Should this man come to the U.S.?
It was after he returned to Europe that he joined the international lecture circuit, making his case for being both a good Muslim and a good western citizen. The increasingly censorious stand of the French Republic on the matter of veils prompted a short book, in which Ramadan argued that while the veil should not be imposed on any Muslim woman, neither should it be prohibited. Ramadan acknowledges that there is much Islamist heavy-handedness behind the veil controversy--and that some Muslim women have been forced or bribed into wearing the hijab head covering. But he argues that veiling should always be freely elected as no more than the outward expression of inward spiritual decision. At the same time, he asks, how can a government prohibition against such an expression not be considered a violation of republican rights? Forming connections with assorted activists and associations--some religious, some educational, some antiglobalist--in France and elsewhere, he spoke often in the immigrant-dense suburbs of Lyon and Paris. "I went to these communities not to urge them to close themselves off," Ramadan says, "but to encourage them to make bridges to the larger society."
But while much of what Ramadan espouses often resembles nothing more than progressive Catholic social thought or the corporate-capitalist critique of the antiglobalist movement, there have been at least two relatively recent controversies that threw his position into more problematic relief--and possibly played a part in Homeland Security's appraisal.
The first grew out of an article that Ramadan published last fall on a Muslim website charging that certain prominent French Jewish intellectuals, including Bernard-Henri Levy, were increasingly biased "toward the concerns of their community" in their writing about delicate international issues, whether it be the Palestinian intifada, the Iraq war, or the instability of Pakistan. In France, where anti-Semitism is a growing problem (and one that Ramadan has frequently denounced when addressing Muslim audiences), to accuse an intellectual of putting communitarian interest over universal values is a serious charge. And this one met with sharp rebuttals, some of which themselves went over the top by suggesting that Ramadan's accusation was tantamount to a modern version of the old anti-Semitic slander The Protocol of the Elders of Zion . "There were about four months of debate after that article," says Ramadan, who stands by what he wrote. "The six or seven people I mentioned were invited to sue me. None did."
Around the same time, in November 2003, Ramadan appeared on a TV debate with then French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who challenged him to call for the abolition of the stoning of women for adultery, a practice considered Islamic according to some fundamentalist interpretations of sharia . Ramadan, who is on the record opposing any Islam-sanctioned forms of corporal punishment, refused to issue a blanket condemnation, calling instead for a moratorium on the practice so that its legitimacy could be debated among learned Muslim scholars and jurists--the ulema --throughout the world. If he simply condemned the act, Ramadan explains, he and his views would have been dismissed from the discussion. And precisely by dint of calling for the moratorium, he says, those discussions are now taking place. "In Jordan, I met with eight scholars who told me that I was giving them a door to get out of this condition." But what might seem like strategic wisdom to Ramadan was taken up by his critics as proof of crypto-fundamentalism.
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