Silencing a voice of reason

Terrorism embodies a deep failure of humanity. Just how deep was chillingly illustrated by the recent events in Beslan and Jakarta, in both of which Muslims were implicated. How could the relationship of the Islamic and Western civilisations come to this?

Of course, our response could be simply to drop as many bombs as possible. But for those interested in more than a caricatured understanding of our current condition, inter-civilisational engagement between the West and the Muslim world is an indispensable aspect of mapping a course through this chaos.

This naturally raises the question of who the advocates should be. It is a demanding question because the necessary engagement is more than a discussion between people with different religious persuasions. It is a dialogue between two intellectual traditions, and requires voices that are fully conversant in both discourses. Such people are indeed rare.

But they do exist. Yet three years after September 11, it is hard to say fruitful inter-civilisational dialogue has happened to any meaningful extent. The Western conversation about Islam remains largely disengaged from mainstream Muslims, even those living in the West. Capable voices are not being engaged with anywhere near the necessary endeavour, but even worse, there are signs of active resistance to their participation.

The recent standout example is that of Swiss writer and academic Tariq Ramadan. The University of Notre Dame in the United States appointed him to teach Islamic philosophy and ethics, yet at the eleventh hour, the USgovernment revoked his visa without explanation. He has endured a fabricated character assassination; branded an anti-Semite, a misogynist, and a terrorist ideologue (on the sole basis that his grandfather was a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood).

Never - not once - has any evidence from his writings or speeches been produced in support of these smears. Rather, he has consistently denounced anti-Semitism and terrorism, urging Muslims to acknowledge and confront these perversions of the Islamic ethos. He has also been a staunch advocate of inter-civilisational dialogue and integration, and worked with the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa in poverty-stricken areas.

Ramadan could have given rare input into the American conversation. That is why the University of Notre Dame appointed him. He works rigorously within the Islamic paradigm, but draws sophisticated insight effortlessly from Descartes, Kant and Nietzsche. His message to Muslims in the West has been to realise that being a faithful Muslim with a Western identity is not oxymoronic. He has articulated the need for Islamic feminism from within a traditional Islamic framework. Now, America is senselessly denied his contribution.

This is not to deny the attempts at a dialogue with Islam in the West. But consider for a moment the voices most prominent in the Western public conversation on Islam.

Perhaps the archetypal example is Canadian writer Irshad Manji, who became ubiquitous in North America and Australia following the release of her book, The Trouble with Islam (Random House, 2003). In Melbourne recently to give the closing address at the Writers Festival, she penetrated every form of Australian media discussing her ideas for the future of Islamic thought.

All well and good. But the problem is that Manji offers an analysis that is almost exclusively the product of Western, leftist, post-modernist theory. She demonstrates no substantial familiarity with the Islamic intellectual tradition, which might be why she effectively advocates the abandonment of traditional Islamic thought.

Unsurprisingly therefore, whilst Manji's populist discourse finds a captive audience in the West, it has absolutely no resonance among the very significant proportion of Muslims with an understanding of, or a sense of fidelity towards, their religious tradition. The result is a conversation little more developed than an exchange between like-minded post-modernists. This is not an engagement with contemporary Islamic thought. It is the West engaging with its own reflection.

If this crucial inter-civilisational dialogue is to be saved from irrelevance, the most important figures will be those who can authentically span the civilisational gulf between Muslims and the West. Excluding such voices will create a void that can only be filled by hostile and isolationist ideologies. That is akin to turning the clash of civilisations unnecessarily into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The devastation of the past week shows the clock is ticking.

Against that background, it is a sobering thought that Tariq Ramadan spent the third anniversary of September 11 in his bare Swiss apartment.