No sooner has he walked into the lobby of the hotel in Paris's place de la République then Tariq Ramadan has attracted a handful of black and Arab fans who ask for a selfie with him. He goes along with it, a resigned smile on his face. The other hotel clients do not notice him. For the last twenty years this 53-year-old Swiss-born intellectual, though a reviled figure for many, has attracted a loyal following. On February 4th, 2016, he announced on Facebook his intention to apply for French nationality and has since taken the first steps at the French Embassy in London where he lives and is planning to hire a lawyer to support his application.
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On paper his request should succeed: his wife is French, as are his four children. It was indeed in France that this Swiss preacher emerged at the start of the 1990s, becoming one of the spokesmen of a young Muslim generation in search of an identity and a role. But he has always declined to apply for French citizenship. “I don't play any institutional role and I won't do because I'm not French,” he said in 2003. He gave the same response to Slate.fr just four months ago: “I've never wanted to take French nationality so that it was clear that I didn't want any role representing Muslims.” Speaking to Mediapart Ramadan now says of his application: “I've thought about it for a long time, even before becoming Swiss in 1984. But when I entered the French debate I didn't want to give the impression that I had some ambition.”
He has changed his mind. And the media-savvy Ramadan has chosen his timing too. “At the time that we're speaking, amid some disorder and din, with the [issue of the] removal of nationality, I think that it's good to give a concrete and positive example of adherence to the Republic's values,” he says. The trigger for him, he says, was indeed the proposal to strip convicted terrorists of their French nationality made by President François Hollande on November 16th, 2015, just after the bloodiest attacks in France since World War II. “It was the straw that broke the camel's back. Even to have thought of it, it was completely negligent, a constitutional disaster.” Tariq Ramadan also throws out a challenge to the French government. “The fact that I was not French allowed [people] to discredit my speeches. I'm Swiss, I want to become French. France is my country: what are you going to do now?”
The intellectual would not be surprised if his application were rejected. “For reasons of state my request can be blocked at any time,” he says. Speaking to Libération newspaper about the issue, Ramadan said: “I want to send a message that Islam must not be treated as something foreign, because Islam is part of France.” It is a phrase that comes across as self-important: that Islam in France can be reduced to Tariq Ramadan alone. That accepting his application for nationality or rejecting it would be a symbol for all Muslims.
In recent years Ramadan has kept his distance from France. Yes, he has continued to give lectures here. But the country where he started his high-profile career is just one of a number of countries where he operates. His official CV is certainly laden with titles from around the world: he is professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, a visiting professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Qatar and also holds positions at universities in Morocco, Malaysia and Kyoto in Japan (though it transpires that he hasn't visited Morocco this year and has given only a few lectures in Japan and Malaysia).
Ramadan is also director of the Research Centre of Islamic Legislation and Ethics (CILE), based in Doha, president of the European Muslim Network (EMN) and member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS). He can be seen on the television just about everywhere in the world, on the Doha-based state-owned Al Jazeera station, on Iranian-owned Press TV and on Saudi-owned Iqraa television. He has written around 30 books since 1994. The latest, called La Génie de l'Islam ('The Genius of Islam') – the title a nod to the 1802 classic The Genius of Christianity by French author François-René de Chateaubriand – was published in January.
For the past two decades this intellectual, who in 2004 was nominated by Time magazine as one of the most influential figures of the year, has been regarded with considerable suspicion in France. Ramadan's grandfather was Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, while his father Said Ramadan was exiled by President Nasser in 1959, before choosing to settle in Geneva. Yet it is in France where Ramadan has become most controversial.
Here in France he is best-known popularly for considering the veil to be an “obligation” on Muslim women, the fact that he called for a “moratorium” on the stoning of adulterous women and his portrayal in a 2005 book called Frère Tariq ('Brother Tariq') by journalist Caroline Fourest. The author claimed that behind the attractive veneer of a modernist Ramadan lay a master of “doublespeak” seeking to radicalise Europe. For the far-right, the Right and a large part of the Left, the Swiss intellectual remains a pariah who fuels many lurid myths. No sooner had Tariq Ramadan indicated his desire to become French then a writer in the right-wing Le Figaro newspaper saw in him the French Muslim president imagined by novelist Michel Houellebecq in his latest book Soumission ('Submission').
The reputation that Ramadan has built up provides an inexhaustible supply of controversy. The prime minister Manuel Valls added to this earlier this year by ostracising anyone who attended public gatherings with him. In mid-March the far-right Front National asked an administrative judge to pronounce on the holding of one of Ramadan's conferences at Carros in the south-east of France. In fact the judge ended up authorising the meeting, rejecting the plaintiffs' claim that such a gathering constituted a risk to public order. At Easter, meanwhile, the right-wing mayor of Bordeaux Alain Juppé considered that Tariq Ramadan and his “ambiguous” comments were not welcome in the city, where the intellectual had held a conference. It is such a challenge finding local councils willing to welcome Ramadan that organisers of his conferences are increasingly resorting to private halls.
In his 2015 book Musulmans au quotidien ('The daily life of Muslims') the sociologist Nilufer Göle pointed out the paradox. “While he understands the French language and culture perfectly, it is particularly in France that he comes up against the most obstacles to taking part in public life.” This mistrust has also been directed at people Ramadan has been closely associated with or who have claimed his heritage: the Comité Contre l’Islamophobie en France (CCIF), which sometimes has a stand on the fringes of his conferences, and the rapper Medine from Le Havre in northern France.
The Ramadan controversies
It seems as if every few years France has a Tariq Ramadan controversy. In 1995 the country was in a state of hysteria faced with attacks from the Algeria Islamist group the GIA. The then-interior minister Charles Pasqua, badly informed by the Egyptian security services, showed his zeal by banning Tariq Ramadan from France at a time when the latter was simply a relatively unknown preacher who had been active in the Lyon area of eastern France for a few months. As a result of the ban, however, a number of “committees for the free expression of Muslims” were set up to defend him. Through them Ramadan forged links with Christian Delorme, a Catholic priest known for encouraging inter-faith dialogue, the future head of the humans rights group the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (LDH) Michel Tubiana, and the philosopher and publisher Joël Roman. The ban, which had no factual justification, was lifted.
Later Michel Morineau, the secretary general of the Ligue de l'enseignement, an educational federation that represents some 25,000 local associations across France, teamed up with Ramadan to create a “platform” for dialogue between secularists and representatives of Islam and other faiths. In 1997 an 'Islam and secularism' committee was set up as part of the League. At times the debates on this committee were rough. A young follower of Ramadan at the time, Omero Marongiu, the son of Italian immigrants who converted to Islam at the age of 18, recalls the “shock at discovering that people could be so open in speaking with us, even the Freemasons”.
The committee was not approved of by the ministerial office of a subsequent interior minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, and it caused tensions within the Ligue de l'enseignement itself. Its new president, Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, mistrusted Ramadan and in 2000 the committee ceased work. Sixteen years later Michel Morineau is still critical of the way that secular “fundamentalists” won out at the time. “It was with people like that we should have discussed. We could have made progress. Since then, what a waste,” he says today.
Meanwhile Tariq Ramadan had became a public personality. The year 2003 marked the highpoint of his media profile. It was also the start of the real “demonising” of which he says he is a victim. Just before the European Social Forum at Saint-Denis, north of Paris, to which he was invited after getting close to some anti-globalist circles, and having attended the initial world forum held at Porto Alegre in Brazil two years earlier, Ramadan published a comment article in which he attacked “French Jewish intellectuals”. In the article he suggested that such figures were developing analyses “directed more and more by sectarian concerns”. It sparked a row that lasted for two months.
“Whether it is on the domestic front (fight against anti-Semitism) or on the international front (defence of Zionism) we are seeing the emergence of a new attitude from some intellectuals who are omnipresent on the media scene,” he wrote. “It is legitimate to wonder what principles and what interests they are defending first and foremost. One clearly perceives that their political positioning responds to sectarian logic, in their position as Jews or nationalists, as defenders of Israel. Universal principles have gone, the retreat into identity is patent and biases the debate, as all those who dare to criticise this attitude are branded anti-Semitic.” Ramadan cited the names of Pierre-André Taguieff (who is not Jewish), Alain Finkielkraut, Alexandre Adler, Bernard Kouchner, André Glucksmann and Bernard Henri-Lévy, pointing out that they had “curiously supported the American-British intervention in Iraq” in 2003.
The comments caused a scandal. Kouchner, the co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) who was to become foreign minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, railed against this “intellectual scoundrel”. Patrick Gaubert, the president of the anti-racism and anti-Semitic organisation LICRA (Ligue Contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme) accused Tariq Ramadan of using “the same rhetoric as [far-right Front National founder Jean-Marie] Le Pen when he scapegoated journalists because of their Jewish name”. The Socialist Party (PS) was outraged and future prime minister Manuel Valls, future education minister Vincent Peillon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon – who later set up the radical left Parti de Gauche – said the comments amounted to “racial hatred”.
Today the trade unionist Pierre Khalfa, who at the time ran the European Social Forum, defends the article against such charges: “As far as I am concerned the article is not anti-Semitic but sectarian.” He continues: “The PS had put pressure on us not to invite him but we didn't give in.” Khalfa says this episode left behind “very profound” marks and was even one of the causes of a later crisis that was to affect the anti-globalisation movement Attac.
Khalfa, who is still a member of the Attac scientific committee, says: “Can we not talk with him because he is reactionary on social questions? It's absurd. Ramadan presents himself as someone who is fighting for equality. In reality his demonisation is a symptom of the difficulty in France of really being able to discuss Islam's place.”
The affair of the Jewish intellectuals returned a few weeks later during a televised debate in 2003 involving Ramadan and the then-minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy. “Anti-Semitism is unacceptable it must be condemned,” said Ramadan. “I didn't like your article … it wasn't clumsy it was an error,” replied Sarkozy. As part of his desire to speak to “Muslims in the whole world”, including the most traditional, Ramadan had once spoken about a “moratorium” on stoning women adulterers. Sarkozy was spluttering with indignation. “A moratorium? In other words we must stop stoning women for a while?” he asked. “No, it is absolutely to stop the application of all those punishments so that we can have a real debate,” Ramadan responded. “You have to have an educational approach … you can't decide on your own to be be progressive without the communities, that's too easy,” he said. Sarkozy dismissed Ramadan's “medieval” comments and won the media debate.
The French elites were starting to regard Ramadan as someone not to be associated with. He became seen as a kind of hidden imam or Mahdi, a threatening figure suspected of masking his true intentions. To associate with him, even from afar, risked virtual excommunication. In 2011 Martine Aubry, then first secretary of the Socialist Party, was attacked for having co-signed an article with Ramadan on diversity: she had to withdraw her name. Her husband, lawyer Jean-Louis Brochen, also had to defend himself for having the association Rencontre et Dialogue, Ramadan's organisation in northern France, as a client. During the 2012 presidential election François Hollande was forced to deny claims that he had received the support of Tariq Ramadan “and of 700 mosques”, a potential banana skin thrown by his increasingly desperate rival Sarkozy in the last days of the campaign.
'Fundamental principles'
Between the two rounds of voting in France's regional elections in December 2015 Clémentine Autain, the spokesperson for Ensemble, one of the groups in the radical left coalition the Front de Gauche, was criticised by the right-wing Les Républicains candidate for the Paris region, Valérie Pécresse, for having invited Tariq Ramadan to a political meeting. It fact it was not true. “A majority of us felt it was not appropriate to invite [him] to this gathering,” explains Autain. But it caused a outcry nonetheless and Manuel Valls became involved. “It went very far, I was even accused of defending jihadism,” Autain says.
With that controversy now over, Clémentine Autain sums up pretty well the huge embarrassment that Ramadan continues to cause the Left. “He remains extremely divisive,” she says. “His declaration on the stoning of women is not my cup of tea, nor even his conservative positions on social issues. Even so the debate over him is irrational. The more one ostracises him, the more one makes him public enemy number one, the more one pushes Muslims back towards the choice of a more reactionary society.”
In terms of our usual political categories – left/right, progressive/conservative – Ramadan confronts us with an unsettling political alloy. He admires Malcolm X, one of the leading figures in the Black Power movement in the 1960s and a Black Muslim. He has met both Dom Hélder Câmara, the Brazilian Roman Catholic Archbishop who preached liberation theology during the dictatorship, and Mother Teresa, renowned chiefly for her work in the slums of Calcutta.
He is a third-worldist and often claims familiarity with liberation theology, the ideology that emerged in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s combining a turn towards faith, conservative mores and opposition to social injustice and neo-liberalism. He is anti-Zionist and opposes Israel's occupation of Palestine. And in 2005 he came out against the European Constitutional Treaty.
At his conferences he lectures on how to live in accordance with the Koran, advocates a return to faith, defends women wearing the veil and denounces Islamophobia. But he also calls upon his listeners to live as Muslim citizens in French society and not to wallow in being victims. Yet his reading of the Koran is dogmatic, and he changes tack when he proclaims that he does not identify with the universalist, rationalist thought of the Enlightenment. And in promoting the affirmation of identity, he seems to question the idea of a secular society or favours reverting to a more sectarian-based society.
In his 2005 book Fragments mécréants ('Fragments of doubt'), Daniel Bensaïd, who was a prominent philosopher and a major theoretician in the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), saw in Ramadan a potential “ally of convenience” but above all a “strategic adversary” whose “post-colonialist” interpretation risks feeding the “guilt machine”. And for a time, Ramadan did try to be a fellow traveller of the Left.
In the mid-1990s, Abdelaziz Chaambi, one of the lynchpins of his network who has since fallen out with his former mentor, suggested privately to Ramadan that he should seek French nationality and be a candidate for greater openness in the European elections, for example, team up with the Greens. “I said to him, if you want to be respected, you must get in via the top.” Ramadan refused. After the controversies, the opportunity never came again.
Vincent Geisser, a sociologist who specialises in the Arab world and who once knew Ramadan well, says he saw himself as a member of the elite. “One of his main complexes was not to have been recognised by the political elite on the left,” he says. Like many, Geisser later distanced himself from Ramadan. In the early 2000s Ramadan began to seek academic recognition. This would only come in 2009, when Oxford University offered him a chair financed extravagantly by the emirate of Qatar.
Haoues Seniguer, a researcher at Sciences-Po Lyon in eastern France who has studied Ramadan, criticises the “exaggerations and controversies” which he says have “sabotaged an honest, critical analysis”. Referring to Caroline Fourest's book Frère Tariq he adds: “Whatever you write you are inevitably categorised as 'pro' or 'anti'. This is partly due to Caroline Fourest. She absolutely sought to demonstrate that he was a dangerous radical Islamist who wanted to subvert the Republic. That does not do justice to the complexity of his character. However, he does have some ideological reflexes that need to be clarified.”
Khadija Mohsen-Finan, an international relations specialist who analysed Ramadan's position for the French Interior Ministry towards the end of the 1990s, says it is impossible to discuss him dispassionately in France. “He crystallises all fears and ignorance.”
Ramadan talks a great deal about the Koran and faith in his lectures, books and audio cassettes, which sold well in the 1990s. To understand him, this is the place to start. He is certainly not an advocate of a liberal form of Islam. He only accepts secular society in the West, something he says is out of place in Islam, because that is the outcome in a particular context of a particular trajectory, namely the historical result of a struggle against the domination of the Church. Ramadan is a religious person and a religious conservative, even perhaps an ultra-conservative.
At least twice, on Beur FM en 2003 and in the The New York Times in 2007, he has defined himself as a “Salafi reformist”. Journalist Ian Hamel, whose 2007 book, La Vérité sur Tariq Ramadan ('The Truth about Tariq Ramadan') is the only accurate biography of the man to have appeared up to now, explains: “Reformist because he calls for a re-reading of the Koran. Salafist because he refers to a tradition that goes back to the origins, as old as Islam.”
Ramadan himself said in 2003: “There are a certain number of principles that are fundamental for me and that I do not want betray as a Muslim.” In 2007 he said in the The New York Times: “The aim is to protect the Muslim identity and religious practice, to recognise the Western constitutional structure, to become involved as a citizen at the social level and to live with true loyalty to the country to which one belongs.”
Ramadan now avoids defining himself as a Salafist, a term that nowadays evokes Islamic State even though it refers to a current of thought within Islam that is overwhelmingly peaceful. “I am not afraid of the word, but I use it rather when I am speaking to an informed public who know what I am talking about,” he replies.
Political science professor Olivier Roy, a specialist in Islam, often crosses paths with Ramadan in debates in Italy or in Britain. The academic chooses his words precisely when describing him, saying he is not an “integrist” or fundamentalist but rather an “integralist”. Roy explains: “He wants to live integrally as a believer. He is not an Islamist, because he does not believe in Islamisation against the laws of the nation state. He is not a fundamentalist because he is not a scripturalist.” In his lectures, Ramadan does indeed favour reading the Koran in context. He frequently argues against “literalists”, those who follow the precepts of the Koran to the letter.
In a French-style secular republic, it is hard to gain acceptance for the mixing of religion in the public arena Ramadan represents, particularly from someone who overtly encourages Muslim youth to become activists. “The French do not understand how one can be entirely religious and accept secularism. Secularism has become ideological. People believe that religion should be private: being entirely religious in the public arena is being a fundamentalist,” says Roy. “There is a suspicion of double-speak if that goes along with a position of tolerance and citizenship.”
'He is irritating because he does not conform to our expectations'
In research carried out in Canada in 2006, French historian Jean Baubérot, a specialist in secularism in society, found that Ramadan was popular among young Muslims “who tended to be close to the Liberal Party” of the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau. “Ramadan favours the cultural integration of Islam at a distance from Western society. He tries to be in a position of mediator between Western culture and a relatively orthodox conception of Islam,” he says.
Baubérot draws a surprising parallel between Ramadan's approach and communist sub-culture. “In its heyday, the French Communist Party also sought to integrate young people from immigrant backgrounds into society by means of a critical ideology,” he says. In the sometimes Pavlovian hatred of Ramadan, Baubérot highlights a “search for secular purity bordering on religious purity, with mental constructs consisting of fear of contamination”.
Roy, the political science professor, explains the discomfort Ramadan elicits by his personality, his rhetorical ability, his French – learnt from literature and the writings of philosophers – and his appearance of an upper class European. “He is irritating because he does not conform to our expectations. He is neither the reformist Arab intellectual we would like, nor the Moroccan imam speaking bad French who thinks women should stay at home.” Baubérot notes: “His approach of critical integration does not go down well because it goes against the post-colonial requirement of allegiance to the Republic.”
In 1994 Ramadan called Omero Marongiu, who had just co-founded the Muslim organisation Jeunes Musulmans de France (JMF), the youth branch of the ultra-orthodox Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (UOIF), one of the main Muslim federations in France and which is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. A year earlier Ramadan had locked horns with the first generation of Muslim leaders, who often spoke very poor French, at the UOIF annual congress. “He wanted to build a grass-roots network around him. I was very surprised he contacted me. At the time, if Ramadan called you, it was incredible!” recalls Marongiu.
From 1996 Marongiu drifted away from the UOIF and became involved in Présence Musulmane ('Muslim Presence'), the structure that was to set up grass-roots associative networks for Ramadan. He distanced himself from this a few years later and has since advocated a much more liberal form of Islam than his former mentor.
“Tariq Ramadan develops a hard-line type of Muslim role model,” Marongiu says. “For him, being Muslim means being observant, respecting Muslim visibility – the veil, the beard – and being a militant. He presents himself as a reformist, but on a scale from fundamentalists to modernists, he is very conservative. “He often speaks of reform, as in his book in 2008, La Réforme Radicale ('Radical Reform'), but he does not question any of the major dogmas constructed by Muslim religious institutions,” Marongiu says.
After the terrorist attacks of 2015 Ramadan again found an audience in France. He clearly condemned the January attacks but nevertheless said he was not 'Charlie', a reference to the slogan Je suis Charlie ('I am Charlie') in support of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the target of the first attack. “If by Charlie, you are saying to me that you are against killing innocent people and cartoonists and you are against the fact of attacking innocent people, then I am Charlie. But if that means supporting the humour of that magazine, well then, no, I am not Charlie,” he told Respectmag.
Since then he has often condemned the state of emergency in France, the search warrants targeting Muslims and the French government's “war on terrorism”. In December at a meeting in Saint-Denis, the heavily Muslim north Paris suburb where terrorists involved in the November 13th Paris attacks had gone into hiding, Ramadan also attacked the way the attacks were “exploited”. He said at the time: “The relationship with the Middle East is directly linked to the analysis and political understanding of what September 11th was. We knew Afghanistan was in the planning stage before 9-11. It was a means of exploiting that. What we know today in relation to France is that it has thought of engaging in Syria for a long time, and so suddenly, the 13th of November is a pretext that will be used to justify war.”
Ramadan is not very relevant when he talks about geopolitics. His book on the Arab Spring, L’Islam et le réveil arabe ('Islam and the Arab Awakening', Presses du Châtelet, 2011), which veers into conspiracy theory, was torn apart in the press. “The book is nonsense,” says Geisser, the sociologist.
Roy, far from seeing Ramadan as an unofficial spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood or the UOIF, with which he has a complex relationship, suggests we regard him simply as an individual. “That is the capacity in which he speaks and that is what makes him original (…) His grandfather was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, but he is far too individualist to be one of them. Tariq Ramadan does not have group discipline. Above all, he has this aspect of a star that allows him to innovate in saying to Muslims, 'you can be entirely religious and French citizens'.”
Ramadan the showman has built his renown through projecting an image of someone pitted against the elites combined with a capacity for persuasion worthy of the best television evangelists. According to Geisser, “Tariq is a consenting victim of the demonization of which he is the object. He has never stopped wanting to be in the limelight. But he would sometimes have done better to have kept his reserve.”
Will his request for French nationality be a way of becoming once again the focus of attention? Haoues Seniguer, the Science-Po researcher, has a different take on this. “Perhaps he feels dated, out of fashion. Ramadan is very popular with observant Muslims yet at the same time still has difficulty in speaking in the name of French Islam. Perhaps seeking French nationality will enable him to legitimise himself again.” Ramadan himself, however, swears he still has no political ambition. “I don’t want it and I have always refused it,” he says.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Sue Landau and Michael Streeter