Tariq Ramadan: Fight over his work divides liberal community
“He gets very emotional. He gets very excited … a lot of spittle around the mouth and so on," says Ian Buruma of Paul Berman, kicking off the latest round of polemical bloodletting between the two liberal intellectuals.
The history of this spat is a bit tedious and more than a bit convoluted, but here it is in a nutshell: In February Buruma, a professor at Bard College, wrote a profile of the Swiss-born Egyptian scholar Tariq Ramadan for The New York Times Magazine. Buruma concluded that Ramadan's "politics offer an alternative to violence, which, in the end, is reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without fear."
Berman found that take dangerously naive and simplistic. In a 28,000 word response that ran across almost an entire issue of The New Republic, Berman delved deep into Ramadan's written work and biography to paint a far more complex -- and menacing -- picture of the controversial and wildly popular scholar of Islam.
Buruma held his fire until late last month when he took after Berman and other "such tub-thumpers for Bush's war" as Christopher Hitchens and the French writer Pascal Bruckner in the course of a review of Norman Podhoretz's new book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Buruma's central point was that he sees no difference between the views of "neo-left" thinkers like Berman and neoconservative thinkers like Podhoretz. (Bruckner and Buruma have tangled before on the related issue of when tolerance for cultural differences becomes tolerance for intolerance.)...
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
The history of this spat is a bit tedious and more than a bit convoluted, but here it is in a nutshell: In February Buruma, a professor at Bard College, wrote a profile of the Swiss-born Egyptian scholar Tariq Ramadan for The New York Times Magazine. Buruma concluded that Ramadan's "politics offer an alternative to violence, which, in the end, is reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without fear."
Berman found that take dangerously naive and simplistic. In a 28,000 word response that ran across almost an entire issue of The New Republic, Berman delved deep into Ramadan's written work and biography to paint a far more complex -- and menacing -- picture of the controversial and wildly popular scholar of Islam.
Buruma held his fire until late last month when he took after Berman and other "such tub-thumpers for Bush's war" as Christopher Hitchens and the French writer Pascal Bruckner in the course of a review of Norman Podhoretz's new book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Buruma's central point was that he sees no difference between the views of "neo-left" thinkers like Berman and neoconservative thinkers like Podhoretz. (Bruckner and Buruma have tangled before on the related issue of when tolerance for cultural differences becomes tolerance for intolerance.)...