), or resorts to selective omission and revisionism when discussing it, and is highly defensive about it.

And yet, prominent liberal intellectuals and journalists in the West continue to give him a pass. In fact, they themselves indulge in similar evasion and willful blindness when faced with the violent legacy of the Islamist movement, which his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founded, and the various offshoots that draw their inspiration from the ideas of Banna and his associates and disciples. Even more problematic, some of them, like journalists Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, wrote approving profiles of Ramadan while attacking critics of the obscurantism that he upholds. Specifically, they targeted author and former Dutch parliamentarian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose life is under constant threat by people whose doctrinal beliefs descend from the teachings of Ramadan's grandfather.


(Snip)

Berman detects in Ramadan's work what he calls "a system of vocabulary substitution." Ramadan will use vocabulary that sounds palatable to Western liberal ears but which in fact carries a very different definition - indeed, an entirely different conceptual frame of reference. Berman quips that Western intellectuals hear "the first 15 minutes" of Ramadan and declare him the reformer they've been searching for. What interests Berman is the sixteenth minute and beyond.

And he dissects every last minute of it. He also presents his readers with the latest historical research on the relationship between Nazi foreign policy and two of Ramadan's heroes: his grandfather (Banna) and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Hajj Amin al-Husseini, of whom Banna was an ardent supporter. This is the legacy that Ramadan cannot and does not wish to break from.

The chapter dealing with this, entitled "The Cairo Files," is, to me, the most fascinating in Berman's book. It shows in detail why Berman does not shy away from the term "fascist" when dealing with the ideologies that have plagued the Arab world throughout the twentieth century into the present.

Similarly, he finds that the bulk of Ramadan's ideas are not only unoriginal, but also that his epistemology is based on a pre-modern premise. It recycles the thought of the twelfth century Islamic philosopher al-Ghazali. He concludes in his book that "in Ramadan's version, the old ideas have reemerged as crackpot ideas."

(Snip)

If so, why should anyone care? For one, "engagement," specifically with the so-called "Muslim world," is the new buzzword in Washington these days. A corollary of this view is the enterprise of engaging Islamist groups, like Hamas, Hizbullah and the Muslim Brotherhood. While al-Qaida is viewed as being beyond the pale, surely these groups who participate in political life are different. And certainly, then, Ramadan becomes a perfect interlocutor, in this framework.

"The Muslim Brothers are defined as ex-lunatics who've evolved into something reasonable," Berman remarks when I raise this angle. "And then we have Ramadan who's presented as one of us - a liberal whose only difference with us is that he chooses to express his liberalism in an Islamically-derived language." But Berman's idea of "engagement" is quite different. "I've insisted on my own definition of the word engagement," he tells me. "There are two definitions of engagement: One is you take somebody's ideas seriously and you argue against them. The other is you lie down like a carpet in front of them."

In the second conception of "engagement," the view is, as Berman quips, "We must engage these people, so you invite them to participate with you in a love fest. I think there's an alternative: that's actually to argue with them and to put up the arguments."

And this is Berman's critique of Western liberals. For him, "there is a war of ideas going on and liberals have to engage in this battle. Islamists are ideological movements. We have to come to grips with that."

Reading Berman's book and talking to him, one comes away with two reasons why this hasn't happened: mediocrity and fear.



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On a related note...

April 29, 2010 — Islamic taboos, the struggle for control of Islam and a hard look and modern Islamic thinkers were just some of the topics covered in the panel discussion, Independent Voices of the Middle East, co-hosted by St. Francis College and the Manhattan Institute on Thursday, April 15 in St. Francis Founders Hall. (Watch the whole lecture)

Frank J. Macchiarola 62, St. Francis College Chancellor offered a brief introduction for the panel which was moderated by Visiting Professor Fred Siegel, who is currently on sabbatical from Cooper Union for Science and Art and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor to City Journal.




On the panel were: Judith Miller, former New York Times reporter, Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Contributing Editor to the City Journal; Paul Berman, Author of Terror and Liberalism, Power and the Idealists and the Flight of the Intellectuals and Writer in Residence at NYU; Lee Smith, Author of The Strong Horse: Power Politics and the Clash of Arab Civilization and Visiting Scholar at the Hudson Institute and Ibn Warraq, Author of Virgins? What Virgins? and Other Essays and Senior Research Fellow at The Center for Inquiry in Amherst.

Lee Smith began the talk by focusing not on Islam but on Arabism, looking at terrorism under the wider umbrella of Arab nationalism and not on a country by country issue. He said that Islamic terrorism endures as a result of nation states that are friendly or supportive of terrorists and that we do not do enough to try to make this clear to the world.

The response by intellectuals to the fatwa declared against Salman Rushdie was a call to action for Ibn Warraq, who says that he took issue because so many thinkers blamed Rushdie for bringing the fatwa on himself. Warraq says that when dealing with Islam and the Koran, he now sees those same intellectuals and others refuse to speak out for basic rights like freedom of expression, some using the excuse of political correctness.

Paul Berman took issue with the way Swiss born philosopher Tariq Ramadan is handled by the media and critical thinkers, saying that while Ramadan calls himself an Islamic liberal, many of Ramadans far more conservative views are dangerously glossed over or ignored.




Looking for a larger context, Judith Miller painted the issues of terrorism as a struggle among Muslims for control of their own religion. She said that the militancy that she covered had little to do with the U.S. or even Israel, but rather it was small groups of Muslims who used the Koran as a weapon to try to silence supporters of tolerance and pluralism. Miller also sees the tide turning against extremism, pointing out that the three books published by the authors on stage with her were able to put out their books without the fear of fatwas being issued and without having to travel with bodyguards. Miller admitted, though, that just because extremism may be ebbing, it does not mean that social reform in the Arab world is on the rise.




After the on stage portion of the panel, several students from St. Francis College, including many members of the Muslim Student Association spoke directly with the panelists about their ideas and philosophies.

This is the fourth panel organized by Professor Siegel and co-hosted by St. Francis College and the Manhattan Institute, the first three were Journalism in the Age of the Internet, Can New York State Government be Reformed? and Keeping New York in the Black, Our Current Fiscal Woes In Light Of The 1975 Fiscal Crisis.