Should this man come to the U.S.?
To make things more complicated, Ramadan will not simply disavow either of those forebears. While saying that he rejects al-Banna's anti-westernism and his political agenda, he adds that he finds aspects of the early Muslim Brotherhood, including its emphasis on renewed piety and social programs, more than laudable in the context of late-colonial Egypt. He also writes movingly of his father, who helped draw Malcolm X away from the Nation of Islam and who spent most of his latter years in principled solitude as he broke with his Saudi backers and others who he felt betrayed the true spirit of Islam. Are Ramadan's statements about those problematic figures proof that he speaks out of both sides of the mouth--or, to the contrary, that he owns up to the harder, more complicated truth? Any answer to that question should take into account that Ramadan has broken with own brother, Hani, because of the latter's fundamentalist orientation.
Politicized . Part of Ramadan's problem is that he is something of an intellectual outsider who cuts his own path. Gilles Kepel, author of The War for Muslim Minds and a professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, sees Ramadan as less a scholar than an apologist with both political and prophetic aspirations. In Kepel's view, the real question is not whether the man should be kept out of the United States--he thinks he shouldn't be, barring proof of terrorist involvements--but why Ramadan should be offered such an academic plum. To Kepel, that fact speaks volumes about what he sees as the deplorably politicized state of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies in the United States, where much scholarship divides into simplistic pro-Arab or pro-Israel camps.
Such unflattering appraisals of Ramadan's intellectual and scholarly standing discount what others see as a distinguished academic record. An avid reader from childhood--"My father told me that life was not all in books," Ramadan recalls--he performed so well in his lycee that, at his teachers' urging, he pursued independent studies and graduated early. After only one semester at the University of Geneva, he began teaching French literature at a secondary school. At 23, while pursuing graduate studies in philosophy and making his run at a soccer career, he was appointed the academic dean of a lycee, the youngest in the Swiss system. Amid teaching, soccer, writing about Nietzsche for his thesis and dissertation, and starting his own family with the sister of one of his teammates, Ramadan also took students on short Peace Corps-like missions in India, Africa, and Brazil. Little wonder that the earnest overachiever was selected one of Geneva's outstanding citizens in 1990.
Throughout his teens and 20s, Ramadan relates, the quietly observant Muslim considered himself fully integrated into the larger Swiss society. More and more, though, events both close at hand and distant--the suicide of one of his students, the fundamentalist excesses following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the growing veil controversy in the French and Swiss public schools--made him ponder the meaning of being a faithful Muslim and a good European citizen. One thing that disturbed him was how ignorant Muslims themselves were of their own religion, a condition that, in his view, allowed the most extreme interpretations of the faith to gain currency. Dedicating himself to mastering Islamic sciences, he embarked in 1990 on a 20-month intensive program with some of the foremost scholars from Cairo's Al-Azhar University.
advertisement
