Ramadan’s festival

The GuardianHay festival 2008: Tariq Ramadan returns to the fundamentals of faith, but brings back an enlightened, progressive IslamIn God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens’ elegant demolition of religion, he notes, with some irony, the “apparent tendency of the Almighty to reveal himself only to unlettered and quasi-historical individuals, in regions of Middle Eastern wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition, and in many instances already littered with existing prophecies”.

In his lecture at Hay, delivered only two days after Hitchens’ appearance here, Professor Tariq Ramadan set himself the challenge of arguing that rather than there being too much religion today, there was too little; more specifically, he suggested that a close examination of one particular “unlettered and quasi-historical” individual – the prophet Muhammad – had important lessons to teach both Muslims and non-Muslims today.

Ramadan, Egyptian by heritage and Swiss by birth, is a compelling, cool performer who delivered his talk from his seat rather than the podium; his lecture, based on his book The Messenger, Ramadan argued that both Muslims and non-Muslims have a distorted opinion about Islam because they have failed either to study or to interpret the life of Muhammad. For non-Muslims, a greater knowledge of Muhammad would reassure them that Islam is not a faith to fear; while, for Muslims, closer study of the prophet would demonstrate his relevance to today.

“When we go back to the source,” Ramadan told the audience, “we find new ways to interpret yesterday to help find new answers today.”

The Muhammad who emerges from Ramadan’s book, and who was described in the Hay lecture, would perhaps have surprised some of those in attendance. In The Messenger, Ramadan relates how “for many years, a young Jew was his companion and followed him everywhere, for he loved the Prophet’s company.” In his lecture, the professor bluntly told the audience that “anti-semitism is anti-Islamic”, and he related how Muhammad had also allowed Christians to pray in his mosque.

Ramadan also talked of the prophet’s relationship with his wives and the lesson he extracted was that Islam was strongly against forced marriages. He said he disapproved of faith schools, but if there were to be Christian and Jewish faith schools, it was unfair that there were not Muslim ones. “There has to be consistency,” he argued. He also stressed the importance of knowledge for Muslims, and later, in the question and answer session, he again urged Muslims to read more widely – a comment which would have had more influence had there been more than a handful of Muslims in the audience (at Hay, if you see a non-white face, the chances are that it belongs to an author, rather than someone in the audience).

For Ramadan, the fact that so many Muslim majority nations have regressive attitudes towards women and education is evidence not of Islam’s backwardness but, he argued, of a confusing of culture and religion and a failure to draw the correct lessons from the life of Muhammad. Hence the need to return to the source.

Listening to Ramadan, I was struck by two contradictory thoughts. The first was the inherent strangeness in the notion that the way to gain lessons in life is by studying thoroughly the life of someone who lived 1,400 years ago.

Ramadan himself suggested that at the core of all the religions were the same values and, in his book, he suggests that the prophet “resisted the worst in himself and offered the best in his being”. This sounds like a thoroughly laudable attitude, but one is tempted to quote Hitchens again when he writes that, for him, “good conscience will do, without any heavenly wrath behind it.”

Yet, while it is perfectly possible to argue that adhering to wisdom gleaned from a book or the life of Muhammad is faintly ludicrous, that does still leave the question of how to tackle the pressing problem of radicalisation among some Muslims. In the question and answer session, Ramadan was asked what his advice was to combat radicalisation and his response was first to urge both non-Muslims and Muslims to read more, but also a demand “not to ‘Islamise’ all problems”. His contention was that often problems that are social, economic and political in their roots are blamed on religion.

He also argued for what he termed a “silent revolution”, one which combated the noise of the extremists who tend to secure media coverage more easily. This revolution, in which Islam was both “a question and a bridge” towards social harmony, had to come, he said, from locally based community initiatives, and it has to come from within. Lecturing and patronising Muslims will not be ultimately successful, instead Muslims need to confront these questions themselves without the usual recourse to blaming others. In this silent revolution, which might otherwise be called a battle for hearts and minds, the end destination is clear: Muslims and non-Muslims respecting each other and living in peace without fear and suspicion.

In attempting to reach that goal, Ramadan’s book could be useful; he is someone who is speaking with both knowledge and credibility on Islam, and he stressed that the lessons he drew from the life of Muhammad used traditional and generally accepted sources. Thus, he is the voice from the inside and, no matter what one thinks about religion in general or Islam in particular, the lessons he extracts are good ones, ones which most people with faith and without could agree on. Given that there are Muslims, particularly among the young, who are growing up with an interpretation of Islam that is not particularly enlightened, perhaps one should applaud Tariq Ramadan for trying to give some scholarly substance to a version of Islam that is both progressive and which sits more easily within the wider society.

Source : The Guardian