Epiphanies from Tariq Ramadan

The Swiss-born grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood's founder made his career trying to prove that the West and Islam, secularism and belief, can coexist peacefully. With his George W. Bush-era travel ban revoked, Tariq Ramadan has now journeyed back to the United States, where his faith in faith has been put to the test by a painful year for American Muslims.

INTERVIEW BY BENJAMIN PAUKER | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011

I grew up in a very liberal family. I was left alone to decide whether to pray or not to pray. I was very interested in solidarity work so I went to South America after graduation. I started an interfaith dialogue, and this is where faith came back to me. It was seeing the poor and how they remained dignified and retained their faith. It was an answer to my quest.

In Germany, Angela Merkel has said that multiculturalism failed. But it has not failed. The facts and figures are showing that it's working. It's only in our mind that Muslims and Westerners aren't integrating. But the true success of integration is to not talk about integration.

When Bush called Islam a religion of peace, it didn't mean anything. He could have said that Islam is a religion of war, just as much as Christianity or Judaism. When I travel in Muslim-majority countries, I tell them: We are not victims. But they are nurturing a sense of victimhood.

I have been targeted by populists and people with a specific agenda. But that's fine. Politicians are playing for the next election. I'm playing for the next generation.

The war in Afghanistan is a lost battle. The Americans are not going to win. They have already lost. For Muslim nations, the problem is that the frustration with the United States is so deep they are just happy it is failing. But they don't understand that what could come out of Afghanistan might be worse than what we had before.

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello for FP

 

Tariq Ramadan, author of The Quest for Meaning, is a professor of Islamic studies at Oxford University.

Benjamin Pauker is senior editor at Foreign Policy.

SHAAMYL77

1:36 AM ET

January 3, 2011

Epiphanies from Tariq Ramadan

Well, America has already failed in Afghanistan, as it is supporting the most corrupt govt of Karzai despite clear evidence....
Well, America has already failed in Afghanistan, as it is already negotiating with selected Taliban.....
Well, America has already failed in Afghanistan, as it is easily be-fooled by a shopkeeper of Quetta, posing himself as rep of Taliban.....
Well, America has already failed in Afghanistan, as it is allowed India to establish number of counsellates on Pakistan border, to destabilize already de-stable Pakistan....
Well, America has already failed in Afghanistan, as it is unable to understand that without intimate support of Pakistan and giving some weight-age to Pakistan,s interest, it will never win...

 

NASAH

4:48 PM ET

January 3, 2011

Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan has already failed as a muddled headed Taliban.

 

DESICANUK

4:52 PM ET

January 3, 2011

Epiphanies from Tariq Ramadan

Well,America has already failed in Afghanistan because it had Taliban(read Pakistan)
as an ally to fight Taliban!!!With an ally like Pakistan you might as well withdraw from Afghanistan and dare I say march eastward across the Durand line into Taliban territory and
finish the job.Taliban = ISI.And of course you dont need India to destabalise Pakistan.Pakistanis have mastered the the technique of self-destruction.1971 will be repeated once more in Baluchistan!!

 

ABELIAN

8:02 AM ET

January 3, 2011

A lot of wishful thinking

Obviously being an Islamist this guy would not want to see the US triumph in Afghanistan....

 

MARTY MARTEL

9:23 AM ET

January 3, 2011

Nothing NEW except it is America's own doing

There is nothing NEW in this epiphany by Tariq Ramadan about U. S. loosing in Afghanistan except that it is America’s own doing.

US lost in Afghanistan the day Bush allowed Musharraf to spirit away by airlift hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban operatives cornered by the advancing Northern Alliance in Kunduz in November, 2001. Pakistan relocated those Taliban cadres including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan and Haqqani network (HQN) in North Waziristan from where Mullah Omar’s QST and Haqqani’s HQN have been planning raids in Afghanistan ever since.

US deliberately ignored Taliban’s Pakistani connections in fueling and sustaining Afghan insurgency as reported by Matt Waldman in ‘The sun in the sky‘ on 6/13/2010, corroborated by WikiLeaks leaks on 7/25/2010 and then further corroborated by Chris Alexander, Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan from 2005 until 2009 in his article on 7/30/2010 titled ‘The huge scale of Pakistan‘s complicity‘.

As Afghan President Karzai told a news conference in Kabul on 7/29/2010 after WikiLeaks leaks, “The time has come for our international allies to know that the war against terrorism is not in Afghanistan’s homes and villages. But rather this war is in the sanctuaries, funding centers and training places of terrorism which are in Pakistan. Our international allies have the ability to destroy these Pakistani sanctuaries, but the question is why they are not doing it?“

Even Afghanistan’s national security advisor Rangin Dadfar Spanta has asked a similar question in a Washington Post article on 8/23/2010: “While we are losing dozens of men and women to terrorist attacks every day, the terrorists’ main mentor (Pakistan) continues to receive billions of dollars in aid and assistance. How is this fundamental contradiction justified? Despite facing a growing domestic terror threat, Pakistan “continues to provide sanctuary and support to the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, the Hekmatyar group and Al Qaeda. Dismantling the terrorist infrastructure “requires confronting the state of Pakistan that still sees terrorism as a strategic asset and foreign policy tool”.

All American officers in southern Afghanistan know that they can not prevail in the ongoing military operations, unless Taliban strongholds across the Durand Line in North Waziristan and Baluchistan are neutralized. Adm Mullen and Gen Patraeus evidently do not want to acknowledge that hard options have to be considered if their soldiers are not to die at the hands of radicals, armed and trained across the Durand Line.

But for some diabolical reason, Gates, Mullen, Petraeus & Company has split the Taliban into the Afghan and Pakistani parts even though they are two peas of the same pod. The US military is going after the Pakistani Taliban, while it encourages the Pakistani intelligence to continue to shelter the entire top Afghan Taliban leadership in Baluchistan province. Mullah Muhammad Omar and other members of the Taliban's inner shura (council) have been ensconced for years in the Quetta area.

As General McChrystal reported in his assessment of August, 2009 to the President: ‘The Quetta Shura Taliban (QST) based in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, is the No. 1 threat to US/NATO mission in Afghanistan. At the operational level, the Quetta Shura conducts a formal campaign review each winter, after which Mullah Mohammed Omar (Afghan Taliban Chief) announces his guidance and intent for the coming year‘.

However US drones have targeted militants in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), but not the Afghan Taliban leadership operating with impunity from Baluchistan. US ground-commando raids also have spared the Afghan Taliban's command-and-control network in Baluchistan.

With an ally like Pakistan, US Afghan mission was condemned to fail from the very beginning.

 

THEANTICLAUS

10:36 AM ET

January 3, 2011

He "grew up in a very liberal family!!"

I love reading this guy's work. He has absolutely no problem telling a complete lie with a straight face. His family represents some of the leading intellectual apologists for the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qa'ida. Tariq Ramadan is the son of Said Ramadan and Wafa Al-Bana, who was the eldest daughter of Hassan al Banna, who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Gamal al-Banna is his great-uncle.

To help consecrate the Islamic order, al-Banna called for banning all Western influences from education and ordered that all primary schools should be part of the mosques. He also wanted a ban on political parties and democratic institutions other than a Shura (Islamic-council), and wanted all government officials to have a religious study as main education.

Hassan al-Banna saw Jihad as a God-ordained defensive strategy, stating that most Islamic scholars: "Agree unanimously that jihad is a communal defensive obligation imposed upon the Islamic ummah in order to broadcast the summons (to embrace Islam), and that it is an individual obligation to repulse the attack of unbelievers upon it." As a result of unbelievers ruling Muslim lands and humbling Muslim honor: "It has become an individual obligation, which there is no evading, on every Muslim to prepare his equipment, to make up his mind to engage in jihad, and to get ready for it until the opportunity is ripe and God decrees a matter which is sure to be accomplished. Al-Banna does not accept claims as sound the Hadith that the jihad of the spirit is the greater jihad, and the jihad of the sword the lesser jihad, and he glorifies active defensive jihad: "supreme martyrdom is only conferred on those who slay or are slain in the way of God. As death is inevitable and can happen only once, partaking in jihad is profitable in this world and the next. His writings still inspire suicide bombers and other terrorists today.

Tariq's father was a prominent figure in the Muslim Brotherhood and was exiled by Gamal Abdul Nasser from Egypt. He moved to Saudi Arabia where he founded the World Islamic League, a dawa/missionary group. He then moved to Geneva, Switzerland, before finishing a dissertation at the University of Cologne in 1959. In 1961 he founded the Islamic Center in Geneva, a combination mosque, think tank, and community center. His son Hani Ramadan now runs that center. Tariq was born in Switzerland but immersed in Islamic education there.

No, I do not see any liberals here!

 

KOANTAO

10:07 AM ET

January 11, 2011

He "grew up in a very liberal family!!"

I'm Swiss and I personally know Mr. Ramadan. I read his articles and books and I assure you that he is by all means, more liberal than you. This may not mean much, but Mr. Ramadan really encloses the liberal way of thinking which charcterised Islamic scholars 1000 years ago.
The same way of thinking which eventually opened the doors to European Renaissance and Illuminism.
As of the critique to his grand-father, all I can say that Nasser was the first egyptian who decided to destroy the Cairo synagogue after the 1956 Suez crisis. If it still stands, it is because the islamic scholars of Al-Azhar university strenuosly defended it.

 

AARKY

9:36 PM ET

January 3, 2011

Defeat in Afghanistan??

We started losing in Afghanistan when we dropped 500 lb bombs that blew up the insurgents along with dozens of innocents and their houses. We really started losing when we purposely killed the ex major of a town and 5000 people came out for his funeral. All those P'Oed people will hate the US forever and are part of the vast amount of people in Aghanistan who want us out.

 

SEVA

11:01 AM ET

January 8, 2011

Tariq Ramdan and his mistresses

He goes from women to women and lies to all of them pretending its love at first sight !!! I was one of them and he slaped me on the face several times - this is what excites him the most and no condoms > never ! Be careful and do not believe one word when he makes you feel you're "special" ! He is a champion to manipulate your heart until you fell for him and then he uses your body. Him a muslim ? not really when you know him intimately...

 

NSC LOS ANGELES

6:45 PM ET

January 18, 2011

That was thin and trite even for him

Good lord (or Allah, or whomever). What a waste of space that article was, the man makes a career out of getting paid to say essentially nothing.