Should this man come to the U.S.?
GENEVA--In search of a restaurant to break the day's fast, Tariq Ramadan negotiates the crowded rush-hour streets of his native city with the easy grace of the athlete he once was. But the soft-spoken scholar, whose short, receding hair and closely cropped beard reveal flecks of gray, is barely remembered, if at all, for those displays of soccer brilliance that almost turned a semi-professional career into a professional one. Instead, his renown--some would say his infamy--derives from his standing as one of Europe's most influential and provocative Muslim thinkers.
The renown has spread. Named by Time magazine as one of the top 100 intellectual innovators of the new century, Ramadan is the author of some 20 books (including the recent Western Muslims and the Future of Islam ) and countless articles that project his reformist vision of an Islam adaptable to liberal western societies far beyond the lecture halls of the universities of Geneva and Fribourg, where he formerly taught both European philosophy and Islamic studies. His lectures, cassettes, and talk-show appearances have even made him something of a media star, albeit a controversial one. In much of contemporary Europe and particularly France, where state secularism verges on the sacrosanct, simply being serious about religion invites as much suspicion as curiosity, even among some Muslims. "For me," says Fatima Lalem, a nonpracticing Muslim and family-planning counselor in Paris, "Tariq Ramadan is someone who is good with words, but he's not the modern, enlightened scholar that he likes to pretend he is."
Many other European Muslims, however, find Ramadan's reformist critique bracing and liberating. Oguz Ucuncu, a Berlin-based mechanical engineer and a leader of Milli Gorus, a Turkish Muslim organization with 513 mosques in its network, says, "Tariq knows how to deal with the young generation and how to begin to find answers of what is our place in European society." Lhaj Thami Breze, president of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, similarly hails Ramadan as "someone who symbolizes a modern understanding of Islam, adaptable to a European context."
And, arguably, to an American one as well. That, in any case, was the consensus of the administration and faculty of the University of Notre Dame's Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, which earlier this year offered Ramadan the Henry R. Luce professorship of religion, conflict, and peace building. But a controversial reputation has its costs. As what should have been his first semester at Notre Dame draws to a close, Ramadan finds himself living in limbo in his nearly empty Geneva apartment. The furnishings were shipped off to South Bend, Ind., more than four months ago, but nine days before Ramadan, his wife, Iman, and their four children were to depart for their new home, the U.S. State Department, acting on advice from the Department of Homeland Security, informed Ramadan that his visa had been "prudentially revoked."
Homeland Security will not specify why Ramadan--who has visited the States for conferences and lectures scores of times in the past--might be considered a threat to the nation's security, apart from saying that there are many possible grounds for denying or revoking a visa. "We don't discuss particular cases," says DHS spokesman Dean Boyd, adding that, in any case, the final call rested with the State Department. Officials at State clearly evince some ambivalence about having to make that call. After revoking his visa, they urged the scholar to reapply so that DHS's findings could be re-evaluated. Embassy officials in Geneva interviewed Ramadan in early October, but a decision is still pending.
advertisement
