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A new voice in Muslim Europe
ahmer
08/05/03 at 20:40:17

subhan'Allah amazing wisdom..!

AUG 6, 2003
Our Columnist
A new voice in Muslim Europe
By Mafoot Simon

DR TARIQ Ramadan might have been another Muslim scholar preaching the message of peaceful co-existence to his fellow believers, if not for who he is, exactly.

The 41-year-old who teaches at both the University of Fribourg and Geneva College is Swiss-born.

He is as familiar with German philosophy as Islamic theology. He's as comfortable quoting Friedrich Nietzsche as Islamic thinker Muhammad Abduh. He's got a degree in French literature and a doctorate in Arabic studies.

And his grandfather was Hasan al-Banna, the founder of al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, or the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members have assassinated two Egyptian leaders, and tried but failed with a third.

Banned by the Egyptian government since 1954 but active despite it, the Muslim Brotherhood came into being as a well-intentioned Islamic revivalist movement in 1922, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent ban of the caliphate system of government that had united the Muslims for hundreds of years.

Al-Banna preached the importance of spiritual renewal as a bulwark against Western decadence. He supplemented the traditional Islamic education for the society's male students with jihad training.

As the Brotherhood grew over the next 20 years, however, it also entered politics: It blamed the Egyptian government for being passive against 'Zionists' and joined the Palestinian side in the war against Israel.

It began carrying out terrorist acts in Egypt: A member assassinated the prime minister of Egypt, Mr Mahmud Fahmi Nokrashi, on Dec 28, 1948. In 1981, they killed president Anwar Sadat.

Al-Banna himself was killed by government agents in Cairo in February 1949.

How does Dr Ramadan feel about being related to such a name? He doesn't want to say much, except that he is publishing a book about his grandfather.

He has no 'organic links' with the movement, he adds, although an uncle is still a member.

He once told an American interviewer that members of the Muslim Brotherhood tend to repeat slogans - Islam is 'all-inclusive... a home and a nationality, a religion and a state... a book and a sword' - without understanding the words.

'He (al-Banna) was using slogans against the Western presence in Egypt, and trying to understand from the Islamic sources the kind of project he wished to implement.

'In one way, he was a reformer, saying that we have global principles in our texts, and a new context in which to read them,' he said in 2000.

In a certain sense, the grandson is embarking on a similar path of reform, although towards different goals.

The father of four young children has a crystal clear message for Muslims: adapt to changes in the modern world, despite calls from others who would want Muslims to remain mired in beliefs and practices which are centuries' old.

The professor of Islamic sciences and religion became well-known after he published To Be A European Muslim in 1999, in which he advocated what he calls an 'independent European Islam'.

He believes Muslims should not consider Europe and other 'non-Muslim' countries as lands of darkness, the dar al-harb, and therefore unsafe for Muslims, as opposed to lands belonging to the House of Islam, the dar al-Islam.

There are about 15 million Muslims in the European Union, migrants and their children from Turkey, North Africa and South Asia.

LEARN BASIC TEXTS

DR RAMADAN, who is currently in Singapore as the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore's (Muis) visiting scholar, explains that in the past, some Muslim religious teachers forbade Muslims from living in the West.

'Don't stay there, come back home. That is dar al-harb,' they would say.

A Muslim can be at home anywhere where he is safe and where the rule of law protects his freedom of conscience and his freedom to worship, Dr Ramadan argues.

And the Muslim must contribute to the life of that country, whether or not it is a Muslim country being immaterial.

Dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, he pointed out in his book, are concepts that cannot be found either in the Quran or Sunna (the sayings and traditions of Prophet Muhammad) - the two original sources of Islam.

'It was the ulama who, during the first three centuries of Islam, by considering the state of the world (then)... started to classify and define the different spaces in and around them,' he wrote.

Dr Ramadan's message for the past 15 years has been consistent: Muslims should always go back to the basic texts - the Quran and Sunna, and interpret them within the actual contexts of their lives, here and now.

But don't try to pigeonhole Dr Ramadan.

He wrote in one of his books: 'Some people do not bother with nuanced distinctions and divide Muslims without reserve into two camps: on the one hand, 'fundamentalists' or 'radicals' (who are therefore to be mistrusted), and on the other hand, 'moderates' (who alone are to be supported.'

This, he said, was 'a binary scheme of things, straightforward and easy to handle, but one that in no way corresponds to the reality of a terrain far more complicated and complex'.

He calls himself a 'reformist salafi' or advocate who believes in giving new interpretation to the two fundamental sources of Islam, the Quran and the Sunna, in trying to find new answers to new challenges.

There are three types of salafis, he wrote.

These are the traditionalists, the political and the literalist. The last do not allow interpretation.

LIVE IN THE PRESENT

TO SPREAD his message of the need to reinterpret texts, Muslims need to first sort out 'a great deal of confusion' in their minds about Islam, he says.

So he tells them: There is one Islam, but also a diversity of interpretation; one Islamic culture but also a diversity of cultures; that Arab is the language of Islam but Arabic culture is not Islamic culture; that they need not fear taking the best the West has to offer while keeping the best of their own cultures.

He warns against confusing principles with models of society.

In other words, don't adopt models from the past in trying to fix problems and issues of the present.

He warns too against what he calls a binary vision, which, for example, sees everything as either halal or haram, clean or unclean.

He also warns of the danger of the 'double discourse' syndrome - saying one thing among fellow Muslims and another to non-Muslims; and of the victimisation syndrome, which is manifest in the 'they (the non-Muslims) don't like us' attitude.

He tells Muslims that maslahah, or common good, does not mean for the common good of Muslims only, but the whole of the society in which they live.

He warns them not to let dialogues turn into what he calls 'interactive monologues' - people of the same flock talking to each other.

'There should be an intellectual revolution,' he says.

He advises them to set up a commission or committee either at national, regional or international levels, comprising ulama and professionals in other fields, to come up with new answers to new challenges.

For those in Singapore, he advises them to prioritise: make a list of the problems facing the community, and not get obsessed with matters like the headscarf or whether to shake hands or not. 'There will always be new issues every two or three years,' he says, and if the community doesn't prioritise, it will get swept up by the current.

The Muslim must also be self-critical: they should speak up - not just to explain their positions to the West but even when they see wrongs done in Muslim countries.

'We have to be the voice for the voiceless,' says this 21st century Muslim reformer.


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