The reformer to his admirers, Tariq Ramadan is Europe’s leading advocate of liberal Islam. To his detractors, he’s a dangerous theocrat in disguise.
By Laura Secor
From the Boston Globe, 30 November 2003
When Tariq Ramadan delivers a lecture, the room is invariably packed to capacity. Afterwards, dozens of young Muslim men are likely to throng the stage, seeking his definitive guidance on everything from veiling to animal rights to how to live with dignity in a secular society.
“What I am doing with them is at the same time important and dangerous,” Ramadan says of his work with these young men. “It could be dangerous if you let them think you have the answers. I try to tell them, ‘I am not what I’m saying. I’m only trying to be.”‘
At age 41, Ramadan, an elegant, Swiss-born intellectual, imam, and activist, has become a magnet for young Muslims in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. He’s done it partly by making himself personally accessible to the devotees who purchase audiotapes of his lectures and often travel for miles just to hear him speak. And he’s also done it with his unstinting criticism of their community’s inclination toward insularity.
Outside the Muslim community, Ramadan is the object of both admiration and suspicion. He’s the Muslim Martin Luther, the American and French press have sometimes rhapsodized: He advocates that European Muslims use their unique experiences to lead a movement toward reform within Islam. He is “two-faced,” critics reply: He sounds like a moderate, having adopted a vocabulary that he knows will be accepted by secular Westerners, but he is actually herding Francophone Muslims down the path of extremism.