Should this man come to the U.S.?
If government officials have been unable to specify charges, many outside officialdom have been free to speculate. His critics in Europe and America relate stories of contacts and associations with shady organizations and individuals, including al Qaeda operatives. While Ramadan has repeatedly refuted those allegations, often citing the findings of European intelligence services to buttress his case, he and his supporters (including Notre Dame, whose own review found the charges groundless) have a harder time countering the broader allegation that he is a radical in sheep's clothing, a "gentle jihadist," as one critic called him.
A miasma. If not an advocate of violence, his detractors say, Ramadan provides the ideological seedbed of a highly politicized Islam--Islamism, as it is called--in which more violent forms can take root. Those critics also say that Ramadan talks like a liberal reformer in front of some audiences and like an unyielding fundamentalist in front of others. After all, they note, Islam condones dissimulation ( taqiyya ) in dealings with "unbelievers." And not for nothing is Ramadan the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian activist who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, the first of the modern Islamist movements, in the early 20th century. "There is a miasma around him," says Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia. "You can explain one, two, three, four, five things. But finally, when there are so many charges, you can't explain everything away. We don't need him in this country."
The controversy clearly weighs most heavily upon the man and his family, but it has much wider implications. Above all, it raises questions about how America, and the West in general, are engaging in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. That world now numbers some 1.2 billion souls and transcends strictly geographic borders to include the roughly 15 million Muslims living in Europe and an estimated 5 to 7 million in the United States. It is hardly news that a decisive conflict is underway in that global community, with a small but well-financed minority hoping to make its absolutist and puritanical construction of religious law (or sharia ) the foundation of an all-encompassing political and social order. A subset of these radical Islamists champion violence to achieve their ends, justifying terror as an instrument of holy war against the infidel. The question, of course, is how America and the West can identify and encourage those other Muslims--particularly intellectual and clerical elites--who see the radical Islamist agenda as a betrayal of the true spirit of traditional Islam and an unworkable blueprint for future states and societies. The controversy surrounding Ramadan, pitting detractors against defenders, who may both speak with the best intentions, shows just how hard it is to make those calls.
For the 42-year-old scholar--who declares for the record that he is "absolutely not an Islamist" of any variety--the seemingly endless task of self-explanation always begins at home, with his own controversial lineage and personal history. It is not simply his grandfather that causes him to be, as he says, "judged guilty by genetic association." Ramadan's father, Said, a follower and son-in-law of al-Banna, was driven from Nasser's Egypt in the mid-1950s for his own Brotherhood activities, finally settling in Switzerland, where he became the head of the Geneva's Islamic Center, backed for a time by Saudi money.
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