ust as Tariq Ramadan was preparing to take up a professorial post at the University of Notre Dame in August 2004, the United States government revoked his visa, denying him entry on ideological grounds.
The US state department lifted the ban in January, and the Swiss scholar is set to take part in a panel discussion in New York on Thursday – his first visit to the US since losing his visa.
“It was a mistake by the Bush administration, to prevent intellectuals from being critical,” Mr Ramadan said in an interview with The National in Doha. “The main thing is for me to go there and build bridges.”
It is sometimes difficult to tell if Mr Ramadan – a rigorous scholar, a champion of Islam and an outspoken advocate for the rights and assertiveness of Muslims in the West – is building bridges or burning them.
Born and raised in Switzerland, Mr Ramadan, 47, is a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and the grandson of Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He is often named among the world’s most influential public intellectuals yet regularly excoriated in both Muslim and western media for a seeming lack of commitment to their respective values.
Last week he lectured in Doha at the request of the Faculty of Islamic Studies, where he will teach a course on contemporary Islam this year. Before delivering his speech he considered the tensions within Gulf societies.
“You have some people that are very reactive to anything that has to do with the West, saying, ‘This is the end of Islam’,” he said. “And you have some others saying, ‘No, we have to follow in the footsteps of the West because this is the way to be developed and modern’, and in between you have people trying to find their way.”
In his next book, The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy for Pluralism, Mr Ramadan writes about the shared values between Islam and the West.
“My understanding of Islam makes it clear that there is no contradiction in the Islamic values and the western values,” he said. “To deal with modernity doesn’t mean that you lose your Islamic background.”
Despite what he sees as the marginalisation of many Muslim communities in the West, Mr Ramadan urges Muslims to look forward, not back. “We need to stop nurturing the victim mentality,” he said, touching on a key theme of his Doha lecture.
Dr Basma Abdelgafar, a professor of public policy at the Faculty of Islamic Studies who has read several of Mr Ramadan’s books, attended the talk and came away impressed.
“It’s a very useful type of contribution to our understanding of Muslims in the West,” said Prof Abdelgafar, a Canadian of Egyptian heritage who was looking forward to having Mr Ramadan as a colleague. “It has nothing to do with a person’s creed or belief, it’s that they are representing something that’s right.”
Mr Ramadan’s critics, however, see him as a dangerous radical. “I don’t see anyone today who is as effective as Tariq Ramadan in furthering fundamentalism in France,” the French journalist Caroline Fourest, the author of an anti-Ramadan book, said last year. She accuses him of doublespeak – saying one thing to Muslims and another to western audiences.
Paul Berman, a journalism professor at New York University, goes further. “The problem lies in the terrible fact,” he wrote in a 2007 article, “that Ramadan’s personal milieu – his grandfather, his family history, his family contacts, his intellectual tradition – is precisely the milieu that bears the principal responsibility for generating the modern theoretical justification for religious suicide.”
That may be going too far. Mr Ramadan has distanced himself from his grandfather’s political opinions and denounced violence.
Still, he does have views unlikely to sit well with some westerners.
“The neoliberal economy, the way it’s now impacting lives and killing people every day because of the injustices of the economy, this is a’anam al harb [the world of war],” Mr Ramadan said during the interview in Doha. “This economic order is killing people, and this is why we need ethics in our economy, and this recent global crisis is telling us exactly this.”
Taking an anti-capitalist, even socialist, stance is neither illegal nor in opposition to the West. But his position on certain huddud punishments may be more problematic. Mr Ramadan was asked if he saw any contradiction between his stated commitment to western values and calling, on French television in 2003, for a moratorium on the stoning of adulterers in order to debate the punishment’s merits.
“As long as we don’t have answers to these questions we have to open a debate,” he said last week in Doha. “It’s not a contradiction, because Amnesty International, a western organisation, is calling for the same thing on the death penalty. So why is it not a contradiction for them and it is for me?”
The New York-based rights group takes a rather less equivocal stance on legal executions. “Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases and under all circumstances,” according to its website.
