Jargon and Jihad
Via DSTPFW, here’s Christopher Hitchens on Tariq Ramadan and the mainstreaming of Islamic imperialism.
“French author Caroline Fourest has made an intensive study of Ramadan’s discrepant appearances in Europe and in the Muslim world, and has concluded that he speaks with a forked tongue and deliberately gives different impressions to different audiences. Having listened to him, I would say that the problem is not quite that. He possesses a command of postmodern and sociological jargon (of the sort that you may easily recognize by its repetitive use of the terms space and discourse to delineate the arena of thinkable debate), and he has a smooth way with euphemism.
Thus, he tells Egyptian television that the destruction of the Israeli state is for the moment ‘impossible’ and in Mantua described the idea of stoning adulterous women as ‘unimplementable’. This is something less than a full condemnation, but he is quick to say that simple condemnation of such things would reduce his own ‘credibility’ in the eyes of a Muslim audience that, or so he claims, he wants to modernize by stealth.”
More on Mr Ramadan’s “discrepant” pronouncements, and those who squint at him optimistically, here.
The problem is, most interviewers ask Ramadan anaesthetic platitudinous questions, precisely because they want anaesthetic platitudinous answers. Here are two questions I’d like to ask him:
1. Mr Ramadan, when I read the Koran I just see the work of medieval Arabian men. Nothing I have found in it exceeds their immediate local experience, geographically, culturally or cosmically. But you don’t agree. You think the book has a celestial super-human author. So can you show me one passage from the Koran which men from that time could not have come up with, a passage which only a God could have authored?
2. Muslims describe their God as being “all merciful”. Yet they also ascribe to him all sorts of very unmerciful instructions, such as to kill unbelievers and apostates. Should we assume that if the instruction is clearly not all-merciful it does not come from God and should be abandoned?
Georges,
I think it’s true that many, if not most, of Ramadan’s interviewers have been absurdly deferential and credulous. Rosemary Bechler’s “interview” is one of the more ridiculous exchanges (see link above), but there are other, equally bizarre, examples of wide-eyed swooning and mooing.
It’s not difficult to find Ramadan’s less encouraging pronouncements; nor is it difficult to see how they contradict his statements for Western journalists. And yet, as you say, very few people have thought to confront him with this mismatch and what it seems to imply. It’s also quite telling that Ramadan is so unwilling to debate those, like Hitchens, who are better informed and who would, as a result, take a less deferential line.