Open to question
L'Islam en Questions (Islam in Questions), Alain Gresh & Tariq Ramadan, Paris: Actes sud, 2002. pp342
L'Islam en Questions, a wide-ranging discussion between Alain Gresh, editor of the French monthly Le Monde diplomatique and Tariq Ramadan, a professor of philosophy at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, moderated by Françoise Germain-Robin, was first published in 2001, and it has now been reissued by Actes sud in the paperback series Babel. For the Egyptian reader, part of the book's interest will no doubt come from the fact that Gresh, one of France's best-known journalists, was born in Cairo of an Egyptian Coptic family, leaving the country for France in the early 1960s, while Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan Al-Banna, founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
In their discussion, Gresh's perspective is that of the paper that he edits, insisting on universal values and on the intellectual duty of solidarity with the oppressed, regardless of national context and cultural difference. His horizons are those of the European, Marxist-leaning left, and he reproduces the kinds of criticisms of globalisation, for example, and of US power that have become the staple content of "Le Monde diplo". Ramadan, by contrast, gives a Muslim perspective on such questions, sometimes clashing with Gresh, and with Germain-Robin, on issues such as the role of women within society and on social institutions like the family.
Rupert Murdoch has clearly yet to reach sections of the French press, since, commenting on his role as editor of Le Monde diplomatique, Gresh writes that "we have an important responsibility towards our readers, all the more so as, whether we are aware of it or not, a journalist always has a 'point of view' or 'vision of the world'. When we describe a situation, we do so on the basis of certain presuppositions, and it is better that these be clearly signalled and known by the readers. For many years, I have founded my commitment on a quite strict, not to say sectarian, Marxist vision of things. But there has always also been a humanist dimension, a refusal of inequality, of injustice and resignation."
Both authors are open to the criticisms of the other, Ramadan in particular parting company with positions with which he might perhaps have been expected to agree, and though the foundations of their debate are adequately rendered by the book's title, the debate itself ranges more broadly, covering topics such as both men's personal histories, the "shadow of Nasser" in the Middle East, the character and future of political and social institutions in the Arab World and prospects for change, and the New World Order and globalisation. In a final section, "Islam against Europe?", Ramadan and Gresh consider the history and present state of European-Arab relations, Ramadan commenting interestingly on the role of Muslim intellectuals, such as himself, within European, traditionally Christian societies.
Alain Gresh was born in Cairo in 1948, his family leaving for France in 1962 following the Nasser regime's nationalisation of his father's business interests. Gresh, however, had "two fathers" not one, for in the mid-1970s he discovered that his biological father was Henri Curiel, one-time leader of the Egyptian Communist movement and long-term Parisian exile. Paradoxically, Gresh by then had long known and worked with Curiel as a result of shared political sympathies. Discovering that Curiel was in fact his father reinforced an already oedipal strand in their relationship, Gresh commenting that while "I rejected my [second] father's 'bourgeois' side, I also combated Henri's Stalinist notions of the USSR in the name of 'eurocommunism'".
Before Curiel's assassination in Paris in May 1978, in a case that is still unresolved, he left Gresh with a series of important lessons concerning the Third World, notably that there are always "dominant and dominated countries". Even though Gresh was a member of the leadership of the French Young Communist group in his youth, "I always had more interest in the Third World and in the Israeli-Arab conflict than I did in French politics....it was debating such matters with Henri at that time that gave me the desire to write my thesis on the PLO and on the concept of a Palestinian state... placing myself squarely in an internationalist framework and within a perspective of the common fight of peoples."
Ramadan, too, describes himself as strongly marked by his family background, notably by the example of his grandfather, assassinated in Cairo in 1949, and by his father Said Ramadan, a close collaborator of Al-Banna's before his exile in Switzerland, and later a well-known Muslim thinker in his own right. Al-Banna and Said Ramadan, Tariq Ramadan says, gave him "a faith and a spiritual rootedness... a political engagement by way of the spiritual", as well as the example of his grandfather's "solidarity with the resistance of the poor of the Third World and his social commitment, his work with the labouring classes, particularly among the Egyptian peasantry". This work, he says, has stayed with him in his own subsequent efforts to "construct references for European Muslims, who being mainly poor are often silenced and dispossessed", as well as to "promote the idea of possible alliances in the fight for justice with people who do not share the Muslim faith".
One early disagreement between the two writers in the present book concerns the significance and historical role played by the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser. Ramadan, in his consideration of Nasser's career, chooses to review early 20th-century efforts towards decolonisation in Egypt before the Nasser regime finally ousted the British in the 1950s. The Wafd Party, he says, obsessed by the notion of political independence, achieved important results, notably the 1936 Treaty. However, unlike Hassan Al-Banna's Muslim Brotherhood, the Wafd paid little attention to the question of cultural dependency, founding its idea of Egyptian society on constitutional notions and ignoring endogenous cultural and religious references.
Hassan Al-Banna, he says, "sensed the danger of a Westernisation that went beyond narrowly political notions... in 1927 he spoke of the reality of a form of colonialism that was, for the Egyptian, a kind of dispossession of selfhood, of being and of language. He spoke of the need for 'internal decolonisation'... he founded the association of the Muslim Brothers in 1928, and 20 years later the movement had something like a million and a half members across the country. From its beginnings, this movement demanded independence, but it also made great efforts at combating illiteracy and in education: to educate was to decolonise minds, and this was also the message of [Mohamed] Abdu" some decades earlier.
Nationalism, Al-Banna thought, was an idea imported from Europe, a kind of racism detached from the universal character of Muslim society. Nasser, in embracing and amplifying it while repressing the Muslim Brothers, had "made himself audible in the West", particularly to the British who were happier "dealing with those who had a strictly nationalist agenda than with those whose ideas included matters of religion and culture", Ramadan says. Furthermore, Nasser also made "the army an autonomous political force", closing down civil dissent, and he introduced a "system of repression in the country -- hangings, torture and orders were the daily lot of those who dared oppose this national 'liberator'".
Gresh does not agree with this, placing the emphasis instead on Nasser's achievements as these are usually understood. Furthermore, he writes, while it is true that the current of Muslim reformism started by Mohamed Abdu, and inherited by Hassan Al-Banna, had asked important questions "about the connections between Islam, religion and modernity", it had nonetheless swiftly abandoned investigation of the "connection between political and cultural decolonisation, and between modernity and identity, in favour of a discourse of defensive resistance, which was closed to innovation and stressed religious practice and the minute observation of dogma, and was therefore incapable of responding to the real questions confronting society".
Do not forget, Gresh writes, that the same Muslim Brothers praised by Ramadan had suggested to King Farouk that the multi-party system be dissolved in favour not of the Nasserist one-party state but of one of their own. "The questions that must always be asked of the Brothers, as of other Islamist organisations, are: can there be any other party besides the 'party of God'? Is there any room for any other kind of politics?"
Such issues are live and controversial and are likely to remain so, as are other issues discussed by the two authors, such as the legal position of women in some Muslim societies. Here Gresh and Ramadan clash over the significance of the protests that met attempts to reform the personal status law in Morocco some years ago. "Who is the real reformer", Ramadan asks provocatively. "Who is progressive? Who is feminist? He or she who speaks like a Westerner, being completely cut off from society but giving pleasure to the ears of European intellectuals? Or he or she who is rooted in society and struggles from within...?" While the two authors disagree on matters such as this one, they agree on others, including the historically sometimes conflictual relation between "Europe and Islam", stressing the fact that despite the efforts of the media in several European countries to conjure up an "Islamic threat", often referring to the "clash-of-civilisations" theory of the American academic Samuel Huntington, there have been "interesting experiences" of engagement and integration in many European countries, as immigrant populations of Muslim faith and culture find their way in societies that have not always welcomed them as equals.
Given the high rates of unemployment that immigrant populations suffer from in many European countries, notably in France, "the real debate", Gresh says, "concerns racism in company hiring policies, the marginalisation of 'difficult areas' and the right to build mosques, etc". He is contemptuous of the reaction of the 'republican left', as represented in the Paris weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, when three young women students of Maghreb origin decided to wear headscarves to class. Well-known Parisian intellectuals wrote an open letter of protest, describing the government's action in allowing this "sign of belonging to a religious community", forbidden under France's secular constitution, as being "the Munich of republican schooling... allowing this would be to capitulate in advance". These writers would do well to get a sense of proportion, Gresh feels.
Finally, this valuable, unconventional book covers a lot of ground, some of which is only distantly related to Islam, not shying away from several points of disagreement between its two dissimilar, Cairene authors. It provides a useful conspectus of French and European attitudes, and, as Françoise German-Robin reminds us in her introduction, the frank and open character of the debate is a refreshing change to much of what appears on similar subjects in the European and American media.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
