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What You Need to Know About the Muslim Brotherhood
Robert Dreyfuss | Source
As the revolutionary upsurge in Egypt builds toward its conclusion, some of the key questions involve the role of the Muslim Brotherhood—the Islamic movement that has been characterized as anything from a benign prodemocracy force to a terrorist-inclined radical group with designs on establishing a global Caliphate.
What, exactly, is the Brotherhood? How strong is it inside Egypt? If the regime falls, will the Brotherhood take over, or is Egypt too modern, too secular, and too diverse to tolerate an Islamist-dominated government? And finally, if the Brothers did seize power, either in the streets or through elections, what kind of rulers might they be? To answer these questions, we need some grounding in history.
Teachers, Players, Assassins, Spies
The group known formally as the Society of Muslim Brothers was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, who from the very start promoted the slogan: “The Koran is our constitution.” Banna, a teacher, described this as “a Salafiyya message,” meaning that the Brothers intended to restore Islam to the alleged purity of its earliest days. They adhered to an ultra-orthodox view of Islam, and in the 1930s Banna established the Secret Apparatus, an underground intelligence and paramilitary arm with a terrorist wing. The Brotherhood had enormous power behind the scenes in monarchical Egypt, playing politics at the highest level, often in league with King Farouk against his political opponents, including the left, the communists, and the nationalist Wafd Party. In 1937, at Farouk’s coronation, the Brotherhood—in Arabic, the Ikhwan—was enlisted to provide “order and security.”
For the next five decades, the Muslim Brotherhood would serve as a battering ram against nationalists and communists. Despite the Brothers’ Islam-based anti-imperialism, the group often ended up making common cause with the colonial British. It functioned as an intelligence agency, infiltrating left-wing and nationalist groups. But it was also fiercely independent, at times clashing violently with the ruling authorities. On several occasions, Ikhwan assassins murdered top Egyptian officials, including Prime Minister Mahmoud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi in 1948. (Brotherhood founder Banna was assassinated by agents of the regime just weeks later).
Revolution, Terrorism, and American Friends
In the 1950s, the Brothers initially coexisted with the revolutionary regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who toppled the king in 1952. Gradually, however, Nasser sidelined the group, and by 1954 Nasser and the Brotherhood were at war. Reverting to its terrorism days, the Brothers twice tried to assassinate Nasser. The Brotherhood’s vicious anti-Nasserism synced up conveniently with British and then American hatred for Nasser, and there’s evidence that London spies may have collaborated with the Brotherhood against Nasser.
By then, the group’s chief international organizer and best-known official was Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna. Ramadan had come to the attention of both the CIA and MI-6, the British intelligence service. In researching my book, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, I came across an unusual photograph that showed Ramadan with President Eisenhower in the Oval Office. By then, or soon after, Ramadan had likely been recruited as a CIA agent. Wall Street Journal reporter Ian Johnson has since documented the close ties between Ramadan and various Western intelligence services in his book, A Mosque in Munich. In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Johnson writes: “By the end of the decade, the CIA was overtly backing Ramadan.” On the run from Nasser, Ramadan—a peripatetic traveler who’d been the chief organizer of the Muslim Brotherhood’s chapters in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Pakistan—settled in Geneva, Switzerland, where he established an Islamic Center that for a quarter-century would serve as a hub for the Brotherhood’s worldwide efforts.
“He used to come to Saudi Arabia for money”
From its early days, the Brotherhood was financed generously by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which appreciated its ultra-conservative politics and its virulent hatred of Arab communists. Hermann Eilts, who served as US ambassador to both Saudi Arabia and Egypt, told me that he once encountered Hassan al-Banna in the offices of the Saudi deputy minister of finance in 1948. “He used to come to Saudi Arabia for money,” Eilts said.
The relationship between the Brotherhood and the House of Saud was always tense. Though the royal family bankrolled Ramadan and the Ikhwan, they never allowed the organization to set up a chapter in Saudi Arabia. For their part, the Muslim Brotherhood chafed under Saudi tutelage and probably harbored ideas about toppling the royals, but the Saudi intelligence service kept close watch on them. Martha Kessler, a former CIA officer who has studied the Brotherhood, told me: “The Egyptian Brothers in Saudi Arabia were [far] removed from any sense of loyalty to the House of Saud.”
Does Egypt Have the Brotherhood to Thank for Mubarak?
Guided by Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, Anwar Sadat—who’d been a member of the Brotherhood in the 1940s—reintroduced the Ikhwan to Egypt. At the time, Sadat had no political base, and he wanted to undermine the influence of the Nasserites and the communists. To that end, he calculatedly unleashed the power of right-wing political Islam. The Brotherhood’s youth wing, often using physical force to intimidate its opponents, helped Sadat recapture ideological control of Egypt’s universities. The Brotherhood also took the reins of Egypt’s professional societies—doctors’, engineers’, and lawyers’ groups. But because Sadat did not formally allow the Ikhwan to set up a political party, it fragmented into various components, some of which—inspired by Sayyid Qutb, a violent Salafi theoretician who was hanged by Nasser—turned to nihilist violence. One of these offshoots murdered Sadat in 1981, and then Vice President Mubarak took over.
For Mubarak, the Brotherhood served primarily one purpose: To justify Egypt’s unending state of emergency. Like clockwork, Mubarak would tell his critics, foreign and domestic: It’s me or the Brotherhood. Though formally banned in Egypt, the organization has been by turns tolerated and repressed—its members arrested, then released, then arrested again.
Where’s the US Been in All of This?
Throughout the Mubarak era, the United States has had a contradictory, uncertain policy toward the Muslim Brotherhood. Robert Pelletreau, who served as ambassador to Egypt from 1991 to 1993, told me in an interview several years ago that he sought to open a dialogue with the group during his tenure in Cairo, and when Mubarak visited Washington, Pelletreau asked then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher to raise the issue with the Egyptian leader. “I’ll never forget what happened next,” he told me. “Mubarak sat up sharply, rigidly. ‘These people killed my predecessor!’ Then he raised this huge fist, and he slammed it down on the table hard, and everything on the table jumped and rattled. Bang! ‘When they come out, we have to hit them.'” Edward Walker, who succeeded Pelletreau as US envoy in Cairo, was far more skeptical about dialogue with the Brotherhood, and for the most part, he supported Mubarak’s efforts to suppress it. “I can’t count the number of times Mubarak yelled at me about how the British were giving the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists safe haven,” Walker told me in 2005.
Since then, there’s been little or no official contact between the US and the Muslim Brotherhood (though a few years ago, the Bush administration convened a series of meetings to discuss whether or not to engage them). The Obama administration has walked a fine line, too, signaling a willingness to make sure that the Brotherhood is included in any negotiations with the Egyptian military, while declaring that there have been no direct contacts between US officials and the Brothers. Obama administration officials have also expressed concern about the possibility that the group could come out on top once the dust settles in Cairo.
“Changed by the system”?
By the 1990s, despite the off-again, on-again repression by Mubarak’s regime, the Brotherhood had completed what many observers say was a transformation. Step by step, its leadership renounced its violent past, engaged in politics, and tried to reinvent itself as a collection of community organizers who operated clinics and food banks, building a network of Islamic banks and companies. Writing last week in Foreign Affairs, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham noted: “Although the Brotherhood entered the political system in order to change it, it ended up being changed by the system.” In the 2005 parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood won 88 seats—20 percent of the Parliament—and probably could have won even more had it run more candidates.
All of a sudden, the Brothers had emerged as Egypt’s most potent opposition force. Though they still faced the wrath of the secret police—and in last year’s parliamentary elections, the game was so rigged that the Brotherhood virtually opted out—they became vocal supporters of liberalizing Egypt’s calcified system, and it made common cause with other pro-democracy groups.
Nathan Brown, a political science professor at George Washington University and an expert on political Islam, is optimistic that the Brotherhood has evolved from its fundamentalist roots: “Their agenda is to make Egypt better,” he told Salon recently. “And their conception of what’s good and bad has a religious basis. So that means increasing religious observance, religious knowledge. It also means probably drawing more heavily on the Islamic legal heritage for Egypt’s laws. They don’t want to necessarily completely convert Egypt into a traditional Islamic legal system. But if the Parliament’s going to pass a law, they want it to be consistent with Islamic law.” No doubt many officials and members of the Muslim Brotherhood would endorse this characterization.
But it’s also fair to ask if Brown’s interpretation is too charitable. In 2007, the Brotherhood released a draft political program that included several very troubling proposals, including the idea that Egypt’s government be overseen by an unelected council of Islamic scholars who would measure the country’s laws against the Koran and sharia to make sure governance would “conform to Islamic law.” Since then, various Muslim Brotherhood officials have also made conflicting statements about anything from the role of women to the treatment of non-Muslim minorities.
In the end, there’s no getting around the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is, if not an anachronism, a profoundly reactionary force. Its views on marriage, the family, homosexuality, and the like are distasteful to most Western minds and many Egyptian ones. And it harbors a strong current of overt anti-Semitism, along with a penchant for conspiracy theories. Despite Egypt’s drift toward a more conservative Islamic outlook since the 1970s—which paralleled similar trends across the Muslim world—the Egyptian people, especially the middle class, may in the end not be receptive to the Brotherhood’s message.
It’s also worth remembering that when the Egyptian uprising began in January, the Muslim Brotherhood was not among the leaders. At the forefront of the movement were young Egyptians, including those organized around a popular Facebook page memorializing the murder of a young man named Khaled Said in Alexandria. They were joined by a panoply of secular, socialist, Nasserite, and pro-democracy groups, and eventually by Mohammad ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Nearly all of the movement has been relentlessly secular, though it admittedly gained a great deal of momentum when the Muslim Brotherhood—which had initially held back—threw its weight behind the protests.
So Could They Take Over Egypt?
Because the Muslim Brotherhood is still a secretive, cell-based organization, and because it operates mostly underground, there are no reliable estimates either of its strength or its potential electoral base. Analysts have placed its membership as low as 100,000 nationwide and as high as a million or more. Similarly, some experts say that in a free and fair election the Brothers would win as little as 10 percent of the vote or as much as 20 to 40 percent—and their share will probably be higher the sooner the election is held, since they are by far the best-organized force at the moment.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former CIA analyst Daniel Byman notes that whatever its numbers, the Brotherhood’s potential role is not to be discounted. “Most Egyptians are not members of the Brotherhood, but the group probably represents a healthy plurality of the country, and its strength goes beyond its popularity,” writes Byman. “The Brotherhood is highly organized and has street power, enabling it to out-organize or intimidate its weak potential rivals. In parts of the Middle East where relatively free elections have been held, such as Iraq, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip, this mix of popularity and superior organization has served Islamist parties well.”
What Does This Mean for US Foreign Policy?
Whatever its ultimate political beliefs, there are several things that the Muslim Brotherhood is not: It is not Al Qaeda or the Taliban. It is a conservative, even ultra-orthodox Islamist group, but it’s irresponsible to compare it to the terrorist groups and armed insurgencies that have preoccupied American foreign policy since 2001. Nor is the Brotherhood the Egyptian equivalent of the Islamic force that seized power in Iran in 1979. For one thing, political conditions are much different; for another, the Brotherhood lacks the network of highly politicized clerics that helped Ayatollah Khomeini succeed in 1979. The group itself is almost entirely made up of laymen, often highly educated, and scholars of Islamic law, not members of the clergy.
To the extent that the Muslim Brotherhood’s power in Egypt grows, it is certain to infuse the country with a stronger strain of anti-American and anti-Israel politics. Officially, the Brotherhood has proclaimed that it will abrogate or shelve the Egypt-Israel peace treaty signed in 1978, although in practice doing so might be difficult. It’s also likely to align Egypt more closely with other Islamist groups in the Arab world, especially Hamas, which began as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. That would be part and parcel of a growing anti-American trend throughout the region, which has been picking up steam since the US invasion of Iraq and the American refusal to challenge Israel’s stonewalling of a Palestinian state. If after Mubarak Egypt does indeed move away from the United States, it will only be joining Turkey, Lebanon, and even Iraq and the Gulf states.
One thing is certain. Having been an important player in Egypt’s political landscape for nearly a century, the Muslim Brotherhood is a force to be reckoned with. It cannot be ignored, and no amount of Glenn Beck-style hyperventilating will change that.
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of “Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam” (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books).
The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism
In Ikhwanophobia we don’t have any biases or prejudices to or against anyone!
This article is harshly criticizing Tariq Ramadan’s Book “The Quest for Meaning”, We think that it will open a new horizons for discussions and debates over Ramadan’s thoughts and ideology.
We’ll try to find a review from another take to enhance the debate and to develop the talks over Ramadan’s ideas, since he is one of the most important Muslims Scholars.
Reviewed by Kenan Malik
In an age in which public intellectuals are often highly divisive figures – think of the storms surrounding Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins or Bernard-Henri Levy – few generate more controversy than Tariq Ramadan. Political activist, Muslim scholar, and professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, he is to some the “Muslim Martin Luther”, a courageous reformer who helps bridge the chasm between Islamic orthodoxy and secular democracy.
To his critics, Ramadan is a “slippery”, “double-faced” religious bigot, a covert member of the Muslim Brotherhood whose aim is to undermine Western liberalism. When, in 2004, Ramadan was appointed professor of religion by Notre Dame, America’s leading Catholic University, the US State Department revoked his visa for supposedly endorsing terrorist activity. The ban has since been lifted.
The debate about Ramadan was re-ignited earlier this year with the publication of The Flight of the Intellectuals, American writer Paul Berman’s savage attack on European thinkers like Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for what he regards as their appeasement of Ramadan. The Quest for Meaning, Ramadan’s first book aimed at a wider Western audience, arrives therefore at a timely moment.
It is, he writes, “a journey and an initiation” into the world’s faiths to discover the universal truths they hold in common and to set out “the contours of a philosophy of pluralism”. Unfortunately it will do little to settle the argument about the nature of Ramadan’s beliefs.
There is a willfull shallowness about this work, a refusal to think deeply or to pose difficult questions, that is truly shocking. Insofar as it is provocative, The Quest for Meaning seeks to provoke not through the excess of its rhetoric but the banality of its reasoning.
What Ramadan has produced here is a faith-lite manual for those seeking multicultural pieties. It is a book that forces the reader to wade through sentences such as this: “We are heading for that realm of consciousness and mind where all wisdoms remind us that it is its shores that make the ocean one, and that it is the plurality of human journeys that shapes the common humanity of men.” And: “Truth (insofar as it has a value) and meaning (for itself) are, quite logically, regarded as truth and meaning of everything.” And: “We need to find, collectively, ways to celebrate the union between emotion and reasonable reason, because, ultimately, that is what it is all about.”
Ramadan’s basic argument is comprised of three elements. Faith is an essential aspect of human life. All faiths embody a similar set of ideals. And given that is faith is essential and all faiths are similar, so society should respect all religious and cultural traditions. We need, in Ramadan’s words, to “apprehend the diversity of our points of view and the essence of their similarity”.
His starting-point is the insistence that humans are limited beings and reason an inadequate way of comprehending our world. Reason tells us in a partial manner how the world is. Only faith can inform us why it is as it is. Faith creates a framework that allows us to give life meaning and to comfort us when faced with our inadequacies.
The relationship between faith and reason is one of the key issues of our times. Ramadan is so sloppy and superficial in his argument, however, and so oblivious to any viewpoint other than his own, that he does little to help us navigate through the tricky waters.
Ramadan takes it as given that it requires a spiritual quest to impute meaning to life. What about those who are not religious and yet live meaningful lives? Silence. All faiths, he suggests, embody the same fundamental truths and are simply “different paths up the same mountain”. So why would he not be happy if all Muslims converted to Hinduism? No answer.
“All spiritual or religious traditions,” Ramadan claims, “have some notion of the universal”, which is the “common space where several roads, several paths, several religions meet, and where reason, the heart and the senses meet”. This is a typical deep-but-meaningless formulation that litters the book. Like much else in The Quest for Meaning it is both philosophically facile – there is, after all, more to the concept of the “universal” than the idea of a “common space” – and historically illiterate, given that the vast majority of religious traditions have been local or tribal, with no universal pretentions, and remain so.
Ramadan’s real aim is not to explore the complexities of reason, faith and universality, but to defend the sanctity of revealed truth. Revealed truth, he tells us, is “clear and immutable” and its legitimacy cannot be challenged by reason.
The question of the relationship of reason and revelation has been central to the controversies surrounding Ramadan. Most infamously, he has argued for a “moratorium” on the Islamic practice of stoning women for adultery, but refused to call for an outright ban: a stance that led to a famous confrontation with Nicolas Sarkozy on French television. Why will Ramadan not simply say that stoning is a barbaric punishment and should be banned? Because, as he explained when I interviewed him for a Radio 4 documentary, the Qur’anic text that demands stoning “comes from God”. But isn’t that the problem, I asked him. Ramadan knows rationally that certain actions are morally wrong but is not willing to say so because of his attachment to the revealed word of God. Simply to believe in rationality, he responded, is to accept the “dictatorship of intelligence”. And that is “a dominant, arrogant posture. It’s dangerous.”
This exchange gets to the heart of the debate about faith and reason. For many of us it is the abandonment of reason in the name of revealed authority that is truly dangerous. What is striking, however, is that there is not a whisper about this controversy in the book. He devotes an entire chapter to the question of gender relations, in which he quotes such secular thinkers as Michel Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir. But he has little to say about the difficulties of the relationship between faith and equality.
There is not a mention of the contemporary disputes over abortion, divorce, adultery, the veil, or female genital mutilation, that often pit religious norms against secular ones, and are central to current debates about pluralism, It is an extraordinary silence, but typical of Ramadan’s refusal to tackle the difficult questions.
The Quest for Meaning reveals Ramadan as neither a bridge-builder nor a dangerous bigot, but as a shallow thinker taken far too seriously by both supporters and critics. His real strength is his ability to trade in that mixture of pseudo-intellectualism and faux-mysticism that has today become so fashionable. At the end of the book, Ramadan informs us that the “architecture of the text” reflects his spiritual journey. There are 14 chapters which “represent two cycles of seven”, seven being a “universal symbol” in all faiths. “Twice seven”, Ramadan tells us, “to reflect linearity, evolution and the cyclical return of the same and the different though the universality of the symbol.” At least The Da Vinci Code did not claim to solve the problems of pluralism.
Kenan Malik’s book ‘From Fatwa to Jihad’ is published by Atlantic
Media: Tories refuse to ban full face veils
The Tories practice the cancer of the left… “political correctness”. Whilst other countries around the world (including Muslim countries) are banning the full face veil in certain situations, the UK is falling over itself to appease. Strange how it’s not allowed to cover your face with a motorbike crash helmet in places like banks,
What does the coalition government get out of it’s stance in shutting down all debate? Is the UK a democracy?
Recorded from Newsnight, 19 July 2010.
Part 1
Part Two
Debating Non-Violent Islamism
By Marc Lynch
I have just published an essay in the new issue of Foreign Affairs which uses Paul Berman’s polemic against Tariq Ramadan, Twilight of the Intellectuals, as a jumping off point for a broader discussion of the challenge of non-violent Islamism. I finished drafting it over a month ago, and since then several excellent review essays have appeared including one by Pankaj Mishra in the New Yorker and another by Yale University’s Andrew March in the American Prospect. I found much to criticize in the book, including Berman’s exceedingly thin engagement with the vast scholarly and historiographical literature, his still-puzzling obsession with Ramadan, and his tiresome infighting with a few liberal Western journalists such as Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma. But looking past the polemics, there’s a serious debate to be had about how to think about non-violent Islamist activism in Europe and the United States, the Middle East, and throughout the Muslim communities of the world. In the end, I argue, Berman “flags important debates about Islam’s impact on Europe and the world, but he is an exceedingly poor guide to navigating them.”
I am not going to reproduce the parts of the Foreign Affairs essay here which deal with the historiography or with Ramadan himself. I urge you to read the full essay for those parts. Here, I want to focus on what I see as the more fundamental issues raised about understanding the challenge posed by Islamism, about which legitimate and genuinely significant differences exist:
Berman gets Ramadan’s struggle backward. Ramadan’s primary adversaries are not liberals in the West but rather literalistic Salafists whose ideas are ascendant in Muslim communities from Egypt and the Persian Gulf to western Europe. For Salafists, a movement such as the Muslim Brotherhood is too political, too accepting of civil institutions, and insufficiently attentive to the formalistic and public rituals of Islam. They urge Muslims to separate from Western societies in favor of their own allegedly pure Islamic enclaves. The Muslim Brotherhood has encouraged women to wear the veil, but only so that they can demonstrate virtue while in universities and the workplace. The Salafists, meanwhile, want women at home and strictly segregated from men. True liberals should prefer Ramadan because he offers a model for Muslims of integration as full citizens at a time when powerful forces are instead pushing for isolation and literalism.
Ramadan has not couched his challenge to the Salafists in abstract language or kept it from public view. For example, when Salafi opponents have confronted him with Koranic verses dictating that women receive only half the inheritance of men, Ramadan has argued that these passages should be reinterpreted given the modern changes in family structure and the fact that many women today raise children alone. Therefore, Ramadan argues, Muslims should “try to keep the justice instead of literally implementing verses, pretending faithfulness to the Koran but in fact creating injustices on the ground.” This is a sharp challenge to the Salafists, the significance of which Berman does not recognize. Similarly, Ramadan’s call in 2005 for a moratorium on the implementation of hudud penalties — including the stoning of adulterers — is mocked relentlessly by Berman as too little, but in fact it posed an intensely controversial challenge to the heart of Salafi political agendas and jurisprudence.
Ultimately, Ramadan disappoints his liberal interlocutors because they are not his most important point of reference. He has made a strategic calculation that embracing the political passions of the Muslim mainstream is the only way for his reformist agenda to gain any sort of credibility or traction with the Muslim audiences that really matter. And although his vision may not be a classically liberal one, it is a fully legitimate guide for how Muslims — or any persons of faith — can participate in a liberal and democratic system. As Andrew March, a political theorist and professor at Yale University, has argued, the cultures of political liberalism in the West should be able to accommodate peaceful, law-abiding citizens who are motivated by explicit religious faith. The United States, which boasts its own powerful religious communities and fundamentalist political forces, should of all places be able to understand how this works.
This does not mean that liberals should not have misgivings about Ramadan’s project. He defines sharia — the system of Muslim jurisprudence — not as the law of the land but as a personal moral code, sustained by the faith of the believer. Why should such a belief be alarming? After all, this is how many people of faith have reconciled themselves to civic states. But in practice, this evangelical project of societal transformation through personal transformation — changing the world “one soul at a time” — is more deeply radical than what violent extremists envision. Anyone can seize state power through violence and then impose his will by force. True power lies in the ability to mobilize consent so that people willingly embrace ideas without coercion — so that they want what you want, not simply do what you want. Nonviolent Islamists excel at this level of soft power and, in doing so, have succeeded in transforming public culture across the Muslim world. Walking the streets of Cairo today, for example, it is hard to believe that only a couple decades ago, few women covered their hair.
Later in the essay, I elaborate on the stakes of this struggle inside Islamist politics:
Those, such as Berman, who see Islamism as flat and uniform claim that Islamists of all varieties — despite differences over the use of violence or the value of democratic participation — ultimately share a commitment to achieving an Islamic state. But this is misleading. There is a vast and important gap between the Salafi vision of enforced social uniformity and the moderate Islamist vision of a democratic state, with civil institutions and the rule of law, populated by devout Muslims. The gap is so great as to render meaningless the notion that all Islamists share a common strategic objective. Ramadan stands on the correct side of this gap, and by extension, he stands on the right side of the most important battle within Islamism today: he is a defender of pragmatism and flexibility, of participation in society, and of Muslims’ becoming full citizens within liberal societies.
Ramadan’s defense of participation places him opposite the literalists and radicals with whom Berman attempts to link him. The hard core of the Salafi jihadists view all existing Muslim societies as fundamentally, hopelessly corrupt — part of a jahiliyya, which means “age of ignorance,” from which true Muslims must retreat and isolate themselves. Ramadan, by contrast, calls for change from within. Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood offer clinics, charities, schools, and other services, while pursuing the dawa, or “spiritual outreach.” Their approach would be familiar to anyone who has engaged with American evangelicals — the polite conversation, the pamphlets and other literature, the self-presentation as honest and incorruptible. There is an obvious difference between a woman who is forced to wear a veil for fear of acid being thrown in her face and one who does so to show respect for God. But there are other forms of coercion — peer pressure, societal norms, and economic need — that can be difficult to detect from the outside. These are topics for serious study.
But Berman does not even try. He sees only a radical mob of fanatics, not individuals who find meaning in their lives given particular contexts and specific challenges. As Berman sees it, blank-faced cyphers impose a grim conformity on passive communities that are unable to resist (presumably because their will has been weakened by an Ian Buruma essay). It does not occur to him that Islamism might offer meaning to those who are confined to gloomy urban ghettos or that Islamist groups might be the only ones working on the ground to improve certain people’s lives. For many Muslims around the world, Islamism may offer a better life in the here and now — and not just in the hereafter — than do many of the alternatives.
This point should not be misunderstood. Although the Muslim Brotherhood is clearly distinct from al Qaeda, it is not the uniformly “moderate” organization that its supporters often say it is. The organization’s character and goals often vary from community to community, and its rhetoric sometimes betrays a number of worrisome “gray zones,” in the words of a 2006 study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Its members generally avoid making clear statements on contentious issues, such as the place of non-Muslims in the Islamic state, the toleration of secular Muslims, or where the authority to interpret Islamic law should reside. And the Muslim Brotherhood’s rejection of violence at home does not extend to areas where Muslims live under occupation, such as the Palestinian territories or Iraq. Such positions may not please many Americans, but they do — like it or not — represent the mainstream of much of the Muslim world.
But, I conclude, the problems with Berman do not mean that there are no problems with non-violent Islamists:
Berman highlights a very real dilemma. Put bluntly, Islamists have shaped the world around them in ways that many liberals in the United States and Europe find distasteful. Even moderate Islamists prioritize religion over all other identities and promote its application in law, society, culture, and politics. Their prosyletizing, social work, party politics, and organization of parallel civil societies have all helped transform societies from below. This frightens and angers secularists, liberals, feminists, non-Muslims, and others who take no comfort in the argument that the political success of the Islamists simply reflects the changing views of the majority. The strongest argument against accepting nonviolent Islamists as part of the legitimate spectrum of debate is that they offer only a short-term solution while making the long-term problem worse. These Islamists may be democrats, but they are not liberals. Their success will increase the prevalence and impact of illiberal views and help shape a world that will be less amenable to U.S. policies and culture.
But this is precisely why Berman’s lumping together of different strands of Islamism is so harmful. Ramadan may not be a liberal, but he offers a realistic vision of full participation in public life that counters the rejectionist one posed by the ascendant corps of Salafi extremists. Pragmatists who hope to confront the disturbing trends within the Muslim world do not have the luxury of moral purity.
And finally:
Secular Muslims, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the Somali-born writer and former Dutch politician — are a sideshow to the real struggles taking place between reformers and traditionalists, Muslim Brothers and Salafists, rulers and oppositionists. The real challenge to the integration of Muslims in the West comes from Salafists who deny the legitimacy of democracy itself, who view the society around them as mired in jahiliyya, and who seek only to enforce a rigid, literalistic version of Islam inside whatever insulated enclaves they are able to carve out. The liberals to whom Berman is drawn represent a vanishingly small portion of Muslim-majority societies. They are generally drawn from well-off urban elites that have become ever more detached from their surrounding environments and would not fare well in the democratic elections that the United States claims to want. Meanwhile, granting such prominence to ex-Muslims who support Israel and denounce Islam discredits other reformists in the real terrain where figures such as Ramadan must operate. Supporting them may offer the warm glow of moral purity — and they may be more fun at parties — but this should not be confused with having an impact where it counts.
At the end, Berman offers an impassioned defense of Hirsi Ali, whom he portrays as a classic dissident who has been betrayed by the leading lights of the liberal West. He feigns bewilderment at why these liberal authors, to whom he devotes so many pages, might find her problematic. Berman appears unbothered by the frightening march toward a clash of civilizations promoted by al Qaeda and fueled by anti-Islamic culture warriors in the West. Nor is he concerned that expressing extreme anti-Islamic views and embracing only those Muslims who reject Islam might help al Qaeda by antagonizing those hewing to the Muslim mainstream and perhaps convincing them that bin Laden is right after all. Berman portrays himself, Hirsi Ali, and a select group of others as the defenders of moral courage in a world where too many have fallen short. But real moral courage does not come from penning angry polemics without regard for real-world consequences.
The most helpful strategic victory in the struggle against Islamist radicalism would be to undermine the narrative that the West is at war with Islam. There should be no tolerance for Islamist extremists who threaten writers, intimidate women, or support al Qaeda’s terrorism. But defending Hirsi Ali from death threats should not necessarily mean embracing her diagnosis of Islam. Berman’s culture war would marginalize the pragmatists and empower the extremists. Muslim communities are more likely to reject such extremists when they do not feel that their faith is being attacked as fascist or that they can only be accepted if they embrace Israel and the policy preferences of American conservatives.
The Muslims in the West are not going away. It is therefore imperative to find a way for these communities to become full partners in the security and prosperity offered by Western societies. If democracy has any meaning, it must be able to allow Muslims to peacefully pursue their interests and advance their ideas — even as the liberals who defend the right of Muslims to do so are also free to oppose them. Ramadan may not present the only path to such an end — but he does present one. And that is why his liberal proponents in the West, who so infuriate Berman for promoting Ramadan, emerge as more compelling guides to a productive future.
There is a lot more in the Foreign Affairs essay, which I hope you’ll read in its entirety.