The Educated Elite vs The Country-Part V: The Debate Continues
As expected, there’s been a great deal of reaction from members of the liberal intellectual elite to Paul Berman’s new book The Flight of the Intellectuals. His targets may lack the courage, as Berman says, to even meaningfully discuss Islamism but they’re ready to fight when it comes to Berman’s portrayal of them and their adulation of Tariq Ramadan.
Here are six reactions—some favorable and some not– to the book and one response from Berman.
Columbia Journalism Review‘s Josh Gohlke asks: “Have Western journalists given Islamofascism a free ride?”
Comparing the responses of intellectuals to Tariq Ramadan and to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he asks:
How did Western journalists come to be more respectful of decorous fundamentalists than they are of brash secularists?
But then he seems to ready to supply lame excuses:
For one thing, they fear that Hirsi Ali’s criticisms of her own tradition will embolden anti-Muslim bigots and xenophobes in America and Europe.
And, really, it’s not their fault. Gohlke seems to be saying that Buruma, like so many journalists, was stuck with the information at hand.
Flight of the Intellectuals is a reminder of the frailties of journalism, and not only in the face of death. “It is not obvious to me that Buruma, in preparing his profile for The New York Times Magazine, had read very much by Ramadan,” Berman complains. Journalists try to approximate the truth with the time and information they have. Rarely can they digest the complete works of a writer as prolific as Ramadan or, for that matter, the vast body of other sources Berman patiently draws on. Journalists choose an angle and go with it—and sometimes, as this sharply argued book suggests, they get it wrong.
(Buruman’s profile of Ramadan is here.)
But the NYT choose Ian Buruma to write about Ramadan because of his expertise.
Tunku Varadarajan –writer and national affairs correspondent for The Daily Beast, research fellow at the Hoover Institute and former assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal– has an interview with Paul Berman at The Daily Beast.
Varadarajan, who agrees with Berman, concludes:
Berman believes that communism was ultimately defeated by argument and debate, and that Islamism should be approached in the same spirit. But we haven’t shown a fraction of the forensic fortitude that the situation cries out for. In fact, as Berman’s invaluable book argues with passion, our intellectuals seem to have ducked the challenge altogether.
“The very worst thing we can do is to surrender to the mystery of it all, and to say, as many say, that there’s no point in arguing.”
I have to ask myself whether forensic fortitude is the same thing as intestinal fortitude.
Carlin Romano— philosophy and media theory prof at the University of Pennsylvania and critic at large for The Chronicle Review— uses the occasion of reviewing Berman’s book to take an intellectually dishonest swipe at the Catholic Church, implying either that silence in the face of Islamism makes sense or that the current death threats against those who speak out against it are nothing new.
Like attacking the Catholic Church during its heyday of killing heretics and infidels, criticizing Islamism today is not for those who jump at the sound of bubble wrap cracking.
It strikes me as very odd that when Romano refers to the televised debate between Tariq Ramadan and Nicolas Sarkozy (before Sarkozy became the President of France), he says Ramadan “allegedly sounded ambiguous on the subjects of suicide bombing and the stoning of adulterous women.” Allegedly? Ramadan refused to condemn it.
Romano criticizes Berman’s insistence that Ramadan maintains allegiance to the anti-liberal ideas of his father and grandfather and asks us instead to compare Ramadan to “[c]hildren of immigrants the world over” who “differ from their parents in profound ways.”
After all, Ramadan was educated in Switzerland , Romano reminds us, as though that’s a reason for thinking he’s amenable to Western ideas.
Amazingly, Romano suggests that there might be a perfectly good reason that Ramadan doesn’t accurately describe “his grandfather’s most abhorrent beliefs.” Instead of secretly sharing those beliefs, Romano speculates:
Might he, rather, be embarrassed by them?
Besides, Romano says, anyone knows that in the Arab and Islamic cultures, one must show deference to one’s parents and grandparents.
Perhaps Romano is taking flight.
I’ve linked the video of the Sarkozy- Ramadan debate here.
Over at Tablet, Christopher Hitchens is one member of the intellectual elite who sides with Berman in all this and disagrees with his friend Ian Buruma’s idea about Islamism:
[Buruman] sometimes seems to think that where Islamism is concerned, we have little to fear except the fear of it itself. This widely shared attitude has condensed into one word—the neologism “Islamophobia.” A phobic is a person suffering from irrational or uncontrollable dread. I don’t choose to regard my own apprehensiveness about Muslim violence as groundless or illusory.
Hitchens gives further evidence of the cowardice that Berman cites:
Not a single mainstream American media outlet, for example, would show the actual cartoons that had been used as a well-choreographed pretext for a sabotage of the Danish economy and society.
When a small magazine for which I write (the secular Free Inquiry) did print the images, we were at once removed from the shelves by a major bookstore chain. Yale University Press excised the cartoons from a book about the cartoons. Comedy Central has twice bleeped out references to the prophet Muhammed in response to violent rhetoric from fringe Muslim groups.
What would there be left to surrender if the pressure was more organized and more intense, or based on the supposed claims of a larger demographic minority?
As it is, the New York Times already speaks revealingly of countries like Iraq and Yemen as “Muslim soil.” Would it do this for “Christendom” or the Promised Land? One hopes not. So, here is defeat in the mind, making slow but sure progress.
Hutchins notes the anti-Semitism of Islamism:
I join with Paul Berman in expressing utter astonishment at this phenomenon, or rather at the way that it is not a phenomenon. Anti-Jewish propaganda, paranoia, and even incitement are now commonplace, at events like anti-war demonstrations where one might expect liberals and intellectuals to take notice of them.
What we’ve arrived at, Hutchins says is “the impasse of cultural masochism.”
Elbert Ventura—managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute– joins the discussion at Progressive Fix.
Here Ayaan Hirsi Ali is suspect because she’s been embraced by the right.
Along the way, Hirsi Ali has established a reputation as a scorched-earth critic of Islam. It has earned her the adoration of the American right – and suspicion from the left, which sees her Islam-or-enlightenment stand as unhelpful.
Yet, Ventura says:
But Berman’s exacting outlook is ultimately problematic.
Hirsi Ali, strident and surrounded by bodyguards, is the model warrior in his war of ideas. It’s a needlessly steep standard – and a counterproductive one. Living under fatwa may be testimony to a critic’s courage, but that’s not the same as a critic’s effectiveness. If the true goal is to modernize Islam and promote liberalism, an effective critique, not just an angry one, is necessary.
Berman’s impatience and his insistence on choosing sides get in the way of a clear-eyed assessment of what we need to win the war of ideas: courage, yes, and anger even, but also reason, canniness and humility.
It’s not the last time we’ll hear from a Berman critic that we must be humble.
What Ventura doesn’t say is that Hirsi Ali is surrounded by bodyguards because when her friend –the Dutch filmmaker and free speech activist Theo Van Gogh—was stabbed to death, the knife held a note warning that Hirsi Ali would be next. Ventura implies that she needs protection because she’s, in his words, strident.
Interestingly, Ian Buruma wrote a book about Van Gogh’s death titled Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.
Andrew F. March, writing at Dissent in May of this year, says Berman has made several mistakes in his portrayal of Ramadan.
March, it should be noted, is a political science prof at Yale and has written many articles on Islamic law and liberalism—three of them on the thought of Tariq Ramadan. In addition, his Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus received the Award for Excellence from the American Academy of Religion. He finds plenty wrong with Berman’s book.
One of Berman’s mistakes, March says, is criticizing Ramadan for what he doesn’t say:
…that is troubling for anyone who rejects Berman’s implicit assumption that a Muslim public intellectual is defined negatively in terms of what he or she has or has not denounced.
Second, March says, Berman doesn’t tell us “how we should read an author like Ramadan–with what methods and in pursuit of which judgments.”
Besides that, he says, “Ramadan’s views have gradually become less conservative, less indebted to Muslim Brotherhood ideology, over the years.”
And, March says, it’s religion, for Heaven’s sake, and the standards are different: Ramadan can’t come right out and condemn things like stoning.
We would do well to remember that religious communities are dealt a different hand than secular ones: they may choose a language of speaking about the status of theological commandments which differs from ours.
Though I doubt March would give this same benefit to Christians or Jews.
Besides:
But let us remember that he is a Swiss intellectual and not the Afghan Minister of Justice. No one has been stoned because Ramadan called for a moratorium on stoning.
And who are we to choose between Hirsi Ali or Ramadan, anyway? We should be humble.
We assume that too much curiosity, too much humility, is not a virtue but a weakness in need of an alibi.
Paul Berman—a member of Dissent’s editorial board– responded to March there the following day. His takedown of March is here.
One instance of many:
… I regard Ramadan’s notion of an Islamic ethics as worthless. Andrew F. March responds by observing that I am not an expert on Islamic ethics. Does he mean to suggest that Islamic ethics are fundamentally different from ethics per se?
And this:
Andrew F. March emphasizes that I am not an expert on Islamic law, and this is true. But it is irrelevant.
Ramadan’s writings are accessible to anyone with a conventional Western education. The suggestion that you need to command an expertise on Islamic law in order to understand the doctrines of someone like Ramadan is a rigamarole that is trotted out to discourage everyone from reading and engaging in debate.
Ramadan, in any case, is not an Islamic jurist. Nor does he present himself as one.
And this:
I conclude that Ramadan’s philosophical position is several hundred years out of date. But Andrew F. March has elected not to join Tariq Ramadan and me in our discussion of medieval philosophy and its bearing on the modern world.
And finally:
Last point: in his opening paragraph Andrew F. March puzzles over what sort of book I have written. Its theme and nature elude him. I will quote from the book’s second page. The Flight of the Intellectuals is a study of “a central debate of our moment—the debate over Islamist ideas in the Western countries, and over the reluctance of journalist and intellectuals from Western backgrounds to grapple seriously with the Islamist ideas.”
I have selected Tariq Ramadan as a representative figure in that debate. My book is therefore about Ramadan. And my book is about Ramadan’s reception among a certain kind of liberal intellectual, whom I criticize—the people who, faced with someone like Ramadan, are reluctant to identify what stands before their eyes; the people who, for fear of giving offense, will not speak openly about Nazi legacies; the people who will not describe Sheikh Qaradawi in full; the people who, out of a paternalism that pictures itself as anti-racism, want to tell us that Tariq Ramadan is the best that more than a billion Muslims are able to produce.
The Flight of the Intellectuals is a book, that is, about Andrew F. March.
