The Company He Keeps

When one is inordinately proud of one's heritage, and resolutely sustains all that the heritage expresses, and in his everyday life intermingles with those who also profess pride in the same source and in so doing consolidate a general impression that they are at heart offensively belligerent toward those outside that heritage, they are a breed apart.

Which is only to say that human nature hungers to 'belong', to see itself part of an identifiable group, which is as a family, a tribe, a culture, a common heritage. Setting them apart from others whose experience has been other than theirs. It is up to each and every one of us to ameliorate the inherent observations and emotions of 'otherness' that is experienced when in contact with those not of the same background.

And this, precisely, is what the president of the European Muslim Network, Tariq Ramadan, prides himself in doing, performing as a highly trusted, admired and influential interlocutor between disparate groups, most most specifically the world of Islam and the world of Western thought and experience, inclusive of Christianity.

This is a man with a formidable reputation as an intellectual bridge between two social-religious-political factions which have a tendency to view one another with suspicion, based, unsurprisingly, on their past connections, and more precisely their historical disaffection with one another through disagreement with religious and social values, leading to violent conflict with one attempting to overturn the advantage of the other, geographically and spiritually.

Mr. Ramadan - so aptly named as a defender of the faith - is a scholar, an Oxford-based academic, a research fellow at St.Antony's College, lecturing on Islamist thought. His major objective is to reconcile Muslims and Westerners and to erase suspicions between the two through greater integration of what has effectively been two historical solitudes. His goal is to effect a "European Islam".

He is in Ottawa for two engagements; the first to attend a fund-raising dinner in support of a proposed new Islamic studies centre at Carleton University, the second, sponsored by the College of the Humanities and the Carleton Centre for the Study of Islam (as above) is to deliver a speech, titled "Identity and Engagement: Western Muslims and the Public Sphere", in his ongoing attempts to breach the gap of understanding between Islam and Westerners.

As a moderate, Dr. Ramadan has gained the trust of the general community, and the admiration of the vast international demographic he represents, the Muslim ummah. Yet there have arisen questions about Dr. Ramadan's real agenda, whether he is as he seems, whether his public statements which appear reasonable and pacific in nature, cover a truer purpose practised traditionally through the Islamic doctrine of dissimulation.

There are those within the Muslim community - some considered to be apostate, others less given to religious rigour - who find fault with Professor Ramadan's seeming double-speak; his public messages are often seen as equivocating when they should, for a moderate, be unequivocal. "Ramadan is a dangerous radical who, far from modernizing Islam is in fact attempting to Islamize modernity", according to scholar and Muslim apostate Ibn Warraq.

Apples do not often fall far from the trees that bore them. And Dr. Ramadan's direct forbears have quite an illustrious history as Islamists; his father, the Islamist Egyptian, Said Ramadan, was expelled from Egypt, arrived in Saudi Arabia and founded the World Islamic League, devoted to spreading Islam and encouraging the quest for Muslims to found a new caliphate.

Said Ramadan's father-in-law, Hassan Al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood for the promotion of Salafism, promoting strict sharia. Hassan Al-Banna distinguished himself by saying "If the Jewish state becomes a fact (the Arabs) will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea", at that time in history when the UN voted to create Israel in the late 1940s.

With Dr. Ramadan's distinct respect and pride in his heritage, it is doubtful that he would easily shed the ideas, the values and the ideological religious culture that bred him. Dr. Ramadan's father established the Islamic Center in Geneva for the purpose of promoting the ideals of the Muslim Brotherhood, once outlawed in Egypt, and responsible for the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, who made peace with Israel.

Professor Ramadan is proud too of his family's links to other scholars, those who promote violent jihad as an integral tool of Islamic vigour and assertiveness, leading inevitably to the return of world-wide Islamic domination, a new caliphate. Dr. Ramadan is said to revere that scholar of Sunni Islam who justified the use of women as suicide bombers, while himself exerting care to never publicly condone violence on his own account.

But he has averred understanding that violence would occur under certain circumstances, as when he refrained to outright condemn terrorism, characterizing the terrorist attacks in New York, Bali and Madrid as "interventions". And stating that the murder of Israeli children through terror acts is "morally condemnable", while at the same time presenting as "contextually explicable".

When Ontario was flirting with the potential of introducing Sharia law into the province and throughout the controversy that ensued, including a denunciation of the possibility from Muslim women, Professor Ramadan gave his opinion on the issue on the matter in an interview with an Egyptian magazine that left more questions about his interior intelligence on the topic than were answered.

According to Tarek Fatah, when Mr. Ramadan characterized such a court as "...another example of lack of creativity" among Muslims, "His 'lack of creativity' remark was another reason why so many people feel he still adheres to his family tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood, but employs very sophisticated tactics to make his politics palatable to secular audiences". Chasing a Mirage, Tarek Fatah

His clumsy equivocation in an interview with Nicolas Sarkozy, when the French President was interior minister, where Mr. Ramadan spoke of a "moratorium" in the Muslim practise of stoning women to death who had been accused to adultery, took Mr. Sarkozy aback. Mr. Sarkozy had requested Professor Ramadan's opinion of his older brother Hani, who had endorsed stoning women to death under Sharia law.

So this is the man, a world-famed Islamic scholar, whom many suspect is not the enlightened moderate that he presents himself to be, who is speaking in Ottawa about the place of Islam in Western society, and specifically Muslims making a place for themselves in the West. Is this truly the best that Islam can offer the West in accommodating one to the other as equals?

"I don't see anyone today who is as effective as Tariq Ramadan in furthering fundamentalism in France", according to French journalist Caroline Fourest, the author of a book on Mr. Ramadan. She claims his celebrity is based on mouthing one opinion to Muslims, another to Western audiences. In an effort "to modify the secular state and help matters evolve toward 'more Islam' ... a reactionary and fundamentalist one."

That conclusion - led by Professor Ramadan's own words, actions and antecedents, along with his obviously-noted values, obliquely stated - is sinister and macabre. Occasionally, the mask slips and Janus is revealed.

The mythical Roman figure of Janus, among other things represents the transition between primitive life and civilization, between peace and war.