On the vast amounts of Islamic scholarship, there are probably larger amounts on Egyptian hermeunitics, philospher's stone and similar. Isaac Newton wrote far more about this stuff than ever he did on Maths and Physics.
It is only of historic interest though. If your starting premises are wrong...
I think that the likes of Tariq Ramadan are jokes not because they have liberal views
I think he is actually very dangerous and deliberately sets out a stall of a moderate Islam to entrap people.
Not long after September 11, 2001, Paul Berman wrote a masterful little book called Terror and Liberalism that electrified me the first time I read it. Later it served as a philosophical and political anchor for me as I ventured out on long and sometimes dangerous journeys in the Middle East to uncover things for myself.
He returns now with a new book called The Flight of the Intellectuals, which is your required reading this month. It picks up, in some ways, where Terror and Liberalism left off. While we haven't had a repeat of the apocalyptic terrorist attacks on September 11, what we do have is an entirely new class of people in the Western democracies who live in hiding and under armed guard from the same sorts of killers. Salman Rushdie was but the first, and Somalia-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one-time collaborator with the butchered Theo Van Gogh, is now but the most famous.
Something terrible has happened to the intellectual class during the interim period. The killers' would-be victims have been excoriated in the press, and even, in some cases, blamed for their predicament. Berman won't stand for it. As Ron Rosenbaum put it hopefully in a recent review of Berman's new book in Slate, "Maybe some of the previously silent will begin to speak out against the death squads rather than snark about their victims and targets."
The Flight of the Intellectuals begins and ends with Tariq Ramadan, a troubling Swiss-born Islamist who has been praised to the heavens by some of the very same intellectuals who carp nastily about Hirsi Ali. Paul and I spent a recent afternoon talking about his book and some of the questions it raises.
MJT: You've spent a great deal of time reading and criticizing Tariq Ramadan, and reading and criticizing others who have written about Tariq Ramadan. What is it that drew you to him in particular?
Paul Berman: I stumbled onto him by accident. I had seen his name mentioned as an admirable young reforming moderate in the world of Islamic religious thinkers, and I thought of him as a good guy based on that reputation. Then by chance I came across a book of his in an Islamic bookstore in New York. I read it, and I was struck by the contrast between what I read by him and what I had read about him.
I touched on this in passing in a book I wrote some years ago, Terror and Liberalism. And then I became ever more fascinated by the contrast. Also a little indignant about it. And the more I poked at the contrast, the more central it seemed to me to some of our debates and dilemmas regarding the Muslim religious world and how we should look at our own journalism. I became seriously interested in Ramadan himself. He is truly an interesting personality, almost someone out of Shakespeare or some great novel that hasn't been written.
He is fated by his family heritage to stand for certain things. But he is fated by his own personal temper and the time in which he lives to stand for other things. He upholds every possible position and its opposite, which did seem to me kind of interesting.
So I plunged into a mad campaign of reading. I read works by Tariq Ramadan, by his family, and sometimes by people around him. I read works written about him. And I marveled at the contrasts and confusions.
Tariq Ramadan
MJT: He has his defenders, and they're aware of you and some of the others whom you quote in your book who are critical of him, but they don't see what the big deal is. They don't seem to think there's much there there. Can you give us the short version of your argument?
Paul Berman: He has different kinds of defenders. Some of those people are his own fans or followers. But he also has defenders in the Western liberal press who are not themselves Muslims and certainly have no relation to the Islamist political movement.
The Western liberals, some of them, defend Ramadan for two reasons. If you listen to Ramadan for fifteen minutes, you will learn that he says all the right things, whatever a liberal-minded person would want such a man to say.
MJT: He does.
Paul Berman: He's against bigotry, he's against anti-Semitism, he's against terrorism, he's for the rights of women, he's in favor of democratic liberties, he's for a tolerant and multi-religious society ruled ultimately by secular values. He's for science, learning, and enlightenment. He's in favor of every possible good thing. There isn't a single objectionable point in the first fifteen minutes of his presentation.
MJT: Yes.
Paul Berman: Unfortunately, the sixteenth minute arrives, and, if you are still paying attention, you learn that he wants us to revere the most vicious and reactionary of Islamist sheikhs -- the people who promote violence, bigotry, totalitarianism, and terror. The sixteenth minute is not good. The liberal quality of his thinking falls apart entirely....
http://www.michaeltotten.com/2010/05/the-flight-of-the-intellectuals.php
Topic: Hi all