At the end of the day both religious and secular seek the same truth, says controversial Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadam. Michael Pye begs to differ
This is an extraordinary book, and that is not a compliment: a wishful incantation dressed up with a clatter of quotes and a touch of mysticism which even the author acknowledges could be thought "ethereal" (or, if you prefer, "fluffy"). You pick it up expecting a remarkable Islamic scholar on how we might stop talking clash of civilisations and try to live a pluralism that insults nobody. You get what the scholar himself calls some kind of "initiation", when he's not likening it, rather too accurately, to crossing a desert.
Maybe that's my fault for having a secular mind, because Tariq Ramadan certainly doesn't and our minds do not meet. He has certainties, and he is certain that if all our attitudes and truths were averaged out we'd find a truth on which we could all agree; and naturally this couldn't contradict his own certainties, so the process is risk-free. To him, everyone is a believer, which suggests he doesn't quite see the difference between believing the sun will rise and accepting a whole system of belief without immediate evidence, like a religion.
You can see the problem: a missionary mindset trying to engage with a secular issue like pluralism. For nobody supposes that everyone will manage a perfect, pluralist mind; we all, to use Ramadan's metaphor, have our windows on the world, and we can only look through one at a time. Pluralism matters somewhere else, in the space (it might be dentistry, it might be bus driving or accountancy) where we are not, first and foremost, religious and where we co-operate with people who believe nothing that we believe. At the moment, that's where we need help. And Ramadan ought to be the man to help: there is nobody quite like him.
He's been banned from France (the French apologised later) and banned from the US when a university wanted to hire him (Americans changed president, and then their minds). He's been accused of sending money to Hamas, although that was before Hamas went on the official lists of public enemies. More, he's on the sharp end of booklength attacks, which is not at all usual, especially when a don at New York University says that Ramadan, a professor now at Oxford University and Doshisha University in Kyoto, "cannot figure out how to unlock the cage. He cannot think for himself. He does not believe in thinking for himself."
Professors don't often anger people this way, but Ramadan is more than a professor: at times, he's been the last hope. He is someone who can explain Islam to the West, we hope, and even more important explain to newcomer Muslims how to make a life in the West without unmaking their faith - or the West. When bombs tore up the London Underground, he was the obvious man to help sort out the consequences, and stop anger turning into yet more carnage.
But maybe that's what angers some people: he makes Islamists seem plausible, rational, even intelligible instead of the gibbering monsters of the tabloid mind. But you have to realise: it isn't easy to reason with him, or his opponents.
His grandfather founded the still-banned Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, helped bring back the Mufti of Jerusalem from his disgraceful wartime exile in Nazi Berlin and was assassinated for being on the wrong side when secular Arab nationalism still had a chance against his Islamist enthusiasm. He also dreamed of a future world where "sedition is no more", where dissent had vanished.
That sounds very much like qualifications: if a man from this background starts to talk moderation, just maybe extremists will listen. But the link to the Mufti is something you'd think Ramadan would discuss, since the Mufti carried the infection of Nazi anti-Semitism, and while he had nothing to do with the Holocaust, he was busy making sure it would continue as and when the Nazis took the Middle East.
His grandfather's greatest gift to Ramadan may have been exile: growing up in Geneva and Lyons, seeing a new world. When he spent a year in Britain, he wrote To Be a European Muslim, an extraordinarily hopeful book: about ending the dangerous mutual bafflement of at least two cultures. But between that book and now, Ramadan fell foul of all those publicists who love to howl about Islamofascists. They kept trying to make him answer: are you now or have you ever been one?
The grandfather's dream of a world without sedition, surely that's downright fascist? Or is it, maybe, just religious? Cardinals saw Nazis as rivals because "the Church strives for totalism when it demands the whole person and the whole of humanity for God" (you can find the quote in the Vatican "Secret" Archives under Germania, 4 periodo, post 643 fasc.160 if you want to check.) Anyone equipped with a great truth wants the world to live by it.
But surely when Islamists dream of a Caliphate, Islamic states that one day grow together and where nobody has wrong thoughts, they're making politics out of that great truth? Well, maybe, but the nostalgic tangle of faith and empire is present in Rome, too: the thrones, the hats, the ring-kissing, and the crown which signified a universal power for the Pope, "father of princes and kings, ruler of the world" (as the 1596 Pontificale Romanum, the book of ceremony puts it.)
I don't bring up these details to say anything about Islam or Rome except this: religions are hugely ambitious, Muslim or Christian, and very sure. They have something else in common: they don't always say what they mean, because what they mean depends on a whole system of assumptions that outsiders are not likely to understand.
So when Ramadan is accused of doublespeak, changing message when his audience changes from believer to infidel, what exactly is happening: a sinister trickiness or the usual confusion when religious assumptions are presented as secular thoughts?
You'd hope a book like this one, which aims for common ground, would clear the air a little. Take the woman question, because women are a question to Ramadan. He was once questioned about the stoning of women taken in adultery, and he wouldn't actually say it was wrong; instead, he said there ought to be a moratorium and a religious seminar on the issue. Understandably, this didn't seem enough.
Now he mentions some feminist writers, but they're buried among old, old authority and revelation; his real subject is what everyone has almost always thought before now. You have to wonder if Ramadan reckons he is - quite literally - damned if he changes his ideas.
He insists that reason has the right to test religion, but also that "reason must not discredit the substance and essence of faith"; reason can waffle, but musn't come to inconvenient conclusions, or claim some kind of superiority when it comes to thinking. But faith is not a matter of substance and essence alone; it almost always means belief in something specific - a man rising from the dead; a man riding up to heaven on his horse - events and facts that faith then makes significant. Ramadan's trick is to generalise until there's nothing to dispute.
Just sometimes, he slips: he mentions history. He writes that "the story of Galileo says it all", that the power struggle between religious authority and scientific investigation is peculiarly Christian and not at all Islamic. In Islam, he seems to say, there can be no contradiction.
This is disingenuous. If Ramadan wants one circumstance to stand for all of Christian thinking, we can answer him - with a single circumstance from Islamic history. The story of Arab astronomy in the Middle Ages is brilliant: westerners quite usually learned Arabic to start their studies of the stars, but just before Galileo's trial, something happened that Ramadan must have forgotten.
The Sultan Murad III built an observatory at Istanbul for the astronomer Taqi al-Din. Within three years, in 1580, it was smashed and destroyed by the same Sultan, on the advice of religious leaders. He had lost against the Turks, suffered plague, suffered unexpected deaths and the imams told him that terrible misfortune naturally followed any attempt to see the secrets of nature. Rome objected to Galileo's answers, but the Istanbul imams tried to stop the questions.
So Galileo doesn't prove what Ramadan says at all, not if you know what he chooses not to mention. This isn't reassuring, not when the whole book rests on a rickety, eclectic reading list: Dostoevsky, Dante and Paulo Coelho; Plato, but also Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (and the self-help style has rubbed off.) Ramadan is meticulous about Islamic sources, but grandly indifferent to western ones. It's as though the infidels are there to keep us reading, but they're not the point.
There's worse. A book with "philosophy" in the title ought to avoid category confusion, but Ramadan doesn't. He assumes we are all seeking the universals of human behaviour, some of us by reason, some by faith; and he assumes we do so in pursuit of safety and peace (which happens to be the Islamic ideal, al-amn): but then he gives universals, which is just another word for what we have in common, the force of law and God, which is entirely religious thinking. Instead of the average of observations, he finds rules, and not all of us think of averages as God.
Universals, after all, have this in common with the comforting, conservative notion of Natural Law: they depend on what you know. They can very easily make law out of ignorance, as when a certain class of Catholic philosopher insists that homosexuality is unnatural, despite the lesbian albatrosses and curiously tender male giraffes and all the other creatures that suggest it is a natural phenomenon, albeit a minority taste. Ramadan, given Islamic distaste for homosexuals, sets himself an awkward problem when he makes "sexual fulfilment" a human right. But then, if we were to find that distaste for homosexuality was a universal, would we feel obliged to agree or get past other people's prejudices? Universals have a way of becoming insistent, so what doesn't fit can't be real or proper That is why some of us have a deep and sensible suspicion of the quest that Ramadan insists every human being follows.
Luckily, he insists in a gauzy tangle of metaphors - we need to change windows in order to wade in the ocean of life, while climbing mountains and bravely seeking ourselves or The One. This is a full agenda. His book is fascinating for the clues to how we should see Ramadan and his followers, what they mean and what they think, but not at all for what it wants to say out loud.
• Tariq Ramadan is at the Edinburgh book festival today, 3pm.