Islamism And The Arab Spring: An Interview With Tariq Ramadan

If anyone can shed light on the role played by political Islam in the wave of democratic revolutions that have swept the Middle East these past three months, it is Tariq Ramadan. The 48-year-old is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the son of Saeed Ramadan, its delegate to the United States in the 1940s and 50s. Having received an intensive one-on-one education in classical Islamic scholarship at the renowned Al-Azhar University in Cairo, he is also currently Professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University.

As one of the world's foremost public intellectuals, Ramadan has spent the last decade and a half trying to educate European and American audiences in the complex reality of Islamism, with its many stripes, shades and nuances, and about the relationship between religion and politics in the Muslim world more generally.

Although neo-conservative critics accuse him of harbouring extremist sympathies, he dismisses allegations of ‘doublespeak’ and ‘stealth jihadism’ as yet more evidence of how Western attitudes towards the Islamic ‘other’ are becoming increasingly crude and simplistic.
 
True to form, the first thing he tells me when we meet at the Mitchell Library in central Glasgow is that, contrary to widespread belief, Islamism is not a monolithic phenomenon. “You have leftist Islamists and you have rightists”, he says, with the thick continental inflection that betrays his upbringing in Geneva, the city to which his father fled following Nasser’s anti-dissident crackdown.
 
“There are Islamists who have no problem with the capitalist order and Islamists who are socialist. What we have to understand is that in the Muslim majority countries it is not a question of two choices only. This binary vision is very much a colonial inheritance.”
 
In characteristic professorial style – composed, intense, fluent – he explains that Islamism occupies a number of positions across a wide ideological spectrum, ranging from the constitutionally secular Turkish model to the authoritarian theocratic Saudi one, with myriad alternate variations. He insists that Western citizens, politicians, and opinion makers must recognise this if they are to have any hope of developing a meaningful understanding of political culture in Islamic countries of North Africa and the Middle East.
 
Egypt, of course, is perhaps the most geo-politically significant of those countries. What position does the Muslim Brotherhood, which may prove to be the critical influence on the nation’s future development, occupy on the spectrum?

“There is a young generation of Islamists (in Egypt) who are very close to the Turkish model. They offer an open version of Islam, although it still essentially accepts the capitalist order – which I am not happy with .”
 
But can they be reconciled to secular democracy? “If you listen to what they are saying, they can. Even if there is a covert agenda, though, we can’t just deny them the right to be involved in democratic processes because we suspect that among their political leaders there is something hidden or unspoken. We have to challenge them with critical assessments.”
 
Ramadan sees his role as helping to advance that challenge. “I am not a member of the Brotherhood. My vision is completely different. My aim is to be critical of what they say about Sharia – how it should be implemented and how it should not.”

Somewhat surprisingly for someone so heavily steeped in the discourse of the post-modern European left, his main criticism of the Brotherhood is that it has strayed too far from the principles on which it was originally founded more than seven decades ago. “My grandfather was a legalist who fought for the anti-colonialist movement. He argued that we had to go back to our culture, but he was not at all of the view that everything that came from the West was bad. He believed Egyptians could take the British parliamentary model as their own. Mainly, he was against foreign occupation – for coming back to the soil. But this has all changed now.”
 
According to Ramadan, the crucial distinction between the Brotherhood of the mid-twentieth century and that of the early twenty-first is that where the former subscribed to an Islam-oriented pan-Arab nationalism, the latter – despite the apparently moderate tendencies of its younger members – nurtures an aggressive religious absolutism.

It is this absolutism which is partly responsible for the acute dilemma the West now finds itself in with regard to the Arab Spring. For the sake of moral consistency, Europe and the United States are obliged to offer at least nominal support to the region’s nascent democratic uprisings. But for the sake of their notional interests, they must ensure that free, open elections do not result in a renewed or enhanced Islamist threat.

In the Arab states of North Africa, the military has often acted as the principal bulwark against that threat, ruthlessly suppressing extremist elements when they begin to gain popular political traction, even if the result is to seriously undermine or circumvent the rights of ordinary citizens.

Nonetheless, many Egyptians continue to view the army high command as a potential force for democratic reform. Ramadan, however, contends that its contribution to the revolt that toppled Hosni Mubarak was at best ambiguous. “The army in Egypt is not at all neutral”, he explains. “They are neutral during the right times, just to ensure they have a role in the future. You can’t rely on the army to go toward a civil democratic process. We are too accepting of the line that this is a ‘transitional period’, but in fact it is critical. This is why protests in Egypt continue today – the people are saying ‘no, we won’t accept this’.”
 
Part of the challenge that faces the people of Egypt and the Maghreb as they struggle to establish for themselves a genuinely representative political system is to successfully balance the conflicting forces of Islamism, the West, and the military.
 
Of course at this stage there is no way of predicating exactly how things will play out. But Ramadan at least is optimistic: “In Egypt, the people rejected dictatorship in a peaceful way. And it was not just leftists or atheists or Islamists or religious people. It was Coptic, Muslims, and non-Muslims. This is something which we have to celebrate and pay tribute to.” On this we should be willing to follow the Professor’s lead. After all, he should know.