Should this man come to the U.S.?
The pity of excluding Ramadan on the grounds that his ideas might be dangerous, many believe, is that it seems to reject the American confidence in the marketplace of ideas. To Ebrahim Moosa, a professor of Islamic studies at Duke University who differs with Ramadan on many points, such an exclusion appears to be driven by hard-line secularists and a number of neoconservative intellectuals who engage in what he calls "a velvet-glove Inquisition that insists on what can or cannot be a proper conversation on Islam and the modern world."
The work. So far, much of the controversy swirling around Ramadan ignores the actual content of his work, his written words. That work elaborates a consistent rejection of the view that Islam is a set of legalistic regulations at odds with liberal understandings of rights and liberties. It further upholds his commitment to the view that Islam is, above all, a spiritual discipline. If there is something inherently incompatible between the fundamentals of this spiritual formation and the ideals and institutions of free, liberal societies, then Ramadan does not see it. But are such assuaging words part of some massive act of dissimulation carried out in the spirit of Muslim Brotherhood subversion? Consider what Oguz Ucuncu says: "There is a question of whether he has a secret agenda or not, and what we say is what Tariq also says: Take seriously what we say in public, and hold us responsible for what we say."
The cost of shutting out Muslim thinkers such as Ramadan could be very high for America if the nation is really committed to winning the long-term war of ideas behind the war on terror. "Regardless of what you think of the substance of Ramadan's views," says New York University law Prof. Noah Feldman, author of After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy and a former constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, "we can only learn what we need to know about contemporary Islam if we have the chance to encounter people like him in our universities. Unless a person is an active security threat, excluding him or her from an academic visit is shooting ourselves in the foot."
With Anna Mulrine and Elizabeth Bryant
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