POSITIVELY ORWELLIAN: TARIQ RAMADAN DELIVERS THIS YEAR’S ORWELL LECTURE: ALAN JOHNSON
The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. (George Orwell, Politics and the English language, 1946.)
This week in London, the annual George Orwell Lecture was given by the Islamist writer Tariq Ramadan. Where is one to start?
George Orwell was against religious censorship. Tariq Ramadan campaigned successfully to cancel a production of Voltaire’s play Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete in Geneva.
Orwell was a rational man. When Ramadan taught at the College de Saussure he argued in favour of Islamic biology over Darwin.
Orwell risked his life fighting for the Spanish Republic against Franco’s fascists. Ramadan is a coward when it comes to fighting fascism. In November 2003, on French television, the future French president Nicolas Sarkozy invited Ramadan to condemn the practice of stoning women. He would not. Ramadan squirmed: “I have called for — because I know my position is a minority one within the Muslim world today — a moratorium so that there can be a real debate between Muslims.”
Orwell opposed state control and religious indoctrination. Ramadan would like the former to impose the latter. He wants Muslim parents to control the content of state school programmes according to “Islamic values”.
Ramadan pokes fun at feminism with silly jokes. Western society supposedly obliges women to “become brick workers or lorry drivers to show that women are effectively liberated”. (OK, so maybe there is a connection to Orwell, who was a bit of a sexist.)
Orwell was for liberty and justice. By contrast, according to the US essayist Paul Berman “Ramadan reveres [the Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide], Sheikh al Qaradawi above all other present-day Islamic scholars, and in one book after another he has left no room for doubt about his fealty. If anyone in the world offers a model of modern enlightened Islam, Ramadan plainly judges Qaradawi to be that person.” That’s the same Qaradawi who, as Peter Tatchell points out, “condones suicide bombing, the killing of civilians, female genital mutilation, forced veiling, wife-beating and the killing of Muslims who turn away from their faith. He also blames rape victims who dress immodestly and supports the execution of LGBT people.”
Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language famously observed that most political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. This is a good description of…Tariq Ramadan. Entire books have been written about Ramadan’s linguistic evasiveness and manipulation. One of those books is even called Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan. In it Caroline Fourest catalogues all of the ways in which a naive French press have fallen for his manipulations.
One French leftist, Yves Coleman, accuses Ramadan of “using the key words of today’s public relations industry: ‘respect’, ‘tolerance’, ‘communication’ and ‘dialogue’ in the manner of a cynical politician.” Coleman offers this telling example of Ramadan using language to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”.
In 1998 Ramadan wrote a foreword to a collection of fatwas by Yusuf al Qaradawi, published by the European Council of the Fatwa … When Ramadan is asked about this foreword and his “deep respect” for such a reactionary theologian he has an answer which is typical of what is called in French “langue de bois” (or “wooden tongue”, a term used to qualify politicians’ language: something which is vague or impossible to understand): “I quote [his work] when I find it interesting. I also express criticisms or distance myself from some of his positions, which can be explained by the fact that he does not live in Western society. He develops social, political and geostrategic analyses which belong to him, and which I don’t always share.”
The gifted American essayist Paul Berman – why not invite him to give the Orwell lecture, by the way? – has brilliantly explained the deeper meaning of Ramadan’s abuse of political language. In his essential bookThe Flight of the Intellectuals, Berman shows that Ramadan is really a “Salafi Reformist”. In other words, Ramadan believes that an Islamic way of life is pure and authentic (the only really good way of life) but that Muslims are oppressed by “a western aggressive cultural invasion” and a “colonisation of minds”. Muslims must find the road back to a life free of animalistic, decadent western oppression and influence. The road back is textual, via the foundational documents of seventh-century Islam. This Koranic revolution is so large that the modern world will be swallowed whole as it is “reformed” in the light of Koranic revelation. “Reformism” then means the Islamification or Salafication of modernity. That’s the scale of Ramadan’s ambition in the West.
Ramadan’s project proceeds in the west strategically. It appropriates the language of modern democratic politics, occupying it, infusing it with Koranic meaning. This is why salafi reformists can sound like contemporary western politicians to wilfully naive people like those who invited Ramadan. But as Berman puts it, “the modern rhetorics [of Ramadan] always turn out to be translations, in one fashion of another, of Koranic concepts. They are worldly exteriors with Islamic interiors.”
Ramadan’s project is organised, pro-active and entrepreneurial in advancing its ideas and influence. By contrast the modern Left has mostly lost touch with what the ideas it should positively stand for, knowing only what it is against (Israel and, most of all, America). For Ramadan, one imagines, the encounter resembles the act of taking sweets from a child.
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