Jim Sleeper: How and How Not to Engage Liberalism and Islam
[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale University.]
Dissent magazine has just posted a revelatory assessment, by Andrew F. March -- a liberal, non-Muslim scholar of Islam -- of the liberal war hawk Paul Berman's untiring efforts to unmask Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan as an insidious apologist for murderous Islamicism. March also casts a skeptical eye on Berman's efforts to discredit Western intellectuals who've indulged Ramadan as a mediator between liberalism and Islam.
March isn't out to vindicate or celebrate Ramadan, but, because March knows Islam's texts and internal conversations better than almost any other non-Muslim in America, he shows that Ramadan -- an internal critic of Islam who needs to be heard by its most important clerics and scholars -- must at times adopt the tradition's reverential tones and skirt confrontations over specific embarrassments, precisely in order to criticize them.
Ramadan's exhibitions of deference to some infamous Islamicist leaders give Berman some "scare quotes" and other excuses to cast doubt on his intentions. But March shows that Berman -- who is comparatively ignorant of Islamic discourse but is hot with his mission to save the West from Ramadan's supposed perfidy and from left-liberals' naïve delight in it -- is merely "skipping stones" across the surfaces of the deep waters of Ramadan's family ties and of the texts and traditions he references.
Berman's touchy, sneering reply largely proves March's point. You may believe that Islam is too vulnerable to the fascist virus for its differences with liberalism to be bridged, but if it's liberalism you want to save, beware its noisy champions like Berman, who do not often exhibit its deepest strengths.
March is a quieter but firmer champion of liberalism. Again, he isn't promoting Ramadan; he's advancing intelligent liberal discussion of Islam against a breathless rush to closure by Berman and other liberal hawks (like Peter Beinart in The Good Fight in 2006). Although Berman has shifted from leftish to neo-connish in his foreign policy intellection, and Beinart the reverse, neither has outgrown romanticist-moralist inclinations that compromise his arguments.
I haven't proved this, of course. Andrew March's warning -- not just to Berman but to all of us journalists and bloggers -- is that even when our best-informed intuitions are right, we should resist the temptation to announce them by skipping stones across deep waters (as I did in my last post). That won't bring us either the critics or the celebrants we imagine we deserve. They have to be earned, the hard way.
Read entire article at Talking Points Memo
Dissent magazine has just posted a revelatory assessment, by Andrew F. March -- a liberal, non-Muslim scholar of Islam -- of the liberal war hawk Paul Berman's untiring efforts to unmask Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan as an insidious apologist for murderous Islamicism. March also casts a skeptical eye on Berman's efforts to discredit Western intellectuals who've indulged Ramadan as a mediator between liberalism and Islam.
March isn't out to vindicate or celebrate Ramadan, but, because March knows Islam's texts and internal conversations better than almost any other non-Muslim in America, he shows that Ramadan -- an internal critic of Islam who needs to be heard by its most important clerics and scholars -- must at times adopt the tradition's reverential tones and skirt confrontations over specific embarrassments, precisely in order to criticize them.
Ramadan's exhibitions of deference to some infamous Islamicist leaders give Berman some "scare quotes" and other excuses to cast doubt on his intentions. But March shows that Berman -- who is comparatively ignorant of Islamic discourse but is hot with his mission to save the West from Ramadan's supposed perfidy and from left-liberals' naïve delight in it -- is merely "skipping stones" across the surfaces of the deep waters of Ramadan's family ties and of the texts and traditions he references.
Berman's touchy, sneering reply largely proves March's point. You may believe that Islam is too vulnerable to the fascist virus for its differences with liberalism to be bridged, but if it's liberalism you want to save, beware its noisy champions like Berman, who do not often exhibit its deepest strengths.
March is a quieter but firmer champion of liberalism. Again, he isn't promoting Ramadan; he's advancing intelligent liberal discussion of Islam against a breathless rush to closure by Berman and other liberal hawks (like Peter Beinart in The Good Fight in 2006). Although Berman has shifted from leftish to neo-connish in his foreign policy intellection, and Beinart the reverse, neither has outgrown romanticist-moralist inclinations that compromise his arguments.
I haven't proved this, of course. Andrew March's warning -- not just to Berman but to all of us journalists and bloggers -- is that even when our best-informed intuitions are right, we should resist the temptation to announce them by skipping stones across deep waters (as I did in my last post). That won't bring us either the critics or the celebrants we imagine we deserve. They have to be earned, the hard way.